The Bodily Transformations of Girls and Wives in Emily Dickinson’s Poems
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Date
2019-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Emily Dickinson has written a plethora of poems that explicitly compare marriage and death. In such poems, a female speaker either anticipates undergoing or has already undergone a radical transformation from an unmarried “maid” to a married “wife.” The speaker often draws parallels between her experience of this change to the experience of dying. The speaker also emphasizes that the transformation is irreversible and occurs within the female body. Each marriage poem is told from the perspective of a speaker communicating from a distinct temporal location within the context of transformation. The temporal location of each poem determines which aspects of the transformation are discussed within the poem. I will discuss the essential aspects of the girl’s perspective prior to transformation and the retrospective position of the transformed wife, along with poems which represent the terms previously outlined with intrinsic variations. Dickinson uses the framework of marriage as a physical transformation that resembles death in terms of gravity in order to depict the similarities in how patriarchal figures affect the bodies of women and girls. Dickinson also seeks to comment on the ways in which girls may anticipate marriage as a form of victory, as marriage was seen as the most important event of a Victorian girl’s life. However, Dickinson also provides the testimony of married women in her post-transformation poems in order to portray the ways that patriarchal figures irreversibly affect the bodies of women, and also how marriage for Victorian women may not be victory whatsoever; marriage may end in disappointment, oppression, or a complete loss of identity.
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Dickinson, Women, Girls, Marriage, Physicality, Transformation