Bi sexuality of emily dickinson

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Bi sexuality of emily dickinson

The inner-workings of Emily Dickinson’s mind continue to be an enigma to literary scholars, worldwide. Dickinson’s agoraphobia caused her to live a solitary and secluded life in her Amherst, Massachusetts home for a large portion of her life. “She rarely received visitors, and in her mature years she never went out” (Ferguson, et. al.; 1895). It is also known that she was in love with a married man (no one knows for sure exactly who this man was) who eventually ended their relationship and this left her very distraught. Some scholars believe that at one point in her life, Dickinson suffered a nervous breakdown, possibly caused by the break-up of the relationship. A woman named Rebecca Patterson exposed the most dramatic and shocking revelation about Emily Dickinson’s life. Patterson’s discovered that many of the emotional love poems that Dickinson wrote were addressed to women. She published her findings in a 1951 book entitled The Riddle of Emily Dickinson.

It was later found out that Dickinson wrote many letters of sexual fantasy and longing to several women. The most notable of these women was her good friend and sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert. The discovery of Dickinson’s affection for woman does not contradict the fact that she was deeply in love with a man at some point in her life. There are many love poems that Dickinson wrote to men. In today’s society, Emily would probably be considered a bi-sexual. Homoerotic thoughts and tendencies were not a possibility during Dickinson’s time because the idea of homosexuality had yet to be socially constructed. That is the reason she had to hide the true intentions of her poetry. The love poems that Dickinson wrote to men are distinc...

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... life. The last four lines in the poem specify the seeking of an emotional attachment to a woman. Dickinson’s reference to the other woman’s heart as a home implies that fact. Other examples of her poetry show that Dickinson was not receiving the emotional support she needed from heterosexual relationships, so she looked for it elsewhere.

Emily Dickinson’s poetry not only contributed extensively to the world of literature but it also helped inspire the female voice to break free from the shackles of oppression that society placed upon it. Her writing told women that it was o.k. for them to express their feelings, hardships, and desires no matter how taboo the subject might have been or how negatively society would have perceived them. For these reasons Emily Dickinson’s writings and poetry will continue to be studied and admired by women for generations to come.

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