![]() As it is with a woman, that others do not, yet her husband knows that she is fallen in league with some other man, he will be strange to her and not do anything for her" (Shepard 59). For example, it is neither random nor arbitrary that, in minister Thomas Shepard's world of analogy, the image of a promiscuous woman was erected as the ultimate emblem of the faithless: "That a false, double, treacherous, disloyal heart to Christ can not expect any thing it comes for onto Christ. This analysis nicely encapsulates the structure of many Puritan narratives concerning conversion. As Teresa de Lauretis argues, in narrative, the hero as male, possessor of desire, penetrates and conquers space, traveling through it those obstacles he encounters en-route, including the matrix of space itself, largely figure as feminine and female (133-140). The female form's sedimentation within narrative is evident in a variety of Puritan discursive forms. These bodies propel the imagination outside of reductive and overdetermined narratives and thereby allow for the reimagination of the female form's possibilities, possibilities of desire, corporeality, and sexuality. According to Dickinson, the route out of the encasement of the female body within a rigid Puritan discourse which insists on perceiving the female body in delimited ways, particularly as feminine and heterosexual, is the creation of alterior imaginary bodies, here bird and bee bodies. Playing off of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's and René Girard's theory that triangles of desire found narrative, I will argue that Dickinson overlays the Puritan triangle of desire with a zoological frame in order to lesbianize the process of conversion. Through the use of bird and bee imagery, Dickinson images anew the erotic triangle of male minister-Christ-congregant underlying Puritan discourse. In order to disrupt this powerful, reiterated Puritan narrative and wrest herself from its delimited mode of imagining women, Dickinson splices the discourse on conversion together with the simplest of zoological knowledge - that bees pollinate flowers and that birds fly. The mere fact that Puritanism's language and practices posit the male minister as the imitative model of conversion to be followed by all congregants and Christ as the final object of desire evidences the way Puritanism privileges the imaginary body of the male over that of the female. In other words, through the process of conversion, the convert inherits a mode of perception that magnifies the positive value of male forms and fully authorizes desire for them. Such a conversion introduces the congregant into a perceptual system structured by an idealization of male bodies and desires for them. Typically in Puritan discourse, conversion is represented in the form of an erotic triangle: the "bride" congregant embraces a love of Christ by imitating the male minister's own example. constructed through a shared language" and "common institutional practices and discourses." One dominant mode by which Puritanism creates imaginary bodies is the discourse surrounding the process of conversion. Thereby it sought to shape her subjectivity through saturating her imagination with what philosopher Moira Gatens calls "imaginary bodies." Imaginary bodies are "socially and historically specific. As such, it immersed her in a discourse which over-determined the value, place, and role of both men's and women's bodies. The Emily Dickinson Journal 9.2 (2000) 42-54Īs Jane Donahue Eberwein has argued, Puritanism was Dickinson's first language (170). And third, the queen represents her Western cultural and religious inheritance wherein bees are symbols of the soul, reincarnation, poetic-philosophical vocation, and a Nietzschean, trans-Dionysian naturalist ontology-symbolized by apiarian Artemis. Second, the hive represents her individual poems (with slants/dashes as stingers, wings as hymn meter, honey as rhymes, variant words as exiled bees, and accompanying flowers their Darwinian coevolution with bees), constituting her writing persona as a multi-voiced self-swarm, as organized in the apiary of her letters and fascicles. First, (a) the bee’s sting represents martyred death (b) its gold, immortality (c) its tongue, the “lesbian phallus” (d) its wings, poetic power (e) its buzz, poetic melody, and (f) its organism, a joyful Dionysian Susan (her sister-in-law and love interest) to Emily’s flower. But following several recent scholars, I identify Nietzschean/Dionysian overtones in the bee poems and suggest the figure of bees/hive/queen illuminates as feminist key to her corpus. ![]() Despite the ubiquity of bees in Dickinson’s work, most interpreters denigrate her nature poems.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |