The Voices Of Gender In Emily Dickinson's Poetry

Emily Dickinson(1830-1886) prevails as a powerful poetic voice and literary figure in the world.In her more than 30 years of literary writing,she created 1775 poems.Her literary genius lies in the fact that she lives in her own time of culture and yet she predicts the psychological preoccupations and poetic themes of the future; Dickinson is widely acknowledged as one of the founders of modern American poetry, an innovative pre-modernist poet as well as a rebellious and courageous woman.The fragmented,multiple,and imagistic qualities have more recently been compared to modernist poetic strategies.The stark style,ambiguous punctuation capitalization variant word choices and multiple versions of poems all contribute to contradictory interpretations that perplex,startle,and amaze readers.Such contradiction attracts great attention of scholars from various countries,including China.This thesis is an attempt to discuss the voices of gender in Dickinson's poetry, Apart from introduction and conclusion,the thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter One attempts to resort to the feminist approach to analyze Dickinson's poetry.She depicts women images in a "womanly" poetic language imbued with her own individuality.Her narrators frequently appear as child images which bear resemblance with the female in their fragility,flexibility,resignation and irrationality. Actually,the narrator in Dickinson's poetry plays the role of the female in conformity with the contemporary culture,tender and resign,but at the same time protesting against the male.Feminist critics discuss the role of gender in Dickinson's life and career with the help of many disciplines of studies such as history,psychology, sociology,linguistics and other literary theoretical schools.Many characters in her works are the genuine depiction of her personal image.Gender actually opens a unique space for her vision and writing.Chapter Two mainly discusses the poetic embodiment of gender in Dickinson's poetry.Questions of identity that concern Dickinson are multiple.They include her identity as a woman,her identity as a poet,her religious identity and her identity as an American.Dickinson's poetry further brings out the complicated relation between Romantic imagination and more traditional metaphysical structures.Romanticism in its own way continues to privilege an unrealized sublimity over concrete realization or embodiment,including embodiment in language.The third chapter deals with the reading and interpreting the voice of gender in her poems.The gender,the lyric poem and the reading constitute the performance. Dickinson both constructs alternatives to a traditional,fixed binary gender system (woman/man) and opens opportunities for the reader to perform alternative genderings.Analysis of voices of gender in and of Dickinson's poems shows that her variant performances of gender are crucial to the general construction of her poetry.Through the analysis of the voice of gender in Dickinson's poetry,the thesis discloses the crucial function of both poets construct and the reader's reading of voice of gender in her poetry,which also demonstrates her uniqueness in her life and literary creativity.