"She Want It All": The Sun Goddess in Contemporary Women's Poetry

Abstract

It is expected of conventions that they be invisible-or visible only when broken. So it is with odd notion that sun is an emblem of masculinity, phallic power, yang force. Odd, that is, to Japanese, Ainu, Koreans, Siberians, Australians, Germans, Scandinavians, Lithuanians, Finns, Cherokee, Eskimo, Toba, Achomawi, and others to whom sun is female. To them, same physical object that in our literature so naturally, so unquestionably represents the solar principle, virile, intellectual, lucid' becomes to them Dearest Goddess, more important than God, who provides not only warmth and colors of rainbow, but good as well.2 To them, radiant power means not man but woman. So, too, to Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Ntozake Shange, and other contemporary women poets, who break literary convention of at least a thousand years by introducing a female sun into their works. Sometimes this goddess is celebratory: