Dickinson’s Transcendentalist Vision in Verse, Non-Heteronormativity, & the Saga of a Timeless Literary ‘Couple’

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born to Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts. The following study intends to critically locate Dickinson's non-heteronormative stance, adopted in selected love-poems, while also focusing on her personal letters addressed to her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. Dickinson, while detesting the submissive docility of a wife, often accepted the burden of acquiescence as a woman of a conservative household and a constrictive era. Nevertheless, prompted by her resentment against that anaemic passivity, she ceaselessly attempted to amend her ‘prescribed' role – one that goes against the grain of her prized individuality. However, with her final compromise of staying within the periphery of a sequestered existence – she vented her rebellion in the words, expressions, and language that drive her ‘radical' and often ‘esoteric' poetry. Dickinson's verse is markedly bold. In fact, Dickinson's “God” is nothing short of a patriarch, trying to fortify the male-female binary. Besides examining her feminism, we readers cannot ignore her erotic voice too. Therefore, we must probe into Dickinson's experiences of ‘otherness' within the politics of 19th century's heterosexual culture. Anticipating the late-twentieth-century Sapphic poems and the ‘Lesbian Existence' as we know it today, Dickinson was already way ahead of her times. The paper explores her treatment of the ‘body' as a metaphor of transcendence from obligatory heterosexuality, and a quest for alternative gender ideologies. Dickinson's poetry indeed emerges as a faithful mirror of her turbulent mind, and accordingly follows an uneven trajectory – seeking to sabotage, overturn, and demolish the very notions that it willingly, at times capriciously, erects.