A Post-Structuralist Feminism Approach To The Nature Poems of Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, and Sylvia Plath

Download as docx, pdf, or txt
Download as docx, pdf, or txt
You are on page 1of 45

“A Critical Analysis using the

Post-Structuralist Feminism Approach


on the Nature poems
of Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, and
Sylvia Plath”

July 2018

Presented by:

Ma. Francesca M. Lingan


ABLL-III
Chapter 1

Introduction

The individual ways of thinking and perceiving the world points mainly towards the different
experiences lived and felt by the two genders. A man may write about his woes but not in the same
way a woman can. Ever since, an inherent dichotomy between how men act and how women act
has always been present. This goes with all fields and areas of work. In writing, a tendency to
associate certain subjects with that of its author, and finding reasons of their relationship causes
even more discord and seldom, overshadowing of the opposite sex.

Most of the nations are a patriarchal society, and so are gender stereotypes. Literature can
attest to this. A large number of studies and analyses venture on finding out in their chosen
literature whether or not gender stereotypes still exist; whether or not male authors’ works
accurately depict a woman’s experience, likewise also looking into whether or not female authors
can be automatically defined as feminists. The voices of women in poetry of the previous centuries
and of today are very much recognized and credited in this era. How they differ from that of their
male counterparts are in the language in their works that they have. But in this day and age, is it
possible that female protagonists in literature still project traditional gender roles?

In the study entitled, “Men and Women Writing Women: The Female Perspective and
Feminism in U.S. Novels and African Novels in French by Male and Female Authors,” Lange,
Cheryl (2008) studied novels in French portraying women by male and female authors and whether
or not gender roles or gender stereotypes still persist in the novels of that time. According to her,
the female characters written by female authors showed a female type of acceptance at the end of
their conflict, the women in the novels showed courage and support towards their fellow women.
As for the male authors writing in the perspective of a female character, they were able to portray
women in diverse cultures in a way that serves to raise awareness of what women really go through.
All novels passed as clear from gender roles and gender stereotypes. She concluded with saying
that ‘although we still live in a patriarchal world, society’s beliefs about women have changed
over the course of time.’
However in a paper entitled “Ambiguous Silences? Women in Anthologies of
Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry” by Pryce, Alex (2014), she addresses both the commercial
business of poetry production alongside the literary representation of women in order to re-insert
women into Northern Irish poetic discussion. The author argues that the way in which women are
represented inside and outside publication in the second half on the twentieth century is severely
lacking. In her paper, she cites Ruth Hooley, a poet and feminist activist, wherein she suggests that
because of the coincidence of the political and social turbulence caused by the deployment of
British troops on British soils, women rallying against the British authority by rubbing excrement
and menstrual blood on the cell walls, and the increase in literary activity in Northern Ireland, the
growing attention paid to women’s writing did not appear to have much impact in Northern Ireland,
despite the cultural renaissance that was ongoing in the province. The author of the paper studied
several anthologies of Northern Ireland poetry and found out that the ambiguous silence stems
from the fact that although there are still poetry written by women, the number was not enough
compared to the number of poetry contributed by male poets in these said anthologies, as well as
the turbulent times from which these anthologies represent itself.

Comparing the two studies alone would suffice it to say that there are in fact diverse
opinions and findings, as well as perspectives regarding how women are represented both in the
publication and in terms of literary representation. The researcher then, will look into different
feminist literary perspectives of past analyses and studies, and articles in order to critically analyze
commonality of language found specifically in the nature poems of Dickinson, Emily Bronte, and
Plath, and will attempt to find out what it is and how it is shown in their poetry by using the post-
structuralist feminism approach.
Review of Related Literature

Nature and women


According to Sarah Milner-Barry, in her article in the website of Quartz Media LLC in
December of 2015, she asserts that ‘while many ancient and continuing traditions revere female
spiritual incarnations of the Earth, most of the references we now hear about “Mother Nature”
have little spiritual context.’ Deeply meaningful terms such as this have been co-opted by an
ideology that actually values neither women nor nature. Orner, Sherry (1974) in her article “Is
Female to Male as Nature is to Culture,” she says that when women are viewed “closer” to nature,
it is also easier to perceive then as subordinate, just as nature itself is manifested everywhere as
devalued and subordinated.

In the same article by Milner-Barry, Carolyn Merchant writes in her book, “The Death of
Nature,” ‘the environment became something to be exploited, transformed, and used for profit.’
Women’s labor and reproductive abilities for thousands of years, had been exploited. These shifts
in attitude took place in a patriarchal context. Moreover, western patriarchal societies saw an
immediate connection between nature and the qualities which they had come to expect of women.
This is attributed to the reified language in environment, leading to terms like “virgin Earth” or
“barren soil” or “fertile land,” which we continue to use today. The term “Mother Nature” then,
has come to represent the twinned exploitation of all that patriarchal society considers inferior to
men.

In an analysis by UK essays (2013), their interpretation of some of Wordsworth poems,


shed light on how the 19th century poet portray women in his poetry and his odd glorification of
nature to the women he describes in his poetry. They argue that “Wordsworth’s view on women
is reflected in his treatment of Nature also. Throughout the ages, Wordsworth has been appreciated
as a true believer in in an extraordinary power of Nature.” In his poems that were analyzed with
Nature as the center of focus, his philosophy regarding women was also not absent. UK essays
(2013) also points out Day’s (1996) discussion of the issue in the most convincing way. He says
that the poet’s treatment of nature is biased by the supremacy of masculine over feminine.

Not to mention, the representation female protagonists get from male authors in most of
the literature produced in the 19th century and are considered classics today, display subtle and
even explicit sexism. In the essay entitled Feminism in Literature: women in the 19th century
published in enotes.com, they say “Most scholars agree that the Victorian Age was a time of
escalating gender polarization as women were expected to adhere to a rigidly defined sphere of
domestic and moral duties, restrictions that women increasingly resisted in the last two-thirds of
the century.” With the continuous domestic roles imposed on women, as well as the rights and
privileges that men experience which women are not able and at most are not allowed to share, so
begins the feminist movement.

The Feminist Movement

The first stages of when the movement revealed itself began with the ‘Feminine’, period
where the use of the male pseudonym in the 1840s until 1880 began with the death of George
Eliot; the ‘Feminist’ period, from 1880 until the winning of the vote in 1920; and the ‘Female’
period, from 1920 till the present-day, including a “new stage of self-awareness about 1960,” Lee,
Elizabeth (1997).

The use of the post-structuralist feministic theory finds its origin in French Feminism.

French Feminism

Feminism in France can be roughly divided into three waves: First-wave feminism, which
is largely concerned with obtaining suffrage and civic rights for women, spanning from the French
Revolution through the Second Republic and Third Republic, with significant contributions
stemming from the revolutionary movements of the French Revolution in 1848 and Paris
Commune, culminating in winning the right to vote in 1944.

Second-wave feminism spanned from the 1940s until the 1990s and came about as a
reevaluation of women’s role in society, reconciling the inferior treatment of women in society
despite their ostensibly equal political status to men. Pioneered by theorists such as Simone de
Beauvoir, second wave feminism was an important current within the social turmoil leading up to
and following the May 1968 events in France, and political goals included the guarantee of
increased bodily autonomy for women.
The third-wave feminism spans from the early 2000s on, and continues the legacy of the
second wave while adding in elements of post-colonial critique, approaching women’s rights in
tandem with other ongoing discourses, particularly those surrounding racism.

In the English-speaking world, the term ‘French feminism’ refers to a branch of feminist
theories and philosophies that emerged in the 1970s to the 1990s. French feminist theory, is
distinguished by an approach which is more philosophical and literary. Its writings tend to be
effusive and metaphorical being less concerned with political doctrine and generally focused on
theories of “the body”. The term includes writers who are not French, but who have worked
substantially in France and the French tradition such as Julia Kristeva and Bracha Ettinger.
Wikipedia (2015)

In the 1970s, French feminist-theorists approached feminism with the concept of écriture
féminine (which translates as female, or feminine writing). Helen Cixous argues that writing and
philosophy are phallocentric and along with other French feminists such as Luce Irigaray
emphasize “writing from the body” as a subversive exercise. The work of the feminist
psychoanalyst and philosopher, Julia Kristeva, has influenced feminist theory in general and
feminist literary criticism in particular. From the 1980s onwards the work of the arts and
psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger has influenced literary criticism, art history and film theory.

