When Then White Picket Fence Comes Crashing Down Essay, Research Paper

When Then White Picket Fence Comes Crashing Down We all have expectations and dreams of what our lives will become; a beautiful house in a nice suburb with 2.3 children, a dog, and a white picket fence. In Adrienne Rich s, “Living In Sin”, the speaker, a woman “Living In Sin”, wakes up one day and realizes just how far away from her dreams she really is. The poem describes how a women imagined how her life would be, how she sees it now in reality, and how she is dealing with the difference between those two views. Rich begins the poem by showing us the dream this woman has. This is exemplary in the lines, “She had thought that the studio would keep itself, / no dust upon the furniture of love.” She imagined her life, as so many of us do, in surreal terms. It is important to understand the mindset during the 1950 s, which this poem was written. America was a booming country and everyone had high expectations about how glamorous and majestic their lives would become. The narrator s dreams were filled with a loving family and afternoon bridge parties. Nowhere in her fantasies did she picture the constant “dusting” that her home and her relationship would demand. Rich uses a whitish tone to accentuate the whimsical daydreams of the narrator; daydreams that bring vivid pictures of how she once saw her future. Rich paints us a vivid picture of what the woman s life should have looked like. This can be seen in the lines, “Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, / the pains relieved of grime. A plate of pears, / piano with a Persian shawl, a cat / stalking the picturesque amusing mouse / had risen at his urging.” In the narrators picture perfect life there would be no leaky faucets of dull repetitive chores. There would be no dirty windows to represent the view of sin that outsiders would have of her relationship. The plate of pears gives us an image of aesthetically pleasing surroundings; orderly, pure, and healthy. The piano is draped with a Persian shawl, giving us a sense of romance and tasteful wealth. The presence of the cat gives us a feeling of warmth and homeliness. The cat s hunt is not violent, but rather playful; Even the otherwise disgusting and disease ridden mouse is seen as cute and “amusing.” Nonetheless the narrators dreams are eons away from reality. At the beginning of line eight we begin to see a distinct change in rhythm and sound, marked by the movement form her past fantasies to her present realities. “Not that at five each separate stair would writhe / under the milkman s tramp; .” There is a sense of disgust and frustration in the words, “separate stair.” The milkman serves as a symbol of the sameness of her day, of her life, as reliable as the milkman himself. The word “tramp” gives us not only a feeling of slow drudgery, but also the connotation of a woman of loose morals; a woman, “Living in Sin.” Similar to lines earlier in the stanza, Rich continues to create a vivid picture of the narrators life, as can be seen in the lines, “that morning light / so coldly would delineate the scraps / of last night s cheese and three sepulchral bottles.” This time we see the reality of what her life is actually like. The morning light is not warm as the reader would expect; instead it s coldness delineates or defines the lack of emotional warmth in the home. The room is dirty contrasting her dreams of a tidy home. The wine bottles are described as “sepulchral”, as empty and used as she feels. The mental images continue to unfold in the lines, “that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers / a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own- / envoy from some black village in the mouldings ” Earlier we saw that the woman s dreams viewed the mouse as a whimsical creature. In her reality her pest is a cockroach. He shows no fear; from the center of her own mess, he meets her gaze, as if confronting her with her own reality. His “black village in the mouldings”, symbolizes her sinful relationship hidden away in the infested apartment. Her thoughts are interrupted by an approaching figure. “Meanwhile, he, with a yawn, / sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard, declared it out of tune, ” Again we see a change in meter and rhythm to a slow boring pace. With the word “meanwhile”, our attention is drawn from the surroundings to the man. He yawns, exhibiting not only that he just awoke, but also displaying his boredom. We see the piano again, but this time it is not romantic, it is

out of tune; just like their relationship. He then moves on, “shrugged at the mirror, / rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;” He shrugs as if he is accepts the way thing are. He rubs his unshaven face; it is prickly and rough like himself. He puts no more effort into his appearance than he does his relationship. He simply leaves and goes for cigarettes without uttering a word. We are left with a distinct impression of this man, he is rough and crude, and takes her for granted. Although he realizes that things are “out of tune”, he is content to keep things as they are. The narrator is now responding to the realization of how far she is from her dream world in the lines, “while she, jeered by the minor demons, / pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found / a towel to dust the table top, / and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.” She chose to “Live In Sin”, believing that it would be the answer to her dreams. She begins to make her bed, covering the place where her sins are consummated, as if hiding it helps her to deny its existence. In reality, their love was not enough to make their relationship clean and sin-free. In disgust and defiance of her lover and her life, she lets the kettle boil over. The kettle can let off steam, but she must try to content herself with the life she has chosen. We begin to see how the woman will deal with her new realization of her life in the lines, “By evening she was back in love again, / though not so wholly but throughout the night / she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming like a relentless milkman up the stairs./ As night comes around, she falls asleep back into her dreamland. Still there is a nagging knowledge that she does not have what she really wanted. It will never be quite the same again. The narrator continues to bury her happiness. Now and again she will look up from the life she is living and remember the life that she dreamed of. Each time she will become a little more disenchanted with her relationship. She will fall a little more out of love. She will become a little more determined to find the life that she had dreamed that she would have. Nevertheless, once again the cold sun rises in the sky “like a relentless milkman up the stairs”, to signify another day of “Living In Sin.” In Adrienne Rich s poem the ends do not necessarily justify the means. In fact, if you make choices that go against your morals, you will very likely not reach the dreams that you hoped for. The woman believed that she could deal with living in sin because she was so much in love. Her love was not enough to overcome the guilt of her choice and the reality of what that choice would do to her life. Reality soon tore down her dreams of living in a beautiful house with a white picket fence; instead it replaced them with a lonely cockroach infested apartment