Speaker

The unnamed speaker is the only voice we hear throughout all of “Mock Orange,” and the world of the poem is filtered entirely through her perspective, which evolves as the poem goes on. The only context we are given about the speaker is indirect, as we can infer from the second stanza that she has had negative sexual experiences with men as she speaks about hating sex. But as we see through the broadening of her argument throughout the poem, we know that the speaker is not just concerned about the issue in the moment, of not being able to sleep. Rather we know that she is kept awake by larger issues: namely, the “tired antagonisms” (17) of societally assigned gendered roles and the inability to transcend them through sex.

Because we know so little about the unnamed speaker, we can assume that Glück is allowing for her...