Helene Cixous

Cixous’ works and contributions both in the movement and in the literary theory, has paved
its way for many debates and stemmed from them a number of other feminist theories. In her
critical feminist essay, The Laugh of Medusa (1975), Cixous issues an ultimatum: “that women
can either read and choose to stay trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow
them to express themselves, or they can use the body as a way to communicate.” She describes a
style of writing (écriture feminine) that she says attempts to move outside the conversational rules
found in patriarchal systems.

Cixous commands women to focus on individuality, particularly the individuality of the


body and to write to redefine self-identity in the context of her history and narrative. The essay
includes the argument that writing is a tool women must use to advocate themselves in order to
acquire the freedom women have historically been denied. The Laugh of Medusa is successful in
its creation of a writing style that allows women to claim authority because it was created on the
foundation of the woman’s claim to herself and her body, therefore eliminating the oppressive
effects of patriarchy. (Wikipedia, 2018)

According to an article by Nasrullah Mambrol in 2016 entitled “Helene Cixous and Post-
structuralist Feminist Theory” published in a website called literariness.org, the characteristics of
male writing “exclusion and linearity” created a hierarchy of sexual difference within language
and discourse. The exclusion of women from writing is due to the fact that Western history of
writing is synonymous with the separation of the body from the text, of the privileging of reasoning
over feeling.” Cixous believes, Nambrol writes, that the need for this separation is only rightful to
take place in women’s writing. This need will be one with “a flow of ‘luminous torrents’, excess,
never-ending and open, without hierarchy, repressive logic or control.”

Post-structuralist feminism

The birth of this theory led to many others. Nasrullah Mambrol (2016), in The Influence of
Post-structuralism on Feminism, “[the theory] gave rise to a plethora of rampant and dynamically
developing areas such as cyber-feminism, eco-feminism, post-colonial, black
feminism/womanism, cultural/radical feminism, liberal feminisms, materialist/neo-marxist
feminism and so on.” The theory discusses gender along the lines of class, subjectivity, sexuality,
representation, and – what this critical analysis will look into – language. The French feminists
mentioned earlier, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigary, and most especially, Helene Cixous, “developed a
notion of women’s writing that is a product of female body, beyond logic, fighting in an anarchic
realm against authority, and being immune to social conditioning.” They postulated and practiced
a “fluid, non-linear, elliptical, part mythic, mystic writing that is partly autobiographic, partly,
fictional, and upsets the notions of form, narrative, order and organization.

This research will be using the Post-structuralist Feminism theory in order to get a more
accurate perspective on the analysis and understanding of the nature poems of Emily Dickinson,
Emily Bronte, and Sylvia Plath. Moreover, the author believes that the tenets by which the Post-
structuralist theory and the Feminist theory individually, and together, stand by, will be able to
help bring out the individual identities of the female poets in their poetry, and the collective
language and voice of women in the art of poetry.
The Female self-identity and Nature

According to Olivos, Pablo (2016) in his study, “Self, Nature and well-being: Sense of
Connectedness and Environmental Identity for Quality of Life,” the study of self and identity ‘is
an important subject of research in social sciences, because of its cultural, social, and psychological
relevance, and because it is a field in which some theoretical and conceptual controversies persist.’
Although the environment is a key factor in the development of identities, Pablo observes that the
investigation into identity’s relationship with natural environments is still fairly new.

A study by, Mthatiwa, Syned (2014) in which the poetry of Bart Wolffe, a ‘self-exiled,
white, Zimbabwean writer,’ was studied. She says that for Wolffe, nature ‘signifies regue,
tranquility, and harmony; it is a sanctuary, more accommodating than the violent and harsh human
society.’ In her paper, she argues that ‘Wolffe’s poetry shows that he uses nature to construct his
identity and belonging and as a means of self-definition, that is, of trying to make sense of himself.
But his project of belonging and identity construction in post-colonial Zimbabwe is somehow
complicated by his whiteness or positionality.’

In another study by Daily, Jessica in 2017, called, “The Nature of Identity: Ecofeminism,
Women’s Poetry, and Reclaiming Power through the Recognition of Parallel Oppressions” she
perceives the way that ecofeminist themes are utilized in poetry throughout history as one that
shows a significant pattern of progression: while in early poetry, nature is depicted as a place for
escape from patriarchal forces into feminine community, in later poetry the bond that women share
with nature is empowering.’ In a contemporary context, she adds, ‘these poems can become a
source of power and healing for feminist activists who may be feeling hopeless in the midst of a
seemingly never-ending fight.’

In comparison to the studies above, this paper argues that there is a direct relationship
between how the chosen female poets (Dickinson, Bronte, and Plath) use nature in their poetry to
reveal their identity. The commonality in their poetry’s language is then looked into, to find out
whether or not the different eras in which they lived and burgeoned in, influenced their identity as
empowered women in their poetry, and especially with their identification with nature.
Statement of the Problem

This paper sought to answer the following questions, all of which are guided by the post-
structuralist feministic theory.

1. What are the elements of poetry found in the following selections:


1.1. “Nature is What We See” by Emily Dickinson
1.2. “Fall, Leaves, Fall” by Emily Brontë
1.3. “I Am Vertical” by Sylvia Plath
2. How can the language and style of the following authors be described?
2.1. Emily Dickinson
2.2. Emily Brontë
2.3. Sylvia Plath
3. What are the similarities and differences in the language and style of the authors?
4. What are the emerging themes present using the post-structuralist feminism approach?

Significance of the Study

This study would be of benefit specifically to the following:

1. School of Arts, Sciences, and Teacher Education. This study may be used for
future endeavors of the department;
2. Bachelor of Arts in Language and Literature Students. This study may serve as
guide or reference for the future ABLL students;
3. The community of feminists. This study pays homage to the women who
dedicated their lives to the empowerment of women; and
4. The researcher herself. This research will serve as her contribution to the
betterment of how society perceive women and their contributions especially in
the art of poetry

Theoretical Framework

The study used the post-structuralist feminism theory for the critical analysis of the poems,
“Nature is What We See” by Emily Dickinson, “Fall, Leaves, Fall” by Emily Brontë, and “I Am
Vertical” by Sylvia Plath.
Post-structuralist feminism takes post-structuralism and combines it with feminist views
and looks to see if a literary work has successfully used the process of mimesis, or representation
on the image of the female. If successful, then a new image of a woman has been created by a
woman for a woman, therefore it is not a biased opinion created by men. (Wikipedia, 2017)

Along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous is considered one of the
mothers of poststructuralist feminist theory. Since the 1990s, these three together with Bracha
Ettinger have considerably influenced French feminism and feminist psychoanalysis.

In the 1970s, Cixous began writing about the relationship between sexuality and language.
Like many other feminist theorists, Cixous believes that human sexuality is directly tied to how
people communicate in society.

Mambol, Nasrullah (2016) says that: Cixous suggests that it is important for women to
expose the flaws in language that currently exist. Through the awareness of such flaws, as well as
the invention of new ways of expression, women can overcome the obstacles that are constructed
by what she labels a phallocentric discourse. She argues that even through attempts to expose
current inadequacies, it will always be impossible to define a feminine practice of writing because
this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded. "It will always surpass the discourse that
regulates the phallocentric system; it does and will take place in areas other than those subordinated
to philosophico-theoretical domination. It will be conceived of only by those who are breakers of
automatisms."

L’Écriture feminine. It literally means women’s writing. It is a philosophy that promotes


women’s experiences and feelings to the point that it strengthens the work. It is a strain of feminist
literary theory that originated in France. This was first introduced by Helene Cixous in her famous
essay The Laugh of Medusa: “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring
women to writing.” Cixous commands women to focus on individuality, particularly the
individuality of the body and to write to redefine self-identity in the context of her history and
narrative. (Wikipedia, 2016)

Luce Irigaray, French linguist, psychoanalyst, and feminist philosopher who examined the
uses and misuses of language in relation to women.
Mader, Mary Beth (2016) writes in Britannica.com, “Irigaray was best known for her
theory of “sexual difference,” according to which the supposedly sexless notion of the subject, or
ego, in Western philosophy and psychoanalytic theory subtly reflects the interests and perspectives
of men, while women are associated with the nonsubject (the Other) or with matter and nature.
She argued that there is no authentic heterosexuality in Western culture, because the culture
represents or cultivates only a male subject, not a female one, particularly in the domains of
law, religion, political theory, philosophy, and art. Irigaray’s project was to introduce into this
philosophical heritage two sexed subjects and to call for the development of a culture and
an ethics that would do justice to both. She conceived of her work as comprising three phases: the
first phase demonstrates the masculine perspective that has dominated Western discourse; the
second sketches possibilities for the construction of a feminine subject; and the third aims to
develop the social, legal, and ethical conditions necessary for relations between two differently
sexed subjects.”

