Animal/Insectual/Lesbian Sex: Dickinson's Queer Version of the Birds and the Bees

Landry, Hilton

doi:10.1353/edj.2000.0014

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…I now conclude this section on Dickinson and bees with H. Jordan Landry. 26 "Through the use of bird and bee imagery," she writes, "Dickinson images anew [sic] the erotic triangle of male minister-Christ-congregant underlying Puritan discourse" (42). More specifically, "Dickinson overlays the Puritan triangle of desire with a zoological frame in order to lesbianize the process of conversion" (43).…”

Section: Apiarian Dickinsonmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Self-Swarm of Artemis: Emily Dickinson as Bee/Hive/Queen

Hall¹

2022

TRA

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Despite the ubiquity of bees in Dickinson's work, most interpreters denigrate her nature poems. But following several recent scholars, I identify Nietzschean/Dionysian overtones in the bee poems and suggest the figure of bees/hive/queen illuminates as feminist key to her corpus. First, (a) the bee's sting represents martyred death; (b) its gold, immortality; (c) its tongue, the "lesbian phallus"; (d) its wings, poetic power; (e) its buzz, poetic melody, and (f) its organism, a joyful Dionysian Susan (her sister-in-law and love interest) to Emily's flower. Second, the hive represents her indivIdual poems (with slants/dashes as stingers, wings as hymn meter, honey as rhymes, variant words as exiled bees, and accompanying flowers their Darwinian coevolution with bees), constituting her writing persona as a multi-voiced self-swarm, as organized in the apiary of her letters and fascicles. And third, the queen represents her Western cultural and religious inheritance wherein bees are symbols of the soul, reincarnation, poetic-philosophical vocation, and a Nietzschean, trans-Dionysian naturalist ontology-symbolized by apiarian Artemis.

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Section: Apiarian Dickinsonmentioning

confidence: 99%