Martha Nell Smith in Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson, argue the contrary

Martha Nell Smith in Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson, argue the contrary

With regard to Dickinson's relationship with Susan, scholars disagree about to what extent she understood her love for Susan to be erotic or sexual and whether or not to classify that love as "lesbian." Faderman, who did some of the groundbreaking Cheap Designer Sunglasses Outlet work on Dickinson's letters to Susan and her homo-erotic verse, insists that Dickinson would not have understood her feelings to be sexual and suggests that any self-consciousness in the homoerotic poetry appears "not because she formulated it specifically as lesbian (she would have seen it as an expression of romantic friendship), but because it revealed so much of her" (Chloe 44). Others, notably Martha Nell Smith in Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson, argue the contrary. Smith notes that Dickinson's love for Susan was an "emotional devotion of a lifetime" and that Sue herself self-consciously found some of Dickinson's letters to her "too adulatory to print."

Moreover, Smith argues, "Dickinson's correspondence to Sue, frequently expressing her wanting to caress and kiss her beloved (L 96 is one of the many examples) and imagining orgasmic fusion with her (L 288, about 1864), speaks Tag Heuer Carrera Replica a carnal as well as an emotional affection." Thus, according to Smith, the term "lesbian ... is most appropriate for characterizing this relationship". Both Faderman and Smith agree, however, that various Handbags Dickinson's attachment to Susan has been "ignored and trivialized over the last century" (Smith 25). Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith's collection of Dickinson's letters and "letter poems" to Susan, entitled Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, presents overwhelming evidence that Susan was indeed "the very core of the poet's emotional and creative life" (Hart and Smith xii), far overshadowing any elusive male figure, including the still unidentified "Master."

Faderman's Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present includes excerpts from letters Dickinson wrote to Susan and to Kate Anthon, another woman to whom she had a passionate attachment, and a dozen poems that could be interpreted as homo-erotic in nature: "Her breast is fit for pearls," "The Lady feeds Her little Bird," "I showed her Hights she never saw--," "You love me--you are sure--," "Like Eyes that looked on Wastes--," "Ourselves were wed one summer--dear--," "Be Mine the Doom--," "Now I knew I lost her--," "Her sweet Weight on my Heart a Night," "Frigid and sweet Her parting Face--," "That she forgot me was the least," and "To see her is a picture". Terry Castle, editor of The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, includes only eight poems, five that appear in Faderman's anthology, plus "Going--to--Her!", "Precious to Me--She still shall be--," Cheap Designer Sunglasses Outlet and "The Stars are old, that stood for me--".

The danger, which some students will immediately recognize, is in assuming the poems included in these anthologies are autobiographical. Dickinson herself wrote to her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "When I state Tag Heuer Carrera Replica myself as the Representative of the Verse--it does not mean me--but a supposed person" (qtd. in Faderman, Chloe 44), and she adopts a male persona in other poems. Still, two of the poems included in these anthologies clearly express feelings of one woman for another woman--"Like Eyes that Looked on Wastes--" and "Ourselves were wed on summer--dear--"--and another refers to Susan directly by her nickname, "Dollie."

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