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist,


and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s.

In an article by Oliver, Kelly (1998) called “Kristeva and Feminism”, she writes: “Kristeva
argues her writings have been misunderstood by American feminist academics. In Kristeva's view,
it was not enough simply to dissect the structure of language in order to find its hidden meaning.
Language should also be viewed through the prisms of history and of individual psychic and sexual
experiences. This post-structuralist approach enabled specific social groups to trace the source of
their oppression to the very language they used. However, Kristeva believes that it is harmful to
posit collective identity above individual identity, and that this political assertion of sexual, ethnic,
and religious identities is ultimately totalitarian.

Among all the theories presented, the researcher chose Helen Cixous’. The study of
language and style of the poems chosen by the researcher is guided by the principles and arguments
by which Cixous proposes. More importantly, by her belief that women should “focus on
individuality, particularly the individuality of the body and to write to redefine self-identity in the
context of her history and narrative.”
Input Process Output
 Biography of the  Semantic  Elements of their
authors Analysis of the 3 chosen nature
 Past-studies about poems poems
the female identity  Contrastive  Language and
in literature Linguistic and stylistic styles of
 Poems stylistic analysis Emily Dickinson,
of the 3 poems Emily Bronte,
 An analysis using and Sylvia Plath
the Post-  Emerging themes
structuralist on feminism
feminism theory
by Helene Cixous
Figure 1. Research Paradigm

Figure 1 presents the Research Paradigm. The biography of the authors, past studies
about the female identity in literature, as well as the poems will be the input. The process
will include a Semantic Analysis of the 3 poems, a Constrastive Linguistic and Stylistic
analysis of the 3 poems, and an analysis using the Post-structuralist feminism theory by
Helene Cixous. The expected output will be the elements of the chosen poems, language
and stylistic styles of Emly Dickinson, Emily Bronte, and Sylvia Plath, and the Emerging
themes on feminism.

Definition of Terms

1. Post-structuralism. This term is defined by its relationship to the system before it –


structuralism, an intellectual movement which argues that human culture may be
understood by means of a structure, and that a text has one single, identifiable meaning.
Post-structuralism then argues that because history and culture condition the study of
underlying structures, both are subject to biases and misinterpretations. The same way that
a text may have multiple, identifiable interpretations.
2. Feminism. Feminism is a range of political movements, ideologies, and social movements
that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal,
and social equality of sexes. This includes seeking to establish educational and professional
opportunities for women that are equal to those for men.
3. Post-structuralist Feminism. It takes post-structuralism and combines it with feminist
views and looks to see if a literary work has successfully used the process of mimesis, or
representation on the image of the female. If successful, then a new image of a woman has
been created by a woman for a woman, therefore it is not a biased opinion created by men.
It is a theory that therefore empowers the woman’s writing.
4. L’Écriture feminine. It literally means women’s writing. It is a philosophy that promotes
women’s experiences and feelings to the point that it strengthens the work. It is a strain of
feminist literary theory that originated in France. This was first introduced by Helene
Cixous in her famous essay The Laugh of Medusa: “Woman must write herself: must write
about women and bring women to writing.” Cixous commands women to focus on
individuality, particularly the individuality of the body and to write to redefine self-identity
in the context of Her history and narrative.
Chapter 2

Background of the Author

1. Emily Dickinson

Born on December 10, 1830, and died May 15, 1886, Emily Dickinson was an
American poet. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in to a prominent family with
strong ties to its community. After studying English and classical literature, Latin, botany,
geology, history ,”mental philosophy,” and arithmetic, at the Amherst Academy for seven
years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before
returning to her family’s house in Amherst.

Dickinson lived much of her life in reclusive isolation. Considered an eccentric by


locals, she developed a noted penchant for white clothing and became known for her
reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. She never married,
and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence. She
was a recluse for the later years of her life.

While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800
poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime
was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the
time. Her poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines,
typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and
punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring
topics in letters to her friends.

Although Dickinson’s acquaintances were most likely aware of her writing, it was
not until afer her death in 1886 – when Lavinia, Dickinson’s younger sister, discovered her
cache of poems – that the breadth of her work became apparent to the public. Her first
collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth
Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, though both heavily edited the content. A complete,
and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when
scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955.

Dickinson was troubled from a young age by the “deepening menace” of death
especially the deaths of those who were close to her. When Sophia Holland, her second
cousin and a close friend, grew ill form typhus and died in 1844, Emily was traumatized.
Recalling the incident two years later, Emily wrote that “it seemed to me I should die too
if I could not be permitted to watch over her or even look at her face.”

When she was eighteen, Dickinson’s family befriended a young attorney by the
name of Benjamin Franklin Newton. Although their relationship was probably not
romantic, Newton was a formative influence and would become the second in a series of
older men that Dickinson referred to, variously, as her tutor, preceptor or master.

Newton likely introduced to her the writings of William Wordsworth, and Ralph
Waldo Emerson. When Newton was dying of tuberculosis, he wrote to her saying that he
would like to live until she achieved the greatness he foresaw. Biographers believe that
Dickinson’s statement of 1862 – “when a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me
Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned” – refers to Newton.

As her mother’s health deteriorated, most of the work in the Homestead (their name
for their home) was put on her shoulders. Because of this she became more and more of a
recluse – not wanting to go outside. And so her love for books and nature were what kept
her company during those days. Days after her mother died, her favorite nephew’s death
followed.

As death succeeded death, Dickinson found her world upended. In the fall of 1884,
she wrote that “The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart
from one, another has come.” That summer, she had seen “a great darkness coming” and
fainted while baking in the kitchen. She remained unconscious late into the night and weeks
of ill health followed. On May 15, 1886, after several days of worsening symptoms, Emily
Dickinson died at the age of 55. Dickinson’s chief physician gave the cause of death as
Bright’s disease and its duration as two-and-a-half years. She requested Lavinia to burn all
her papers, but it did not include the copies of her poems she kept hidden. These, after her
death, were discovered by Lavinia, and made it published.

Her style of poetry consists of the extensive use of dashes and unconventional
capitalization in Dickinson’s manuscripts, and the idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery,
combine to create a body of work that is “far more various in its styles and forms than is
commonly supposed.”

When her poem, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” was published as “The Snake” in
the Republican, Dickinson complained that the edited punctuation (an added comma and a
full stop substitution for the original dash) altered the meaning of the entire poem.

Original Wording Republican version


A narrow Fellow in the Grass A narrow
Occasionally rides – Fellow in the
You may have met Him – did you not Grass
His notice sudden is – Occassionally
Rides –
You may
have met
Him – did
you not,
His notice
sudden is.
As Farr points out, “snakes instantly notice you”; Dickinson’s version captures the
“breathless immediacy” of the encounter; and The Republican’s punctuation renders “her
lines more commonplace.” With the increasingly close focus on Dickinson’s structures and
syntax, has emerged a growing appreciation that they are “aesthetically based.”

Dickinson left no formal statement of her aesthetic intentions and, because of the
variety of her themes, her work does not fit conveniently into any one genre. She has been
regarded, alongside Emerson, as a Transcendentalist. Dickinson’s poetry frequently uses
humor, puns, irony and satire.

Critical attention to Dickinson’s poetry was meager from 1897 to the early 1920.
By the start of the 20th century, interest in her poetry became broader in scope and some
critics began to consider Dickinson as essentially modern. Rather than seeing Dickinson’s
poetic styling as a result of lack of knowledge or skill, modern critics believed the
irregularities were consciously artistic.

The second wave of feminism created greater cultural sympathy for her as a female
poet. In the first collection of critical essays on Dickinson from a feminist perspective, she
is heralded as the greatest woman poet in the English language.

