“THERE IS A MORN BY MEN UNSEEN”: A CLOSE READING OF DICKINSON’S PARADISE

Abstract

Emily Dickinson’s poem “There is a morn by men unseen” (Fr13) has been interpreted by feminist critics as a manifestation of the poet’s stance against patriarchy, arguing she drew a paradise men could not access. While in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar state it depicts “a female Easter, an apocalyptic day of resurrection on which women would rise from the grave of gender in which Victorian society had buried them alive” (p. 646), Wendy Barker asserts it portrays “unrepressed female energy” (1987, p. 127). This paper aims to demonstrate that the critics’ conclusions arise from a problematic assumption that the word “men” was employed in this poem to refer to gender. It also questions the assertion that Dickinson approached lyric poetry as a form of self-expression. To argue for an understanding of Dickinson’s paradise as a genderless haven for creativity, we turn to a close reading of the poem as well as to other instances where she employed this word in her poetic oeuvre.