The Manipulation of space

The environment around Dickinson sometimes portrays her sense of self. Her lifetime spent in her family’s household has created a dynamic for Dickinson where “space” plays a major role in her poetry. Space represents a major part of her self and how she functions with the lack of physical, mental, and emotional space. Emily Dickinson, through most of her poetry, exhibits a sort of agoraphobia or fear of spaces. This fear was probably the result of her lifetime of confinement at home, and her lack of freedom and space needed. Dickinson’s poem “The soul has bandaged moments” and “I was the slightest in the house” both represent space in different, unique ways. One discusses the possibility of space as being a confinement of intellectual ecstasy, and the other a representation of her space as a small and ignored “position”. In addition, these portray how Dickinson always felt ignored, and underrepresented. “The soul has bandaged moments” and “I was the smallest in the house” both!

represent Dickinson’s awareness of the space around her and how it confines her intellectually, and physically; these poems show how Dickinson worked with the notion of space as a transcendatory aspect, where when she manipulate

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It is obvious that given the choice, Dickinson would choose to have these moments of intellectual escape, where she truly represents herself and her goals. “The soul has bandaged moments” and “I was the slightest in the house” are two poems, which show how Emily Dickinson manipulates space to her advantage. Consequently she redoubles her efforts to pressure the band of “sister” already separated – by physical distance, marriage, death, - whose companionship had buffered her against an enhancing sense of self as ‘one of the lingering bad ones’…”(Pollak 37).

“On the other hand, while freeing her from the terrors of marriage and allowing her to “play” with the toys of Amplitude, the child mask (or prose or costume) eventually threatened to become a crippling self, a self that in the crises of her gothic life fiction locked her into her father’s house in the way that a little girl is confined to a nursery.

“As a teenager, Emily Dickinson identified with her mother, but as an adult she needed to disengage herself psychologically from her”(Pollak 37). These escaped moments may relate to Dickinson’s childhood and her attempt to psychologically separate herself from her mother. These facts are crucial in understanding Dickinson’s representation of space, and why she constantly writes about escape, and the small, restricted spaces around her. The words show Dickinson’s space around the child similarly. Most often, this was her state in the household, where she could not escape intellectually, or physically. This is an excellent depiction of what Dickinson suffered continually at home. The soul is tired because of its intellectual, ecstatic experience, and is now described as shackled and coming back unwillingly.

These lines depict the soul’s transitory escape. The following lines discuss the soul’s escape and how it is free, dancing, and ecstatic while in escape. What was the habit in the sense of costume became habit in the more pernicious sense of addiction, and finally the two habits led to both an inner and outer inhabitation-a haunting interior other and an inescapable person” (Gilbert and Gubar 591).

“I was slightest in the house/I took the smallest room/At night, my little lamp and book/And one Geranium”(Dickinson 234).

Approximate Word count = 1256
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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