Biographers of the past tended to separate Dickinson’s roles as a woman and a poet.
George Whicher wrote, “Perhaps as a poet, she could find the fulfillment she had missed
as a woman.” However, Feminist criticism declares that there is a necessary and powerful
conjunction between Dickinson being a woman and a poet. Adrienne Rich theorized that
Dickinson’s identity as a woman poet brought her power: “She chose her seclusion,
knowing that she was exceptional and knowing what she needed… she carefully selected
her society and controlled the disposal of her time … neither eccentric nor quaint; she was
determined to survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary economics.”

2. Emily Bronte

English writer Emily Bronte (1818-1848) is remembered primarily for her only
novel, Wuthering Heights, and her sibling Charlotte Bronte, author of Jane Eyre. But
Emily clearly stands as a unique writer in her singularly evocative poetry. One compiler
has assembled representative poems under the apt title of "Poems of Solitude," and
solitude is indeed Emily Bronte's outstanding theme as a thinker and artist. She is
preeminently a poet of self-conscious expression, of an interior life focused on
observation, imagination and introspection. And Emily's life was that of a representative
solitary.
Making of a Solitary

Among the elements in Emily Bronte's life that shaped her solitude must be counted:

 the death of her mother when Emily was age two;


 the death from typhoid of her two older sisters Maria and Elizabeth when Emily
was six;
 her upbringing on the bleak and desolate moors of Yorkshire;
 her independent learning and intense intellectual and creative interests without
formal schooling or socialization;
 the benevolent toleration of her father, a village clergyman of modest social and
monetary means who encouraged the independent thinking of his children.

Early in youth, Emily developed her imagination around the influence of her natural
setting as a keen observer of sky, animals, plants, rocks, soil, and water, but also around
romantic contrivances of fictional worlds influenced by her reading. Her world of Gondal,
developed with her older sister Charlotte and younger sister Anne, was a far-away land
peopled with medieval-like and romantic-era characters: kings and consorts, princes and
princesses, generals and rebels, implacable foes, irreconcilable traitors, and flawed lovers.
Their land and seascapes were filled with castles, cathedrals, dungeons, warships and
forest battles.

Though all three sisters and even brother Branwell partook of these childhood
pastimes, Emily preserved, extended and matured these scenarios into adulthood. About
half of her poetry she labeled Gondal poems.

The Gondal poems clearly overlap with her own sensibilities. She explores emotions
and settings through the increasingly more complex characters who become personal
masks for her own engagement with society and human behavior. No mere projection of
an isolated life, the Gondal poems stand on their own as a vivid commentary on the world
and human nature.

Among intellectual resources during Emily's day were the rising romantic voices like
Lord Byron to complement her knowledge of folklore and local color. Byron's style and
heroic sentiments, his "metaphysical rebelliousness," as one Bronte observer puts it, were
an early influence to complement the nostalgic and non-intellectual Walter Scott.

Emily captured the zeitgeist of romanticism despite her physical and cultural isolation.
Her father was an avid reader who regularly borrowed books from colleagues and brought
them home -- not merely clerical tracts but the latest in literature, politics, art, and culture.
Patrick Bronte subscribed to Blackwood's and other magazines of higher culture of the
time and read them aloud with his children. He indulged Emily's refusal to teach Sunday
school or even to attend Sunday services. He was proud of his daughters' intellectual
achievements and the closeness of his family, even to the exclusion of outsiders.

Commentator Gérin summarizes Emily's youth and character:

In the solitude of the moors, and of the tiny room,


in long uninterrupted communings with herself, she
formed a character as much in advance of her age
in some aspects as it remained childish in others
-- this her diary-papers attest. The hermit's life
of that uncomplicated household developed in her
fearless questioning mind a natural bent towards
metaphysical speculation.

And as Charlotte put it succinctly concerning Emily's relation to nature, Emily was
"a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove."

She found in the bleak solitude [of the moors] many


and clear delights, and not the least and best-
loved was liberty. ... Liberty was the breath of
Emily's nostrils; without it she perished.

Another set of factors in the making of Emily's character and solitude was her
observation of people and the world. It is not only what Gerin observes, that "the
conditions Emily hated were not the domestic conditions of her life but the human
condition itself deprived of its spiritual dimensions." It was further that each experience
with the world was a profound disillusionment for her.

On Emily's first occasion to attend school, she felt so stifled by the atmosphere of
rules, authority, insensitive schoolmates, drab lessons and suffocating interiors that she
fell seriously ill and was withdrawn, only to quickly recover at home. Emily missed the
companionship of her younger sister Anne and the liberty of her home.

But it was Emily's observation throughout youth and adulthood of the fracas of
personal relationships in acquaintances and others that truly confirmed her philosophy of
life. Coveting her privacy and completely freed of public ambition, Emily was mortified
by Charlotte's discovery and reading of her poems, only worsened when Charlotte sought
to have them published, if only under a pseudonym. Emily was disillusioned by the
publishers' fraud and complacence. When she obtained a position as a school-teacher, and
as a governess, these lasted only several months, for Emily was unable to put up with the
circumstances and demands of others. Further, she witnessed her brother Branwell's
ambitions in art and writing eventually collapse, first in a series of temporary jobs from
tutor to railway clerk, then in a descent into gin and opium -- and finally death.

Another disillusionment was the unmitigated panning of her novel Wuthering


Heights, labeled too crude, violent, and masculine by literary critics who only knew its
author as the pseudonymous Ellis Bell. Together with her publisher's fraud, Emily
virtually gave up on the world, and, more tragically, seemed to lose her spirit, her
inspirational muse, her refuge in imagination and creativity.

Only the faith in one's own solitary enlightenment, one's own insight, brings
certitude, even after the struggles with despair and the allure of death. It is not God but
"God within my breast" that reveals itself, that animates, pervades, broods, changes,
sustains, dissolves, and creates.

Emily had always seen death not as dreadful but as complementary, leveling the
personality to the elements of nature, a solidarity or deep sympathy with all the other
creatures of the earth sharing mortality in mute acceptance. She often spoke regretfully of
Heaven, preferring Earth as her eternal resting place, to abide within the nature so akin to
her spirit.

That she had exhausted her creativity, her imagination, and life itself, therein
welcoming death, has been suggested by many observers. The assumption gives a power
to Emily that is plausible though simplistic.

Emily Bronte died in December 1848 at the age of 30. Her close sister Anne died
five months later of the same apparent cause.
3. Sylvia Plath

Born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, and died on February, 11,
1963 in London, England, Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist. Best known
for The Bell Jar, poet and novelist Sylvia Plath explored the themes of death, self, and
nature in works that expressed her uncertain attitude toward the universe.

Her father, a professor of biology (the study of plant and animal life) at Boston
University and a well-respected authority on bees, died when she was eight years old. She
was left with feelings of grief, guilt, and anger that would haunt her for life and led her to
create most of her poetry. Plath gave the appearance of being a socially well-adjusted child.
She was also an excellent student who dazzled her teachers in the Winthrop, Massachusetts,
public school system and earned straight A's and praise for her writing abilities. She was
just eight and a half when her first poem was published in the Boston Herald.

Plath lived in Winthrop with her mother and younger brother, Warren, until 1942.
These early years gave her a powerful awareness of the beauty and terror of nature and a
strong love and fear of the ocean. In 1942 her mother found a job as a teacher and purchased
a house in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a respectable, middle-class, educational community
that also influenced Plath's life and values. Her first story, "And Summer Will Not Come
Again," was published in Seventeen magazine in August 1950. In September 1950, Plath
entered Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts, on a scholarship. There she once
again excelled in her studies academically and socially. Referred to as "the golden girl" by
teachers and peers, she planned her writing career in detail. She filled notebooks with
stories and poems, shaping her words carefully and winning many awards.

In August 1952 Plath won a fiction contest held by Mademoiselle, earning her a
position as guest editor at the magazine in June 1953. Her experiences in New York City,
were depressing and later became the basis for her novel The Bell Jar (1963). Upon her
return home, Plath, tired of her image as the All-American girl, suffered a serious mental
breakdown, tried to kill herself, and was given shock treatments. In February 1953 she had
recovered enough to return to Smith College. She graduated and won a Fulbright
scholarship to Cambridge University in England, where she met her future husband, the
poet Ted Hughes (1930–1998). They were married in June 1956 in London, England.
After Plath earned her graduate degree, she returned to America to accept a teaching
position at Smith for the school year 1957–1958. She quit after a year to devote all her time
to writing. For a while she attended a poetry course given by American poet Robert
Lowell (1917–1977), where she met American poet Anne Sexton (1928–1974). Sexton's
and Lowell's influences were important to her development as a poet. Both urged her to
write about very private subjects. Plath and her husband were invited as writers-in-
residence to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, where they lived and worked for two
months. It was here that Plath completed many of the poems collected in The
Colossus (1960), her first volume of poems. Her first child, Frieda, was born in 1960.
Another child, Nicholas, was born two years later.

