Summary
In “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” the speaker watches her aunt embroidering an image of tigers prancing. In the first stanza, the speaker describes this image. The tigers are gemlike “denizens,” or occupants, of the green world of the forest. The aunt has included an image of men beneath one of the forest trees, but the tigers are unafraid of these men. The noble animals are courageous, unafraid, and totally certain of their safety and power in the forest.
In the second stanza, the speaker shifts her attention to Aunt Jennifer herself. She appears uncertain and nervous, barely able to pull the needle through the fabric. She is weighed down by her wedding band, which makes it difficult to move her hand.
In the final stanza, the speaker compares Aunt Jennifer with the tigers. The speaker predicts that even when Aunt Jennifer dies, she will still be weighed down. Just as her hand is ringed with the wedding band in the second stanza, her dead hands will remain “ringed with ordeals,” or weighed down by the difficulties of married life. Meanwhile, the tigers will live forever in the image she made, and they will remain energetic, “proud and unafraid.”
Analysis
“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is a straightforwardly feminist poem. The speaker contrasts the freedom of the tigers with the constraints women experience in marriage. Through this contrast, the poem touches on compulsory heterosexuality, as well as the complex relationship between craft and womanhood, and the difference between real life and images.
In the first stanza, Rich begins with the image of tigers prancing “across a screen.” Don’t be fooled by the word “screen”—this poem was written in 1951, so Rich definitely isn’t referring to a handheld electronic device. Instead, she’s probably describing an embroidery hoop, or maybe a cross-stitch frame: two crafts made by stitching a colorful design into a stretched panel of fabric.
The fact that Aunt Jennifer is creating an image out of textiles, rather than a painting or drawing, is important. In Western culture, craft and art are often separated from one another. Crafts are usually defined as objects made with a practical purpose in mind. In contrast, we often define “art” as an object made only to be beautiful, or otherwise visually compelling. This distinction might not seem like a problem, but it gets more complicated when we look at individual examples.
For example, an embroidered image might be purely decorative, but it still gets defined as craft. On the other hand, a medieval reliquary, or container for the body parts of saints, has a very important religious purpose, but it usually gets called “art.” Feminists argue that really, the distinction between craft and art is about devaluing work historically associated with women and people of color. “Art” is seen as highly valuable and is displayed in museums and taught in schools. Meanwhile, “craft” is often dismissed as trivial.
As you read the poem, think about this distinction between craft and art. How does Rich portray the image Aunt Jennifer is making? If Jennifer had been seen as an artist, would this poem end differently?
In the first stanza, Rich emphasizes the beauty of Jennifer’s image, and plays down the materials it is made from. By describing the tigers as “bright topaz,” she compares them to gemstones. Rather than the textiles that create this image, we see a bejeweled and sparkling image that is far more precious and valuable. The word “denizens,” a fancy term for “occupants,” adds to this feeling of extravagance—it's the kind of word that feels more at home in a luxurious palace than a suburban home. All of this imagery aids in constructing the “world of green” that Rich imagines within the frame of the embroidery panel. Rather than a simple image, Aunt Jennifer’s tigers are like a portal into another world, a world that is lush and beautiful while Jennifer’s is dull and weighed down.
In this world, the tigers have feelings of their own. Rich characterizes them as courageous and noble; the word “chivalric” alludes to the codes of honor followed by knights. Like “denizens,” it's the kind of formal, antiquated language that suggests that these tigers inhabit a world that is very distinct from the suburban household where Aunt Jennifer embroiders. It's also a self-consciously literary term: chivalry is the stuff of medieval romances, more than any real historical period. This sense that these tigers might be most at home in a storybook adds to the exciting feeling of imagination and potential that surrounds them.
The second stanza shifts abruptly from the “world of green” to Aunt Jennifer’s sitting room. The speaker is watching as her aunt attempts to pull a thick ivory needle through the wool fabric she is embroidering. The first description we get for Aunt Jennifer is “fluttering.” This verb immediately suggests weakness and uncertainty. In contrast to the fearless tigers with their “chivalric certainty,” Jennifer seems unsure and flighty. She finds “even the ivory needle hard to pull,” which further suggests physical weakness, as well as a lack of mental fortitude necessary to perform even basic tasks.
The second two lines of the stanza explain that this is due to her marriage. Her hands are held back by the “massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band.” We aren’t meant to take this statement literally—no wedding ring would be so heavy that the wearer couldn’t move it. Instead, Rich is using synecdoche, a literary device in which a part stands in for the whole. Here, the wedding ring stands in for Jennifer’s marriage. This marriage weighs her down, prevents her from realizing her potential, and discourages her from developing her own strength.
