Amplitude of Queer Desire in Dickinson's Erotic Language

Abstract

Dickinson's poetics of erotic desire can best be understood as queer—a transgression of normative cultural systems that regulate gender, sexuality, and desire. This paper explores an aspect of Dickinson's masochistic fantasy, linguistically created with metaphor, that by way of figurative excess constructs a play of excitement and desire that bypasses traditional gender and sex arrangements and redefines the sexed body.

Poetry as a Sexual-textual Site of Transgression: Some Insights into the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Forough Farrokhzad

“…(p. 59) Moreover, the phallocentric grounds of gender and power are repudiated by Dickinson through her poetic idiosyncrasies lying in the contents, the style and stature of her poems. Juhasz (2005) stresses this aspect of Dickinson's poetry, quoting Amy Lowell's poem "The Sisters," where the latter espouses Dickinson, Elizabeth Barret Browning and Sappho: "We're a queer lot / we women who write poetry" (p. 32). Juhasz (2005) further holds: "Dickinson's queer poetics, orchestrated by the textual electric, its metaphoric language, creates a most complex erotic amplitude" (p. 32).…”

“…Juhasz (2005) stresses this aspect of Dickinson's poetry, quoting Amy Lowell's poem "The Sisters," where the latter espouses Dickinson, Elizabeth Barret Browning and Sappho: "We're a queer lot / we women who write poetry" (p. 32). Juhasz (2005) further holds: "Dickinson's queer poetics, orchestrated by the textual electric, its metaphoric language, creates a most complex erotic amplitude" (p. 32). Dickinson's is an avangardist style -a blend of subjectivised speaker in the form of authorial persona "I", self-adopted meter and off-rhyme, use of capitalisations of the middle words, mostly common nouns and most notably, use of dashes -was deemed to be a queer style but made a Dickinsonian symbol of poetry that constitutes her own stylistic poetics of resistance in a culture where writing poetry was entirely grounded upon phalocentric canonical conventions.…”