The Colossus was praised by critics for its "fine craft" and "brooding [anxious]
sense of danger and lurking horror" at man's place in the universe. But it was criticized for
its absence of a personal voice. Not until "Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices"
(1962)—a radio play that was considered a key work by some critics—would Plath begin
to free her style and write more natural, less narrative poetry. "Three Women" is like much
of Plath's later poetry in that its structure is dramatic and expresses the highly personal
themes that mark her work.

As Plath's poetry developed, it became more autobiographical and private. Almost


all the poems in Ariel (1965), considered her finest work and written during the last few
months of her life, are personal accounts of her anger, insecurity, fear, and tremendous
sense of loneliness and death. She had found the voice that she had tried to express for so
long. Violent and vivid in its description of suicide, death, and brutality, Ariel shocked
critics, especially several poems that compare her father to a member of the Nazis.

Plath could not escape the tragedy that invaded and took over her personal life. By
February 1963 her marriage had ended. She was ill and living on the edge of another
breakdown while caring for two small children in a small apartment in London, England,
during the coldest winter in years. On February 11 she killed herself. The last thing she did
was to leave her children two mugs of milk and a plate of buttered bread.

In later poetry published after her death in Crossing The Water (1971) and Winter
Trees (1971), Plath voiced her long-hidden rage over "years of doubleness, smiles, and
compromise." A more complete look into Plath's tortured mind was possible following the
publication in 2002 of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962.

Although Sylvia Plath is often regarded by critics as the poet of death, her final
poems, which deal with the self and how it goes about living in a destructive, materialistic
(focused on the acquiring of material wealth) world, clearly express her need for faith in
the healing powers of art.
Chapter 3
ANALYSIS

I. Semantic Analysis

1. “Nature is What We See”


Structure
Her non-conformity and transcendentalist personality has always been present in
her poetry. In Nature is What We See, its structure is purposeful: her use of profuse
hyphens and unusual capitalization holds all the significance the poem contains.

Most of her critics believe her use of hyphen in place of commas is only for
pretense, and so usually, her publishers alter it, and make her poetry more ‘marketable’.
She remains bashful yet specifically ticked off at this habit of her publishers. Her use
of hyphen in this poem, like in most of her poetry, is to properly emphasize or express
– in the case of this poem – the breathlessness, or perhaps a spontaneous emotion that
a person feels and thinks when seeing the different faces of nature.

The poem’s lines are mostly in the natural order. The last line, however, So
Impotent our wisdom is / to her simplicity is in reverse. It just so happens that these are
also the only two lines that don’t contain a hyphen in between any of the words. The
reverse order of sentences, in this case the two particular lines in the poem, may
emphasize the profound feeling she feels towards nature. She also tries to articulate her
own wordlessness through not including a hyphen in these particular lines. The non-
existence of a hyphen therefore gives emphasis on her listlessness, on her not-knowing,
on her own sporadic surge of emotion and spontaneity towards these scenes of nature,
by being sure to magnify her own ignorance, as well as, by standing firm, and full of
conviction – no punctuation, no hyphen whatsoever, that the truth is that man’s wisdom
will never amount to what nature can be and is.

It would not be the first thing that one would notice but the word nature in the first
line of the poem, is written with double quotation marks on either side. Punctuation is
no longer new, knowing Dickinson’s style. But her distinct use of the punctuation
marks in the word nature may represent the surface of what we see in nature. The line,
“Nature” is what we see suggests how we see nature when we don’t ponder on it.
Nature is in itself what we see. We know this because of the lines that follow: The
Afternoon – The Hill, which are tangible and concrete things that we see from nature.

What might constitute the meaning of her use of random capitalization? Looking
into the life of Dickinson, she has always been solitude’s friend, especially in her
moments of being alone, which were more than usual during the time that she was
taking care of her ill mother. In this poem, she probes nature’s mysteries with the
utmost reverence. The capitalization of some words – which were things that we see
from nature – may connote Dickinson’s utter respect to them. Similarly, when we use
the first person in writing, we use the capital ‘I’ instead of ‘i’, as well as capital g in
God.

Needless to say, Emily Dickinson’s critics are wrong when they argue that her
unusual style – which includes the use of excessive hyphenation and ‘inappropriate’
capitalization – do not have any significance to her poems’ meaning at all.

The rhyme, rhythm and meter of the poem holds as much importance as its
abundant hyphen and capitalization. In “Nature is What We See,” Dickinson uses
Iambic trimeter.

The varied rhythm and meter show how much one might be missing if one
depended on what she wrote alone. Combining its unique structure, and now its sound,
like in most of her poetry, is what makes Emily Dickinson’s poetry relevant even until
today.

# Line Rhythm and Meter

1 “Nature”/ is what / we see – Iambic trimeter


2 The Hill / – The Af / ternoon –
3 Squirrel – / Eclipse – / the Bum / ble bee – Iambic tetrameter
4 Nay – Na / ture is / Heaven – Iambic trimeter
5 Nature / is what / we hear –
6 The Bo / bolink – / the Sea –
7 Thunder – / the Cri / cket –
8 Nay – Na / ture is / Harmo / ny – Trochaic trimeter
9 Nature / is what / we know –
10 Yet have / no art / to say –
11 So im / potent / Our Wis / dom is Trochaic tetrameter
12 To her / Simpli / city Iambic trimeter

Lines #1-#2: Throughout the poem, the stress of the word nature varies. And this
proves how much meaning every unit in poetry meant. In the first line of the poem, the
stress is in the second syllable, this is to make way for the pause that would come after.
The pause, then, is that of a breath that one takes when a word is spoken. It adds to the
effect of the words that it follows. In the second line, Dickinson enumerates things in
nature that the eye sees.

Line #3: In the third line, Dickinson enumerates three things which the eye sees as
well. The only possible reason why the meter then changes, is that these are things we
rarely see. Squirrels are shy. Eclipse don’t always occur. The Bumble bee is an insect
– we won’t be able to see that it is until we really look.

Lines #4-#7: The succeeding lines after the third resumes its initial rhythm and
meter, which is the Iambic trimeter. The word nature in the fourth line then resumes a
different tone. It is preceded by a ‘nay’ which is an expression used for contradiction.
She contradicts her saying that nature is what we see, with ‘nay, nature is heaven.’
However, she seems to be contradicting herself, silently, or solemnly. We know this
because of the rhythm of the line which follows that, since it is iambic, the stress is in
the second syllable: “Nay, Na / ture is / heaven /”. The word nay, there, is unstressed.
In the succeeding lines, she then goes on to describe what nature is again a bit more
abstractly. She says, ‘nature is what we hear / The Bobolink – The Sea - / Thunder –
The Cricket - /. She enumerates things that are more abstract. The Bobolink, is a
migratory bird whose sounds are distinct. The sound that the sea makes could either be
the steady or silent flow of water, or the gushing waves. Thunder, we often associate
with the presence of lightning, but it is really just something we hear. The cricket is an
insect we hear deep in the night’s silence. These things in nature are indeed more
abstract, than the things enumerated earlier, retaining the steady sound of iambic
trimeter. The meter breaks when the pattern is lost in the word cricket. Thunder / the
cri / cket. One unstressed syllable is left. Its stressed partner syllable resumes at the
eighth line of the poem.

Lines #8-#11: The meter changes then into Trochaic trimeter. The strong syllable
follows the weak syllable. In this case the second syllable in cricket follows the word,
‘nay,’ which in comparison to her first use of the nay, is emphasized, and evokes a
stronger emotion and contradiction to herself. ‘Nay, nature is harmony’ then means that
the things enumerated earlier are not separate things. The things we see, the things we
hear in nature are not to be separated. These are at once perceived by the senses – in
harmony. She emphasizes this by saying, ‘Nature is what we know / yet have no art to
say.’ This means that no matter how much we get to see and hear and experience from
nature, we could never quite replicate or articulate it enough on our own. The 11th line
is a trochaic tetrameter. So im / potent / Our Wis / dom is asserts to the fact that what
we think we know is never going to be enough to describe what is in the twelfth line.
The rhythm in lines 8-12 may connote her strong contradiction to everything she tries
to say in the beginning of the poem.

