"Dreaming a golden dream": The female poetics of Emily Dickinson.
Item
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Title
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"Dreaming a golden dream": The female poetics of Emily Dickinson.
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Identifier
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AAI9530862
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identifier
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9530862
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Creator
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Costa, Catherine D.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Gerhard Joseph
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Date
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1995
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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The notion of a female poetics emerges from women's own experience of literature and women's ways of knowing and focuses on how and what the female writer creates. Dickinson is an excellent choice for a study of female poetics because she has been seen by several critics, including Adrienne Rich and Suzanne Juhasz as the foremother of American poetry, while others use her as a paradigm for their discussions of female poetry.;Poetics refers to the general principles of literature. For Dickinson's canon, this includes her idiosyncratic stylistics, themes and images, as well as her modes of composition, including the materiality of the holographs, choice of audience, and cultural field.;This study begins with an overview of several elements of her poetics and attempts to analyze them in the light of female poetic theory. The major part of the study traces certain elements of Dickinson's female poetics, particularly style and themes, in relation to two neglected members of her cultural field--Helen Hunt Jackson and George Eliot. Helen Hunt Jackson, a poet nurtured in the same Amherst milieu as Dickinson, is the only female poet with whom Dickinson had an on-going relationship. George Eliot is her self proclaimed foremother with whom Dickinson shared many affinities concerning her female poetics. Jackson and Eliot represent the boundaries of Dickinson's cultural field. She tests her mettle, on the one hand, against the grain of Helen Hunt Jackson's position as the eponymous female poet of her time. Jackson's poetry represents the fairly genteel, derivative feminine poetry that was being published in 19th-century America. George Eliot, on the other hand, represents for Dickinson a strong model of female poetics, for she went beyond the gender restrictions of her time. Through seeing Dickinson's complex relationship with these two writers, one can develop a fuller understanding of how she defined herself as a female poet.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
