Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson

Feminism is an ideology and political movement premised on the belief that women should enjoy equal rights, power, and opportunities as men. Since its emergence as an organized campaign in the 19th century, feminism has passed through many different phases and diversified into various branches that do not always agree on the nature of women’s subordination or the remedy for it. Rich’s political awakening coincided with second-wave feminism: a mid-20th-cenury movement that looked beyond political equality toward issues like reproductive rights and women’s work inside and outside the home. More specifically, Rich embraced radical feminism, which called for a revolutionary transformation of consciousness and total reworking of gender roles and societal structures. Rich’s passion for and involvement in feminism is at the core of this essay, as she emphasizes the explosive and transformative power of female creativity and elucidates how patriarchal society both discourages and misunderstands that creativity.

While a lesbian is typically understood to be a woman sexually or romantically attracted exclusively to other women, Rich used the term in a much more complex and multifaceted way. Challenging the heteronormative narratives that have long marginalized lesbian identities, Rich asserted that lesbianism is not simply about attraction but is rather a fundamental aspect of female identity: an orientation of one’s whole life toward other women, in whatever capacity. In this essay, Rich therefore combats the idea that determining whether Dickinson was a lesbian in the conventional sense is meaningful. What matters, Rich suggests, is that her life evidences her strong commitment toward women—not only the friends to whom she wrote passionate letters, but also herself and her own creative potential.

Patriarchy is a type of society or government that assumes the superiority of men over women and largely excludes women from holding any form of power. In her essay, Rich explores Women in Patriarchal Society, demonstrating through the case of Emily Dickinson how such societies oppress women writers and creatives and how women have resisted their subordination. Rich also discusses how patriarchy has manifested in the realm of literary criticism, arguing that lesbian and feminist perspectives on women writers (and all writers) are essential to deconstructing patriarchal standards in literature.