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IV．Major Voices
Emily Dickinson
Wendy Martin
When Emily Dickinson died of Bright's disease, a kidney disorder, ontly, feminist critics have analyzed Dickinson's work and life in the context of the constraints placed on women in the traditional New England society in which she lived. These new interpretations demonstrate quite convincingly that she was a dedicated and disciplined poet whose relative isolation was a self-imposed strategy that gave her time and space in which to write. She was able to make such a profound contribution to American literature because of her radical questioning, reworking, and often rejection of conventional language, poetic style, theology, feminine roles, and attitudes toward her world. To protect herself from more conventional opinions, she largely divorced herself from her social context and created a very private life that suited her artistic needs, and her strikingly original perceptions are clearly visible in her poetry and letters.
As a young woman Emily Dickinson experienced a series of conflicts with powerful male figures from which she gained a sense of herself as an independent thinker and writer. In order to achieve psychological and artistic autonomy, she had to undergo a "civil war" of the self against the very authorities religious, familial, literary she sometimes sought to follow
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Her first skirmish in the battle for self-reliance was with the traditional religious concept of an all-powerful God who laid claim to her soul. As an adolescent she resisted being converted during the religious revival that swept through Mount Holyoke Seminary where she was sent to school from 1847 to 1848. In her sermons the headmistress, Mary Lyons, skillfully applied the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric used a century earlier by the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards. Most of Dickinson's classmates responded, but Dickinson remained impenitent. For meeting after meeting, she was the only student described as having "no hope" o