Lines #12: To her Simplicity. The last line resumes the Iambic trimeter, to connote
the impotence of our own wisdom that we use to try to define nature on our own terms.
The use of her, and the emphasis on the word her due to its iambic rhythm, is important
to note as well. Apparently, Dickinson refers to nature as a woman. Perhaps her
quotation-marked nature means something else. That nature is full of complexities, that
us ourselves are unable to understand or articulate – just as that of women. Nature’s
simplicity – the concrete things we see to the more abstract things we hear – are what
Dickinson points out to be ‘what we know’ but ‘have no art to say.’ This may give us
the reference that she is pointing out God’s existence.

Sound

Like most of her poetry, she has always stuck to free verse. However, her unique
form of poetry – being that she didn’t conform to her time’s conventions in her poetry
– still had sound. Her abundant liberty and free-spirited mind kept her firm in her
choosing to be unique. However, it is most likely that the right way to describe her
writing was that she was prone, not to avoidance in following her contemporaries’ style
and convention, but to its exploitation.

Dickinson’s use of sound devices is unique as it is in her use of form, and vital to
the whole of her poem. Her unique use of sound devices such as imagery, alliteration,
assonance, and internal rhyme were evident in Nature is What We see.

Imagery is prominent in her enumeration of scenery and sounds from nature such
as ‘the hills,’ ‘the afternoon,’ ‘thunder,’ ‘cricket,’ ‘eclipse,’ ‘bumblebee,’ ‘bobolink,’
and ‘the sea’.

Alliteration and Consonance are also present in the lines: ‘Nay – Nature is heaven’;
‘So impotent our wisdom is / to her simplicity’; ‘Nay – Nature is what we know – / yet
have no art to say’; ‘Nay – Nature is Harmony’; ‘nature is what we see’; ‘The Hill …
/ Squirrel – Eclipse – the Bumble bee’.

Assonance makes itself present in the lines: ‘Nature is what we see’; ‘Nay – Nature
is Harmony – Nature is what we know – Yet have no art to say’; ‘So impotent Our
Wisdom is / to her Simplicity’.

The lines with the phrase ‘Nay – Nature’ are ones that are used as repetition to add
emphasis and create rhythm.

Sense

One prominent figurative language in Dickinson’s “Nature is What We See” is the


use of symbolism. The enumeration of the things we see, hear, and know about nature,
such as the afternoon, the hill, the squirrel, eclipse, etc, are used to stand in place of
nature. The poem establishes a meaning that no matter how much we see, hear and
know from nature, and no matter how simple we view nature so as to easily define it
for ourselves, we can never know the mysteries it holds. Dickinson’s reference to
nature’s simplicity as something that is complex may be pointing towards a belief in
the supernatural. As said in her biography, she is also considered, like Emerson, a
transcendentalist in her time.
Persona-Addressee

The persona may be described as someone who has looked at nature many
times, and pondered of her mysteries. She may be accustomed to a habit of looking
outside her window, or sitting outside her porch to observe ‘the afternoon’ or to
wonder at ‘the hills’ or the sound of ‘thunder’ during a thunderstorm, or the sound
of a ‘cricket’ during nighttime’s quietness. The persona is intrigued by these
mysteries of nature and tries to word it. Yet only to find out that the things she
knows are things that are what makes the things she doesn’t know as well. Nature’s
simplicity and apparentness to her is what makes its complexities.

The addressee may be someone who the persona is in debate with of what
nature is about. Or perhaps a normal conversation she shares with.

2. Fall, Leaves, Fall

Structure

The first word of each line begins capitalized, even though some are a
continuation from the previous line. However, this is justified by her use of the
semi-colon, which we see a lot of times throughout the poem. A semi-colon is used
at the end of a statement or sentence to denote that there is still a continuation to it.
Bronte’s numerous use of it may all the more imply her impatience for the fall
season to come. It is a one-stanza poem with eight lines.

Emily Brontë is preeminently a poet of self-conscious expression, of an


interior life focused on observation, imagination and introspection. Like Dickinson,
perhaps, she is just as rightly conscious of her own use of semi-colons and
capitalization.

Moreover, the poem uses an AABB rhyme scheme. The poem is not
consistent with its meter, however, it is when it comes to its rhythm. Fall, Leaves,
Fall uses the Trochaic foot. The use of it makes the poem sound like a chant.
Sound

There is a prominent use of end rhyme, all throughout the poem since its
determined rhyme scheme is AABB. However, the use of alliteration, consonance,
assonance, and repetition were also apparent in the poem.

‘Fall, Leaves, Fall’ were lines that were repeated twice – once as a title,
and once as the first line of the poem.

Consonance was present in lines such as ‘fall, leaves fall, die, flowers,
away’; ‘lengthen night and shorten day’; every leaf speaks bliss to me’; ‘fluttering
from the autumn tree’; ‘I shall smile when wreaths of snow’; ‘Blossom where the
rose should grow.’

Assonance, in the poem, was distinguished, as well. The lines are: ‘lengthen
night and shorten day’; ‘I shall sing when night’s decay ushess in a drearier day.;

Alliteration, on the other hand consist of the repetition of the consonant


sounds at the beginning of words. ‘Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away’; ‘I shall
sing when night’s decay / ushers in a drearier day.’

The imagery the poem uses are quite inherently sensory, or appeals to the
senses. Bronte evokes a thoughtful account unto the reader’s mind and projects a
distinct picture of how an image would be, such as: the flutter of a leaf from an
autumn tree, or the ‘blossoming’ of a wreath of snow.

Sense

Early in youth, Emily developed her imagination around the influence of


her natural setting as a keen observer of sky, animals, plants, rocks, soil, and water.
Fall, Leaves, Fall, is only one among a number of poems dedicated to the season
of autumn. She was raised in the bleak moors of Yorkshire. She seems to be well
attuned to the season of fall more than any other season, as said in her biography
earlier. However, in this poem, she is more distinct about what she likes about the
season, and goes about it quite bleakly when one looks deeper into its meaning.
The effect of which the non-existence of meter, due to the uneven
distribution of syllables per line, but of the presence of the trochaic foot, which
gives off a sound that is quite like chanting is remarkable. Why should someone be
so enthusiastic about the arrival of fall? Unlike most people who feel dreary when
summer leaves?

Her life is described as someone of that who is accustomed to solitude. In a


manner of speaking, she has had – or chose to have – enough time for herself to
ponder on a lot of things, that includes the things she sees – nature, and the things
unknown, such as death.

Her biography as a poet of solitude suggests, as mentioned earlier: “Emily


had always seen death not as dreadful but as complementary, leveling the
personality to the elements of nature, a solidarity or deep sympathy with all the
other creatures of the earth sharing mortality in mute acceptance. She often spoke
regretfully of Heaven, preferring Earth as her eternal resting place, to abide within
the nature so akin to her spirit. That she had exhausted her creativity, her
imagination, and life itself, therein welcoming death, has been suggested by many
observers. The assumption gives a power to Emily that is plausible though
simplistic.”

Not to mention, critics had called her first novel, Wuthering Heights to be
“too crude, violent, and masculine.” Had it been that she was a man and wrote such
things, would her work still be called such things. Not to mention, her use of a
male pseudonym (Ellis Bell) did not even seem to have any effect. This may be
taken into account that she lived during the ‘Feminine’ period, as described by the
Feminist movement. Feminine period included the use of a male pseudonym by
female writers and poets.

In all of her poems, such as this, she has maintained her unique style of
meaning in her poetry – that is, her bleak and dreary yet beautiful and solemn
imagery of nature and her being accustomed to solitude, and her warm, even
welcoming perception towards death.
A woman raised with liberty and independence in thinking, is empowered.
A poet, all the same. Fall, Leaves, Fall by Emily Bronte is a depiction of what
more a woman sees as a poet, and what a woman is capable of depicting. Fall,
Leaves, Fall isn’t only about a person’s fondness for the fall, finding ‘bliss with
every leaf that falls from a tree’, or smiling when seeing ‘wreaths of snow’, or
singing ‘when night’s decay ushers in a drearier day’ – it is about curiosity, a
marveling on death.

Persona-Addressee

The persona may be described as someone who is fond of the season of


fall. Her companion is her anticipation of it. Instead of despondence or
melancholy, she is drawn towards the beauty that she sees in fall.

