Julien said:
> THe problem with the Emily Dickenson analogy...is that in the 19th
> century...women didn't have the luxury of having a job to pay the rent and
one
> to do for fun. Women had children, stayed home, and did womanly things.
> Emily couldn't even go out and get a job, (well maybe schoolmistress or
some
> such designated job...as long as it conformed to womens work) let alone
have
> an identity. WOmen were largely dependent upon the males. Think "Sense
and
> Sensibility." If you didn't have a father, you were married off, or went
to
> live with an uncle. Writing for many women was their way of expressing
> themselves in a confining patriarchal structure.
Well...yes and no. Emily Dickinson was, I think, an anomaly among nineteenth
century women writers. Many women did write to express themselves, but for a
lot of women it was their livelihood. (I think of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, a
Christian fantasist who was fairly well known in the late nineteenth century,
although hardly known at all now). They were writing to pay the bills and
went about their writing in a very businesslike way. Phelps, for example, was
adamant about *not* being "dependent upon the males" and has a number of
female characters choose work of some sort over marriage. Anna Ella Carroll,
a political pamphleteer in the pre-Civil War era, is another example.
The real flaw with the Emily Dickinson analogy is that not only did she not
have to write for her livelihood, she didn't seem to care whether she
published or not. If I remember correctly--I haven't read about this in a
while so I may be slightly off--she only tried to publish a handful of her
hundreds of poems and she didn't try very hard to publish those. She wrote
for a very select audience--a circle of family and close friends--and beyond
that I don't think she cared very much what anyone else thought about her
poetry. Not exactly a model for anyone who wants to be a published writer in
today's world.
-- Gayla
P.S. I'm a relatively new subscriber to the list: an M.A. in history
(emphasis on women's & political history) and now a computer programmer. I've
been reading science fiction since I picked up a copy of the Foundation
Trilogy when I was about thirteen. My current favorite are Octavia Butler,
Sheri Tepper (just finished "Grass"), Ursula LeGuin, and Robert Silverberg.
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