Even after the discovery of so many letters by Dickinson, indicating her range of correspondence, and her writings which indicate the freedom of her mind and spirit, the image of the pitiable hermit still stands strong. Much scholarly work has gone into reinterpreting and understanding the personality of Emily Dickinson, yet the impression of the solitary and thus tortured poetess refuses to completely leave her. But while a brooding loner male figure is usually an object of attraction and fascination, his female counterpart might have been burnt at the stake during the Middle Ages and is branded an oddity even today. Pablo Picasso had said, “Without great solitude, no serious work is done.” Picasso too supposedly turned into a recluse late in his life. It came to be assumed that she was forced into isolation after a possible heartbreak because this deliberate choice to be alone did not make sense for a woman.Īlso read: Why Do Good Male Authors Write Bland Women Characters? It is thus that we have the idea of the detached, lonely, probably bitter poetess in white robes scribbling away on pieces of paper at a little desk.
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EMILY AND MTTY TUZINSKY FOR FREE
Photo: Emily Dickinson archiveīut for this love of seclusion and yearning for free will, she was punished by her early publishers – who were instrumental in forming the image we have of Dickinson even today.
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Emily Dickinson never got to see the sea.Įmily Dickinson’s handwritten manuscript for “Wild Nights-Wild Nights!”. She experienced “wild, wild nights” and early one day she took her dog “and visited the sea”. So she visited these impossible sites through her imagination and in her poems. There would always be places she would never see during her lifetime. It is evident that she was well aware of the societal limitations on her and she frequently she tested this “circumference”.ĭickinson must have realised that even if she did venture out of her home, this freedom was going to be superficial. She had an acute aversion to power and dogma. Like a true rebel, she placed great importance on freedom. The reason for this preference can be found in her words, for Emily Dickinson was an outlaw. It was also her choice to be alone and socialise mostly through her letters. Thus, Dickinson’s crime was not only radical poetry. For a 19th century woman, as for most modern women bogged down with household work, time for practising her art was preciously limited. Writing letters and poems in her few spare hours was the only way she could hone her writing skills and socialise at the same time. The rest of the day, she spent in her room at her tiny writing desk beside the window, composing nearly 1,800 poems during her lifetime, and writing letters to close to 100 correspondents. Although she disliked household chores, Dickinson now restricted herself to her home, engaging in baking, gardening, sewing and being devoted to her dog Carlo.
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But towards the latter part of her life, she gravitated more and more towards isolation.
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Such a woman, who also shuns socialisation and enjoys solitude, should be distrusted and/or dissected, because she is supposedly an irregularity, a glitch in the normal order of things.Įmily Dickinson fulfilled all of these criteria.Īlso read: Woes of a ‘Child-Free’ Indian Womanĭuring her youth, Dickinson had a social circle and a fiancé. The single adult woman with no husband, no children, and with no desire for a family, is suspect. But perhaps the lone woman is the most dangerous or, at least, the strangest of them all. Yet she rejected his invitations, even to meet other contemporary poets.Īll women are dangerous, if we go by most traditional texts which have discussed women and especially those which have been written by men. Higginson was one of Dickinson’s regular correspondents, one with whom she shared her poems as well. She had been invited three times by Higginson to Boston to attend his lectures and meet other poets to have literary discussions. “…I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town,” replied Emily Dickinson in a letter to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the writer, abolitionist and soldier.