The Use of Sexual Imagery in Dickinson's Love Poems

Abstract

Emily Dickinson's love poems depict that she fell in love with some men. However, none of her lovers could become her husband. She failed in her love affairs due to their parting and untimely demise. Therefore, she could not fulfill her sexual desires and impulses in her life. Dickinson repressed those desires into her unconscious mind to be erupted in distorted forms in her love poems. Her failure in several love affairs inspired her to write love lyrics exploiting sexual imageries in them. She sought sexual pleasure through the varieties ofsexual imageries in her poems. She chose to live a reclusive life within her father's homestead and compose love lyrics in large numbers as an alternative outlet of her suppressed feelings. The Freudian interpretation of her love poems exposes her as a woman of unfulfilled sexual desires. Her love poems are dream visions of such desires and search for a sexual partner. As the poetic persona cannot meet her sexual desires, she disguises her inborn sexual identity eventhough she fails to do so. Thus Dickinson's love poems are the expression of unadmitted sexual desires that resulted in extreme sexual frustration in her life.