3 - The Feminist Revolution in Dickinson Criticism

Summary

My little force explodes

— Emily Dickinson to T. W. Higginson (1862)

From a feminist perspective, Dickinson's life was neither a flight, nor a cop-out, nor a sacrifice, nor a substitution, but a strategy, a creation, for enabling her to become the person she was.

— Susan Juhasz, introduction to Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson

The more we come to recognize the unwritten and written laws and taboos underpinning patriarchy, the less problematical, surely, will seem the methods she chose.

— Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson”

FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM does not appear until the mid-1970s, nearly a quarter century after the rise of modern feminist writings such as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (originally published in France as Le Deuxieme Sexe in 1949; in the United States in 1953). Of course, feminist writing has a long and varied history that can be traced back centuries. Two treatises in English, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1797) and Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) are foundational.

Feminist Criticism of Emily Dickinson: Its Birth and Flowering

Despite the widespread influence of Beauvoir's book, augmented in the following decade by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Andrew Sinclair's The Emancipation of the American Woman (Original title, The Better Half, 1965), it wasn't until the 1970s that modern feminist literary criticism took root.