Schuler Ravencraft- Rebellion Poem

Sonnet: The Ladies’ Home Journal

By: Sandra Gilbert

The brilliant stills of food, the cozy

glossy, bygone life – mashed potatoes

posing as whipped cream, a neat mom

conjuring shapes from chaos, trimming the flame –

how we ached for all that,

that dance of love in the living room,

those paneled walls, that kitchen golden

as the inside of a seed: how we leaned

on those shiny columns of advice,

stroking the thank yous, the firm thighs, the wise

closets full of soap.

            But even then

we knew it was lies we loved, the lies

we wore like Dior coats, the clean-cut airtight

lies that laid out our lives in black and white.

It is said that, “Poetry is man’s rebellion against what he is”, and Sonnet: The Ladies’ Home Journal is no exception. Sandra Gilbert is both a poet and critic, and is well known for writing a highly influential piece of literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. In this poem Gilbert describes the lives women in the 80’s were expected to have. She describes the “ideal life”, talking about the “brilliant stills of food” and a “neat mom conjuring shapes from chaos” but then in the next stanza opens it up by saying, “But even then we knew it was the lies we loved”. Gilbert is rebelling against this role society has established for her. She presents a notion that women are fed these lies as they grow up about this “picturesque life” but in the end it is not so perfect and believes that women are meant to do much more than just take care of the family. Gilbert did not want to be the stereotypical mother/ wife living in a white picket fence house and the poem reflects her feelings toward living this life style. Gilbert never let herself fill this mold and is an English professor at University of California, Davis.