艾米莉狄金森诗歌的生态女性主义解读
关键词：艾米莉•狄金森；诗歌；生态女性主义；自然；女性
Abstract
This paper focuses on using Eco-feminist criticism as the theoretical basis and combines Emily Dickinson’s life experience and her poetry to analyze her reclusive life and her prospective Eco-feminist awareness reflected in her poetry. The emphasis is on the analysis of Emily Dickinson’s poems from the perspective of female awareness and ecological thought. And the final conclusion is: because of her special social background and life experience, Emily Dickinson formed her Eco-feminist awareness and then expressed it in her works. It is unknown whether she is a feminist or an environmentalist, but it can be found from her life and poems that Dickinson always pursues female identity and shows great enthusiasm to nature.
Key words: Emily Dickinson; poetry; Eco-feminism; nature; women
An Eco-feminism Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry
Contents
摘 要 i
Abstract ii
I. Introduction 1
II. Theoretical Background 2
2.1 Main Concepts and Arguments of Eco-feminism 3
2.2 Eco-feminist Literary Criticism on Eco-feminism 4
III. Origin of Emily Dickinson’s Eco-feminist Awareness 6
3.1 Background of Patriarchal Society 6
3.2 Life Experience of Emily Dickinson 8
IV. An Eco-feminist Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry 10
4.1 Interpretation of Dickinson’s Ecological Awareness 11
4.1.1 Dickinson’s Transcendental View of Nature 11
4.1.2 Dickinson’s Puritan View of Nature 12
4.2 Dickinson’s Feminist Consciousness 14
4.2.1 Dickinson’s Struggle in Religion 14
4.2.2 Dickinson’s Resistance in Literature 15
V. Conclusion 16
Bibliography 19
Acknowledgements 21
I. Introduction
During the 19th century, there are certain significant people in American literature. One was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poet, essayist and ideologist, who led the Transcendentalist movement; one was Walt Whitman, a poet, essayist and humanist, who was claimed as America’s first “poet of democracy”; the third was Emily Dickinson, a remarkable poetess in American literary history, who made a great impact on American literature. Dickinson was outstanding among the contemporary poets for her unique writing style, creative images and profound ideology. Therefore, she was praised as “the most topping poetess in west since Sapphic”. Although Emily Dickinson was a less striking figure in literature circle when she was alive, she was later known as a quite influential poetess in the history of American literature. Thus it is of high importance to research on Emily Dickinson and her works.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was born in a Calvinist family of Amherst, Massachusetts. Although she could be disconcertingly inpidualized, there were no signs that she would become a recluse. After her 25 years old, Dickinson dwelled in deep seclusion and rarely come out. Even so, it made no difference to her creative ability and artistic imagination. She stayed single and wrote poetry day after day for the rest of her life. For her poetry, most of her poems are about nature, love, death, eternality, her self-awareness and the resistance against man-dominated reality. Only a few poems are about the society, political events or scientific field. In this sense, Chang Yaoxin argues that “Dickinson explores the inner life of the inpidual” (16.). After Emily Dickinson's main works having been published in the late 19th century, her works have always aroused the interest of scholars and readers around the world. Among these criticisms, her works even received unfavorable comments and skepticism for her having challenged the traditional poetry. Even so, her poetry writing ability and wisdom were widely recognized.
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