Judith Wright :

A Quest for Female Identity

Abstract

This paper attempts to explore that the poetry of Judith Wright is a quest for female identity. Judith Wright (1915-2000), who got herself involved in the Feminist literary movement that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s through her poetry, expresses her personal experiences in a subjective mode with an autobiographical touch. Her experiences are mostly the experiences of pain, suffering and oppression, which chiefly relate to male dominance and male hegemony. Like many of her contemporaries, she writes both as a person and as a representative figure of her gender, and she creates her own image of a woman rejecting the image of a woman portrayed by men. By exposing herself explicitly and discarding the socially created inequalities between men and women, she rebels against the established order of patriarchy and thus affirms her gender identity. The present study, therefore, aims at showing that Judith Wright establishes a female identity in her poetry through the exploration of her private sufferings.