The Full Text of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
The Full Text of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
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“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” Introduction
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"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" is a landmark feminist poem by Adrienne Rich, published in her 1963 collection of the same title. Its 10 sections offer a series of "Snapshots" of the modern female condition, touching on the struggles of ordinary women as well as female figures from literature and myth. The speaker moves from portraying the plight of a particular woman (the "Daughter-in-Law" of the title) to imagining a kind of modern goddess who delivers all that women have been "promise[d]"—or fulfills their own thwarted "promise." The poem is at once a protest against the male-dominated world that has held women back, a call to women to demand more of and for themselves, and a "promise" that women can defeat social barriers and attain their loftiest dreams.
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“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” Summary
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You were once a beautiful young woman in Shreveport, Louisiana, with reddish-brown hair and skin as pink as a budding peach. You still wear dresses patterned after the ones you wore back then. You play one of Frédéric Chopin's preludes for piano, which the pianist and editor Alfred Cortot compared to beautiful, fragrant memories drifting through the mind.
Your mind is now like a stale wedding cake, loaded with pointless experiences, paranoia, gossip, and illusions. It's falling apart in the face of reality, like old cake under a knife—even though you're in your peak years.
Your bold, glaring daughter cleans the teaspoons and grows up very differently than you did.
Throwing a coffeepot into the sink with a clatter, she hears inner, angel-like voices scolding her. She gazes out the window, across the tidy gardens, into a messy sky. It's only been a week since the angels told her to lose all patience.
The next time, they told her to indulge her cravings. Then they said she should rescue herself, because she can't rescue anyone else. Occasionally, she scalds her arm with hot water from the tap, or holds a burning match till the flame reaches her thumbnail, or sticks her hand into the steam puffing out of a kettle's spout. It's probably angels telling her to do all this, because she seems miraculously immune to pain, except for the pain of facing each morning—which feels like squinting into a wind full of debris.
Any thoughtful woman is intimately acquainted with the monstrosity of misogyny (or intimate with monstrous men). She internalizes the prejudice that seizes her like a bird's beak (as in the myth of Zeus taking the form of a swan and raping Leda). All the varied aspects of female experience go into her nature, as if filling a giant, open-lidded trunk across times and cultures: the decaying orange blossoms, the pills for menstrual pain or birth control, the striking breasts of the ancient queen Boadicea under fox stoles and orchids.
I hear two beautiful women fighting. Both confident, incisive, clever, they yell across fancy glasses and glazed earthenware dishes, like mythical Furies (half-bird, half-women monsters) held back from their prey. It's the female version of the ad hominem argument, as if they're saying: I'm going to take all the insults people have wounded me with and wound you with them, my double, my sister!
Women understand each other all too well. Their talents are not like fruits ripening but like thorns sharpening against the slightest insult. They might sneak in some reading while the iron is heating up; or (in the case of Emily Dickinson) write the poem "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—" in a kitchen in Amherst, Massachusetts, while making jellies that boil and froth; or, more typically, look steely-eyed and sharp and fierce as a bird while dusting everything on some random surface, every single day.
Sweetly laughing, sweetly speaking, she shaves her legs till they shine like fossilized woolly mammoth tusks.
When Corinna sings along with her lute (old-fashioned stringed instrument), neither the music nor the lyrics are hers—just the long hair draping her cheek and the silk rustling against her legs. And even these are altered by the male gaze.
As you stand nervous and dissatisfied in front of the ultimate cage—an unlocked door—tell us, you tragic, bird-like or machine-like creature: is yours a fertile kind of pain? Trapped by love—which, for you, is the only part of your nature you can act on—are you better prepared to unlock the safe of Nature's secrets? Daughter-in-law, has Nature revealed secrets to you (as if opening her books) that men have never seen?
In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that it's essential, in an unstable world, to have some kind of stability no one can take away. Wollstonecraft was semi-courageous, semi-virtuous, and wrestling with a problem she semi-understood. But few of the men around her wanted to be, or were capable of being, any better—so they called her all the classic misogynistic names.
The French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot said that all women, figuratively speaking, die at age fifteen. After that, they become partly mythical and partly conventional. Even so, we women spin fantasies behind our steamed-over windows. Delicious thoughts of everything we could have been, and everything we used to be—passion, sorrow, cleverness, good taste, sacrificed dreams—well up, like the memory of an affair we could have had, inside our tired, drooping, middle-aged chests.
"Not that it is done well, " as Samuel Johnson said of women preaching, "but that it is done at all"? Yeah, imagine the odds! Or ignore the odds. The indulgence of being treated like a gifted child or beloved, chronic invalid: would we refuse it if we could, sisters? Our curse as artists has been the low standards we're held to (or, the curse of misogyny has given us easy jobs as artists). We settled for talent alone, shining through in incomplete works.
"Sigh no more, ladies," as Shakespeare wrote. Time is a drunk man who toasts beautiful women. Thrown off by chivalry, we let men flatter us for mediocre work, interpret low output as a kind of self-discipline, pass off sloppy thinking as "intuitive" thinking, excuse every fault. The only faults they treat as criminal are excessive boldness and total originality. Those trigger punishments like solitary confinement (in jail or in the home), tear gassing, and attrition warfare (i.e., the kind of attacks that wear us down slowly). Not many women chase that kind of "honor."
