Emily Dickinson on the Individual

Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems champion the importance of the individual over that of the group. She seemed to have had an immense disdain for those who blithely followed the conventions of society with little thought of their own. The reclusive life she preferred for herself was greatly reflected in her works. She disagreed with her family’s views of culture and religion leading her toward transcendental reflections of what she thought to be a better way to connect spiritually to the world. Ms. Dickinson’s poems demonstrate an opinion against the ridiculousness of the achievement of recognition and status, she wrote of the need and the right of the individual to maintain its integrity.

In “I’m Nobody, Who Are You?” perhaps one of Ms. Dickinson’s most famous poems, she bemoans the inclination of most people to want recognition. In the first stanza she warns of the dangers of voicing one’s interest in remaining anonymous, cautioning that one will be ridiculed if “they,” meaning the majority, find out. She mocks those who go around constantly boasting of themselves, vainly attempting to keep their names in popular circulation. She quite cleverly compares them to croaking frogs, ever noisily reminding the world of their existences.

Her poem, “Much Madness is Divinest Sense” further demonstrates her perspectives on society’s intent to squash the individual. The speaker intimates that it is always up to the collective to decide what is sane and what isn’t, “Assent and you are sane, Demur you’re straight way dangerous.” And once they decide you are insane, you will be “Handled with a Chain.” The speaker is not implying that the majority is right all the time, but still, as an individual, you cannot be accepted unless you agree with them. The world can sometimes be so brutal to individuals as to subdue them.

In keeping with her theme of the rights of the individual over the group, Ms. Dickinson’s “Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church” can be viewed as a commentary on how a person should live their spiritual life. Here the speaker asks the reader to consider the transcendental ideal that God “transcends” the physical world and should be experiences by the individual through their experiences with the natural world. It mocks the very idea that God can be experienced in a group setting after all.

In “What Soft Cherubic Creatures” Ms. Dickinson reveals the hypocrisy of the group versus the individual. She exemplifies women, who are expected to put on a made-up “face” for society, yet reveals that upon closer inspection, the “freckled human nature” can be seen. The speaker is commenting on the pressure of society to behave a certain way, while hiding one’s true passions, yet another way the collective subdues the individual. In her article “Writing Poetry Like a Woman” Corinne Blackmer discusses how conventional “feminine verse” of Ms. Dickinson’s era usually touched on domestic topics while Ms. Dickinson “wrote poetry that defied all conventional gendered norms” and “ridiculed the pretensions to virtue and self-righteous piety of these “angelic” creatures. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay entitled Self Reliance said, “It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after one's own. But great is the man who in midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

In “Alone, I Cannot Be” Ms. Dickinson writes in defense of keeping one’s own company. The speaker is telling the reader of the “recordless company” she keeps in her solitude. One can imagine the countless hours the poet spent alone writing her poems. It can be inferred that Ms. Dickinson was plagued by a constant companionship of voices, either imagined or conjured by her creative endeavors. Either way it would seem she is happier for their company, than for that of their warm-blooded counterparts.

In further examining her continued struggle to champion the rights of the individual, it is imperative to examine Ms. Dickinson as an unpublished poet. Her advisor, mentor, and publisher, Thomas Higginson, continually counseled against the publishing of her poems, citing that her poetry would be misrepresented in print form. Ms. Dickinson’s style of writing so defied the conventional forms as to render it nearly impossible to adequately reveal its original intent. She exemplified her feelings about this in the poem, “Fame is a Bee.” Over the course of her lifetime Dickinson maintained control and ownership in order to write, as Sharon Cameron states, "in public while effectively exempting her writing from public legislation" (Cameron, "Amplified Contexts", 241). Writing in this way, perhaps Dickinson felt she was protecting herself against the sting of the bee.

First Essay for English Comp 2 - Thematic Analysis

Okay, I know I still owe you a copy of my hate language essay, and as soon as I locate it I WILL post...but this one I wrote in about an hour and 20 minutes and I'm particularly proud of it. If you'd like to read the short story that it is based upon, you can check it out at the link below:

http://cai.ucdavis.edu/gender/thelesson.html (you'll have to copy and paste to your browser - apparently blogspot add links isn't working properly at this time!)

Enjoy:


Thematic Analysis of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Lesson

In her short story, The Lesson, Toni Cade Bambara explores the theme of innocence versus experience through the eyes of a group of adolescents from the ghetto. These kids are introduced to the world outside of their neighborhood by a woman, Miss Moore, whom we learn is a college educated, proper speaking, black woman who has taken “responsibility for the young ones’ education” (Bambara 1.) Bambara takes the theme even deeper in relating how ignorance of one’s circumstances is a sort of innocence, to be broken by the experience of becoming aware of them. This theme is further articulated by Bambara’s concealment of the name of the main character until later in the story, as this awareness begins to creep in to Sylvia’s consciousness even as she vehemently attempts to deny it.

Early in the story we are introduced to the contempt the youth have for Miss Moore by the way in which Sylvia describes her. It becomes apparent that the youths view her as an impediment to their enjoyment of their surroundings, as plays out in Sylvia’s description of their hatred for her, “And we kinda hated her too, hated the way we did the winos who cluttered up our parks and pissed on our handball walls and stank up our hallways and stairs so you couldn’t’ halfway play hide-and-seek without a goddamn gas mask.” (Bambara 1) We can see that this group of kids is interested only in their own self-gratification. They are resentful that this woman has come into their lives and is attempting to “educate” them, especially since school is out and they have better things in mind to occupy their time.

Miss Moore’s “lesson” on this particular day takes this group out of the comfort of their home territory. They are taken by taxi to the city to visit the FAO Schwarz in Manhattan. They are made aware of just how out of place they are by the instantaneous exposure to ladies in stockings and “One lady in a fur coat, hot as it is. White folks crazy.” (Bambara 4) In addition, they are confronted by the reality of their socio-economic positions in life when they begin to look at the wares offered in the windows and in the displays of the store. At one point the characters describe the difference between the prices of a “handcrafted sailboat of fiberglass at one thousand one hundred ninety-five dollars” (Bambara 25), with a sailboat set they can buy at the local bodega for about fifty cents. Although Sylvia wants desperately to know what a real boat would costs, she won’t give Miss Moore the satisfaction of asking her directly, demonstrating her resistance to being removed from her provincial bubble.

As the story continues Miss Moore describes what a paperweight is used for and we realize that there are differing levels of socio-economic position even amongst these poor kids from the ghetto. She questions where her “pupils” do their homework to which she gets varying responses. Junebug explains that he doesn’t have a desk. Big Butt says he doesn’t have homework and Flyboy professes to not have a home at all. Mercedes, we learn, not only has a desk but has scented stationary that she received as a gift from her godmother. (Bambara 15) In attempting to reach these “students” to help broaden their horizons Miss Moore is continually confronted with a cultural mindset of accepting mediocrity. When Sylvia realizes that all of the items in the store are so far out of the realm of anything they will ever have as long as they remain in their mediocre, ghetto dwelling lives she becomes angered. We see that she is becoming aware of her circumstances. It is at this time that Bambara finally gives her a name.

Even as Sugar attempts to engage Miss Moore regarding the lesson of the day we see Sylvia beating a hasty retreat back to her provincial bubble. Then she realizes that she can’t close that box again once it has been opened and she becomes even angrier with both Sugar, for wanting to engage this new awareness, and Miss Moore, for perpetrating this heinous act upon their innocent minds. Bambara’s theme is once again reiterated in the notion that some of the best lessons in life are learned not from the classroom, but from experiences, experiences that both enrich us, and rob us of our innocence.