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Dickinson's a Little East of Jordan: Jacob the "God-fighter".(Emily Dickinson)

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From: The Explicator
Date: 20070322
Author:Wargacki, John P.

Cynthia Griffin Wolff was the first to observe the deep affinities between Emily Dickinson and the patriarch Jacob--an association not unique to the poet, she claims, but rather as a part of an emerging belief among Amherst Trinitarians with whom the poet was affiliated: "[T]hey construed Jacob's wrestle with God as the archetypal model for every man and woman who sincerely strive for belief. So it was, then, that Jacob was every-where in Dickinson's experience" (144). It is particularly revealing then that the one scenario Dickinson chose to write about from among Jacob's many ...

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