What does it mean to combat heteronormative convention within the realm of academia? For Emily Dickinson scholars, deconstructing heteronormative tendencies entails a constant reevaluation of one’s interpretive lens. Martha Nell Smith makes a similar claim in “Gender Issues in Textual Editing of Emily Dickinson,” concluding that “hiding, overlooking, or ignoring Dickinson’s love for women … cloaks Dickinson in mystery, befuddles critics, confuses issues,” and ultimately “[diminishes her] radical poetic experimentations” (Smith 93, 96). In short, solely adhering to prevailing heteronormative paradigms has the capacity to strip Dickinson of countercultural inclinations she may have incorporated into her texts. In fact, solely adhering to any …show more content…
Looking at these texts through a homoerotic lens simply allows for the possibility of a more nuanced reading of Dickinson’s work. Ultimately, Emily Dickinson’s tendencies to contradict literary convention, resist binaries of gender and sexuality, and call attention to societal conventions are better understood through a queer lens—a lens which inherently aims to understand and “disarrange normative systems of behavior and identity” (Juhasz 24). This analysis will use such a lens to consider multiple versions of four poems—“I hide myself within my flower,” “Her breast is fit for pearls,” “He showed me hights I never saw,” and “Going to Him! Happy letter!”—and demonstrate Dickinson’s capacity to tackle societal norms through subtle changes in diction and syntax, beginning with how the Amherst poet queered poetic …show more content…
Despite the fact that most differences within Dickinson’s drafts are limited to word choice and syntax, each draft of a single poem is capable of presenting wildly different information. Not only that, but these shifts in information often play into themes of secrecy and ambiguity. For instance, the second line in “I hide myself within my flower” varies from the first to the third version: a flower hiding “on your Breast –” and “from your Vase –” presenting varying levels of intimacy (80A/80C: 2). The prior phrase produces an image of a flower on a breast—breast being a term that could easily be read as non-gendered, but, interestingly enough, it simultaneously has a feminine connotation as old as Macbeth (“breast, n.”). Conversely, Dickinson’s second and third versions of “I hide myself within my flower” speak of a vase, an object devoid of gender and life. This simple shift dehumanizes the subject in the initial version of the
The dash in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, initially edited away as a sign of incompletion, has since come to be seen as crucial to the impact of her poems. Critics have examined the dash from a myriad of angles, viewing it as a rhetorical notation for oral performance, a technique for recreating the rhythm of a telegraph, or a subtraction sign in an underlying mathematical system.1 However, attempting to define Dickinson’s intentions with the dash is clearly speculative given her varied dash-usage; in fact, one scholar illustrated the fallibility of one dash-interpretation by applying it to one of Dickinson’s handwritten cake recipes (Franklin 120). Instead, I begin with the assumption that “text” as an entity involving both the reading and writing of the material implies a reader’s attempt to recreate the act of writing as well as the writer’s attempt to guide the act of reading. I will focus on the former, given the difficulties surrounding the notion of authorial intention a.k.a. the Death of the Author. Using three familiar Dickinson poems—“The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” “The Soul selects her own Society,” and “This was a Poet—It is that,”—I contend that readers can penetrate the double mystery of Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life and lyrically dense poetry by enjoying a sense of intimacy not dependent upon the content of her poems. The source of this intimacy lies in her remarkable punctuation. Dickinson’s unconventionally-positioned dashes form disjunctures and connections in the reader’s understanding that create the impression of following Dickinson through the creative process towards intimacy with the poet herself.
The life led by Emily Dickinson was one secluded from the outside world, but full of color and light within. During her time she was not well known, but as time progressed after her death more and more people took her works into consideration and many of them were published. Dickinson’s life was interesting in its self, but the life her poems held, changed American Literature. Emily Dickinson led a unique life that emotionally attached her to her writing and the people who would read them long after she died.
Emily Dickinson was a polarizing author whose love live has intrigued readers for many years. Her catalog consists of many poems and stories but the one thing included in the majority of them is love. It is documented that she was never married but yet love is a major theme in a vast amount of her poetry. Was there a person that she truly loved but never had the chance to pursue? To better understand Emily Dickinson, one must look at her personal life, her poems, and her diction.
Emily Dickinson had an interesting life, and is a profound woman in the history of America and literature. Emily wrote many poems. Some are titled, and many are given chronological numbers instead of headlining the main theme. I am interpreting Poem #315.
