Emily Dickinson and Her Gothic Writing Styles

Introduction

Emily Dickinson was a US poet, whose passionate poetry has placed her in the small group of founding American poets today sharing the founding title with Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson spent most of her life confined in a room in the house of her father in Amherst, and except five poems (three of them published without her signature and one without the author's knowledge); her enormous work remained unpublished and hidden until after her death.

Discussion and Analysis

Gothic literature, it has been argued, typically combines a 'fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space'. For Emily, the literary-hertorical sign 'Gothic' forms a secret link between the polarized male and female legacies of writing which the daughter-in-mourning inherits. Freud's famous essay on 'The "Uncanny"' points out that the German term unheimlich (uncanny) literally means unhomely, and argues that what is now regarded as 'uncanny' must once have been familiar or 'homely' (Faulkner, 1-9). Ghosts threaten the feminine realm of the home, the proper or the domestic. Emily's tendency to conflate metaphors of psychic and enclosure taps into the conventions of Gothic romance, coded as feminine; at the same time, it exploits the ironic possibilities of that archive of masculine literary fantasy which Mario Praz called 'the Romantic agony'. Her alternation between the roles of persecuted heroine and avenging female demon connects the drama of literary inheritance with the themes of ambition, domesticity, and revenge (Hoefel, 1-6).

One of the best of Dickinson's nature poems, "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass," is really another comment on the most elusive aspects of human existence. The tone is typical: polite, cynical shyness, almost like a very slight, self-mocking smile. Apparently a precise rendering of a snake's appearance, the poem is actually a profound perception of the reality of time past, of myth, of the Jungian "collective unconscious”. The poem is too well known to be quoted in full. In the first stanza, the basal tone is set by immediately calling the snake (never referred to as "snake") "a narrow Fellow," a comic personification the elegant variation of which enforces the theme. (You do not call a snake a snake because, trailing clouds of myth, the snake is loathsome.) Also, "her notice sudden is the underplayed element of surprise, of shock and mystery; is carefully built up to prepare for the dramatic, earned emotion ...