“My Life had stood †a Loaded Gun †” Feminist Analysis Essay

This verse was pen by the American poet Emily Dickinson around the year 1863. It is probably ane of the most mazy of all Dickinsons poems because it does non see a single coherent and cheering interpretation. This is due to the circumstance that it exemplifies her technique of the omitted content, a device by which the generator omits in turnation that is crucial to the understanding of the poem. Nevertheless, the determination of the present paper is not to talk over the manifold possible interpretations of the poem. Its aim is alternatively to try to explain it or canvass it from a feminist omen of view, spotlight how it gives an image of a woman different from the one people be utilise to, as well as how it inverts the sexual activity economic consumptions moreover accepting them at the comparable duration. The speaker system starts by presenting herself as a Loaded Gun, that is as a mortal weapon capable of sidesplitting and destroying.This can be underst ood as the poets rejection of the traditional ideas and images about womanhood, she is delineation herself as strong and potentially lively voice in opposition to the common ideas of impuissance and passivity associated with women. Later on, in the 3rd stanza, she will compare herself to a outlet, routine the possibility of destruction a possible fact up until that point into a corporeality. So now she is not yet revealing the ref that she can be active, dangerous, and pestiferous, besides she is actually being it the old threat is now an event.This image of the outlet is even more important because it is a common one, employ to a fault by Emerson one of her greatest influences to refer to the poet. The deflection is that whereas in Emersons essay The Poet it is a rather benignant image this of the volcano used to portray the poet as a power of nature in Dickinsons poem it is a burning and destructive force. With this change in the meaning or connotation of the metaphor, she whitethorn be telling us that creation, carried out by a woman, is at the same time an act of aggression. This idea is closely related to the exercise many feminists have made of this poem, perceive it as an example of how power in a woman can be seen as a danger or even a threat.As for the sex activity roles one may argue that there is a contradiction in this poem. On the one hand she depicts herself as the active force in her relationship with her proprietor and Master. She speaks for Him she fights for him and defends him from Salceda 2 his foes. It is important to recognize how in the fourth stanza she guards his head sequence he sleeps, thus preferring or displace her role as defender onwards her role as lover, i.e. her masculine role before of her feminine role. It is better to killing for him than to lay with him. In this poem she is the cavalry in armor while the virile is, as to say, the damsel in excruciation. But on the other hand, the reader i s told at the beginning that her Life had stood a Loaded Gun / In Corners until her proprietor passed and identified her.That is, she had no identity of herself she did not exist as an individual empower with consciousness until he found her. It is also important to notice that the vocabulary used in the first stanza depicts her as an object. because all her representations of herself as the leading contour in the poem, the strong one, the powerful one are, in whatsoever way, undermined by the fact that, at the beginning, she is just an object empower with subjectiveness by a real and pre-existent subject the priapic vitrine who then becomes an object himself. The idea that her subjectivity is only one borrowed from him can be clearly seen in that, throughout the poem, her only goal is to defend him, to protect him form his foes who are at the same time hers. Nonetheless, this dependence on a male subject is, if not denied, at least(prenominal) overcome in the last stanz a where the speaker presents herself as immortal. Thus, if she will live presbyopic before he has died, her existence must be independent of his.If the last get of my analysis seems confusing and even contradictory, it is because the poem itself, as it has already been said at the beginning, is confusing and even contradictory. To sum up I would like to say that, from my point of view, the important point about this poem is how Dickinsons attempt to break up with the traditional ideas of womanhood and gender roles, since it is establish upon the traditional opposition between femininity/masculinity, passivity/activity, object/subject, proves itself in some way futile. One may notice that she is not defending femininity, or trying to posit it higher or at the same level than masculinity, still what she is doing is taking a male position.This may explain why she takes her identity from a man. She is opposing the fact that being a woman entails being passive and defenseless, moreo ver at the same time she is proverb that her aggressive character appeared only later a man identified her. So, she is not pulling down the differences or the pecking order existing between male and female, but interchanging the roles. Nevertheless, one should not think that Dickinsons poem is a failure from a feminist point of view , but on the contrary it is a success, since she manages to play up the difficulty, or even impossibility, of writing at the same time Salceda 3 from and against a preestablished language and a system of thought, which are the very bases of the discrimination of women.