Emily Dickinson: Creating an Identity for Women Essay

The first hurdle in comparing the works of Dickinson and Gilman is examining the superficial features of womanhood in their pieces. In Emily Dickinson’s “764” or, as it is also known: “My Life had stood- a Loaded Gun”, the main superficial features of womanhood are somewhat rudimentary and predictable. Women are merely tools, to be used by men but destined to remain useless otherwise. They are left and forgotten “In Corners-“ (Dickinson 1211) without a man to take them up and “identif[y]”

Emily Dickinson was an exceptional writer through the mid-late 1800’s. She never published any of her writings and it wasn’t until after her death that they were even discovered. The complexity of understanding her poems is made prevalent because of the fact that she, the author, cannot expound on what her writing meant. This causes others to have to speculate and decide for themselves the meaning of any of her poems. There are several ways that people can interpret Emily Dickinson’s poems; readers often give their opinion on which of her poems present human understanding as something boundless and unlimited or something small and limited, and people always speculate Dickinson’s view of the individual self.

Harriet Jacobs and Emily Dickinson convey the female experience in very different ways. Dickinson was a white-American poet known for and secluded because of her eccentric nature. Jacobs was an African-American writer enslaved and isolated because of her race and gender. It is easy to see the differences in Dickinson and Jacob’s personal lives, but it is also easy to draw parallels between Dickinson and Jacobs as their work shares a very common theme; the power of silence. While Dickinson suggests that a woman who understands how to use silence can be powerful, Jacobs finds empowerment in silence itself, but what is most interesting is how the two women navigate silence in order to become powerful.

Dickinson’s poem unfolds truth to society’s power over a woman’s identity. The poem has an angry tone read from the first line, “I’m ceded- I’ve stopped being Their’s-” (1). A defiant and condemning voice aimed at an ambiguous, authoritative figure who is embodied by the capitalized, plural pronoun “Their.” Dickinson’s refusal to exactly specify who “Their” is, demonstrates the power and relationship “Their” has over the speaker. Dickinson interchanges this pronoun with “They” (2) as the poem progresses on, and this larger entity is associated as the church, family, society, etc. because of Dickinson’s references to “church” (3) and “childhood” (6) within the opening stanza. Dickinson’s narrator is tired of being put aside or controlled by others. This angry tone begins to grow louder as Dickinson beings conveying this message and while the poem moves through stanzas uncovering the narrator’s identity.

Emily Dickinson, recognized as one of the greatest American poets of the nineteenth century, was born December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts (Benfey, 1). Dickinson’s greatness and accomplishments were not always recognized. In her time, women were not recognized as serious writers and her talents were often ignored. Only seven of her 1800 poems were ever published. Dickinson’s life was relatively simple, but behind the scenes she worked as a creative and talented poet. Her work was influenced by poets of the seventeenth century in England, and by her puritan upbringing. Dickinson was an obsessively private writer. Dickinson withdrew herself from the social contract around the age of thirty and devoted herself, in secret, to writing.

Emily Dickinson, born in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, is regarded as one of America’s best poets. After a poor experience at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she was regarded as a “no hope,” her writing career took off in full swing. Although her family was more conservative, regular churchgoers, and socially prominent town figures, Dickinson preferred a socially reserved lifestyle that renounced the traditional values of her day (Baym, 1189-93). The iconoclastic spirit pervasive in Emily Dickinson's poetry reflects her conflict with the traditions of New England society.

The last two lines of the poem are a timid reflection on what might happen “Had I the Art to stun myself/ With Bolts—of Melody!” (23-24). The idea that creation is a power that can get loose and injure even the creator illuminates why in this poem the artist positions herself firmly as a mere spectator. In these first two poems, we meet a Dickinson who is not entirely familiar to us—even though we are accustomed to her strong desire for privacy, these poems can be startling in the way they reveal the intensity of Dickinson’s fears. She is, after all, shrinking from what is dearest to her—nature, one of her favorite subjects, becomes a harsh judge, and poetry, her favored medium of communication, can suddenly render the reader “impotent” and the writer “stun[ned]” (19, 23). The extremity of her positions in shrinking from the small and beautiful things she loves creates the sense that this is just the beginning of a journey by leaving so much room for change.

