Disquieting intimacies: Confession and the Gothic poetic in Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson

This dissertation examines Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson's development of a uniquely gothic and "confessional" mode of poetic writing that critiques and resists certain cultural and political assumptions that are implicit in mid-nineteenth century American literature. The significance of Poe and Dickinson's particular style of lyric is its synthesis of traditional notions of confession as a therapeutic and culturally normative mode of discourse with the more disruptive and politically subversive potential of gothic writing. The term "gothic" refers to a form of sensationalist terror writing that grows out of late eighteenth century European and American Romanticism, while the "confessional" refers here to any writing organized around representations of the act of personal introspection, intimate revelation, and dialectical exchange (often by means of a theatrical address to a reading audience). While the act of confession generally indicates a submission to discursive conventions and social norms, I argue that it can sometimes be used to resist and disrupt those same structures. By means of affective manipulation, linguistic rupture, and performative evasions, Poe and Dickinson reveal their anxiety and skepticism towards a literary culture dominated by the expectations and aesthetic values of their Transcendentalist and sentimentalist contemporaries---especially the latter's paradoxical faith in both the autonomy of the individual and the necessity of intimate social bonds. An analysis of Poe and Dickinson's work suggests that these writers are more uncertain than their peers about such shared values, more anxious about the consequences of self-exposure, and at times even hostile to the demands made upon them as writers, citizens, and marginalized "voices" to conform to social expectations. Their "gothic-confessional" poetic combined with a distinctly theatrical form of lyric address enables them to both engage their reading audiences in familiar terms and voice their dissent from an unexpected position of authority.