Such a woman, who also shuns socialisation and enjoys solitude, should be distrusted and/or dissected, because she is supposedly an irregularity, a glitch in the normal order of things.Įmily Dickinson fulfilled all of these criteria.Īlso read: Woes of a ‘Child-Free’ Indian Womanĭuring her youth, Dickinson had a social circle and a fiancé. The single adult woman with no husband, no children, and with no desire for a family, is suspect. But perhaps the lone woman is the most dangerous or, at least, the strangest of them all.
Yet she rejected his invitations, even to meet other contemporary poets.Īll women are dangerous, if we go by most traditional texts which have discussed women and especially those which have been written by men. Higginson was one of Dickinson’s regular correspondents, one with whom she shared her poems as well. She had been invited three times by Higginson to Boston to attend his lectures and meet other poets to have literary discussions. “…I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town,” replied Emily Dickinson in a letter to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the writer, abolitionist and soldier.