Well, the fully empowered woman has been a long time coming. In order to triumph, she has to be harder on herself than all of male-dominated history. I envision her arriving, her mind as full as a sail, her breasts skimming over the water, her body sunlit and at least as impressive as a boy or helicopter. She's still approaching, poised, disturbing the air like chopper blades, but when she arrives, the goods she brings will no longer be just a promise. They'll be a tangible gift, delivered to us at last.
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“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” Themes
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Feminist Liberation and Patriarchal Oppression
Written at the start of the second wave of the feminist movement, Adrienne Rich's "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" is a wide-ranging meditation on womanhood and gender. The poem presents male-dominated society as stiflingly oppressive, an elaborate "cage" that offers women only modest, limited roles. Some women bristle at this situation, others adjust, all are dissatisfied. Though the speaker holds out hope for the future, she implies that women must fight for their liberation. Drawing on examples from history and myth, she warns that such rebellion is never easy and that rebels should prepare for backlash.
The poem portrays women as hindered by, and deeply frustrated within, a male-dominated culture. For example, the "Daughter-in-Law" of the title used to thrive within a classic and narrow gender role—the beautiful, fashionable young woman—but feels lost now that she's aged out of it. Meanwhile, her own daughter seems to be a proto-feminist, "grow[ing]" up "another way" and actively angry with ("glowering" at) the limited existence prescribed for her. She hears inner voices, or "angels," that seem to "chid[e]" her with urgent advice: "Have no patience," "Be insatiable," "Save yourself; others you cannot save." Privately, that is, she desires and demands far more than what society offers. At the same time, she is skeptical of the possibility of widespread liberation ("others you cannot save").
In this oppressive society, it’s a "crime" to cast too bold a shadow / or smash the mold straight off"—that is, to be too original or revolutionary. Accordingly, many women find it safest to remain "Bemused by [male] gallantry" and to accept the modest roles the patriarchy offers them. They "adjust[]" themselves to male expectations, performing a cultural script or score they did not define ("neither words nor music are [their] own") and becoming mere "reflections" in the "eye" of what feminists later called the male gaze. (In other words, a heterosexual male perspective that objectifies women.)
In general, then, the women Rich describes are studies in wasted potential or thwarted rebellion. All are talented but deeply unfulfilled. And she includes herself in this portrait of general frustration. She laments not only "all that we [women] might have been" but "all that we were—fire, tears, / wit, taste, martyred ambition." She suggests that this loss of youthful hopes, potential, etc. becomes acutely painful in women's "middle years." It "stirs" their imaginations "like the memory of refused adultery": that is, it becomes a kind of fantasy about what they might have attained but could not or dared not attain.
Ultimately, the poem holds out a vision of better things for women, while making clear that this dream will not be easily won. Even as the poem seems to encourage a confrontational, uncompromising feminism, it warns of the violent backlash such confrontation has triggered throughout history. For the "crime" of genuine rebellion, Rich cautions, women receive "solitary confinement, / tear gas, attrition shelling"—that is, the full brunt of male violence. Dryly, she notes that there are "Few applicants for that honor" due to the suffering involved.
The last section then envisions the arrival of a kind of modern goddess: a redemptive figure who is "long about her coming" but finally "deliver[s]" on women's hopes and ambitions. Yet her triumphant arrival makes "the air wince," like "helicopter" blades, and requires her to "be / more merciless to herself than history." This vision implies that in order to achieve liberation, women must be, in some sense, harder on themselves than men are. (And than men are on men!) They must be warriors of a sort: enduring pain, maintaining the utmost standard of discipline, and accepting no "mediocrit[y]" in their work or character. Only then, Rich suggests to her fellow women, will true freedom and equality be "ours."
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-13
- Lines 14-25
- Lines 26-39
- Lines 40-49
- Lines 50-52
- Lines 53-68
- Lines 69-76
- Lines 77-85
- Lines 86-107
- Lines 108-122
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Historical and Internalized Misogyny
"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" looks back over a long history of misogyny, patriarchy, and violence. In fact, it views history—especially the history of female experience—as defined by these things. Through a variety of examples, the poem shows how men perpetuate misogyny and how women often internalize it, directing it against themselves and/or other women.
The poem depicts "history" itself as a history of sexism, enforced by men who want to shape human experience according to their desires. The speaker asserts that "Time is male," playing on the conventional image of Father Time and suggesting that, throughout the ages, culture and the arts have generally been male-dominated and male-defined. The poem mentions the word "history" only once, but revealingly casts it as a force that opposes and oppresses women. The modern woman, the speaker says, "must be / more merciless to herself than history."
The poem's actual historical examples reflect the weight of that misogyny. For instance, Rich quotes Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), by the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, on the need for women to find some stability in an "uncertain world." Thoughts is a more conventional book than Wollstonecraft's later feminist writing, so to Rich, it reflects the author's evolving understanding of a patriarchy she "fought" but only "partly understood." Sympathetically, Rich observes that "Few men" around Wollstonecraft "would or could do more" than she did, "hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore." Her courage triggered harsh, sexist retaliation—as such courage always has, the poem implies.
