Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 54

“Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought
her to the man. The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be
called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man.” (Genesis 2:22).
Emily Dickinson is historically known for her reclusive nature. From gifting flowers and poetry to others
through her bedroom window, to speaking to visitors through the door; her poetic voice and any thought
of publication became as shy as Dickinson herself. Dickinson believed publication to be ‘the Auction/ Of
the Mind of Man -/ Poverty – be justifying.’ This language is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s in I Sing the
Body Electric (1855), his idea of ‘A man’s body at auction’ premised upon the notion that the human body
is too complex, perfect and idealised to be sold. Dickinson takes these ideas further through her refusal
to make her poetic body a public spectacle; it is instead coded as a body of privacy and control, shyness
and individuality. This is not only parallel to Dickinson’s own reclusive persona, but equally portrays her
awareness of an inability to travel to the places only her poetic body travelled. Whilst her physical body
was to be contained within a household based on patriarchal normalities, Dickinson’s poetic body was her
own body to control.
19 th Century poetry relies heavily on the Genesis story when referencing the formation of the
body. Francis Hargrave provides a summary of the Victorian woman, describing her as ‘the poetry of the
world, in the same sense as stars are the poetry of heaven.’ Language constructing the female form relies
on ‘heavenly’ and ‘holy’ connotations of religious association. The feminine form was shaped through a
patriarchal understanding of limiting women to the home, emphasising her body as weaker and radically
inferior to that of the male. As an educational source for 19 th Century society, biblical language was
manipulated, teaching men to condemn and control women and in turn teaching women that
disobedience to man is punishable. Coventry Patmore’s poem The Angel in the House (1854) popularised
female submission to man grounded within religious comparisons, resembling a teaching through a direct
voice of those above and in control of women, stating that ‘man must be pleased; but him to please/ Is
woman’s pleasure; down the gulf/ Of his condoled necessities.’ Religious imagery concerning the female
form is again apparent in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poem “Body’s Beauty” (1868), with the lines: ‘Of Adam’s
first wife, Lilith, it is told/ (The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)/ That, ere the snake’s, her sweet
tongue could deceive/ And her enchanted hair was the first gold.’ The imagery, taken from the book of
Genesis, is interlinked with that of the supernatural and mythical - in Rossetti’s language of the witch, and
in the Medusian ‘enchanted hair.’ The text of Genesis becomes a story which forms a metaphorical body
of the woman, either depicting its inferiority to man or described through the language of temptation and
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