In her first leap from male-dominated metrics and themes, Rich produced "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law" (1963), a visually charged odyssey. Ironically akin to the dense verse of T. S. Eliot, the text moves through ten measured glimpses, each challenging the truth of preconceptions about the female individualist. The focus, a Shreveport belle, enters stanza 1 with studied grace. Well-schooled in womanliness, she performs a musicale, one of Chopin's piano confections. By the end of the poem, the persona has achieved a transformation "long about her coming." No longer the precious, static model of femininity, she accepts the challenge to "be more merciless to herself than history."
The poem's inner structure is a self-willed passage over a treacherous mindscape. From a psyche "moldering like wedding-cake," the daughter-in-law departs from self-abuse and from becoming masculinized, like "the beak that grips her." Jettisoning the trappings of fashion and custom, she battles "ma semblable, ma soeur!" — "my double, my sister!" The doppelganger motif places the speaker in merged roles — challenger and challenged — as she sheds constraint and uselessness, typified as "the whatnot every day of life."
