“Homelessness — for Home:” Emily Dickinson’s Sense of Place, Travel, and Becoming
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Liu, Chun-An
Abstract
This thesis aims at exploring the travel imaginings of Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century American poet who was known for her seclusion, and analyzing how she sought to subvert domestic constraints, and the patriarchy, dominance, and rules that home embodies, and finally attain to a greater extent of freedom, autonomy, and liberation. The first chapter begins by pointing out that many Dickinson’s critics have unanimously ascribed her proclivity for seclusion to her unsociability or her suffering from mental illness. To provide an alternative reading of the poet’s seclusion, this thesis draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology as well as other theorists’ discussions on the subversive and transformative power of travel and tries to explain how Dickinson’s private writings about her imaginary travels have successfully led her to overcome domestic constraints and to encounter with the outside world despite her seclusion. Chapter Two provides a more comprehensive and objective discussion on Dickinson’s relationship with home. Both her strong sense of place toward home and her dissatisfaction with home are explored in detail, but with a particular focus on the latter, for those unpleasant circumstances are precisely the stimuli that encourage the poet to write poetry in her state of seclusion and thereby open up an alternative and private smooth space in her imaginary realm. Chapter Three then discusses how Dickinson expands this alternative space by going on imaginary journeys and comes to benefit from the subversive and transformative potential of travel. Traveling enables the poet to deterritorialize the rules and institutions in real life, and through the encounters in those journeys, she dissolves all the fixities of the rigid line and gradually moves toward the transformation and liberation of self. Chapter Four continues to display Dickinson’s “becomings” after her travels. Her journeys often end either with a return to home or with the arrival at a state of homelessness, but both endings can adequately manifest her successes in self-liberation and transformation of mind. The home that the traveler returns to is no longer the same home but is a (re)new(ed) start-point of her next journey, and if the traveler chooses to roam in that homeless state, she continues that endless journey and produces more becomings. The key is that Dickinson’s sense of place has been transformed; with a liberated mind, she is able to perceive everywhere as home. Lastly, Chapter Five reinforces the ideas that Dickinson’s imaginary travels have substantially helped her sabotage domestic and patriarchal institutions and that she is able to freely write poetry in her seclusion. The poet’s seclusion is actually an active, voluntary, and assertive act of resistance to the outside world instead of a passive retreat. It is anticipated that this thesis will contribute to the Dickinson scholarship by offering a more positive interpretation of her choice of seclusion.
Subjects
艾蜜莉狄瑾森
地方感
旅行
游牧論述
化蛻
SDGs
Type
thesis
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