is at her
best, I think, when she's writing about the full range of experiences of the female body, both
good and bad. Her poem "There is a girl inside" may seem at first to be quite
different from her poems showing a female speaker who loves her own big hips or feels grief over
her abortions, but it in fact it is much like them in how it, too, is closely tied to a woman's
life experiences.
There is no one theory of feminism, of course, and the
types of feminism that might best apply to "There is a girl inside" are perhaps ones
(often called "radical feminisms" or "essentialist feminisms") that embrace
the female body and see it as the foundation of female identity. Adrienne Rich and Monique
Wittig may represent this sort of feminism.
The poem itself seems to
challenge stereotypes about what girls and women should be, perhaps even by literally rewriting
the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, which has often been taken as a tale of female
maturation (e.g. the red hood might symbolize menstrual blood and the wolf might symbolize
rampant sexual desire). Indeed, the open lines of Clifton's poem calls this girl "randy as
a wolf" and very different from a grandmother. If you follow this perspective, you may find
it helpful to compare Clifton's poem to Angela Carter's prose rewritings of the same fairy
tale.
The speaker in this poem is no longer willing to wait "patient as
a nun." She embraces her sexuality, curses, has multiple lovers, and so on, but these
developments are hardly presented as destructive. They afford her the opportunity to fully
explore herself and her world.
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