10/21

One can’t talk about females in literature for too long without Emily Dickinson coming into the picture. Interesting because she only published about four or five poems in life but now in death has become synonymous with poetry. One of the unjust ways in which the patriarch keeps the free expression of women to a minimum is the tremendous bias with which works of literature get published. To this effect it was very difficult for a woman to get published while using her own name. Even Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein was first released under her husbands name just to get it on the shelves. And so following with a specific idea touched upon in class (that idea being the pressure on women to develop masculine characteristics in order to be successful within the patriarch) I’d like to look at Emily Dickinson’s Poem numbered 764 (754).
The poem is a narrative of sorts. The speaker is an inanimate object, a gun. In the first stanza there is the implication of ownership, “till a Day / The Owner passed – identified - / And Carried Me away -”. In the fourth stanza there is a value judgment made that I think is critical to the read. “And when at Night – Our good Day done - / I guard My Master’s Head - / ‘Tis better than Eider Duck’s Deep Pillow –to have shared-”. Here the speaker places protection above comfort in value to her master’s life. The poem continues to describe the deadly threat the gun represents as kind of a warning, “To foe of His – I’m deadly foe”. The poem continues to assert the value of aggressive or destructive traits, traits commonly associated with the masculine, while consistently down playing the importance of softer traits, associated with the feminine. Through the whole poem there is the constant reminder that the speaker, the gun, is but a tool, a thing of no use unless in the hands of the master.In poetry there is a thing called an ars poetica. A basic definition is “ a poem about poetry”. Reading this poem as an ars poetica aids the feminist read. With this in mind the destructive power of the gun becomes the masculine aspect she must incorporate into her writing in order to be taken seriously in the literary world. And a comment on society can be seen if we consider the last lines of the poem as a statement of sexual repression, “For I have but the power to kill, / Without the power to die-”