At the age of seventeen she attended a public speaking in which she was not participating. While listening, she was distraught by the speaker when he said that though he had daughters which were “the equal of any man’s, they were destined to lives of domesticity and were unsuited to careers as doctors, lawyers, preachers, bankers, or the like.” Dickinson fired off at him “in Heaven’s name, sir, what else is to be expected of such a father?” Gaining recognition in the area for doing this on other accounts in the area is what leads her to finally standing on the platform and not in the audience.

The language present in Emily Dickinson’s poetry is at times unclear, sometimes ungrammatical and can be found to be disjunctive. Dickinson wrote in distinct brevity, irregular grammar, peculiar punctuation and hand picked diction. Her poems were written in a circular manner, where she took the reader to one place and them swept them back to the beginning always relating one metaphor to the next. Dickinson was an intimate person throughout her life, and her poems reflect that lifestyle. Like her poems, she was never quite figured out. Dickinson wrote not for the audience to understand but for her own self

To understand the extent that Dickinson’s modernist tendencies shine through in Adrienne Rich’s writings, it is important to first explore the impact Dickinson had on Rich’s life and compositions in general. It is no accident that Rich adapts styles and themes from Dickinson’s poetry; many parallels can be drawn between Dickinson’s and Rich’s life, including how “she [like Dickinson] set herself apart [from society’s framework] in order to define her own emotional and social territory” (Martin, 171). Also, both writers revered and feared their fathers, even though both chose to pit themselves “in opposition to [their fathers], to live according to [their] own premises” (Langdell, 166). Although Rich states that she could not have lived her life the way Emily Dickinson does in her essay “Vesuvius at Home: the Power of Emily Dickinson (1975),” she also admits that she has “come to understand her necessities [and] could have been a witness in her defense” (Rich, 158). Rich admires Dickinson, even calling some poems of her own mere “imitations”

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born December 10, 1830, into an influential family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her father helped found Amherst College, where Emily later attended between 1840 and 1846. She never married and died in the house where she was born on May 15, 1886.

Seventy-five years after the 1890s publication of the premier volumes of Emily Dickinson's poetry, critics still squabble about the poet's possibly lesbian relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson. Indeed, the specifics of Dickinson's relationship to Susan are ambiguous at best. All of the critical attention that her mysterious sexuality

As child Emily Dickinson was known in her town since her parents were about education and women’s rights. She was very wealthy and was usually always in the library or writing letters but did not write poems at the time. When she was sixteen she

Emily Dickinson is described as “outspoken” , “defying the 19th century expectation that women were to be demure and obedient to men” , although this view is not clearly evidenced through her poetry.

The controversy surrounding Emily Dickinson is her odd lifestyle and her tendencies to be somewhat of a recluse. She is sometimes considered abnormal because she does things differently from most others. She spends much of her life dressed in white and withdrawn from much of society. Of course, her peers take this negatively, but what they do not understand is that her being so private is more of a meditation to her, instead of a hiding. She just wants to escape the pressures she feels are normally required of women. She does not want to be a servant to sick and elderly. She feels she has more potential for her mind to grow, and those obligations would just be hindrances to her writing (McQuade 1255). Her childhood and her staying out of society as an adult, along with many other aspects known and not known, influence her poems and the style in which she goes about writing the works. Her techniques of writing are completely different from any other writer, whether prose or poetry. Dickinson composes her phrases by marking them off with a dash, placing a space before and after. This small maneuver places more emphasis on her “impress of the mind in its analysis of experience” (McQuade 1256). Her slant thymes and unique form of expression produces more of an oddness to the audience.