“Compulsory Heterosexuality in
The Mirror in the Well”

This is an academic essay I wrote for a 2019 class on sexuality and gender in literature. It focuses on connecting famous poet and feminist/queer scholar, Adrienne Rich, to a short novella we read in class, The Mirror in the Well, by Micheline Aharonian Marcom. This essay synthesizes many texts of critical theory and ideas from the novel. It required a lot of reading and research and making connections to tease out some of the broader themes hidden in the novella.

The essay also references more classical figures in feminist literature, like Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley, uniting one of the strong founding voices of feminist theory with one of the strong founding voices of modern queer theory, Adrienne Rich. This essay shows off my work as a researcher and my ability to synthesized and summarize complex and disparate ideas into an overarching thesis.

The woman is trapped by the societal institutions of what Adrienne Rich calls “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich 1591). While she is able to attain some amount of freedom and happiness within the framework of this institution, ultimately, she is oppressed by a patriarchal culture that she does not have the tools to navigate or escape.