Hi, I have just joined the forum in hopes that someone here will help me on my topic. I am doing a paper on Emily Dickinson and why she became reclusive. If anyone can help me out a little please fell free to do so. Thanks
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Hi, I have just joined the forum in hopes that someone here will help me on my topic. I am doing a paper on Emily Dickinson and why she became reclusive. If anyone can help me out a little please fell free to do so. Thanks
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Originally Posted by Khill
I just did a 10-pager on a poem of hers, and its difficult to separate her life and her poems.
Hm? Why she became a reclusive. First, ya gotta define reclusive because she was around people, pets, nature and horticulture stuff. So, she was not THAT reclusive, even if she in later times liked dressing in white and stayed in her room a lot. Also, don't forget she basically had a marriage proposal during her last couple of years.
But, her dumb father controlled the family a lot and kept her quite a bit out of circulation, nor did she find a match up to her standard of intellect.
Next to no recognition by the men-centered society; they even tried to re-write her poems so they could put a couple in a newspaper. Life really did not afford her a pleasant path. So, she probably said, "ta hell with it -- I'll have a life afterwards" sortof like the guy in "The Three Sisters" saying that this life is just a prep-school towards the next life. What's his name? Vershinin, yea that's it.
So, personally, I don't think she "chose" that life; but that it was foisted on her. Today, she might be a jet setter from Paris to Tokyo to New York; on talk-shows. But back then - pathetic to think as to this brilliant gal's prospects. But, in the long run, as she predicted, she is now recognized as truly one of the greatest and most penetrating minds to have existed.
Probably not much help; but a few considerations --
I'm not a Dickinson scholar, but I've wondered about her seeming preoccupation with death. If she did have an unhappy love affair, or lost a lover by illness or injury, this might explain the death theme and her reclusivity in one stroke. I haven't heard that as anything that happened to her, though. It was pointed out to me this week that she didn't title her poems herself, but that the titles included with the poems were put there by various publishers. Does anyone know anything about that? As far as her father goes, I don't suppose anyone's father was more controlling than Elizabeth Barrett's, but she managed to get out!
Good point. In "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" (the play anyways) the father is -- shall we say -- weird; on the unnatural side as far as a true father. But, Eliz. had a beau who wisked her out of the situation, but Emily D. didn't quite have that knight in shining armor that we know about.
She was indeed placed in a sitiuation, and a time where she could not be at her best, nor have the best opportunities for someone so gifted, which is sad. But I think she had her own world, and never wanted to be defined by anybody else's, and that would include the modern world if she had gotten the chance to live in it. She would have done better to be born in more modern times though, if not in today's world. The 19th century was very male dominated, and Emily never fit the model of women writer that that century required, although you could be succesful if you did. Emily's father was eccentric, and controlling, but not as bad as he is often portrayed in legend, which is as very bad. That's a common misconception.
She never married because possibly, she never found the best sitiuation or person. I believe it was also because she wanted her independence as much as a woman could have then, and did not want to be a wife, even if it woudn't have lasted very long, nor involved some of the worst tasks of 19th century wifehood, say if she had married Judge Lord. Her death obsession is true, although it could be explained by saying that was typical of the 19th century, and also Emily had a questioning mind on things, both of this life, and the next.
The obsession with death could also have been due to the mystery surrounding it. Since no one knows what happens after death, it's always been a bit controversal, some people believe you keep living and others believe it ends all. This might have had a draw for Emily as well.
As for being a reclusive it's also a theory that she had Agoraphobia, which is the fear of being in crowded, public places like markets or the fear of leaving a safe place. This added to the fact she was in very men-controlled atmosphere, and had very inconventual ideas for her time, might have increased her "reclusive" attitude towards the world dramatically.
I think that she was built her own little world because she found this world too disturbing or too interferring. In one of her poems she talk about how she loves to be a mystery, she doesn't want to be discovered by this world. So i think she wanted to be like that, she found another meaning in life instead of just common living.
thanks