Emily Dickinson And Her Works From The Perspective Of Eco-feminism

As one of the most prominent American women poets in the nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson wrote1775poems, among which more than500poems are about nature. In her poetry she described nearly everything in nature. However, she also held contradictory attitudes towards nature. She loved nature; meanwhile, she felt worried and suspicious about it, and she refused to accept the traditional belief and held suspicious attitude towards God. All of these challenged the traditional patriarchal system. By giving prominence to women’s rebellion and self-salvation and subverting patriarchy, the poetess revealed her feminist thoughts and the new image of women, and constructed her unique cultural values a century earlier than the emergence of feminism in the1960s.Emily Dickinson, together with her poems, has never escaped the attention of many critics. There are numerous papers at home and abroad to explore her life and poetry, but there are few authors who probe her life and poetry from the perspective of eco-feminism. The reasons are that the previous studies failed to combine feminism with environmentalism, so they neglected the relationship between women and nature. Although Emily Dickinson had little intention to be an eco-feminist, the intuition of a poet and the life experience as a woman made her express her concern about the fate of nature and woman in her works unconsciously.This thesis uses eco-feminist criticism as the theoretical basis and combines Emily Dickinson’s life experience and her poetry to re-read her reclusive life and her perspective eco-feminist awareness reflected in her poetry. And the final conclusion is: because of her special social background and life experience, Emily Dickinson formed her eco-feminist awareness and then expressed it in her works. Above all, her eco-feminist awareness has its realistic value and inspiration to the modern world even though it is immature, deficient and limited.