Un-Silencing Dickinson: Emily Dickinson's Aversion to the Male Body and Heterosexuality in "My Life had stood–– a Loaded Gun"

Global Tides Volume 19 Article 1 April 2025 Un-Silencing Dickinson: Emily Dickinson's Aversion to the Male Body and Heterosexuality in "My Life had stood–– a Loaded Gun" Cassandra Barron Pepperdine University, Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/globaltides Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons, and the Queer Studies Commons Recommended Citation Barron, Cassandra (2025) "Un-Silencing Dickinson: Emily Dickinson's Aversion to the Male Body and Heterosexuality in "My Life had stood–– a Loaded Gun"," Global Tides: Vol. 19, Article 1. Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/globaltides/vol19/iss1/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Seaver College at Pepperdine Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Global Tides by an authorized editor of Pepperdine Digital Commons. For more information, please contact . Un-Silencing Dickinson: Emily Dickinson's Aversion to the Male Body and Heterosexuality in "My Life had stood–– a Loaded Gun" Cover Page Footnote Thank you, Dr. Frye for introducing me to Emily Dickinson my freshman year. I would not be the writer I am today without you! Thank you to all of my friends and classmates that have read this paper and listened to me talk about it endlessly! I appreciate you forever. I am very grateful to have such supportive and encouraging mentors: Dr. Gould, Dr. Koch, Dr. Mullins, Dr. Frye (again) among others. Thank you!! This article is available in Global Tides: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/globaltides/vol19/iss1/1 Barron: Un-Silencing Dickinson Un-Silencing Dickinson: Emily Dickinson’s Aversion to the Male Body and Heterosexuality in “My Life had stood–– a Loaded Gun” Introduction Death, domination, immortality, ecstasy, sex. Emily Dickinson’s intentional exploration of subversive and peculiar facets of human existence mark her as a distinctive and anomalous nineteenth-century female poet. On the page, Dickinson defines herself through her work– a culture-altering and painfully ambiguous writer with an ability to craft remarkable metaphors from a pen and scraps of paper. Public discourse about Dickinson often characterizes her as strange and agoraphobic while simultaneously embracing her epigrammatic style. Pedagogies, syllabi, and anthologies including Dickinson frequently define her as spinster, mad woman, and the recluse in white. When readers examine her work with these preconceptions, they miss essential elements of her work and, by extension, pieces of Dickinson herself. Notably, in the past few decades, potential Queer readings and interpretations of Dickinson's work and identity have emerged in the wake of second-wave and third-wave feminist scholarship. Lesbian critics argue that Dickinson had a fervent relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. Dickinson wrote letters expressing her deep affection to Gilbert during their early twenties. A particularly powerful line in one of these letters reads,“Dear Susie, who please ourselves with the fancy that we are the only poets- and everyone else is prose.” In 1856, Gilbert married Dickinson's brother, Austin Dickinson, which caused a cataclysmic shift in the women's relationship. Nevertheless, Ellen Louise Hart writes, “the hundreds of poems and letters Dickinson sent Susan from her early twenties until the last years of her life are testimony to the fact that Dickinson's love remained constant.” (252). Dickinson’s experience of romantic desire directly impacted her writing and should be taken into consideration when examining her work. Socio-culturally, we have adopted a narrow view of reading and interpreting historical texts. By reclaiming historical and authorial figures with Queer theoretical frameworks and methodologies, we add to the movement of breaking down structures of oppression and create new understandings of the history of sexuality. Dickinson’s 1863 poem, “My Life had stood–– a Loaded Gun,” has been widely anthologized and interpreted as one of her most inventive and rich poems. Most scholars agree that Dickinson identifies herself as the titular gun controlled by a belligerent husband figure in the poem. I contend that there is an alternative and perhaps more accurate interpretation of this poem through using Dickinson’s biographical and historical context to grasp a new way of reading Dickinson. In this paper, I will address how and why Dickinson uses metaphor to other herself as an inanimate object experiencing sexual and marital domination by a male figure. Dickinson’s use of metaphor allows her to express facets of her experience beneath the surface without access to advertent language. In this sense, for Dickinson, metaphor is a medium of alternative communication in a pre-categorization of language for Queer desire or experiences. Drawing from Queer and feminist theories, it becomes apparent that Dickinson’s “My Life had stood–– a Loaded Gun” serves as a mode of closeted Queerness through Dickinson’s aversion to the male body and heterosexual marriage. Published by Pepperdine Digital Commons, 2024 1 Global Tides, Vol. 19 [2024], Art. 1 Nineteenth-Century Marital Law and Ethics Exploring traditional marriage practices and ethics from the nineteenth-century contextualizes Dickinson’s position on the male body and heterosexual marriage. Sara L. Zeigler traces the role of the institutionally grounded notion of marriage in nineteenth-century America. Zeigler defines the function of marriage law as “provid[ing] ground rules to govern the specific relationship characterized by a lifetime sexual and economic partnership between a man and a woman and endorses that relationship by giving it legal force” (2). Marriage law was designed to consider the relationship between men and women as a contract to formulate restrictions surrounding sexual relations, economics, labor, and partnership. Marriage enforces domination over the female body by stripping women of their selfhood, mandating forced labor through “wifely duties” and, “economic dependence of most adult women on their husbands” (Zeigler 2). Dickinson’s refusal to marry is emblematic of the “problematic” and inappropriate woman that Zeigler describes (2). Elucidating traditional marriage practices and ethics illuminates how Dickinson’s attitudes toward marriage may have emerged. Dreading the Vesuvian Husband In “My Life had stood–– a Loaded Gun,” Dickinson expresses her revulsion for the oppressive, institutional, and dominating nineteenth-century heterosexual marriage by stripping the gun-speaker of her bodily autonomy and identity. The poem opens with, “My Life had stood–– a Loaded Gun” (Dickinson 1). Dickinson capitalizes “My Life” and “Loaded Gun” drawing the reader’s attention to the speaker’s livelihood transitioning into a device of utility and reliance as opposed to one of independence and liberty (1). The speaker perceives her life or body as an inanimate object wi (...truncated)