The choice of the ring isn’t random. By focusing on it, Rich can also center her exploration of Jennifer’s lack of freedom on her “hand.” The hands are important: they’re how we make things, how we change our surroundings, how we express affection. By emphasizing that Jennifer’s hands are weighed down, Rich suggests that her marriage has made it especially difficult for her to do the things our hands symbolize. Knowing this metaphorical dimension, we might return to the image of Jennifer struggling to “pull” the ivory needle. The image of “pulling” suggests a person acting on their surroundings, even though it is difficult. In Jennifer’s case, she struggles to pull “even the ivory needle,” not because she is weak, but because her husband prevents her from actively transforming her own life.
The image of the hands carries into the third stanza. Here, the speaker shifts to a time after Aunt Jennifer’s death. Once again, Rich uses Jennifer’s hands to represent her entire personality. But now, the image escalates—the hands aren’t just “fluttering,” they’re “terrified.” The word terror suggests that Uncle is potentially abusive, and certainly controlling. However, the next line emphasizes that the problem isn’t just one toxic man. Aunt Jennifer is “ringed,” not with a violent husband, but “with ordeals.” The fact that "ordeals" is plural suggests that Aunt Jennifer has spent her life contending with a number of challenges. From a feminist perspective, we can infer that these challenges likely included the daily frustrations of keeping house—the numerous frustrating tasks many women have to complete each day. The time spent solving these daily problems often prevents women from pursuing more interesting goals, like those their husbands might work towards. The daily ordeals of keeping house thus become a kind of prison, a “ring” that limits Aunt Jennifer and prevents her from realizing her full potential.
This imprisonment is contrasted against the tigers in the panel. The contrast is ironic: the tigers Aunt Jennifer embroidered are free, while she herself is not. Long after she has died, they will persist in the image she created. Craft is crucial to this irony. Activities like embroidery are partly popular among women because they allow for frequent interruptions, do not take up much space, and do not appear ambitious. It’s easy to put away an embroidery project and go tend to a child who needs help. In contrast, something like oil painting requires “a room of one’s own,” lots of supplies, and long periods of uninterrupted time. The fact that Aunt Jennifer embroiders is thus a product of her own oppression. The tigers she stitches can be free partly because she herself is not.
When Adrienne Rich wrote this poem, she was still a young writer. Her early poems had been praised by the famous poet W.H. Auden as “neatly and modestly dressed.” Rich recalls that at this point she still defined herself in relation to male poets, because she believed that the most a woman could hope for was to write as well as a man. However, she also experienced a “split…between the girl who wrote poems, who defined herself writing poems, and the girl who was to define herself by her relationships with men.” In “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” Rich says, “looks with deliberate detachment at this split.”
The poem is detached because it doesn’t speak at all about Rich’s own experiences. Instead, the speaker is mostly absent, totally focused on her Aunt. There aren’t any explicit statements about gender as a whole; it would be possible to read the poem as describing just one unhappy marriage. However, Rich’s statement suggests that Aunt Jennifer might be read as a stand-in for Rich herself. Jennifer here is the creator trying to “define herself by her relationships with men.” The image she makes is beautiful, but it's also ironic, because it can’t be separated from the forces that make her less free. Just like Jennifer’s craft exists in the shadow of patriarchal art, so Rich’s early poetry was defined through male poetry that was understood as superior by default. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” suggests that creating art in this patriarchal context will never be enough. Even if the tigers are free, the woman who embroiders them isn’t.
This conclusion also has some implications for the difference between reality and the image. In a more surreal poem, the poet might blur the distinction between the image and real life. Indeed, many poets delight in the capacity of poetry to create magical or impossible images that still feel “real” to the reader. In “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” however, the boundary between an image and reality is pretty solid. As we saw in the first stanza, Rich uses a lot of literary language to emphasize the imaginative world the tigers inhabit. Partly, this emphasizes their freedom, in comparison to Jennifer’s confinement. However, by describing the tigers as “topaz denizens,” and “chivalric,” Rich also emphasizes and re-emphasizes that she is describing a created image. It feels like a world to the tigers who inhabit it, but it isn’t a world Aunt Jennifer can access, as a living, breathing human person. As she does in “Amends,” Rich is subtly reminding the reader that beauty, although worth paying attention to, doesn’t do anything to make the world a more just place. That takes concerted political action—otherwise, we’re left with proud topaz tigers, and a dead and terrified Aunt Jennifer.
