Early American Female Writers

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson and Margaret Fuller are among the most famous and acclaimed women writers in America before 1865. However, of the three, Margaret Fuller is the only one who actually dedicated her writings to the gender hierarchy issue, which was specific to the nineteenth century. The author points out that, even if other women writers did not openly address the gender issue in their works, there is still a hidden tension in their thought that is obviously caused by their difficulty in finding their own voice in the male-dominated literary world. The paper concludes that their poetic themes indicate the relationship, which existed between the women and the world that surrounded them at this time.

From the Paper:

"Emily Dickinson is arguably a writer of genius with a genuine, extremely personal voice and one of the greatest female writers of all times. Dickinson's poetry is remarkable thus for its original tone and also for the poet's unparalleled and ingenious use of language. Perhaps surpassing most of her contemporaries in her art, Dickinson approaches a great variety of themes in her poetry. If Bradstreet asserted herself through her unusual erudition as a woman for her time and the very incipient feminine subjectivity and Fuller through her outright feminine voice, Dickinson represents, in a way, a step further for the female voice in literature."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Bradstreet, Anne.
• Dickinson, Emily. Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924
• Fuller, Margaret. The Collected Works of Margaret Fuller. New York: The Modern Library, 1970.
• Kolodny, Annette. "Inventing a feminist discourse: rhetoric and resistance in Margaret Fuller's 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century.'." New Literary History 25.n2 (Spring 1994): 355(28).
• McClure, Smith. "'He Asked If I Was His': The Seductions of Emily Dickinson," in ESQ, Vol. 40, No. 1, 1994, pp. 27-65.

More papers on Early American Female Writers:

• Analytical Essay # 102229 : "The Forces of Feminism"
• Book Review # 49517 : "The Scarlet Letter"
• Essay # 4377 : "Anne Bradstreet: Contradictions in Knowing"

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