The Girls by Diane Wakoski
"The Girls" by Diane Wakoski is a feminist poem that explores the complexities of identity and self-perception through the lens of female experience. The poem is structured in six verse paragraphs where the first-person speaker contrasts her own physical and intellectual attributes with those of other women, referred to as "the girls." While these girls embody traditional standards of beauty, the speaker feels both envious and superior, depicting herself as the "class brain" with qualities that society often overlooks. The recurring motif of snakes serves as a powerful metaphor, symbolizing both danger and the allure of feminine power.
Wakoski's use of imagery, such as the speaker's identification with Medusa—a figure that represents both fear and intellectual strength—challenges conventional gender dynamics and highlights the complexities of female relationships. The speaker's assertion, "I have never been one of the girls," emphasizes her sense of alienation from traditional notions of femininity. Ultimately, "The Girls" invites readers to reconsider societal definitions of beauty and intelligence, while celebrating the nuanced struggles of women in navigating their identities. The poem resonates with themes of empowerment, vulnerability, and the ongoing negotiation of gender roles in both personal and social contexts.
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Subject Terms
The Girls by Diane Wakoski
First published: 1986, in The Rings of Saturn
Type of poem: Verse essay
The Poem
Diane Wakoski’s “The Girls” consists of six verse paragraphs in which the first-person speaker addresses the differences, both physical and intellectual, between herself and other women, whom she labels “the girls.” Since “girls” is a term customarily used by male chauvinists to describe females of all ages, Wakoski’s poem has a decidedly feminist edge. “The Girls” was written “for Margaret Atwood and Cathy Davidson”: Atwood is a Canadian writer and literary critic with feminist views, and Davidson is a feminist literary critic.
In the first two verse paragraphs the speaker stresses the differences between herself and “the girls.” While they have thin hips and lemon-scented hands and look like models in fashion magazines, she sees herself with “fat ankles/ And ass as soft as a sofa pillow.” She, however, is the “class brain” who answers more questions in class than they do. More significant, she is the “ugly duckling class brain,” an allusion to the fable about the seemingly ugly duckling which becomes a beautiful swan. In effect, the speaker envies the girls who torment her (Valerie Twadell, who “chased [her] with worms”), but she also feels superior to them.
The third paragraph continues the description of the physical beauty of the girls and also develops the motif of snakes introduced in the fourth line of the poem. Cathy is slim with a fashionable “Zelda-ish bob,” and Peggy is as “slender and chic as Jane Fonda.” The use of “now” and the reference to Fonda suggests that at age forty-seven the speaker still sees the same differences between herself and other women. Further, the reference to Cathy’s “sorority girl students” raises the issue of the speaker not belonging to a clique.
The focus of the verse paragraph, however, is on the ease with which the girls handle the snakes the speaker fears. The speaker concludes the verse paragraph by alluding to Emily Dickinson’s poem about the “narrow fellow in the grass” and stating that she “would have died” if she had seen it. Dickinson’s and the speaker’s personification of the snake makes it obvious that “snakes” are to be seen not only literally but also metaphorically and symbolically.
In the fourth verse paragraph the speaker begins, “I have never been one of the girls,” a line that is repeated twice later in the poem. The “girls” are smart but are not given labels such as “encyclopedia,” which dehumanizes the speaker, or “brain,” which segments her. They are “graceful” without dieting and are “followed by men.” It is the “ease” with which they handle snakes that the speaker most envies. She mentions only dangerous snakes (the python, mamba, cobra, and cottonmouth), but the snakes are seen in intimate contact with the “girls.” The skin of the python is “like milky underwear,” and the cottonmouth swims “next to you all night/ in muddy fertile loving water.”
When the speaker continues the snake imagery in the fifth verse paragraph, she becomes the mythical Medusa “with vipers hissing around my hair” and with the power to turn men into stone, but this is how men regard her, not the way she sees herself. In the last paragraph she repeats, “I have never been one of the girls” and states that if she had seen the phallic snake D. H. Lawrence described in his poem that she would have “turned and run.” Unlike Lawrence, who believed “snakes were/ the Lords of Life,” the speaker believes that “you pretty girl women” are “the real Gods.” In the presence of such “Gods,” she is “neither man/ nor woman,” essentially deprived of her sexuality.
Forms and Devices
In an interview with Andrea Musher, printed in Wakoski’s Toward a New Poetry (1980), Wakoski discusses snakes and mythology. She states that the image of the rattlesnake is “basically the phallic image,” but she goes on to claim that “snakes were almost always part of the female cult in all religions.” The Medusa image, which she uses in “The Girls,” is the image “of an intellectual woman that turns the man to stone unless he has a mirror that can reflect it away from himself.” This image she considers “the threat of the female mind.”
In “The Girls” Wakoski uses the symbolism and mythology of snakes to differentiate herself from other women. These women understand and control the “Lords of Life” (the snakes) because they are at “ease” with phallic power. The passage about the cottonmouth best exemplifies the relationship between the sexes: “the cottonmouth who swims next to you all night/ in muddy fertile loving water.” There is no violence, but the swimmers are in “fertile loving water,” suggesting a fruitful union of the sexes.
How this control is achieved is explained in the last verse paragraph: “but I know you pretty girl women/ who handle them like hula hoops,/ or jump ropes,/ or pet kittens.” To handle a hula hoop is to make it circle one’s hips, while maintaining only occasional fleeting contact with it—this is to tease and control through sexuality. To deal with a jump rope is to respond rhythmically to an outside threat without being tripped up or “caught.” To handle a pet kitten is to be affectionate to something that has been domesticated. In all three instances the woman knowingly uses her sexuality to control the men who would control her.
The reference to “pretty girl women” implies that women are only pretty “girls” grown older and more adept at manipulation. In contrast, the speaker is the Medusa figure, who becomes in Wakoski’s mythology “the threat of the female mind.” Men do not adore her, as they do the “girls,” when they are turned away. In fact, the only means of protection a man has against Medusa is the mirror, which reflects the gaze away from himself, but since it is a mirror, the reflection itself becomes a self-destructive threat to the Medusa figure.