29 pages • 58 minutes read
Adrienne RichVesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1975A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Women in Patriarchal Society
Adrienne Rich begins her essay “traveling at the speed of time” (178)—attempting to enter the world of a 19th-century female writer. “Vesuvius at Home” is not a historical essay, and Rich does not elaborate at length on the status of women in 19th-century America. Nevertheless, that status underpins her exploration of what might have motivated Dickinson to write as she did.
Much of Rich’s essay concerns the psychological effects of life under patriarchy, including the way in which strict delineation of gender roles results in a fractured psyche. Ambition, anger, desire, and other traditionally “masculine” feelings all become elements that women must either repress or give voice to only in sublimated form, and this idea is central to Rich’s exploration of how Dickinson uses the male pronoun and other “masculine” language. However, the essay’s title suggests a more concrete aspect of women’s subordination in 19th-century America: the expectation that they would be homemakers.
Rich emphasizes that this is precisely what Dickinson was not, even as she spent most of her time at home: “Her sister dedicated herself to the everyday domestic labors which would free Dickinson to write” (180). Consequently, a place that many women might have found imprisoning became a source of liberation and even rebellion for Dickinson. This is evident both in Rich’s description of Dickinson’s bedroom as “the room which for Emily Dickinson was ‘freedom’” and in the title itself (180), which subverts conventional notions of what a woman “at home” looks like, suggesting that Dickinson’s withdrawal from society was active and energetic rather than passive and retiring.
Within this context, it becomes clear that the popular conception of Dickinson as a “frail” hermit stems from misogyny. While women’s lives were limited in real ways in 19th-century America, reducing women to those limitations erases the ways in which they challenged their status. The status of women in a patriarchal society is therefore not only a key theme of Rich’s essay but the impetus for writing it. According to Rich, critics have consistently failed to understand Dickinson’s verse in large part because of their own misogynistic expectations; they believe, for example, that the “natural” thing for a woman to do is to partner with a man, so they assume that a thwarted “heterosexual romance” must lie at the heart of Dickinson’s work. If, as Rich argues, the role of the poet is to speak for those who cannot, uncovering these biases becomes doubly important. In proposing a feminist reading of Dickinson’s work, Rich is herself “see[ing] for those who […] are less conscious of what they are living through” (194).
The Relationship Between Poet and Poem
Rich examines multiple Dickinson poems in order to understand how her poetic language reflected her environment, relationships, and cultural context. Ultimately, however, Rich argues that these elements are just the trappings of Dickinson’s work. Poetry, the essay claims, arises from the unconscious and is fundamentally about the poet themselves: “It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment—that explodes in poetry” (180).
It is for this very reason that Rich believes Dickinson exemplifies the best of American poetry. Dickinson’s work frequently concerned her own mental states, as Rich notes: “Dickinson was a great psychologist, and like every great psychologist, she began with the material she had at hand: herself” (192). Rich implies that the task of plumbing one’s own mind is daunting for any poet but all the more so for a woman, and all the more so one from Dickinson’s era. Because 19th-century society demanded that women not only conform to strict gender roles but also that they devote their existences to others, selfhood itself would have been fraught for Dickinson—practically synonymous with unacceptable self-assertion. That Dickinson not only scrutinized herself but frequently celebrated herself therefore becomes further proof of both her courage and her greatness as a poet.
Poetry’s close relationship to the poet’s self does not mean that no other influences matter. In fact, much of Rich’s argument centers on poems that do not seem to be primarily “about” Dickinson herself—e.g., “He fumbles at your soul,” which Rich says “has intimations of both rape and seduction merged with the intense force of a religious experience” (183). Rich attributes the veiling of the poem’s “true” subject to several factors, including the nature of poetry itself. If poetry thrives on metaphor (which Rich describes as Dickinson’s “native language”), it is only natural that the metaphors a poet would reach for would relate to the time and place in which they lived. Most important, however, is the problem of expressing oneself as a woman. To mitigate the psychological dangers of engaging in “unfeminine” behavior, Rich argues, Dickinson and others have expressed themselves indirectly and with recourse to the sanctioned outlets of heterosexual love and religious devotion. Moreover, it is this particular psychological tension that Rich sees as the state of “psychic extremity” most central to Dickinson’s work; the fear, guilt, and despair that inform Dickinson’s work reflect Dickinson’s ambivalence toward her own creativity.
The Poet’s Private Versus Public Personas
Closely related to the poet-poem relationship and the experience of women under patriarchy is a third theme: the gap between the private and public selves. Throughout her examination of Dickinson’s poetry, Rich highlights how the pressure to conform to strict gender roles causes deep divisions within women’s psyches and examines the ways in which Dickinson’s poetry both reveals and seeks to reconcile those divisions.
Although Rich argues that the popular characterization of Dickinson as a meek and fragile recluse is largely misguided, she concedes that Dickinson herself at times played into such conceptions: “A strain in Dickinson’s letters and some—though by far a minority—of her poems was a self-diminutivization, almost as if to offset and deny—or even disguise—her actual dimensions as she must have experienced them” (184). Rich implies that this self-effacement, like the “poems about bees and robins” that Rich regards as overly precious (184), was a direct and perhaps deliberate response to a culture that demanded women be modest and retiring. It is similar in this sense to Dickinson’s physical seclusion, which Rich implies would have been virtually the only path open to a 19th-century woman writer serious about her craft; marriage and motherhood, at least, would have been far greater drains on a woman’s time than marriage and fatherhood would have been for a man.
Nevertheless, Dickinson’s cultivation of this public persona even as she penned forceful and subversive work heightened the psychological tension caused by patriarchal norms and expectations. Rich close reads the poem “I would not paint—a picture—,” in which Dickinson describes wanting to be a muse, a viewer, and a listener—roles that Rich describes as stereotypically “feminine.” The irony of the poem, Rich points out, is that it is a poem about not wanting to be a poet. However, Rich describes a shift in the last stanza, where Dickinson describes wanting to be both “the maker and receiver at once” (186). Rich explains that this represents Dickinson’s dilemma of pursuing her passion as a writer or playing the role she was expected to as a woman in the 19th century; it is also an attempt to reconcile the two, much like the paradox of the poem itself.
Rich implies a final layer of complication to this situation—namely, that the poet’s role is both intensely personal and intensely public. Poetry draws on the poet’s subconscious to give voice to “universal” (or at least widespread) experiences. There is thus an irony to Dickinson’s occasional adoption of a more “girlish” persona. Ultimately, Rich suggests, it was her poetic voice—a public “persona” much more in line with her inner self—that would end up mattering.
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