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Traditionally women's life has been linked with the institution of family, which is largely based

on a clear demarcation between male and female roles. Generally the role of women was

considered inferior to that of men. Literary history testifies that women were assigned qualities

which were considered inferior; female experience in itself was considered trivial and unworthy

of literary expression. Thomas Powell in ‘Art of Striving writes:

Let them learne plaine workes of all kind,

so they take heed of too open seeming.
Instead of song and musick let then
learne cookery and laundry, and instead
of reading Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia,
let them read the grounds of housewifery,
I like not a female, poetesse at any hand.

These lines make it abundantly clear that women were considered intellectually inferior to men,

fit only to look after "home and hearth," The writings of women have always been evaluated by

patriarchal critical standards which do not provide for grasping the subtitles of female experience.

In a world where everything is expressed and evaluated in terms of male norms and values, women

in all cultures found themselves usually in deep conflict with the society around dominated by

men.

The study of the woman’s voice in literature is relevant to understand the historically

unrepresented or under-represented woman’s point of view or approach to life, society and values

in which the woman lives. The voice of the woman, particularly in women’s writing, is the
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‘invisible bullet’ that transforms what the text had so far traditionally represented. It shatters the

text’s male constructed images and conventions that, “killed [woman] into art” and revises

“literary paternity” in order to claim female authorship and female autonomy. Thus, the woman’s

voice in literature acts as the subtext and subverts the text of the traditional critic.

Emily Dickinson can be considered today as one of the most original voices of the mid-nineteenth

century American poetry, particularly when one studies the woman’s voice that emerges from her

poetry. She wrote at the time when poetry was “an almost sacred vocation performed only by a

highly-educated male elite." She challenged in her poems the subjugation of the women writers

and asserted female literary prowess and authority with her unconventional poetic theme and style.

She extricated the true self of women’s writing from the male constructed incapacitating images

of women as “[g]Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite” (Elizabeth Barret Browning,

‘Aurora Leigh’). It is this new tendency in her poetry that was not understood during her times and

caused its critical neglect for a long time. Her literary skill was viewed skeptically as her poems

deviated from the male-centric conventional poetic norms. She refuted what Gilbert and Gubar

consider “the many-faceted glass coffins of the patriarchal texts whose properties male authors

insisted that they are” (The Madwoman in the Attic).

Disgusted with the society that stifled women’s imagination, and influenced by poets like

Elizabeth Barret Browning, Dickinson often expressed her resentment against the received image

of woman of her times in her poems. Like in her poem ‘They Shut me in Prose’.

They shut me up In Prose -

As when a little Girl
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They put me in a Closet

Because they liked me ‘still’ -

Still: Could themselves have peeped -

And seen my Brain - go round -
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason - in the Pound -

Himself has but to will,

And easy as a Star
Abolish his Captivity -
And laugh - No more have I -

Here Dickinson is expressing her need for freedom in "finding her own voice," which has been the

dominant central concern of feminine poetry. The word “They” in the poem is a clear reference to

the society that did not want women as poets. Dickinson describes the bindings Imposed on her in

terms of imprisonment and confinement. Rendered quite forcefully through similes of a girl being

shut up in a closet to be still and a bird put in prison for violation, she points at her society that

expected a woman to be quiet and sober. The girls in such a society were brought up under strict

discipline so that they did not strive to go against social norms. Poetry offered them freedom of

thought. This was considered dangerous to the social order, and the idea is reinforced in the poem

through the simile of the bird detained in prison for violating its duty against the sovereign.

Dickinson mocks at the existing convention by saying that like a bird every true singer can escape

his/her captivity and sing.

Dickinson in a letter to her sister expressed her fear that she like every woman, "her life is

henceforth for him" and therefore might yield to social pressures because in her society marriage
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was the only possible respectable way a woman could live. Based on the Puritan assumption that

men were superior to women and therefore wives were subject to the will of their husbands,

successful marriage required woman to be passive towards the "mighty"male. Dickinson’s

disapproval of this kind of marriage is expressed in many of her poems. In ‘The Sun-Just touched

the Morning’ she contrasts the powerfulness of men and the powerlessness of women in terms of

the images of the male Sun and the female Morning:

The Sun-just touched the Morning-

The Morning – Happy Thing -
Supposed that He had come to well
And life would all be spring!

She felt herself supremer -

A Raised – Ethereal Thing!
Hence forth – for Her – What Holiday!
Meanwhile – Her wheeling king -
Trailed – slow- among the Orchards -
His haughty – sprangled Hems -
Leaving a new necessity!
The want of Diadems!
The Morning – fluttered – staggered -
Felt feebly – for Her Crown -
Her unanointed forehead -
Henceforth – Her only One!

The female "Morning" feels happy that her union with the male "Sun" will elevate her into a

"Raised-Ethereal thing." Like every married woman, she anticipates that her life would be full of
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gaiety and charm in the corrpany of the male Sun. But the male Sun glides away from her, leaving

her alone, making her pine for love, which is precious as "Diadems" for a married woman. Her

helplessness and struggle are suggested through the words "fluttered" and "Staggered." In the

Dickinsonian, a fully recognized woman in the society was honoured and a woman without the

experience of wedded love was seen as devoid of status. This poem, on the whole, can be read as

Dickinson’s sad commentary on the plight of a woman in the role of a wife.

In ‘She Rose to His Requirement’, Dickinson argues the same about how marriage immobilized

women by annulling their imagination:

She rose to His Requirement—dropt

The Playthings of Her Life
To take the honorable Work
Of Woman, and of Wife—

If ought She missed in Her new Day,

Of Amplitude, or Awe—
Or first Prospective—Or the Gold
In using, wear away,

It lay unmentioned—as the Sea

Develop Pearl, and Weed,
But only to Himself—be known
The Fathoms they abide—

The tone in the poem is satirical in the way that it trivializes “The Playthings of Her Life” which

to a woman like Dickinson are not lightly set aside. These “playthings” are the woman’s dreams,
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aspirations, talents and imagination. A woman just as a man should, pursue his or her personal

desires and dreams in order to be complete. She critiques that for a woman, it is like one fine day,

she just has to give up all that she once held dear and take up the “honorable work” of being a

“wife and a ‘woman” the way patriarchal enclosures want one to be. Moreover, after marriage the

woman is made to suppress her needs for the collective needs of the family. And even those

sacrifices are not acknowledged. It is also a subtle attack on all the women who give up their own

dreams, work and remain as mere housewives.

Dickinson also tells us how the identity of a woman is derived from her marital status and not from

what she actually is. She is never seen as a woman with thinking abilities. All her talents and

sacrifices “lay unmentioned” as the “pearl” and the "weed” in the sea. But what this overarching

masculine authority fails to understand is that woman is powerful and secretive as the sea, for still

waters run deep. What goes on in her mind is like the sea. No one knows except “Himself” (God).

Who could fathom the fathoms they abide. Thus, the pause in the last line is deliberate on the part

of the poet. It is almost a warning to the society that forbids a woman to vocalize her requirements.

Dickinson does not out rightly challenge established gender roles but rather uses sarcasm when

she says the woman sacrifices her desires. On the surface Dickinson seems like she could be

endorsing the traditional standpoint of marriage but gradually throughout the poem she provides

readers with significant evidence that she is actually opposing that very institution.

Dickinson feminizes oversoul to overcome female repression. She shows by her own secluded life

and work that woman can transcend the cult of womanhood and that she can rejuvenate her

repressed female self in the very same private sphere within which she is confined. Her poetry
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originates from the closed spaces of the private sphere that allows her to access the power and

ability of Reason. Poetry, therefore, written in the confines of her room enables her to transcend

the repressive actual world and becomes the only possible link with the larger spiritual world. She

transforms the closed feminine space into a realm of infinite freedom and opportunity for

creativity. Such a freedom in the writer‟s self helps her attain self-definition in the larger or greater

spiritual universe as in ‘Exhiliration – is within’:

Exhilaration – is within –There can be no Outer Wine

So royally intoxicate
As that diviner Brand
The Soul achieves – Herself

Hence, she defines herself as a transcendent female self who is “alive” and omnipotent thus:

To be alive – is Power –
Existence – in – itself
Without a further function –
Omnipotence – Enough

Dickinson’s transcendental self is different from the male created one, in the sense that she focuses

primarily on woman’s private life, domesticity and the feminine sphere that centers woman, unlike

man’s focus on public life, war, politics, and commerce celebrating masculine power. While the

masculine tradition centering on male self excludes woman, Dickinson’s all-inclusive poetry

centering on the female self universalizes the female self. In the poem, “I Dwell in Possibility” the
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word “Possibility” epitomizes poetry as an avenue for woman‟s freedom and opportunity through

female imagination. Hence, poetry is “fairer House than Prose” as seen below:

I Dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –

Dickinson’s unique poems, dismissed initially as irrelevant came to enjoy serious critical attention

elevating her status to the forerunner of feminist poetry. The fierce defiance of male literary

hegemony and social authority has long appealed to feminist critics, who consistently place the

Amherst poet in the company of such major writers as Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Barrett

Browning, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Sylvia Plath and

Adrienne Rich. Adrienne Rich considers that, Dickinson experienced herself “as a loaded gun”

and “felt the lethal power of poetry for women”

Dickinson, therefore, is often described as being ahead of her time, and I think that the life she

lived served a greater example to women of her time. She uses these women to give readers a sense

of what a woman should not be, she pokes fun at the rigidity of gender boundaries and offers

herself as an example of a more liberated woman as she never took on the role of wife and mother.

This is why she presents her ideas about womanhood in a subtle way; not forcing anyone to change

their minds but rather offers her opinions and commentary on her own environment. Her poems

have become a resource to women of subsequent generations. She stands out because she did not

just talk about being independent and unconventional; she lived according to what she believed a

woman could be.