Tragic Disobedience As Depicted In Emily Dickinson's Poems

1. Emily Dickinson’s poetry was mostly published after her death with only a few poems being published while she was alive. Those poems in which she published when she was alive were altered by the publishers in an attempt to make her work more mainstream. This included changing some of the words as well as removing her famous dashes at the end of lines. Following her death her work had the same kind of edits made to it until the facsimile copies of her work were published. After the hundreds of poems were found in her chest after her death they were published with alternative words she sometimes provided in the drafts. The facsimile versions of her work were published in a book in which all of the pages had been directly copied giving the

Flint. Everything that represented Linda was a contradiction to what a slave and a women should be at the time she broke down boundaries for her freedom in the face of some of the greatest adversity possible. Linda described herself as having “stubborn disobedience”. Something special that she and Douglass did that is similar to the tactics of John Smith is the demonizing of the group you want to be seen as the other. This is consistent through many of the text we read this semester and I think will be a common theme in many other works of literature. In using language that makes your opposite group seem evil and threatening you are able to polarize the two groups. For Smith this meant having his men and everyone back in England continue to support his reckless terror on the Native Americans but painting them as less than human and himself as super human. For Douglass and Jacobs it was a role reversal form the language that was used to describe them as slaves to showing the evil, manipulative and violent ways of their master in order to separate white slave owners as the others and slaves and the human relatable ones to the reader. Gender also plays a role in all of the decision making between who is in and who is out. It is a complex system of the other and I do not know if it is possible to stop it. We are programed in every situation to look for the winner and the losers and until we learn that the only way to be peaceful and productive is to be on an equal playing field this idea of the “other” will continue to lay out in both our lives and