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The Role Of Isolation In Emily Dickinson's Poetry

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Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst , Massachusetts (Crumbley 1). The greater part of her life was consciously spent in seclusion, where she was free to exercise her zeal for literature. During this time she wrote poetry which reflected many of the social issues of the era with unorthodox syntax and brevity. An example being “The Soul selects her own Society”. Literary conventions such as double entendres, the repetition of selection and rejection, and images of isolation depict the female speaker’s perspective on marriage which is used by Dickinson to express the issue of the limited status of women during the mid-nineteenth century. Double entendres explain the female speaker’s role in marriage and society, and her sexual …show more content…

The female speaker is used to exercise agency. Dickinson may be proposing rejecting marriage as a means of rebelling against its hardships, she does so by portraying the sorrows of married life. Once the “Soul selects her own Society” then the door to her divine majority must be closed eternally, with the Soul itself no longer an active member of her community (the soul being an alternate persona of the female speaker). The Soul fulfills its purpose by marrying, removing the need to interact with all men and increasing domestic responsibilities, with isolation from the rest of society represented as a byproduct of marriage. The female speaker blames marriage for making the Soul an individual entity removed from everyone. This is demonstrated by “I’ve known her—from an ample nation—Choose One—Then—close the Valves of her attention” (Dickinson 303). The Soul recognizes a past self (unmarried female speaker) as a member of a large group, and recognizes that marriage her loss of participation in society, isolating her from the rest of her peers. Dickinson, uses the females speaker’s description of married life to represent a loss of rights and diminishing choices, more obligations, and complete isolation to portray the sorrow of a married

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