The addressee could be fall, itself. She calls to it, almost chants for it to
arrive. Perhaps the persona could be addressing people who might be listening to
her wonder about fall, or the people who she knows to be indifferent or spiteful of
fall, or the cold.

3. I Am Vertical

Structure

There is no distinct use of punctuation or capitalization, compared to the other two


poems. Although, the poem is made up of two ten-line stanzas of unmetered slant-
rhyme couplets. It may have a distinctive rhythm but it doesn’t answer to any metrical
description.

A slant rhyme uses words that rhyme, but not quite. For example, some lines from
the poem:

But I would rather be horizontal.


I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
The final sounds of the last word in each line, have the same sound, which makes
it a slant rhyme.

A poetic line – which are words that form a single line of poetry – makes itself
evident as in the title ‘I Am Vertical’ and meaning follows through in the first line:
‘But I would rather be horizonal.’

Plath’s use of enjambment helps the reader carry the word-flow over to the next
line. She completes a thought in as much as she uses little enjambment.

Sound

The final sounds found at the end of each word in each line, as said earlier, creates
a slant rhyme – one that creates the effect of a rhyme only enough for the lines to sound
more intact, and more like a poem.

Sound devices such as assonance, consonance, and alliteration reveal themselves


in the poem. Assonance being, the repetition of vowel sounds within words in a lines,
is apparent in the lines: ‘

Only in the later parts of her life does she realize her unique style in poetry.
Consequently, her inclusion of personal and autobiographical elements in her poetry
is what made her poetry much recognized until today.

Sense

Plath’s allusion to lines represent the upright being of a person and the horizontal
– asleep or dead – ‘being’ of a person.

She doesn’t compare herself with a tree because a tree has its root in the soil,
‘sucking up minerals and motherly love,’ for her to ‘gleam into leaf’. She is not the
beauty of a garden bed as well. She refuses to attract appreciation, to be oblivious to
the inevitability of death, of ‘unpetaling’. There is non-identification with the beauty
of these things because she believes she’s neither. She is not the ‘immortal’ tree or the
‘daring’ flower beds. She is a person, capable of vulnerability, and thinking about
death and existence.
Persona-Addressee
The persona is perhaps, someone fed up with the image people around her keep on
forcing on her to project. She has had experiences and people telling her to be vertical,
to be beautiful. She, for one, doesn’t really think about all these things. To her, beauty
and uprightness are trivial and inconsequential things. To her, while other people don’t
realize it, getting appreciation such as what the tree and flower beds get as a woman, is
shallow and absurd and dumb. If she is going to be compared to trees and flower beds
at all, the persona would want its ‘longevity and the other’s daring.’

The addressee may be herself. Or perhaps, anyone who is disagreeable, and the
persona tries to coax them out of what they think of her, to convince them she is more
than what they want her to project as a person, as a woman.
II. Contrastive linguistic and stylistic analysis

Emily Dickinson is known for her style of punctuation and capitalization, as well
as her language in the realm of poetry. She had left the world with her unique body of
work – poetry of about almost anything, breaking boundaries of her period’s
conventions in writing, and more specifically, breaking free from what women are
supposed to be complying to. She did not maintain to be identified with one theme in
her numerous poems, but instead there were countless of themes, from nature to
immortality to death to solitude to grief.

“Nature is What We See” is a poem identifying towards the recognition of a Higher


Being. Dickinson wrote to acknowledge the presence of something, and remained
steadfast towards her style of writing poetry. Her excessive use of punctuation and
unusual capitalization is not merely for function, like her critics assume it to be. She
knows her aesthetic, and she is conscious of the things she writes. These are not merely
adornments without significance to the meaning of what she tries to convey in her
poetry. Her varying use of rhythm and meter throughout the poem, including her
hyphenation and capitalization, down to the last enjambed lines, are important to be
considered in this poem’s being. Compared to the other two poems, “Nature is what
we see” is perhaps formed as a thought, a realization, a result of wisdom and spare
time. It is as deep and cunning as it is.

“Fall, Leaves, Fall” bares itself to us in the language of consistency and rawness.
Bronte uses AABB. As well as the trochaic foot, only without the consideration of a
meter because of her uneven number of syllables in the poem. Her body of work,
compared to that of Dickinson, has remained and established itself towards one
emerging theme, and it is solitude.

Her poem gives us a kind of vulnerability. Her fondness for fall, and the bleak
imagery she uses are, to some degree, romanticized, but only to give way to a deeper
meaning, which is her fondness and impatience for perhaps, death. Compared to
Dickinson’s “Nature is what we see”, this poem is undeniably more personal. More
meaning underlies it regarding the poet herself.
“I Am Vertical” is a poem, yet again, more daring towards the idea of death. This
time, compared to the other two poems, the use of nature is not to impart its pondering
or fondness, but to impart refusal of being identified with it. She uses trees and flowers
to be subversive towards her time’s use of it. Moreover, the poem does not identify
with any particular rhyme, rhythm or meter. A slant rhyme, which is an internal rhyme
found throughout the poem is, however, identified. This yet again, comparing with the
other two poems makes it unique.

“Nature is what we see” then, is a thought, a more general approach towards an


idea, brought about by the poet’s own wisdom and interpretation of nature, a slight
inclination towards the poet’s way of thinking. “Fall, Leaves, Fall” reveals
vulnerability, leaning towards the speaker’s fondness. Rather, it is a more personal,
more intimate approach towards writing about death. “I Am Vertical” is a poem
overthrowing the romanticized use of trees and flowers, her non-identification with
these things are her own approach towards death.

All of these poems, however, are written by women. The one emerging similarity
is their daring to expose themselves, to be true, to be empowered in writing for their
own, and it is found in their inconsistency in or the non-existence of rhyme, meter, and
rhythm in each of their poetry, it is found in their refusal to be bound by rules and
conventions of writing in their time. Their language is their profound boldness and
resilience in baring truths about their own selves, regardless of the times periods and
societies they all lived in.
III. Analysis using the Post-structuralist Feminism theory

The post-structuralist feminism theory is a theory used to see if a literary work has
successfully used the process of mimesis, or representation on the image of the female.
If successful, then a new image of a woman has been created by a woman for a woman,
therefore it is not a biased opinion created by men.

Guided by the philosophy of Helene Cixous, that women should ‘focus on


individuality, particularly the individuality of the body and to write to redefine self-
identity in the context of her history and narrative, this theory will bring out the
emerging themes of feminism and the poets’ identities in the nature poems of Emily
Dickinson, Emily Bronte, and Sylvia Plath.

“Nature is what we see” reveals the poet’s introspection towards the things that
nature shows us, but we (the reader) don’t really notice or acknowledge the deeper,
more relevant meaning of. Dickinson portrays the simplicity of the concrete and
abstract aspects of nature in a way that ponders the mystery and complexity that it
exudes.

Her hyphenation then, as a result, serve to impart deeper meaning. All throughout
the poem, her use of hyphenation in place of commas or any other punctuation, serve
to enunciate breathlessness, or spontaneity in the emotion felt in a word, which is
apparent in her enumeration of a thing of nature, followed by a hyphen. Her style in
writing makes the reader aware that the hyphenation and capitalization which they
notice at the beginning, serves a more important purpose.

Not to mention, her refusal to conform to her time’s traditions and conventions in
writing poetry. She was a feminist by her own right at the time due to this. Her critics
tell her that her poetry not a realized conscious aesthetic, her publishers before change
her hyphens into commas. And yet, she remains unfazed by this, and continues to
remain steadfast in her own style of poetry. Moreover, when male poets of her time
such as Whitman write about nature and its romanticizing of women, she writes of
nature to simply evoke thought, to reveal its complexity in what we see as simple,
revealing then a woman’s unique perspective of nature, and God.
“Fall, Leaves, Fall” by Emily Bronte is a poem, unseemingly at first, about death.
Her chanting and calling towards death, in the form of her fondness for fall,
enumerating details of bleakness, and that of dreariness are quite unsettling at first.
But in a way, it is a poem yet again that shows a language innate to the poet’s own
thought.