The poem also depicts how some women internalize misogyny, turning it inward or inflicting it on the women in their lives. Rich asserts that "A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. / The beak that grips her, she becomes." These lines allude to the Greek myth of Leda, who is raped by the god Zeus disguised as a swan (a story retold in W. B. Yeats's famous poem "Leda and the Swan"). Metaphorically, Rich means that women internalize—in a sense "become[]"—the monstrous misogyny, violence, etc. that holds them down. For example, out of frustration with her domestic routine, the daughter of the "Daughter-in-Law" commits small acts of self-harm: "let[ting] the tapstream scald her arm, / a match burn to her thumbnail," and so on. Later, the poem portrays a fight between women as a kind of misdirected retaliation: "all the old knives / that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours, / ma semblable, ma soeur!" This French phrase (a play on a line by the male poet Baudelaire) means "my double, my sister!" and suggests that these women secretly see themselves in one another. Having internalized a misogynistic culture, they attack each other out of self-loathing—rather than bonding in sisterly alliance, as the poem implies they should.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 20-25
- Lines 26-27
- Lines 33-39
- Lines 40-42
- Lines 69-76
- Line 77
- Lines 86-88
- Lines 95-107
- Lines 108-110
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Aging, Beauty Standards, and Discontent
"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" shows women struggling under the burden of male beauty standards. Patriarchal society demands that women be attractive, conventionally feminine, and pleasing to men. Once they can no longer meet these standards (e.g., due to age), society treats them as largely irrelevant. But Rich also hints that the standards themselves may soon be irrelevant: that women who rebel against them represent the future, where women who abide by them may be left behind.
The poem shows how conventional beauty standards objectify women who satisfy them and cruelly cast aside women who don't. It introduces the "Daughter-in-Law" as a former "belle" (a French word meaning beauty) who has reached middle age. She was once celebrated by a patriarchal culture for her beauty, style, and piano playing (a conventionally acceptable talent for a young woman of her time). She is now "In the prime of [her] life" by many measures, yet she is still trying to live up to that image of youthful beauty (for example, by copying the pattern of the "dresses" from her fashionable girlhood). It's implied that, as she loses her youth and conventional beauty, society has relegated her to a dreary domestic life, and the weight of reality itself has become unbearable. Later, the poem describes a woman shaving her legs "until they gleam / like petrified mammoth-tusk." She is grooming her body to look youthful (in fact, girlish), in accordance with her society's beauty standards. Ironically, however, the speaker compares her to a prehistoric fossil—perhaps suggesting how the woman feels about her own aging or implying that the beauty standards themselves are hopelessly old-fashioned.
In the following section, the archetypal woman Rich calls "Corinna" (after a famous Renaissance-era poem by a male poet) maintains a conventionally feminine appearance and sex appeal. That is, she wears "long hair," sensual "silk against her knees," etc. Even this performance is "adjusted in reflections of an eye": the eye of the male gaze, which distorts even women who have already altered their true selves in order to satisfy it. Hence, the poem sees Corinna—and women like her, such as the daughter-in-law—as a "tragical" figure, "trembling and unsatisfied" by the social conventions that have shaped her.
Yet these restrictive conventions, the poem suggests, might also point the way to freedom. Metaphorically, the daughter-in-law (who merges with the Corinna figure) faces an "unlocked door," which Rich ironically calls "that cage of cages." In other words, women like the daughter-in-law can see a path to liberation but are anxious about taking it. On some level, they may fear turning their back on the standards they've learned to live by. Still, the poem rhetorically asks whether the daughter-in-law's dissatisfaction is "fertilisante douleur": fertile pain. In other words, her misery might yet be artistically fruitful—or politically galvanizing. For example, she is "Pinned down / by love," or love as defined and controlled by men. But this plight might help her understand the "secrets" of love—including core truths about gender and human experience—better than men do.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-13
- Lines 27-32
- Lines 50-52
- Lines 53-68
- Lines 77-85
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Nature, Art, and Female Experience
In "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," Adrienne Rich examines women's relationship to art with a sympathetic yet critical eye. Simultaneously, she examines women's relationship to "Nature" by contrast with men's. In the poem's view, women have a more intimate, complex knowledge of "Nature" (meaning, here, human nature in general and female nature in particular) than their more superficial male counterparts. Great artistic potential lies in this knowledge, as well as in the rage provoked by social repression, distortion, etc. of women's true natures. Yet this same repressive society rewards female artists who produce fragmentary, mediocre, conventionally pretty work, while harshly attacking those who are truly subversive. In short, misogyny boxes women artists into stereotypically "feminine"—and unnatural—modes of self-expression, while punishing women who draw on their deep understanding of "Nature" to reveal life as it is.
