Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 58

different countries that she could not physically visit. In “In lands I never saw – they say,” the speaker is
‘Meek at whose everlasting feet/ A myriad Daisy play’ and uses the imagery of ‘Immortal Alps’ to reference
her inability to venture into and learn about the world around her, including the ‘alps’ which the ‘daisy’
cannot see through or establish a dominance over. The male resonance to the mountains introduces a
critique of men, who trap women within the private sphere, preventing them from being able to roam
freely.
The argument for possession of the female form by patriarchal hands is expressed most notably
in Dickinson’s “I am afraid to own a Body -”:
I am afraid to own a Body / I am afraid to own a Soul / Profound – precarious Property /
Possession, not optional
Double Estate – entailed at pleasure / Upon an unsuspecting Heir / Duke in a moment of
Deathlessness / And God, for a Frontier.
The alliterative third and fourth lines exaggerate the two separated forms, the body and the soul, through
the speaker’s lack of ownership. The word ‘precarious’ means ‘not securely held or in position;
dangerously likely to fall or collapse, depending on chance.’ To refer to the body as ‘property’ both alludes
to its individual ownership as but also suggests that the body is owned by something greater than the
individual. This is again emphasised by separating ‘Property –‘ and ‘Possession’ with a caesura, suggesting
that an individual possession of the female body becomes the property of the patriarchal world. The
language used in the second stanza changes between male judges of both the body and soul, alternating
between an heir, death, and God himself being in charge. The poem presents the inevitability of a male
source as both the earthly and eternal judge. Unlike Whitman, Dickinson distinguishes between the body
and soul as two separate entities. Both, however, inevitably belong to the male.
Though Dickinson took control over her poetic body, only a handful of her poems were published
during her lifetime. Those poems which were published, closely adhered to expected standards by the
Victorian society, ambiguous in tone. Control over the female form became immortalised in biblical
language, through mythology, literature and art of the period, becoming canonized views of how the
female body should perform and be presented. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood depicted women in
immortalised moments of perfection. For example, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Venus Verticordia’ (Figure 1)
depicts his model, Alexa Wilding, as the mythological Venus. Depicted in a paradisiac style, with the
goddess of love holding an apple with a look of seduction, the woman becomes reminiscent of the Edenic
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