Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 57

her, her poetic body having the ability to ‘climb’ places that Dickinson herself had never visited. She would
travel from her home into worlds and topics deemed ‘unfit’ for a Victorian woman. This is notably
reminiscent to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s liberation brought on by her last years spent in Italy, a
“liberation that is specific to Victorian womanhood and which must have appeared the grater to Elizabeth
Barret Browning as she suffered to a greater degree than most” under the roof of her tyrannical father.
Dickinson created a body which, like a volcano, is ready to erupt and is constantly contemplative within
her poetry. She employs a subconscious mask to translate any struggle to express her ‘conception in
unorthodox and original poetry through a central metaphor, the volcano’ which her poetic body is allowed
to climb and conquer. Dickinson is cautious about portraying an accessible world of which she is
geographically unaware, through suggesting that ‘those who know her, know her less/ The nearer her
they get.’ This validates Dickinson’s geographical language, as even those who do venture into the world
will never know it fully. Dickinson’s imagination thus becomes just as reliable as that of someone who has
visited said places physically.
In “The Robin’s my Criterion for Tune -” the speaker claims, ‘I grow – where Robins do’ once again
linking her poetic voice to winged, unrestrained creatures. However, the speaker spurns ‘Daisies,’ a flower
that was associated with subservience in the nineteenth century. The speaker, coming from a ‘New
Englandly’ viewpoint, imagines a rejection of feminine stereotypes and submission. The use of a different,
‘foreign’ perspective suggesting a necessary alienation is required in order to subvert tropes associated
with the ideal of Victorian femininity. Giving herself the ability to take the form of an outsider by depicting
herself as a free roaming flower or an unapologetic bird, Dickinson criticises her world more freely. She
creates foreign settings within an American home, allowing room for the freedom of expression stated by
her speakers but coding it through an adherence to Victorian restriction of pastoral language.
This ambiguity and lack of constraint is visible in Dickinson’s “As if some little Arctic flower,” which
again portrays a flower coming to life, wandering ‘down the latitudes.’ The word ‘latitude’ means not only
the scope for freedom of action, but also of thought. The flower once again becomes Dickinson’s poetic
body, a reminder of overt femininity through floral language in which the flower disobeys forced
normalities, listening to songs of ‘birds of foreign tongue.’ This is portrayed as a necessary alienation,
presenting a lack of fluency in the language of Victorian condemnation for women. Dickinson’s poetic
body links itself through a deafness towards a world which condemns her. Dickinson herself, accepting
Thomas Higginson’s nickname for her, ‘Daisy,’ saw herself as constrained by Victorian limitations. She
wished to imagine herself through an unrestrained poetic body, a metaphorical flower venturing into
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