Question

Write a one page on the history of Emily Dickinson and feminism

Answer 1

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She left school as a teenager, eventually living a reclusive life on the family homestead. There, she secretly created bundles of poetry and wrote hundreds of letters. Her poetries were published after her death and she brought what we know about feminism today. She imparted and vent out her feelings through poems.
Dickinson, known by many as the “reclusive poet,” lived at a time where women were about to initiate a large change. As the women’s suffrage movement began to take shape, so did post-Civil War societal attitudes regarding women. Emily Dickinson, though, was beginning the literary force that people know of today.
People noted that young Dickinson had a “ mother, who is often represented as the passive wife of a domineering husband” and that is where the idea of feminism and poetry came from. From a very early age, she understood how women are treated in male-dominated society and are not allowed to do what they want to. The idea that there was already a passive woman in her life from a young age suggests that even a young Emily Dickinson had a grasp on what women should look like and do. This helped to shape the idea of Dickinson as a literary precursor to the feminist movement. She wrote many poems and the lines below are just an instance of one

"Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality."

Paying attention to this poem as a feminist, Emily Dickinson wants to explain that the “he” she refers to in this poem is capitalized. It adds a gender-based characterization to death itself. Also evident throughout the poem is the capital “D” in death. Death, in a sense, embodies the masculine characterization of what death is and what it has become through the works of Emily Dickinson. Scholars have long speculated what this poem is about, but the general consensus is that death, in this case, is a symbol of a marriage lasting for an eternity. From a feminist perspective, this would be an eternity of living in a world focused around the patriarchy.

Unlike many women at the time, Dickinson did not want to be immortalized and in love with someone forever. Rather, she was quite comfortable with being a woman with no ties to a romantic relationship. That alone says that Emily Dickinson was, in fact, an early feminist. She did not want to be with someone who holds her and not let her be and then seeing her mother suffering and going through all that, she was sure she does not want any. That brought the feminist feeling in her and she wrote so well so as to become one of the famous poets in American literature.