A Reading Of Emily Dickinson's Surreal Death Poetry In The Light Of Dream Psychology

Emily Dickinson's surreal death poems, characterized by a dead woman's narration of her own death or afterlife, portray a series of female figures in flesh and blood from the unusual angle of death and thus appeal enormously to the reading public.In this thesis, the present author makes an attempt to break through the limitations of previous psychoanalytic Dickinson studies and establish connections between dreams and Dickinson's surreal death poems, so as to interpret them in the light of Sigmund Freud's dream psychology.Freud's weapons of dream interpretation are the symbolic meanings of the dream components and the free associations of the dreamer. In the thesis, the Freudian approach is adapted to literary criticism by the substitution of literary texts bearing intertextual relations to Dickinson's surreal death poems for the inaccessible free associations. The present author focuses on exploring the sexual implications of certain poetic elements and the intertextual relations pointing to an erotic content, thus revealing the wishes and desires latent in the surreal death poems.The thesis concludes that Dickinson's surreal death poetry is an expression of her unconscious wish for sensual love.