To a Daughter Leaving Home

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1998

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Despite having been born in the thirties, Linda Pastan’s timeline and scope can be described most accurately as late Modern or even Post-Confessional. Having delayed the start of her writing career in order to raise children and run the household while her husband attended medical school, Pastan has more in common with a later generation of writers, the second wave of Confessional poets like Sharon Olds, Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, and Maxine Kumin. Many of these poets adopted themes, motifs, and personal perspectives of poets like Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and other poets generally called “Confessional.” Pastan finds her subjects in personal, domestic settings associated with Confessional poetics: the household, family relationships, everyday concerns. She too embraces emotionally complex situations, such as the speaker’s deeply mixed feelings in “To a Daughter Leaving Home.” In this poem, a poignant personal exchange represents a more universal transfer of power from one generation of women to the next; Pastan here takes the raw emotional vulnerability of Confessional poetry and elevates its use. The poem moves beyond the internally therapeutic nature of Confessionalism, inviting solidarity and understanding from readers for whom the poem’s metaphor of freedom resonates in broader ways. Pastan’s work can be called Post-Confessional in the way that it seeks community rather than confirming isolation. For Pastan, common experiences are sacred because they are universal, and their value lies in their ability to create bonds between people.

Social Context

Linda Pastan’s work is at home in the context of Feminist poetics. Her poems most often depict domestic, everyday situations, inviting comparisons to poets who mine those settings in order to reflect the concerns, anxieties, and inequities of life as 20th-century women. Earlier Feminist poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton found metaphor and meaning in the kitchen, the garden, and the various household roles associated with women. Audre Lorde, Margaret Atwood, Alicia Ostriker, and other later Feminist poets continue to examine domestic roles as both confining and as the place of grace and release for women. Motherhood especially offers for these poets a terrain in which to explore female power and subjugation. “To a Daughter Leaving Home” balances, as the girl on the bicycle, the terror and strength inherent in motherhood. In her most traditional role, the speaker of this poem commits a quietly revolutionary act by raising her daughter to leave, to be independent, to guide her own life. She gives the young version of her daughter the physical power of transportation in this vignette. The poem itself, in direct address to the older version of the unsteady girl in the story, invites a woman to leave her childhood home in strength and celebration. The poet smuggles this invitation to her daughter and to the reader through allegory rather than an open call to independence, suggesting a speaker who has not completely thrown off her traditional subservient societal role as a woman. But the confidence with which the speaker communicates in code with her audience (both the daughter and the reader) also implies an understanding between women, an assurance that the message will be received.

Cultural Context

While scholars also often classify Pastan as a Jewish poet, Pastan explains in interviews that her use of Jewish cultural themes is symbolic and cultural, rather than religious. Her connection to her Jewish cultural identity is a dimension of some of her work’s main themes: a focus on the personal and historical past, along with a deeper acceptance of the mysterious but inevitable continuum of human experience. In many of Pastan’s poems, she visits the landscapes of her ancestors with the same ease and intimacy with which she narrates her own world, suggesting we carry our collective familial past as part of our own identity. Her book The Last Uncle and its title poem show the way Pastan calls on personal family narrative to address universal themes of loss and mortality, as well as to raise questions about what can or should be passed from one generation to the next. The mother’s arc back and forth between fear and joy as she sends her daughter into the world, watching as she becomes “smaller, more breakable” (Line 16), resonates with this deeper theme throughout Pastan’s poetry: the strength of familial connection within a world of constant threat and flux.