Teaching Approaches

Teaching Approaches

Dickinson's reading:

How was Touissant L'Ouverture depicted in the Atlantic, Harper's Weekly, and other reading material available in the Dickinson home?

Did Dickinson read any African-American literature?

What could have been known to her?

Dickinson's writings:

Search the Dickinson archives for the word slavery and comment on your results.

What do we make of Dickinson's construction of whiteness?

Broader research topics:

Harvard census data

Mercy Philbrick's Choice

In L 94 Dickinson writes: "Why cant I be a Delegate to the great Whig Convention? — dont I know all about Daniel Webster, and the Tariff, and the Law? Then, Susie, I could see you, during a pause in the session--but I dont like this country at all, and I shant stay here any longer! ‘Delenda est' America, Massachusetts and all!"

American

Literary History,

Dickinson's frequent invocation of a language of titles, rank, and pre-Revolutionary aristocratic privilege might seem curiously at odds with the prevailing idiom laced with republican ideology. Her language can be read as a reflection of an inherited sense of class-based difference and superiority. Yet it can also be read, at a psychological level, as a reaction against a type of entrapment, what some nineteenth-century women called "the slavery of sex." Comment on the idea that Dickinson, though not overtly sympathetic to African-Americans or concerned about slavery, provided from a different angle than African-Americans an equally challenging critique of the contradictions and failed promises of American democracy.

How would you characterize the political position of key members of Dickinson's circle--her friend Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her brother Austin Dickinson (an active member of the Know Nothing party), her father Edward Dickinson (a prominent Whig politician)-- on the questions of race and slavery and abolition?

Springfield Republican

Atlantic Monthly

Journal assignment:

Read the following post from EMWEB and then write an essay exploring the difficulties of arguing on the basis of absence (with special reference to the case of Dickinson). Consider also the obligations of modern critics to confront less attractive sides of admired writers even while attempting to steer clear of the complacent, self-congratulatory, retrospective moralizing.

You're right, it doesn't, but was your father a friend of highly visible
anti-war stompers? Did your brother pay someone to fight in his stead?
Did significant anti-war supporters spend the night next-door at your
brother's house? Was anyone trying to force you to believe in a certain
way and your own writing and personal mission were full of your reaction
against that?

I'm not concerned with her as a writer attacking the issues head on, but it
does bother me that with what she does say about the Civil War, she
doesn't discuss anything about its causes, etc. I don't mind that she
didn't write poems about it but when you look at the letters in which she
refers to war matters, she doesn't address the whole point of the war. . . . It
doesn't make her poetry less good and it doesn't mean she's going to spend
all eternity in hell, but considering everything, it is odd that an
extremely significant event isn't anywhere in her prose or poetry.

Marcy

Return to Main Menu