348 Dickinson, Emily
Revealing the identity of Madame Defarge may
help us understand her impulse for revenge, but it
does not go as far as inspiring sympathy. It is impos-
sible to feel for her as she plots her final attack on
Lucie and her child and she listens to Jacques Three
gloating at the notion of presenting the child to the
guillotine. But the novel restores the moral right
through Madame Defarge’s encounter with Miss
Pross. The two women seem to represent compet-
ing ideas of feminine strength: Both are fighting for
loved ones, but they use different weapons. Madame
Defarge has put away her knitting and arrives with
a pistol in her bosom and a sharpened dagger at her
waist, while Miss Pross’s only weapon is her courage
and her love. She prevents Madame Defarge from
storming into Lucie’s room, and in the struggle,
Madame Defarge is shot with her own pistol,
the final “crash” leaving Miss Pross permanently
deaf. Madame Defarge dies as a result of her own
violence.
Miss Pross’s valiant effort, along with Carton’s
sacrifice as he trades places with Darnay at the guil-
lotine, are presented as the only acts that are capable
of interrupting the cycle of violence. As the narrator
concludes, “Sow the same seed of rapacious license
and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the
same fruit according to its kind.”
Maria Gonzalez-Posse
DICKINSON, EMILY poems (1830–
1886)
Despite not achieving fame in her lifetime, the dis-
covery and release of more than 1,500 poems since
her death in 1886 has meant that Emily Dickinson
is now considered one of the greatest American
poets. Unlike her contemporaries, such as Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, Dickinson
was not overtly concerned with the making of a
specifically American literature. Upon first glance,
her poems have the same kind of universal appeal
as Shakespeare’s plays; they are concerned with life,
death, nature, spirituality, and, perhaps sur-
prisingly to some readers, love and hope. So key
are these themes that they are often directly named
in her poems, suitably capitalized, and frequently
personified.
Yet Dickinson’s poems also tell a personal story.
In them we find a response to the solemn Calvinist
upbringing she had had in Amherst, Massachusetts,
where she was born in 1830. Her poems are austere
and restrained in their condensation, but they are
also rebellious against such restraint in their content.
Just as Dickinson resisted the radical Puritan reviv-
als that swept the New England states in the 19th
century, so too do her poems favor human experi-
ence over religious testimony, with nature providing
signs and metaphors by which to interpret behavior
and emotions. Though her poems are almost always
introspective and illustrative of the long periods of
reclusion and despair that Dickinson experienced,
their continual appeal to observable nature over an
invisible God for enlightenment makes her poetry
transcendental in character, compelling the modern
reader to consider her in relation to Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel
Hawthorne.
Sarah BarnsleydeatH in the Poems of Emily Dickinson
Death imagery permeates so many of Emily Dick-
inson’s poems that it seems as if she is making a
statement that it is never too far from human con-
sciousness. Death is inevitable and close to all—so
close that one poem’s speaker claims to feel a funeral
in her brain and mourners treading through her
mind, with the beating drum of the service and the
creaking of a coffin being carried off for burial (“I
felt a Funeral, in my Brain”). A review of the con-
tents of first lines confirms the extent of this striking
readiness to confront and interrogate death, yielding
an unsettling array of voices that seem to be speak-
ing from both inside and beyond the grave itself
with startling familiarity with the afterlife: “I died
for Beauty” utters one voice; “I heard a Fly buzz—
when I died” testifies another; “I went to Heaven”
says another voice, as if likening the passage of
death with all the banality of an account of making
a routine journey. In “Because I could not stop for
Death,” Death is personified as a kindly gentleman
passing by the living in a carriage, stopping to pick
up the passenger, who narrates the poem with all the
civility of a friendly neighbor.