Emily Dickinson: a irmã de Shakespeare

Abstract

Dickinson lived in a society that cultivated the ideology of
domesticity which expected that women unconditionally submitted to men's needs and wants since they represented the power at home, in the church, in politics and in the economy. Her poetry must be approached without the stereotypes that prevent the social, cultural and aesthetic recovery of her work. Having been discouraged to publish because she did not meet the women writers' literary patterns of her time, she presented many of the ideas she wanted to convey in a slant way, thus choosing to preserve her artistic integrity in a world where creativity and independence were denied to women. There is a repressed tension within her poems generated by the oppression which women saw themselves constrained to. In using an original and concise language made up of striking images and private metaphors, Dickinson inaugurated a new poetics that is open to many possibilities of interpretation. Therefore, because of her different writing style she cannot be labelled as a representative poet of the women's literary tradition of her age, which was tuned with the popular taste and permeated with a conservative and sentimental style.