The poem strongly implies that women know more about "Nature" than men do—and certainly know a side of human nature, the body, etc., that men do not. Nature is traditionally feminized in many cultures to begin with, and the poem follows classical tradition in personifying Nature as a goddess. Rich then hints that the reality of nature is a kind of secret passed down from woman to woman, while men remain largely in the dark: "[H]as Nature shown / her household books to you, daughter-in-law, / that her sons never saw?" Elsewhere, Rich compares "Nature" to a giant "steamer-trunk" that gets "stuffed" with all the various, conflicting elements of female experience across times and cultures. These elements range from "mildewed" flowers (symbols of decaying romance or the deteriorating body) to "female pills" (e.g., birth control pills) to the brave, yet failed rebellion waged by Queen "Boadicea." As a metaphor, this overflowing trunk reflects the immensely complex psychological reality women grapple with. Its unsettling, dangerous contents undermine stereotypes of women as naturally meek and fragile. This messy and painful experience, Rich acknowledges, sometimes drives women to turn on each other—or even become as "monst[rous]" as the men and social forces that oppress them.
Moreover, this experience often struggles to find its way into women's art, which has to maneuver around male standards, judgements, and punishments. Parodying Thomas Campion's 17th-century poem "When to Her Lute Corinna Sings," Rich observes that the words and music Corinna sings are not "her own." Implicitly, Corinna is performing men's art according to men's standards. In general, Rich suggests, women artists have had to develop themselves in spite of and in response to oppression. Their artistic and personal "gifts" are "no pure fruition, but a thorn" evolved like a weapon in response to "scorn." They have had to seek paths around social expectations and domestic drudgery, as when "Reading while waiting / for the iron to heat." Even when women have managed to make "our" own art, Rich argues, "Our blight has been our sinecure: / mere talent was enough for us." In other words, women's curse as artists has been expecting too little of themselves—as little as men do. Rich laments that "We hear / our mediocrities over-praised" by male peers, and too often settle for that false acclaim.
When women do reveal their true nature and experience in art, the result is explosive. (Rich uses, here, the example of Emily Dickinson's famous poem "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—.") But men typically punish women, sometimes violently, for the "crime" of such "bold[ness]." Unlike prizes and praise, Rich remarks, that kind of punishment is an "honor" most women would rather avoid.
Even while noting the costs of rebellious honesty, Rich clearly endorses it. In Rich's view, women understand, deep down, that "Nature" is darker and more complex than society and art usually admit. Yet to the "thinking woman" who must grapple with the "monsters" of misogyny, this deeper psychological reality contains the makings of better art—and a better world.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-13
- Lines 26-32
- Lines 40-49
- Lines 53-59
- Lines 60-68
- Lines 86-107
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Daughterhood and the Generation Gap
"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" is addressed to "You," the daughter-in-law of the title. This character also has a "daughter" of her own. The poem shows that both women are struggling and unsatisfied in a sexist world, but in subtly different ways. Whereas one laments her lost youth, the other seems restlessly eager for a better future. Simultaneously, then, the poem portrays misogyny as a timeless problem—one that every generation of "daughter[s]" confronts—and illustrates a generation gap that offers hope for real progress.
The "Daughter-in-Law" and her daughter are defined by a generational and psychological divide: one looks wistfully back, the other impatiently forward. The "Daughter-in-Law" is defined by her relationship to others, and specifically to men (her husband). In a misogynistic world, she has been unable to establish and define her own identity in full. She seems to pine for her lost youth—when she was most prized by a male-dominated society, perhaps, but also when she nurtured dreams she hasn't been able to fulfill. Meanwhile, her daughter is defined by her relationship to family, but not men specifically. As a member of the next generation, she seems headed for a different fate: "glowering" with resentment at domestic chores like "wip[ing] the teaspoons," she "grows another way" entirely. Indeed, she constantly hears "inner" voices urging her toward self-realization: "Have no patience," "Be insatiable," and so on.
The poem does not suggest that the rise of a new generation will magically solve everything, only that the younger woman's rebelliousness points a way forward. The daughter feels bored, trapped, and angry to the point of masochistically harming herself. Still, in her impatience and insatiability, she seems a preview of a more liberated future. The generational cycle goes on forever, the poem implies—as does the "Nature" mothers and daughters share—but the cycle of misogyny doesn't have to. Women will never stop dreaming of better lives than society allows them; they can imagine and find "another way."
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-13
- Lines 14-25
- Lines 60-68
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
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Lines 1-6
You, once a belle ...
... ""Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" begins by describing the woman in the title. In fact, the first stanza seems to offer a metaphorical "Snapshot[]" of her life. It incorporates sound as well as visual imagery, so it's not describing any kind of literal photograph—nor is the rest of the poem. Rather, the poem presents a series of brief vignettes or sketches over the course of 10 sections.
The "Daughter-in-Law" part of the title is only half true also. While the daughter-in-law is a recurring character, she doesn't appear in every section. And the poem illustrates the experience of various other women, too, from the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to the poet Emily Dickinson to the daughter-in-law's daughter. The speaker, an apparent stand-in for Adrienne Rich, also finds indirect ways of commenting on her own experience.
In this opening section, the poet addresses the daughter-in-law directly. The first word is an abrupt, commanding "You" (emphasized by a caesura just after). It's as if the speaker means to startle the daughter-in-law with this blunt second-person address. (The poem that follows, in fact, will be a kind of feminist call to consciousness.) The speaker then describes what the daughter-in-law "once" was: a "belle," or attractive young woman, in the city of "Shreveport," Louisiana. The woman once had reddish-brown ("henna-colored") hair and "skin" as pink as a "peachbud." In other words, she seems to have fit a certain ideal of white Southern womanhood, as in the old archetype of the "Southern belle."
