Emily Dickinson's Willed Paradise: In Defeat of Adam and Repeal

The poems written by Emily Dickinson may be understood as forming an imaginary world of their own. Although this linguistic realm which Dickinson creates is indeed referential to the world of reality, nevertheless, it is not especially mimetic, or imitative, of the mundane world. Instead, the world created by the poems provides an alternative to the actuality of existence in the social world of Amherst, Massachusetts, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The imaginative function of Dickinson's poetry is rather a constant feature; it holds as true for the single works as it does for the small packets of poems, or fascicles, which were organized by Dickinson to be read together, or even for the totality of the output—the more than 1775 poems with their drafts and variants which comprise Dickinson's life work.1

The questions which arise from Dickinson's withdrawal of her subject matter from the public realm to a fantasy realm are twofold and are interdependent. The first aspect which this study will deal with is a consideration of what causes an individual to remove the locus of her writing from the quotidian world so that she will then be free to create another world as a background for the poetic, or subjective, “self,” of the writing. The next question to be considered is what kind of privatized world it is that Dickinson creates as a habitat for this ego, or “self,” which she expresses through the first-person viewpoint. Both parts will be approached through a psychoanalytic interpretation which rests on the methodology of Freudian ego psychology as applied to creative writing.

Although we do not normally invest the “I” of a literary work with the characteristics of the author's own identity, in