Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1951

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Weight of Marriage

Rich had a fraught relationship with the idea of marriage, which corresponds with the attitude of other female artists of her generation. In the 1950s, the overwhelming cultural attitude was that women belonged in the home as wives and mothers. Talented and ambitious young women had to make difficult choices about their future, a pressure that their male counterparts did not face. In “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” Rich grapples with the consequences of early- to mid-century gender roles in marriage.

In the poem, Aunt Jennifer’s hands weave the tapestry by “fluttering through the wool” (Line 5) with innate skill and creating beauty from a few strings, like a musician playing an instrument. The reader knows that Aunt Jennifer is an artist who made the scene described in the first stanza: The tigers belong to her because she wove them with woolen string and thin air. Her fingers have a mind of their own, and they are driven to make art.

However, she finds “even the ivory needle hard to pull” (Line 6) because of her wedding ring. This “massive weight” (Line 7) limits the dexterity of her fingers and encumbers her ability to work her needle through and complete the tapestry. The ring “[s]its heavily” (Line 8) upon her hand, implying that the weight of the gold and jewels on the ring limit her left hand’s ability to work as well as her right. The weight of the wedding ring on the left hand is a metaphor for traditional marriage roles’ burden on women. Though Aunt Jennifer mastered a difficult skill, her artistic prowess is outweighed by society’s view of her as merely a wife.

Women’s Work

Women’s work includes those tasks assigned to women either to run a household or—in the case of wealthy women—to keep them busy. Traditionally, sewing, weaving, and tapestry-making are skills associated with women’s work. Aunt Jennifer has a weighty wedding ring and knows a highly specialized craft, so she is a woman with wealth. This privilege affords her an escape from drudgery, instead leaving her trapped and creating work few people will see.

Because textile skills are associated with women’s work, society minimizes both the physical and intellectual effort of these modes of creation. Weaving is an art form that strains the hands and eyesight and can require formidable mathematical planning. The physical effort contributes to Aunt Jennifer’s discomfort and why she finds the needle “hard to pull” (Line 7). Working her fingers and the needle through thousands of woolen strands into intricate rows—and ultimately into a pattern to make the image of tigers—wears her down. The wedding band further strains her creative process: It inhibits her movement and, symbolically, deprives her of an artistic career. In this way, the wedding band both compounds and trivializes her efforts to master her craft.

Immortality through art is a common theme in poetry, and Rich includes Aunt Jennifer in this trope when the end of the poem offers a slight turn for the fate of Aunt Jennifer’s work. While Aunt Jennifer will eventually die, “[t]he tigers in the panel that she made / will go on prancing,” kept alive by the enduring threads she felt compelled to weave (Lines 11-12). This will allow Aunt Jennifer to be remembered as an artist by future generations who will see her work; today, we look back through history to celebrate the work of talented women forgotten because of their era’s limitations.

The Price of Mastery

The speaker in “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” portrays the main character as a master of her craft. Tigers are difficult to draw realistically, let alone weave stitch by stitch on a loom. Yet, these tigers look so lifelike that they appear to move: “[T]igers prance across the screen / Bright topaz denizens of a world of green” (Lines 1-2). The animals in their jungle habitat move so deftly through the poem that they themselves become characters; Rich’s skill in bringing the tigers to life through poetry parallels Aunt Jennifer’s skill in bringing them to life through tapestry.

Rich uses Aunt Jennifer as a metaphor for the price of artistic mastery for women. Though a young poet in 1951, Rich already understood that she had to fight to be taken seriously as an artist because she had fewer options for artistic influence from other women. In their essay “The Anxiety of Authorship” (1979), Gilbert and Gubar explore this lack of female role models in poetry. The essay focuses on 19th-century poets but leaves room for interpretation of this anxiety in the 20th century. Today, we view 1950s gender roles as outdated in a similar way that writers 50 years ago viewed the Victorians.

In the poem, Rich expresses this anxiety about mastery. The speaker views Aunt Jennifer as a capable artist with talent inhibited by her marriage, to the point that her wedding ring weighs her down. The ring turns her tools for creation into “terrified hands” (Line 9) that contrast the fierceness of her created tigers. Instead of owning her mastery, Aunt Jennifer remains stuck in her monolithic identity as a wife. The speaker notes that Aunt Jennifer’s hands remain “ringed with ordeals she was mastered by” (Line) and that she cannot overcome her matrimonial struggle. This sentiment correlates with a common and enduring marital anxiety for women.