The influence by which Emily Bronte was described to have lived is apparent in
her own works, in her poetry. In this poem, she chants, and calls out to death. While
this interpretation of a poem that is of many mention of the beauty and bleakness of
fall may come off as silly or preposterous, it could be proven. Emily had always seen
‘death not as dreadful but as complementary, leveling the personality to the elements
of nature, a solidarity or deep sympathy with all the other creatures of the earth sharing
mortality in mute acceptance. She often spoke regretfully of Heaven, preferring Earth
as her eternal resting place, to abide within the nature so akin to her spirit. That she
had exhausted her creativity, her imagination, and life itself, therein welcoming death,
has been suggested by many observers. The assumption gives a power to Emily that
is plausible though simplistic.’ This behavior and worldly perspective of Emily could
not have been possibly accepted by critics during her time, would it? Which is why,
Emily Bronte by all means, empowered in her individuality that she herself cultivated
and embraced in her writings such as this poem.

“I Am Vertical” is Sylvia Plath’s refusal to be compared to trees, not because she


hates feminine-established comparison of trees and flowers, but her aim in the poem
was to bare her self-loathing. She refuses to preach about trees and flowers being
likened to herself because she is not ‘immortal’ and attention-seeking. To elaborate,
she does not have ‘a tree’s longevity,’ she does not have herself attached to the ground,
with roots dependent on ‘motherly love’ in order to gleam into leaf. She is unable to
be a garden bed acquiring awe and appreciation from people.

Plath was described in her biography, to be someone whom people liked and fell
in love with immediately. She was able to maintain such a pleasing personality, baring
an all too American girl attitude towards people she meets. But inside, within the
bounds of her own emotion, she is stuck. She has had to cope with her own illness on
her own, one that she can only start to articulate in her poetry, and it is her unending,
unfathomable sadness and grief and anger. She has tried to kill herself twice within
her lifetime. The second time being successful.

This poem, then, is a bold venturing on the subject of death, and her need to be
horizontal, to be lying down, instead of upright, contributing to the world, gleaming
into leaf, earning aahs from crowds. She is, by her own right yet again, a woman
empowered in her own refusal to be wanted as a woman whose only purpose is to
remain steady, resilient, and wanted by people.
Chapter 4

CONCLUSION

The researcher was able to come up with a Semantic Analysis, a Contrastive Linguistic
and Stylistic Analysis, and an analysis using the Post-structuralist Feminism approach of the
nature poems of Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, and Sylvia Plath. In the process, she was able
to find out the authors’ individual and collective voice as female poets of their time, which is what
makes them empowered women of their respective periods from which they burgeoned.

The language and style of Emily Dickinson is that of her hyphenation and capitalization,
as well as her conscious use of these in her poem’s aesthetic. Her refusal to conform or the
exploitation of her time’s traditions in poetry, is what makes the success of the woman writing
for her own, the success of finding and establishing a personal voice. Moreover, the tradition of
transcendentalism – wherein the mystery and complexities nature holds point toward a Higher
Being – in her poem, and the baring of her own perspective towards her experiences in nature is
contributory to what makes her identity as a woman.

Emily Bronte’s poetry’s linguistic and stylistic features also makes apparent her own
worldly and liberal and independent perspective of the world, well-unexpected from a woman at
the time of which she lived as a female writer. Her poem, “Fall, Leaves, Fall” is a representation
of her own subdued yet powerful identification with the idea of death.

Sylvia Plath’s “I Am Vertical” also shows her distaste in being compared to trees and
flowers to enunciate her own sadness, and choosing to be horizontal, being open to the idea of
death, not for the purpose of romanticizing, but because it is for herself. She used themes of self-
loathe to identify her own, her refusal to acquire admiration and establish resilience as a woman.
The poem is written as something personal, akin to her own view of the world, of her own history
and narrative.

All three poems are successful in establishing an accurate representation of the female
identity. The similarity of language and style lies not only in their unique and non-conformist use
of structure and sound devices such as rhythm, meter, rhyme, imagery and figurative devices, but
also in their profoundness in thought, their own unique kinds of wisdom that they themselves
possess. The themes of death and transcendentalism and melancholy in the poems confirms
Cixous’ Post-structuralist feminism theory because they did not separate their body from the text,
that the language of which their body wills them to exude, they followed.
References

Barry, S. M. (2015, December 01). The term “Mother Nature” reinforces the idea that both women
and nature should be subjugated. Quartz. Retrieved June 18, 2018, from
https://qz.com/562833/the-term-mother-nature-reinforces-the-idea-that-both-women-and-
nature-should-be-subjugated/

Cixous, H. (1976). The Laugh of Medusa (K. Cohen & P. Cohen, Trans.). Signs,1(4), summer,
1976. Retrieved June 25, 2018, from
https://artandobjecthood.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/cixous_the_laugh_of_the_medusa.
pdf

Emily Dickinson. (2018, June 20). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 27, 2018, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson

Feminism. (2009). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 19, 2018, from


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism

Feminism in France. (2018, June 02). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 21, 2018, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_France#French_feminist_theory

Hermitary, T. (2009). Emily Brontë, Poet of Solitude [Web log post]. Retrieved June 27, 2018,
from http://www.hermitary.com/solitude/bronte.html

Holland, B. (1998). Luce Irigaray: A Biography. Retrieved June 27, 2018, from
https://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Irigaray.html.

Lange, C. (2008). Journal of Undergraduate Research(Vol. XI). Retrieved June 20, 2018, from
https://www.uwlax.edu/urc/JUR-online/PDF/2008/lange.pdf

Lange, C. (2008). Men and Women Writing Women: The Female Perspective and Feminism in
U.S. Novels and African Novels in French by Male and Female Authors(Vol. XI) [UW-L
Journal of Undergraduate Research]. Retrieved June 20, 2018, from
https://www.uwlax.edu/urc/JUR-online/PDF/2008/lange.pdf
Mambrol, N. (2016, December 20). Helene Cixous and Poststructuralist Feminist Theory [Web
log post]. Retrieved June 25, 2018, from https://literariness.org/2016/12/20/helene-cixous-
and-poststructuralist-feminist-theory/

Mambrol, N. (2016, May 11). The Influence of Poststructuralism on Feminism [Web log post].
Retrieved June 25, 2018, from https://literariness.org/2016/05/11/the-influence-of-
poststructuralism-on-feminism/

Men and Women Writing Women: The Female Perspective and Feminism in U.S. Novels and
African Novels in French by Male and Female Authors(UW-L Journal of Undergraduate
Research XI ed., (2008)) [UW-L Journal of Undergraduate Research]. (2008). Retrieved
2018, from https://www.uwlax.edu/urc/JUR-online/PDF/2008/lange.pdf

Oliver, K. (1998). Kristeva and Feminism. Retrieved June 27, 2018, from
https://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/Kristeva.html.

Ortner, S. (n.d.). Manuscript submitted for publication, Woman, Culture,and Society, Stanford
University Press. Retrieved June 18, 2018, from
https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/sv/sai/SOSANT1600/v12/Ortner_Is_female_to_male.p
df

Plain, J. (2010). Sylvia Plath [Web log post]. Retrieved June 28, 2018, from
https://www.poemhunter.com/sylvia-plath/biography/

Pryce, A. (2014). Ambiguous Silences? Women in Anthologies of Contemporary Northern Irish


Poetry(Vol. 9, Time and Space in Contemporary Women's Writing). Retrieved June 20,
2018, from
https://www.academia.edu/7957772/Ambiguous_Silences_Women_in_Anthologies_of_
Contemporary_Northern_Irish_Poetry

Shape, P. (2009, January 18). Emily Dickinson: Iambic Meter & Rhyme [Web log post]. Retrieved
June 27, 2018, from https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/emily-dickinson-
iambic-meter-and-rhyme/

Sylvia Plath. (2008). In Wikipedia. Retrieved June 28, 2018, from


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath
Timpane, J., & T. (n.d.). Looking at Rhythm and Meter in Poetry. Retrieved June 28, 2018, from
https://www.dummies.com/education/language-arts/poetry/looking-at-rhythm-and-meter-in-
poetry/
"Nature" Is What We See
Emily Dickinson

"Nature" is what we see—


The Hill—the Afternoon—
Squirrel—Eclipse— the Bumble bee—
Nay—Nature is Heaven—
Nature is what we hear—
The Bobolink—the Sea—
Thunder—the Cricket—
Nay—Nature is Harmony—
Nature is what we know—
Yet have no art to say—
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

Fall, Leaves, Fall


Emily Bronte

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;


Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me,
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night's decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

I Am Vertical
Sylvia Plath

But I would rather be horizontal.


I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

You might also like