She seems nostalgic for her bygone youth, since she "still" wears dresses "copied from that time." That is, she still has her clothes made from the same old patterns, as if desperately trying to preserve her youthful glamour. She even plays a 19th-century piano piece drenched in nostalgia: Frédéric Chopin's Prelude No. 7, Andantino, A Major. As the speaker notes, the 20th-century pianist Alfred "Cortot," who edited an edition of Chopin's works, compared the sound of this prelude to "Delicious recollections" that "float like perfume through the memory."
Already, then, there seems to be something a bit sad about this character. She seems stuck in the past, as if she's pining for her glory days. Indeed, Chopin's music itself is often used (in film scores, for example) as a shorthand for romantic wistfulness. And as the next stanza unfolds, the Chopin/Cortot allusion will take on an ironic quality: for this aging belle, recollection isn't really "Delicious" or "light" as perfume. Her memories are a "heavy" burden, to the point where she's experiencing some sort of personal crisis.
In general, the poem will often handle its allusions—and it contains many!—in a critical or ironic way, introducing quotations in order to challenge them or undermine their authority. This device becomes central to the poem's larger, feminist critique of male authority.
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Lines 7-13
Your mind now, ...
... grows another way. -
Lines 14-19
Banging the coffee-pot ...
... you cannot save. -
Lines 20-25
Sometimes she's let ...
... into her eyes. -
Lines 26-27
A thinking woman ...
... her, she becomes. -
Lines 27-32
And Nature, ...
... heads and orchids. -
Lines 33-39
Two handsome women, ...
... semblable, ma soeur! -
Lines 40-49
Knowing themselves too ...
... day of life. -
Lines 50-52
Dulce ridens, dulce ...
... like petrified mammoth-tusk. -
Lines 53-59
When to her ...
... of an eye. -
Lines 60-68
Poised, trembling and ...
... sons never saw? -
Lines 69-76
"To have in ...
... shrew and whore. -
Lines 77-80
"You all die ...
... blankening with steam. -
Lines 81-85
Deliciously, all that ...
... our middle years. -
Lines 86-91
Not that it ...
... if we could? -
Lines 92-99
Our blight has ...
... our mediocrities over-praised, -
Lines 100-107
indolence read as ...
... for that honor. -
Lines 108-115
Well, ...
... or helicopter, -
Lines 116-122
poised, still coming, ...
... ours.
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“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” Symbols
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Household Items
The household items in the poem are symbols of domesticity itself. The female characters' handling of these objects reflect their discontent with the domestic sphere (to which women, historically, have often been confined).
In lines 12-13, for example, the daughter "glower[s]" while "wip[ing] the teaspoons," as if smoldering with frustration at this boring domestic chore. In the following line, she irritably "Bang[s] the coffee-pot into the sink" rather than placing it there gently. Later in the same section, she uses the features of her kitchen to perform small acts of self-harm—letting "the tapstream scald her," burning "a match [...] to her thumbnail," and holding her hand in the "steam" of a stovetop "kettle[]."
Household items also feature prominently in the volatile scenes in the third and fourth sections. Two women "scream" in a kitchen or dining room full of "cut glass and majolica" (fancy glassware and dishware); Emily Dickinson writes her poetry "while the jellies boil" in her pantry; and so on. Some of these items are fragile (like the glassware), others dangerous (like the boiling jelly), but all seem to reflect or represent violent emotions—especially female anger—bubbling up within orderly and well-kept homes.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 12-13: “Nervy, glowering, your daughter / wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.”
- Line 14: “Banging the coffee-pot into the sink”
- Lines 20-23: “Sometimes she's let the tapstream scald her arm, / a match burn to her thumbnail, / or held her hand above the kettle's snout / right in the woolly steam.”
- Lines 34-35: “I hear scream / across the cut glass and majolica”
- Lines 43-44: “Reading while waiting / for the iron to heat,”
- Lines 45-46: “writing, / My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun— / in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,”
- Lines 48-49: “iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird, / dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.”
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The Blank Windows
The steamed-over windows in line 80 play a symbolic role:
"You all die at fifteen," said Diderot,
and turn part legend, part convention.
Still, eyes inaccurately dream
behind closed windows blankening with steam.The steam seems to represent the vague "dream[s]" or hazy nostalgia of these house-bound women, as they fantasize about all that their lives "might have been" (line 81). The "blank[ness]" of the steam might be like the blankness of an empty canvas: a space for creative projection. But it might also suggest the emptiness of the women's prospects in this confined, domestic environment. That is, they feel trapped in their homes and can't see any possibility of escape. They no longer gaze outward, through the window, but inward, into memory and imagination. The "blankening" could even suggest the blankness of death—at least, the metaphorical, emotional death described at the beginning of the stanza ("You all die at fifteen").
The "steam" might also tie back to lines 22-23, in which the daughter holds "her hand above the kettle's snout / right in the woolly steam." Here, the steam is hot and dangerous. Putting the two images together, the steam on the windows might evoke the dangers of "inaccurate[]" dreams—that is, sentimental nostalgia or wishful thinking.
