What Tiger Mending Has to Do with Poetry Analysis

A painting by Amy Cutler entitled "Tiger Mending"
on view at SITE Santa Fe

In a recent post, I shared a poem by Adrienne Rich called "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers." Someone wrote in asking for insight.... "Why tigers?" 

I believe we interpret poems, and artwork for that matter, from our own history, what we know, and also from what's around us now, our moods, the spaces we find ourselves in.

Lately, I've been hanging around the galleries at SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe's cutting-edge international art space. I'll be teaching a fairy tale writing workshop there at the end of the month, in conjunction with a surreal exhibit, and I've wanted to fully experience the art.

When I read Adrienne Rich's poem, I can't help but think about Amy Cutler's strange little painting in the first gallery, "Tiger Mending" (pictured above). In the Cutler painting, expressionless women painstakingly stitch stripes back on depleted tigers, as though their concentrated effort will enliven the animals.

As an artist who has worked primarily with fabric and thread, I know all too well that sewing is a gender-specific role, one that is typically considered quiet and demure. The women in Cutler's painting and Aunt Jennifer all seem without voice, stuck in their roles. But that doesn't have to be what sewing is; it has always felt to me quite powerful -- the ability to create something out of stitches. 

From the poem, we know that Aunt Jennifer needs a way out of a rotten situation with her husband, and we know too - from the line "When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie / Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by," that she'll never get it. 

For Aunt Jennifer, embroidering those tigers, and making them "prancing, proud and unafraid," is her only way into a better life. In that fantasy place, she is golden and formidable, surrounded by a wide vista where she can roam freely. The two-dimensional tigers she's drawing on her canvas give Aunt Jennifer what little resilience and power she has. 

No wonder she is sewing on their stripes.