In the poem “We dream - it is good we are dreaming” (531), Dickinson uses dreams, or the imagination, to prod the mysteries of death. The speaker says, “we are playing”, using repetition and language to show that the players are only dreaming, but they begin to feel paranoid that the performance may truly involve dying; “Lest the Phantasm - prove the mistake." Dickinson equates this dream state with imagination and acting, explaining, "It would hurt us - were we awake -." Dickinson changes the "Phantasm" into "livid Surprise” in the end of the same stanza, as the dream turns into reality, and all that remains of the actors are "Shafts of Granite - / With just an age - and name." The speaker concludes that “It’s prudenter – to dream —” than
Emily Dickinson is one of the great visionary poets of nineteenth century America. In her lifetime, she composed more poems than most modern Americans will even read in their lifetimes. Dickinson is still praised today, and she continues to be taught in schools, read for pleasure, and studied for research and criticism. Since she stayed inside her house for most of her life, and many of her poems were not discovered until after her death, Dickinson was uninvolved in the publication process of her poetry. This means that every Dickinson poem in print today is just a guess—an assumption of what the author wanted on the page. As a result, Dickinson maintains an aura of mystery as a writer. However, this mystery is often overshadowed by a more prevalent notion of Dickinson as an eccentric recluse or a madwoman. Of course, it is difficult to give one label to Dickinson and expect that label to summarize her entire life. Certainly she was a complex woman who could not accurately be described with one sentence or phrase. Her poems are unique and quite interestingly composed—just looking at them on the page is pleasurable—and it may very well prove useful to examine the author when reading her poems. Understanding Dickinson may lead to a better interpretation of the poems, a better appreciation of her life’s work. What is not useful, however, is reading her poems while looking back at the one sentence summary of Dickinson’s life.
This article by Chris Semansky begins by praising Emily Dickinson’s talent of writing intriguing poems about herself. Semanky, argues that this poem expresses Dickinson’s independence ,and her fear of succumbing to rules of the world. Semansky unconventionally argues that this poem is a statement that Dickinson, was trying to make about the dangers of marriage for independent woman. “Death” personified as a kind suitor takes his busy wife. Semanky takes this poem and puts it into perspective of 19th century life. It was a different time, where a woman’s place was beside her husband. Instead of the women recounting a peaceful death, Semansky argues that the woman was actually describing her seduction as a young woman into death.
Hughes Gertrude Reif. (Spring 1986). Subverting the Cult of Domesticity: Emily Dickinson’s Critique of Woman’s Work. Legacy. Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 17-2
Her poetry legacy approximates nearly 2,000 poems. Many of them include a radical philosophy, which requires sensitive perception from the reader. Typically, the poem “She Rose to His Requirement” contains an indignant point of view of gender inequality. In the 19th century, women were inferior to men, and they did not have many rights as men did. Married women were restricted to domestic employments. They were the shadow of their husbands. This prejudice was normal in Dickinson’s time period, but she refused to follow this convention. She owns a feminist ideology of a modern woman, so to her, limiting women’s ability is against nature. Therefore, the poem is her voice for the desire of gender equality for women, and for wives.
Throughout the vast majority of the Romantic Movement, Emily Dickinson’s work was the center of attention. This idea of romanticism; thinking outside of the box, questioning reality and challenging perception was all so foreign that readers and audiences everywhere could not help but begin to question their own awareness of the world around them. Similar to that of many other writers during the Romantic Movement, poet Emily Dickinson wrote all about her ideas that challenged actuality and the natural world. She wanted to explore human intellect, and exactly just what the mind was capable of doing.
Emily Dickinson, a radical feminist is often expressing her viewpoints on issues of gender inequality in society. Her poems often highlight these viewpoints. Such as with the case of her poem, They shut me up in Prose. Which she place herself into the poem itself, and address the outlining issues of such a dividend society. She is often noted for using dashes that seem to be disruptive in the text itself. Dickinson uses these disruption in her text to signify her viewpoints on conflictual issues that reside in society. From the inequality that women face, to religion, to what foreseeable future she would like to happen. All of her values and morales are upheld by the dashes that Dickinson introduces into her poems.
Emily Dickinson’s poem, “When I Gave Myself to Him” demonstrates and examines the commonalities of a women’s role in the 19th century and deliberately moves against the standard. Her use of figurative language, analogies, and the use of dashes represent an intense emotion between her feelings concerning the affiliate desires of society: to marry and have children. Emily uses the conventional use of poetic form by adding six to eight syllables in her quatrain that adds rhyme and musical quality to her poem to treat the unconventional poetic subject of the women’s gender role. This poem is not an ordinary love poem though isolation in unity that deals with the complications and ideas of belonging to someone.
Emily Dickinson is an author, that once wrote a quote I felt was very puzzling. I read the quote quite a few times, when finally I understood the message the author was trying to get across. The quote is " A word is dead When it is said, I say, it just Begins to live that day." Due to my personal experiences, I can say I agree and disagree with this quote. I believe what ones says may be immortal or may die out once said, but it all depends on your audience. It also depends on how you combine the words together, if using more than one. Another important factor would be how powerful the words are. Two words can have the same meaning, but when said, one may sound weaker than another. As for example, if you go deep into the roots of the words hate and dislike you'd see they both carry the same meaning, yet hate sounds a lot stronger and more powerful than dislike.
Psychological criticism is known as the type of criticism that analyses the writer’s work within the realms of Freud’s psychological theories. Such approach can be used when trying to reconstruct an author’s position throughout their literary writings, as well as understanding whom the author was and how their mind created such works. When considering the work of Emily Dickinson, psychoanalytic criticism comes into play with the role of explaining the many meanings behind her poetry, as to make the reader relate to such poetry on a deeper level or not to who she was as a human being.