![]() The book and what it contains has denied many women the chance to pursue the things that would’ve made them the happiest. The stories in the book have shaped women’s history and pushed their accomplishments out of common knowledge. The book of myths that Rich refers to several times in the poem is a symbol of old-fashioned beliefs about how women are supposed to behave. Their lives and accomplishments have been ignored and in some cases erased. This poem can, and really should be read as an extended metaphor about the way that women have been treated throughout history. But, with detailed reading, and an understanding of Rich’s other work, her allusions to the fight for women’s right is quite clear within the text. The latter two are more obvious, perhaps than the former two. These include women’s rights and the oppression of women, as well as exploration/discovery. ‘Diving into the Wreck’ is filled with important themes that are crucial to the poem’s overall meaning. ![]() She makes several more statements about herself and concludes with another reference to the “book of myths… in which / our names do not appear”. Both figures move around the ship and dive inside. ![]() She is “mermaid and “merman” while under the water, she says. The myths and stories about it are no longer enough to satisfy her. She explains how she came to this place to see the wreck first hand. She uses a metaphor to compare the sea to a story, one that investigating its complexities is something that one does not need strength to complete. The speaker again emphasizes the fact that there’s no one there to help her, to let her know she’s touched the water, or to speak a word of encouragement.Īs she descends, the air changes and she worries about the oxygen in her mask. She climbs down the ladder into the water and she compares herself to a bug. She was alone there, investigating the ocean. She read the book that informed her about the history of the wreck, put on all her equipment, which included her camera and knife. In the first lines of this piece, the speaker, who addresses her life through the first-person perspective, describes preparing for a dive. In 2011, while around half of American adults making less than $30,000 per year agreed that “ today’s children will lead a better life than their parents,” only 37 percent of those making $75,000 or more were as optimistic.‘ Diving into the Wreck’ by Adrienne Rich is a hauntingly beautiful poem about the erasure of women from the historical record. Upper middle class Americans do seem worried. It looks like a long drop, because it is. So the incentives of the upper middle class to keep themselves, and their children, up at the top have strengthened. As the income gap has widened at the top, the consequences of falling out of the upper middle class have worsened. Overall, the evidence for a “Great Gatsby Curve” is quite weak.īut at the top of the distribution, there could be some incentive effects linking inequality and immobility. ![]() The relationship between income inequality and intergenerational mobility is a much-disputed one, as regular readers of this blog know well. The cost of falling reflects the particular way in which income inequality has risen in recent years: namely, at the top of the distribution. than in other nations, and is getting bigger over time: There is a significant earnings gap between those at the top and those in the middle. They are likely to try even harder if the drop looks big, in economic terms. It is also understandable that they’ll use the resources and means at their disposal to try to reduce the chances of their children being downwardly mobile. It is natural and laudable for parents to want their children to prosper. (These “opportunity hoarding” mechanisms are the focus of my forthcoming book, Dream Hoarders.) Inequality incentivizes class persistence Some are unfair: playing the legacy card in college admissions, securing internships via closed social networks, zoning out lower-income families from our neighborhoods and school catchment areas. Good parenting, but also opportunity hoardingĬlass reproduction is of course driven by a whole range of factors, from parenting and family structure through formal education, informal learning, the use of social networks, and so on. The American upper middle class is reproducing itself quite effectively. especially, the top of the income distribution is just as “sticky”, in intergenerational terms, as the bottom. Politicians and scholars often lament the persistence of poverty across generations. ![]()
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