Dickinson, Emily | "I Dwell In Possibility—" (Poem 657)

"I dwell in Possibility—" (Poem 657)

A. JAMES WOHLPART (ESSAY DATE WINTER 2001)

SOURCE: Wohlpart, A. James. "A New Redemption: Emily Dickinson's Poetic in Fascicle 22 and 'I dwell in Possibility.'" South Atlantic Review 66, no. 1 (winter 2001): 50-83.

In the following essay, Wohlpart argues that the poems that make up fascicle 22, particularly "I dwell in Possibility—," illustrate the gender constraints implicit in a patriarchal culture and Dickinson's attempt to undermine the foundations of that culture.

It was a life deliberately organized on her terms. The terms she had been handed by society—Calvinist Protestantism, Romanticism, the nineteenth-century corseting of women's bodies, choices, and sexuality—could spell insanity to a woman genius. What this one had to do was retranslate her own unorthodox,...

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