An Analysis Of Emily Dickinson's The Awakening

Dickinson was considered an odd and mystical woman of her time. This is due to her rejection of social norms and the isolation from the rest of the world she committed to when she was relatively young. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Dickinson chose to write about death, god, nature, love and art. During this time, all that was being written conformed to the thought that women were only meant to be wives and mothers alone. Motherhood being the only profession appropriate for women. One aspect of her that I found incredibly refreshing was that she was unwilling to accept anything based on faith alone. She was a woman of scientific, logical, and rational thought. Of the woman writers that we have studied up to this point, to me, she is the

To me, she’s a woman seeking her own little space in the world. She wants to live outside of the society she now finds herself stuck in. Stuck because she’s married to a man who brings her security and provides for her and her children. This man just so happens to thrive because of the way the society is set up, where a man has no responsibility to his children except to bring in the money. When Edna finds that she can support herself through painting, she attempts to achieve her full potential as an artist. This to me is one of the keys that lead Edna to her awakening as a

Cady Stanton uses an interesting and unique technique to support her points. She begins by building a comparison of women and slaves. She successfully allows the audience to see how women and slaves have been denied the same rights, with this rapport she then turns the conversation around and says that “the prejudice towards women is more deeply rooted and more unreasonable maintained than that against color”. She goes on to explain how women have been forgotten and ignored while slaves started gaining civil rights. Another technique that Cady Stanton uses is referring to the Bible and other important writing to support her points. She can reach more people when she uses the Bible because these are stories that those who are religious will be able to recognize. With the Bible she proved that women have been marginalized for a long time and that they’ve been shunned out of important parts of a human’s every day life. With references to popular literature like Gulliver’s Travels and Commentaries on the Laws of England, Stanton broadens her audience once