Finally, the "steam" is symbolically tied to erotic desire (as in steamy fantasies). Rich draws this connection herself at the end of the stanza, comparing women's dreams of "all that [they] might have been" to fantasies about "adulter[ous]" affairs they might have had.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 80: “behind closed windows blankening with steam.”
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“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Juxtaposition
The whole poem consists of a series of juxtapositions, laid out over the course of 10 sections. The conceit of the poem is that these sections are "Snapshots" of a woman's life—or slices of women's lives in general (since the poem includes episodes from history and literature). Only some of the "Snapshots" are grounded in visual imagery; section 7, for example, is more meditative. But the poet juxtaposes them in order to craft a broader argument or story, much as one might do with a collage of photos. In the end, the whole is greater than the sum of its 10 parts.
As a simple example, sections 1 and 2 juxtapose the daughter-in-law's life with her daughter's life. (Section 1 focuses more on the former, section 2 on the latter.) Through this juxtaposition, the poet illustrates a generation gap between mother and daughter—namely, the way the mother seems stuck in the past while her daughter's ambitions for the future remain "insatiable."
However, not every juxtaposition is this straightforward. Section 4 portrays women (including the poet Emily Dickinson) doing housework in a mood of suppressed fury, while section 5 portrays a woman (perhaps the daughter-in-law's daughter, the "she" from section 2) shaving her legs. There is no direct relationship between the two vignettes, but both show women conforming to gendered expectations in a patriarchal society. Although the "iron-eyed" woman dusting the house "every day of life" seems more obviously unhappy than the woman shaving her legs, the unpleasant simile in the second vignette ("until they gleam / like petrified mammoth-tusk") makes the poet's skeptical perspective clear. Patriarchal standards, the juxtaposition implies, force women into uncomfortable or degrading routines, whether these involve maintaining the home or grooming the body.
Through implied comparisons like these, the poem portrays female dissatisfaction across a range of times, cultures, and literary traditions. In some ways, the poem mimics the metaphorical "steamer-trunk" in section 3: that is, it contains an assemblage of seemingly random items, which together show what it is to be a woman. Or, again, the poem works like a thematically arranged photo album, grouping portraits of male misogyny with illustrations of female suffering and persistence. (The last section, which adapts an image from the French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir, offsets the sadder "Snapshots" with a more hopeful vision.)
Where juxtaposition appears in the poem:- Before Line 1
- Lines 1-13
- Between Lines 13-14
- Lines 14-25
- Between Lines 25-26
- Lines 26-39
- Between Lines 39-40
- Lines 40-49
- Between Lines 49-50
- Lines 50-52
- Between Lines 52-53
- Lines 53-68
- Between Lines 68-69
- Lines 69-76
- Between Lines 76-77
- Lines 77-85
- Between Lines 85-86
- Lines 86-107
- Between Lines 107-108
- Lines 108-122
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Allusion
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Metaphor
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Simile
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Irony
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Asyndeton
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"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Shreveport
- Belle
- Henna-colored
- Dresses copied
- Chopin prelude
- Cortot
- Moldering
- Glowering
- Nervy
- They
- Insatiable
- Grit
- Steamer-trunk
- Tempora and mores
- Sprung-lidded
- Commodious
- Orange-flowers, foxes' heads, orchids
- The female pills
- Boadicea
- Foxes' heads
- Cut glass and majolica
- Furies
- Argument ad feminam
- Ma semblable, ma soeur!
- Fruition
- My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
- Amherst
- Scum
- Dulce ridens, dulce loquens
- Petrified
- When to her lute Corinna sings
- Fertilisante douleur
- Prise
- "To have [...] utmost consequence."
- Harpy, shrew, and whore
- Diderot
- Blankening
- Matryred
- Drained and flagging
- "Not that [...] done at all?"
- Chronic invalid
- Sinecure
- Sigh no more, ladies
- In his cups
- Bemused
- Indolence
- Abnegation
- Styled
- Slattern
- Attrition shelling
- She's long about [...] no promise then
- Palpable
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “You, once a belle in Shreveport,”)
A small city in northwestern Louisiana.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
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Form
"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" contains 10 numbered sections of uneven length. Some of these sections contain meter; some contain rhyme; some contain neither. For example, sections 6 and 7 close with rhyming couplets (iambic pentameter couplets, in the case of section 7):
her household books to you, daughter-in-law,
that her sons never saw?And:
Few men about her would or could do more,
hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.Meanwhile, sections 1, 2, 3, 5, and 9 contain no end rhyme at all. Some sections are more meditative and abstract, others more imagery-driven. Section 5, for example, is almost as short and concrete as a haiku):
Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,
she shaves her legs until they gleam
like petrified mammoth-tusk.The mix of metrical and free verse gives the poem a part-traditional, part-experimental quality, which reflects its theme of women struggling out from under sexist social traditions. Rich herself, at this stage of her career, was beginning to shed the formally conventional style of her first two books in favor of the free verse she largely adopted from the late 1960s onward. At times, she associated traditional poetic form with the patriarchy itself. In 1972, she famously remarked of her early technique:
I know that my style was formed first by male poets: by the men I was reading as an undergraduate—Frost, Dylan Thomas, Donne, Auden, MacNiece [sic], Stevens, Yeats [...] In those years formalism was part of the strategy—like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle materials I couldn't pick up bare-handed.
