The Interior Castle : Gruesome Detail With Physical Pain
900 Words4 Pages
2. “The Interior Castle” – gruesome detail with physical pain
a. uses metaphors to describe pain
i. “the role of language in linking the mind to physical and metaphysical reality” ii. preoccupation of her priceless mind
1. for Pansy, the physical pain inflicted by the doctor never possesses her real self
2. never stains her true source of beauty, her brain
3. although in a time when appearance was important for women, Pansy exclusively concerned about her interior; women would mold themselves to be reconstructed primarily for the benefit of the man
a. her nose surgeon mourns the damage done to her beauty, but Pansy is secretly obsessed with the fear of damage to her brain – she wishes to be isolated in her head – she lost her means…show more content… For Pansy, physical pain is nothing compared to the fear of being violated in some way
b. Psyche of someone who is not sure she can go back to the ordinary world, who feels her true self is folded up deep within and who struggles to have a language for that self; accomplishing the nearly impossible
Second paragraph
1. Pain has an element of blank “poem”
a. Pain 's" inability to recollect further personifies it by also making it subject to the human ability to forget.
b. Pain establishes within the context of the progression of time by giving it a past, a future and a present
c. Pain’s inability to remember its own origins strongly suggests an extreme span of time since its beginning – pain has lasted a long time
i. “It has no future but itself,” – always exists (blank?) ii. pain leads to more pain
1. “its past, enlightened to perceive new periods of pain”
2. pain already has a fated future, one that includes only more pain iii. pain of the past gives rise to the pain of the present and the future
1. involves the acknowledgement of past periods of pain
d. as pain is the only subject in her poem, Dickinson represents pain as being limitless and its existence within time leads to a sense of overwhelming size when considered “infinite” – outstanding size of pain
e. the size of pain leads the reader to analyze the physical weight of the pain
2. overall meaning:
a. Dickinson writes about a very vague meaning of pain leaving the reader to