Name: Manolescu Dana-MariaYear:3rd

Group:L232

Emily Dickinson's Portrayal of Women in Society

In this essay, two of Emily Dickinson's poems, "Success is counted sweetest" and "The bustle in a house", will be analyzed for their common theme of death and the customs surrounding it to illustrate the position of women within society.

Bibliography:

Emily Dickinson,” Succes is counted seetest”, “The bustle in a house”

According to feminist gender criticism, the female perspective is of little consequence to most in a modern, patriarchal society, and traditionally the roles of women are secondary to those of men. This paper will attempt to show how each of these poems illustrates this secondary role of women in society by using death as a metaphor to symbolize women's separated social position. The first poem, "Success is counted sweetest", written in the first person perspective, has Dickinson describing women's experience in society as silent and separate. In the second, "The bustle in a house", Dickinson describes women's experience as viewed by patriarchal society using the metaphor of a household cleaning up after a death in the family. It is this separateness, illustrated in "Success is counted sweetest", that is perpetuated by men's alienation of women in patriarchal societies, as presented in "The bustle in a house", tand this leads to the conclusion that women's lives are full of loneliness.

The first couplet of "Success is counted sweetest" defines the status of women in

society: "Success is counted sweetest/ By those who ne'er succeed." It suggests that

only those who have never achieved success are most able to recognize success in

others. For example, women understand the inequality of men holding most positions of

power in the United States, such as political posts, while this inequality remains invisible

to those same men holding those powerful positions. The second couplet explains that

women know they are perceived as second-class citizens within society: "To

comprehend a nectar/ Requires the sorest need."

The second stanza contrasts women's awareness of their inequality with the

majority of society's lack. Not one "purple host" (in this case the words refer to a large

army, with the color purple indicating an association with royalty) could describe the

concept of victory even though he was taking up the flag for king and country. Here

Dickinson depicts the army as unaware of its cause and not understanding the meaning

of the word "victory". However, as the previous and the third stanzas suggest, women

clearly understand the definition of victory because, as stated in the third stanza, she

will die before she attains victory. This paradoxical notion of understanding those things

that distant to us can be untangled best by imagining we are watching a large game in

play. When viewed from up close, one can only see the game pieces. The majority of

people see the game this way because they are participants. But women, who are

separate from the majority's experience, see the game from afar because they cannot

play. They therefore can watch the strategies as they unfold and understand them more

clearly because of their unique and lonely perspective.

The final stanza describes this lonely perspective thus: "The distant strains of

triumph/ Break, agonized and clear". Dickinson's use of death in this poem serves to

show women's feelings of separation from the norms of society. According to Dickinson,

the "sorest need" required to comprehend this "nectar" in the poem is death, and death

is the ultimate act of separation in Western society. When we die, we are as isolated as

we can possibly be from society. In death, we are completely removed from all

participation in life. Dickinson uses the metaphor of death as a separating act to

illustrate how life is for women in society.

With this understanding of women's perspective within society, it can now be

examined how women perceive society's actions toward them. In other words, we can

explore how society behaves to make women feel separated and secondary in society.

Again, Dickinson uses death as a persuasive metaphor to address this issue in her

poem "The bustle in a house". This poem simply describes the scene of a household

cleaning up after a death in the family. The first stanza tells of the automatic, quiet

business of removing a dead family member from the household: "The bustle in a

house/ The morning after death/ Is solemnest of industries/ Enacted upon earth-/." The

theme of the poem as a metaphor to describe society is clear: "the solemnest industry"

in the poem is the process of separating the dead person from the family fold. A form of

alienation, this action is similar to the moves made by Nazi Germany to alienate the

Jews, or that of America alienating people of color. Here the act of alienation is applied

to women. The second stanza describes the details of this "solemnest of industries":

"The sweeping up the heart/" suggests one must pack up his emotions, generally

thought to reside in the heart, and store his love specifically away somewhere.

Furthermore, that the members of this family will not "want to use [love] again, until

eternity", shows that this alienation is permanent within the world of men. It is only when

one reaches the Kingdom of Heaven that one can bring his love out of its dusty box and

love all people again. This is how Dickinson describes the total alienation of women

within society-it is akin only to death in the way the majority treats women as separated

from the games men play.

In short, through Dickinson's imagery of death the lonely life of women emerges.

The most poignant aspect of Dickinson's use of death is that women only must live

under these circumstances. The men of modern, patriarchal societies go through this

act of separation only when they die and become unconscious of their state. In

"Success is counted sweetest," Dickinson gives us a glimpse of what it means to

experience life as a woman, separated from the successes and victories made

attainable only to society's men. She further shows us the bittersweet wisdom that

women come to possess from living this reality. For a woman, living such a hollow

existence hurts as much as hearing the trumpets of victory as she lays dying, knowing

that she will never be able to celebrate that victory with her comrades. In the same vein,

"The bustle in a house" shows the empty, separate, and cold mentality that the majority

of society has towards a woman's position in society. Dickinson's message in this poem

is that women may as well be dead. She again uses death imagery to illustrate her

point. The majority of society sees a woman as a dead family member, someone they

must forget, sweep up, and someone for whom they must put their love away, never to

use again. As depressing as these comparisons may sound, if we consider the lives

women lived in the 19th century, it becomes understandable how most would view life

this way. Today, by contrast, women's roles have come closer to being equal to men's

in our society, yet they are still striving for full equality.