In 1995, she commented that the traditionalism of her early poems now struck her as a way of "block[ing], through assimilation and technique, the undervoice of [her] own poetry." In other words, it was a shield against what she really wanted to say. (In other late-career remarks, however, she suggested that surface effects like meter and free verse were less important than how creatively writers handled them.)
In both its politics and its technique, "Snapshots" is often considered Rich's breakthrough poem. Its jagged rhythms, unpredictable rhyming, creative punctuation (as in the last three lines), and medley of literary allusions (including in other languages) are all techniques associated with 20th-century modernism. The modernist poets T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore, for example, became famous for peppering their work with quotations and allusions (as in Eliot's The Waste Land and Moore's "Marriage"). By adopting these techniques, Rich seems to be signaling the radical modernness of her own work—and in the process, carving a path away from a male-dominated past.
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Meter
"Snapshots" blends traditional meter with free verse. Generally, the meter it departs from and returns to is iambic pentameter, the most standard meter in English poetry. Lines of iambic pentameter contain 10 syllables, arranged in an unstressed-stressed syllabic rhythm (da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM). Reader can hear this rhythm pretty clearly in line 3, for example:
still have | your dress- | es cop- | ied from | that time,
Notice that there's a variation here: the first metrical unit (foot) is actually a trochee rather than an iamb (meaning its two syllables are stressed-unstressed rather than the opposite). But the rest of the line follows the iambic pattern perfectly. Small variations like these are common in metrical verse.
Again, however, the poet doesn't stick to small variations, or to meter in general. In this first section of the poem, lines 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 13 are all fairly close to iambic pentameter (some closer than others). For example, here is line 13:
Your mind | now, mold- | ering | like wed- | ding-cake,
The other lines are not. The effect is deliberately unsettling, as if Rich is constantly toggling between "formal" and "free" modes, tradition and experimentation. In fact, that toggling will continue until the end of the poem. Lines 73-76 ("a woman [...] shrew and whore."), for instance, are smooth iambic pentameter, whereas there's no pentameter at all in lines 95-107 (an entire long stanza; "Sigh no more [...] Few applicants for that honor.").
The mix of pre-20th-century and 20th-century techniques ingeniously reflects Rich's subject matter: mid-20th-century women caught between old, stifling, patriarchal conventions and the dream of liberation.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem has no set rhyme scheme; its rhyming is intermittent and unpredictable. As noted in other sections, the mix of rhymed and free verse (a quintessentially "modern" technique) is meant to reflect the situation of modern women (that is, Rich's contemporaries), who found themselves choosing between patriarchal convention and feminist liberation.
However, the rhymes here aren't just reminders of a stodgy past. Rich also sprinkles them like a spice over some of her wittier, more epigrammatic lines, such as lines 109-110 (her vision of the liberated modern woman):
she's long about her coming, who must be
more merciless to herself than history.The rhyming makes this key thematic statement more musical and memorable.
In two sections (6 and 7), Rich uses rhyming couplets as a kicker or closer, the way many traditional poems (such as Shakespearean sonnets) do. Look at lines 73-76, for example:
[... ] a woman, partly brave and partly good,
who fought with what she partly understood.
Few men about her would or could do more,
hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.The punchy rhymes forcefully underline the misogyny "she" (Mary Wollstonecraft) had to contend with. Here, Rich seems to be using traditional meter and rhyme to turn her cultural tradition against itself—in other words, to fire back at the men who have historically dictated literary and cultural standards.
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“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” Speaker
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The speaker is unnamed and largely unidentified, but she is clearly a woman writing to and for other women. In section 9, for example, she includes herself among the "ladies" she's addressing ("Sigh no more, ladies [...] we hear / our mediocrities over-praised"). She may have some personal familiarity with the "Daughter-in-Law" of the title, whom she addresses familiarly as "You," but the exact nature of that relationship is unclear. It's possible that she, herself, is the woman's mother-in-law, but section 1 hints that this "You" figure is actually older than she is. (It's also possible that the "Daughter-in-Law" is a fictionalized portrait of Rich's mother, Helen Jones, a conservatory-trained pianist from a genteel Southern family—though Jones was raised in Birmingham, Alabama, not "Shreveport," Louisiana. If so, this might mean the "daughter" character draws on aspects of Rich's own experience.)
This guide assumes that the speaker is essentially a stand-in for the poet, given that the poem voices many of the ideas Adrienne Rich expressed in her nonfiction (e.g., essays on feminism and literature). The fourth section, for example, explores ideas that Rich later revisited in her essay "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson" (1975), which also focuses closely on Dickinson's poem "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—."
For the most part, the speaker offers third-person portraits of other women or addresses the "Daughter-in-Law" in the second person. When speaking in the first-person plural (as in the "ladies" example above), she seems to speak on behalf of women in general. Occasionally, however, she speaks for herself—in the first-person singular—as when she says that "I hear" two women screaming (lines 33-36), or that "I see" a goddess-like figure arriving (line 111). In these moments, she acts as a kind of visionary or seer, offering glimpses of symbolically charged scenes. The reader doesn't learn much about her as an individual; instead, the reader learns from the visions she presents.
