Rachel Jamison Webster Harkens to Alice Notley 'To Vanquish the Patriarchy'

At Tin House, Rachel Jamison Webster remembers the height of the #MeToo moment last fall and her turn to Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette for solace. "While most historical epics were quests undertaken by an individual male hero, Notley’s protagonist, Alette, is female and plural. She is an individual on a mission to find and kill the 'tyrant,'" Webster explains, "but she is also a vessel for a chorus of voices. These voices unleash a stoppered, collective utterance much like the voices of #MeToo." From there: 

To indicate the poem’s spoken quality, Notley inserts quotation marks between phrases throughout the poem. The effect—confusing at first—comes to resemble women finishing one another’s sentences, and implies that a shared coming to speech is central to female consciousness. These voices are souls riding below ground, below the “above world” that is run by the “tyrant:”

“Which of us spoke? did “it matter” “Who saw what” “was being seen,” “knew what” “was known?” “Gradually what was seen “became what I saw” “to me” “Despair & outrage” “became mine too” “Sorrow” “became mine—“ “To ride a “mechanical” “contrivance” “in the darkness” “To be steeped in “the authority” of another’s mind” “the tyrant’s mind”

“Which of us spoke? did it matter?” . . .Despair & outrage became mine too this winter as more than 100 female athletes came forward to tell their accounts of sexual assault at the hand of U.S. Gymnastics physician Larry Nasser. How did this take so long? experts wondered. But several of the girls had reported this assault, and were told that they had mistaken a standard medical procedure for abuse. Their stories were discredited while their abuser was protected. Many other girls were taught to distrust their experience even before they could name it, because of a culture that elevated the male authority of Nassar, and positioned them as fortunate to receive his “care.”

This is what it is to live in patriarchy. It is ““to be steeped in “the authority” of another’s mind.”” And the mind is not only the mind of the abuser, but all the surrounding minds, the mind of the culture that upholds its hierarchies and its forms.

Read more at Tin House.