EN 346: The Woman Question

Emily Dickinson

Feb 4         Dickinson—Canon and Vocation

 Letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (L 260, 261, 265, 268); Letters on ED from TWH to his wife (xeroxes); J 216 (“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”), 318 (“I’ll tell you how the sun rose”), 319 (“The nearest dreamrecedes unrealized”), 320 (“We play at paste”), 742 (“Four trees upon a solitary acre”), 67 (“Success is counted sweetest”), 288 (“I’m nobody”), 401 (“What soft cherubic creatures”), 448 (“This was a Poet”), 709 (“Publication is the Auction”)


Feb 7         Dickinson—Natural Spaces, Secular Places

J 130 (“These are the days when birds come back”), 214 (“I taste a liquor never brewed”; cf. Emerson, “The Snowstorm”), 258 (“There’s a certain slant of light”), 712 (“Because I could not stop for death”), 1052 (“I never saw a moor), 1755 (“To make a prairie”), J 59 (“A little East of Jordan”), 61 (“Papa above!”), 324 (“Some keep the Sabbath”), 797 (“By my window”), 668 (“‘Nature’ is what we see”), 254 (“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”), 164 (“Mama never forgets”), 501 (“This world is not conclusion”)
Feb  11      Feminism and the Myths of Nature
J 24 (“There is a morn by men unseen”), 106 (“The Daisy follows soft”), 199 (“I’m wife’”), 1737 (“Rearrange a ‘Wife’s’ affection”), 461 (“A Wife at Daybreak”), 508 (“I’m ceded”), 722 (“Sweet mountains”), 732 (“She rose to his requirement”), 601 (“A still—volcano—life”), 754 (“My Life had stood a loaded Gun”), 1677 (“On my volcano”), 1705 (“Volcanoes be in Sicily”), 1748 (“The reticent volcano”), 1072 (“Title divine”)