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“Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” Setting
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Parts of the poem have no well-defined setting: they are abstract reflections on womanhood, history, literature, and more. Some seemingly concrete setting details are actually metaphorical: for example, the "unlocked door" in line 61 is a metaphor for potential liberation, while the "wind" and "currents" in lines 111-112 are part of a symbolic vision of feminist triumph.
When concrete settings do appear in the poem, they're nearly always domestic. That's no accident: throughout much of human history, patriarchy has relegated women to the domestic sphere, insisting on some version of the idea that "a woman's place is in the home." In scene after scene, Rich's poem shows women chafing against this confinement. In section 1, for example, the unnamed "Daughter-in-Law" feels her "mind [...] crumbling to pieces" as she plays piano at home. In sections 1 and 2, her "glowering" daughter despises her numbing domestic routine, to the point where she "scald[s]" herself in order to feel something. In section 3, two arguing women "scream / across the cut glass and majolica"—that is, elegant glassware and dishware in a kitchen or dining room. Similar "Snapshots" of domestic unhappiness appear in sections 4, 5, and 8 as well.
The poem also ranges widely over history, looking back from Adrienne Rich's vantage point in the early 1960s. One of the settings in section 4, for example, is both literary and historical. Rich describes the legendary poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) working at home in Amherst, Massachusetts:
writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,Dickinson was famously reclusive, so her domestic confinement was extreme and partly voluntary. Still, like most women of her time—and Rich's, and ours—she did domestic chores for her family (e.g., making "jellies"). And as a 19th-century American woman, unable to vote or participate in most aspects of public life, she would have had to fight hard for any greater status in the literary/cultural sphere. Rich suggests that the volatile emotions in some of Dickinson's poems (including "My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—") express the poet's "boil[ing]" frustration with the limited place her society assigned to her.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
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Literary Context
"Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" is the title poem of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), the third collection by poet, essayist, and activist Adrienne Rich (1929-2012). Though both the poem and the collection met with a hostile response from critics (as well as Rich's own father), Rich considered her work from this period a creative breakthrough. "Snapshots" has since come to be regarded as a classic of feminist poetry, and an early milestone in what came to be known as second-wave feminism.
Along with friends such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan, Rich helped lead a generation of female and LGBTQ poets whose work challenged patriarchal, racist, and homophobic power structures in America and beyond. Some early elements of this approach were already present in Rich's first book, A Change of World (which includes the often-anthologized poem "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"). Though she later regretted publishing her second collection, The Diamond Cutters, its well-known poem "Living in Sin" reflects her deepening exploration of gender, love, and inequality during the 1950s. The formally traditional style of these early collections contrasts with Rich's later adoption of free verse, which she found less "distancing" and restrictive than meter.
Rich's commitments to feminism and left-wing politics grew over the course of the 1960s, in parallel with the growing women's liberation movement and other social movements of the era. Her collections from the late '60s (including Leaflets) and early '70s (including The Will to Change and Diving into the Wreck) are considered landmarks of feminist and LGBTQ literature. Diving into the Wreck, whose title poem explores women's erasure from cultural narratives, shared the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974.
Historical Context
As both a writer and activist, Adrienne Rich was a leading voice in what is now known as second-wave feminism (or "women's liberation," the term she preferred). After leaving an unhappy marriage and coming out as a lesbian, Rich also became a leader in the modern LGBTQ rights movement.
Second-wave feminism extended from the 1960s through the 1980s and sought to redress a wide range of social injustices. Where first-wave feminism had largely focused on women's suffrage, the second wave centered on issues such as reproductive freedom, workplace opportunity and equality, and legal protections against sexual harassment and domestic violence. Its advocates opposed the belief (widespread in post-World War II America) that a woman's proper place was in the home, keeping house, raising children, and supporting men's ambitions. Betty Friedan's bestseller The Feminine Mystique (1963), which directly challenged the notion that women should be content with this "housewife-mother" role, is often credited with launching second-wave feminism.
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law appeared in the same year as The Feminine Mystique and mined some of the same emotional and political territory. It gives voice to the widespread discontent of traditional housewives and mothers of the mid-20th century: what Friedan famously called "the problem that has no name." According to Friedan:
It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries [...] she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—"Is this all?"
By portraying the ironies and injustice of this situation, the poem foreshadows the politics that marked Rich's most famous poetry—and many of the social changes of the '60s and beyond.
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More “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poet's Life and Career — Read a biography of Adrienne Rich at the Poetry Foundation.
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Rich and Brand: A Conversation — Watch a filmed conversation between Rich and fellow feminist writer Dionne Brand, complete with readings of their work.
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Rich's Feminist Awakening — Learn about how Rich's feminism evolved over the course of her life and work.
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Rich, Remembered — Read Rich's 2012 obituary in the New York Times.
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Marilyn Hacker on "Snapshots" — Poet Marilyn Hacker honors the literary legacy of "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Adrienne Rich
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