| Balancing cultural studies and feminist theory with archival research, the project examines the psychological, and therefore artistic, ramification of Emily Dickinson's connection to her mother.; Chapter One provides an overview of critical assessments of the poet's relationship to her mother, exploring the long-standing characterization of the mother-daughter relation as one marked by conflict and estrangement. Yet, the very idiosyncrasies of Dickinson's work to which critics are drawn, the chapter argues, articulate a desire for the maternal which, critically discounted at the level of biography, remain indecipherable at the level of poetry.; Chapter Two revises typical depictions of the poet's mother as a pathological personality debased and rejected by her daughter. The project traces the mother's creative efficacy in creating the Dickinson home and her important influence in empowering her elder daughter to confidently claim poetic prowess. Drawing distinct biographical continuities between the poet and her mother, the chapter argues that Emily Dickinson's life was a replication of her mother's rather than a rejection of it.; Chapter Three argues that the institution of separate spheres in nineteenth-century America intensified mother-daughter identification as well as the trauma of mother-daughter marriage separation. An epidemic of female invalidism is linked to this marriage trauma and, as medical discourse increasingly defined the female body exclusively by its reproduction functions, to the loss of women's efficacious social role. The chapter examines the parallel periods of psychological invalidism shared by the mother and the poet during the 1850s and 1860s, reading these illnesses, and the poet's ultimate reclusion, as a resistance to mother-daughter separation and nineteenth-century marriage.; Chapter Four examines the unique linguistic techniques Emily Dickinson inherited from her mother to express a homoerotic maternal yearning distinct from a reproductive sexuality. Utilizing a ploy of withholding, both Emily Dickinsons produce a writing of seduction that, through the use of silence and the blank page, maximizes the somatic sources of language and the sensual effects of the literary. |
