A new way of reading Dickinson's poetic experiments with gender has been offered by the work of Judith Butler and other cultural critics, who contend that gender is socially constructed and neither fixed nor essential. For Butler, gender is "the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being" (Gender Trouble 33). Gender is constituted performatively through a stylised repetition of gestures and acts that establish rather than express a stable abiding gendered identity. This article focuses on those Dickinson poems that construct speakers who blur and confuse the regulatory distinction between the masculine and the feminine, which Butler argues constrains and limits the proliferation of alternative configurations of gender through different repetitions of acts (147-9). These gender-crossing poems can now be read as subversive in that, like drag and cross-dressing for Butler, they disrupt the illusion of gender identity as an essential inner substance by denaturalising and mobilising gender categories (136-8). I suggest that the subversion...

"No Matter - now - Sweet - But when I'm Earl": Dickinson's Shakespearean Cross-Dressing

The Revenge of Cato's Daughter: Dickinson's Masochism

The daily musical activities of poet Emily Dickinson (1830–86)—home performances at the piano, collecting sheet music, and attending concerts—provided a vital and necessary backdrop for her emerging artistic persona. Dickinson's active musical life reveals a great deal about the cultural offerings available to a woman of her time, place, and class. Moreover, her encounters with the music-making of the Dickinson family servants and the New England hymn tradition encouraged artistic borrowings and boundary crossings that had a deep and continuing influence on her writing. Through her engagement with music, Dickinson was able to fashion an identity served by musical longings, one that would ultimately serve a vital role in the formation of her unique poetic voice.

“ My Business is to Sing”: Emily Dickinson's Musical Borrowings

Although, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian avoid
labelling themselves 'feminist poets', each provides a 'feminist insight' into what
Catriona Clutterbuck describes as their 'marginalization from official systems of
representation,.J This thesis will primarily discuss how each of these women
poets, from both the North and South of Ireland, writes from the margins of Irish
myth and history to question the concept of silence. The introduction interrogates
the meaning of silence in relation to wider philosophic responses to the politics of
silence in contemporary Irish poetry. This chapter will also briefly review some of
the more monumental anthologies of Irish literature and major works of litelary
criticism (1989-2004) to illustrate how women poets have emerged from their
obscurity and established themselves as prominent figures within a patriarchal
tradition that had previously marginalized their voices.
As an example of their rise in status, Chapter II will have a comparative
look at how all three poets employ the body to paradoxically speak of women's
silence, while using it to maintain a level of silence. This thesis will then move on
to discuss how Ni Dhomhnaill, Boland and McGuckian all write from the margins
of Irish myth and history to speak of the unspeakable. In Chapter III, Ni
Dhomhnaill speaks of women's silence through Irish myth and history by
engaging in the oral tradition of storytelling. Whereas Ni Dhomhnaill favours
myth over history, Boland's overall ambition in Chapter IV is to write woman out
of her silence, thus 'out of myth [and] into history' by using her autobiography The fifth chapter will return to the mythical realms of McGuckian' s more radical
approach to history in her later poems from Captain Lavender (1994) and discuss
her private symbolic re-reading of Northern Ireland's political history. Since in
much of their later poetry, Ni Dhomhnaill, Boland and McGuckian all adopt the
ethical position of speaking while maintaining a certain silence, Chapter VI will
conclude with a comparative look at some of the Irish women poets writing of
silence in the twenty-first century.

Speaking of silence : myth and history in contemporary Irish women's poetry (1989-2004)

While it is expected that nineteenth-century love poetry would engage with Shakespeare's Sonnets, considering their status and pervasive appeal at the time in Anglo-American culture, this paper puts forward the case for Emily Dickinson's specific borrowings from these poems. More specifically, within the context of their afterlife, it argues that the Sonnets provided the American poet with an authoritative and, at the same time, controversial resource for her construction of love. It examines Dickinson's use of a vocabulary of aristocratic and economic tropes, love triangles, imagery of light and darkness, physical beauty and erotic multiplicity, which she would have identified as Shakespearean. His unconventional sonnets, it will be suggested, offered Dickinson a means of validating the traditionally feminine position of powerlessness within the discourse of love, of representing female desire for a male figure, and of constructing poems that connote same-sex love. Like the Sonnets, Dickinson's love poems are queer: They unsettle repressive categories of gender and sexuality and make possible the signification of same-sex passion. This paper continues current discussion of the queer afterlives of both writers as an antidote to the intrusive and spurious biographical readings of their brief, repetitious, and figurative lyrics.

Sylvia Henneberg

Papers

Neither Lesbian nor Straight: Multiple Eroticisms in Emily Dickinson's Love Poetry