Inflections Of The Pen

Emily Dickinson is now regarded as one of America's most cherished artists. Apart from her poems, she creates a large number of letters with great literary value. Dickinson creates divergent and dynamic epistolary selves. Some scholars explore the reasons from the psychoanalytic perspectives. From a contemporary feminist-poststructuralist perspective, this thesis aims to analyze the strategies and sociocultural functions for posing as various selves.The exploration goes on four aspects. Firstly, the nineteen century epistolary conventions insist on a rigid discrepancy between poetic and epistolary conventions in general, and marginalize the female letters into non-literature in particular. Secondly, by adopting letter-poems, posing and figures of speech, Dickinson bents the norms of letter-writing and metamorphoses from a real person into a series of supposed ones. Thirdly, in her correspondence with Elizabeth Holland, Dickinson mainly poses herself as a dependent child, a docile daughter, and an ideal friend who shares the ideology of true womanhood. Fourthly, in her letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her self-presentations are much more dynamic. She reconciles two apparent opposite epistolary selves of submissive pupil and confident poet. In addition, by quoting and modification, she even enacts as the critic of Higginson's works.Dickinson's letters show a border blur between factual sociocultural circumstances and fictional epistolary responses. She adopts different epistolary strategies to create divergent epistolary selves and reverses the dichotomy between letter and poem. On the one hand, she conforms to the social and epistolary conventions, so as to guarantee the continuance of correspondence. On the other hand, she creatively yet coyly challenges the narrowly socially circumscribed female roles.