Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 55

lust, of doom and failure, establishing an immediate inferiority of the female form as under the man or as
an object to be admired.
Religious language started to inform the role of the body, various poetic voices presenting an
influence of religious dilemmas. Walt Whitman’s I Sing the Body Electric explores the physicality of the
human form as a direct parallel to the human soul, grounding theological ideas within the earthly body.
The body becomes emblematic of perfection, a well-made man’s body proving excellence through not
only his face, but equally ‘his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,/ It is
in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him.’ The body, as
a whole, is described through language that exemplifies its complexity, Whitman using the image of the
body to remark that these limbs, no matter whether ‘red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and
nerve,’ blood running red in everybody. Nevertheless, even as a poem that exemplifies ideas that were
ahead of its time, the female form is described through terms familiar to Victorian readers - of both
Patmore and Rossetti, remarking upon women that they are ‘Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their
performances,/ The group of labourers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their
wives waiting,/ The female soothing a child, the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard.’ Although
the woman in this scene is described outside the confines of the household, her form is still contained
within a pastoral setting, a motif of women which shaped literature from the Romantic period and bled
into the Victorian.
In her youth, Dickinson claimed that heaven was a ‘garden we have not seen.’ Immediately the
Edenic connotations of Genesis are remarked as hidden within the natural world around her. During her
education at Mary Lyon school, Dickinson was praised as a successful student, ‘but a girl who, surprisingly,
felt no need to “declare for Christ” under the pressure of the Second Great Awakening.’ Dickinson was a
Calvinist, following a school of religious thought rejecting teachings which held that God can be
manipulated for an individual’s election to Heaven. According to Calvinists this decision has been made
before one is born, making the actions of each individual on earth less restricted than those who fear
judgement day. Dickinson’s refusal to conform to a controlled religious understanding allowed for a wider
freedom within her poetic voice. Nevertheless, the world around Dickinson maintained a stance which
differed to hers. She describes her world perfectly in one of her letters to Thomas Higginson, explaining:
“I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his
briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he
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