CU-MA-Eng-SEM-IV-Women’s Writing

poems. The poem appears as the expression of the emotional striptease of a woman deprived of what she wants next. The conflict in her minds between traditional roles and feminist learning has left them perplexed and bewildered. 9.3EUNICE DE SOUZA –BEQUEST 9.3.1. Poem – Bequest In every Catholic home there’s a picture of Christ holding his bleeding heart in his hand. I used to think, ugh. the only person with whom I have not exchanged confidences is my hairdresser. 9.3.2. Introduction aboutthe Poem – Bequest “Bequest” is written by the feminist poet Eunice de Souza in which she talks about how patriarchy shapes the destiny of women. She speaks from the perspective of a speaking woman (probably representing the poet himself) whose mind is shaped by the authoritarian rules of phallocentric society. Her tone remains somewhat lost and reflects a feeling of pain. This painful soliloquy is not just a confession from a single woman. It is a harrowing monologue of all those women whose unique voices are attenuated or colored with the essence of patriarchy. “Bequest” appears in Eunice de Souza’s best-known poetry collection, Forms of Belonging. It was published in 1990. Her other notable works include Women in Dutch Painting, My Words, and Learn from the Almond Leaf. de Souza was a Goan poet whose works portray patriarchy in Indian society and the affairs of Indian women. In the poem “Bequest”, she takes a position similar to that of Kamala Das in her poem “An Introduction” to shed light on the effect of social conventions and patriarchal standards on a woman’s mind. He describes how patriarchy reigns in all spheres, be it religion, society, or family. 9.3.3. Poem Analysis – Bequest  “Bequest” is a poem about transmitting a woman’s true emotions to her supposed other halves for the sake of standards or fluctuating along with the flow of convention.  Through this piece, de Souza reveals how the mentality of a speaking woman is formed, revised and changed from an early age. 201 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 The way she learns everything naturally is also controlled to mold her mind according to the patriarchal structure.  She used to think that showing her true emotions is symbolically represented by the image of Christ holding her heart.  She tried to follow the same; the company made her follows the standards.  Finally, as an adult woman, she believes herself to be a “plastic flower”, devoid of sincerity, individuality and, above all, her true identity. The poem “Bequest” begins with an idea similar to the general theme of the poem, sacrificing oneself. De Souza presents a cliché image of Christ holding his bleeding heart. This image has two faces. First, it is a religious symbol of the sacrifice and passion of Christ. On the other hand, it portrays the bleeding heart of the speaker inflicted by the norms of the patriarchy. When the speaker (Eunice de Souza’s poetic self) was a child, she felt a bit disgusted and worried after looking at the bloody heart of Christ. The expression “ugh” reflects this feeling of disgust. However, the situational irony of the poem is that as she grows up, she grows used to this metaphorically bloodthirsty side of patriarchy. The second stanza makes it clear that the poet interpreted this image of Christ differently. She sees it as a symbol of openness and sincerity. Putting your heart in someone is a symbolic gesture of fidelity to others. It means that Christ offers his true emotions to the world. The speaker learned this idea from this image. Therefore, he remained faithful to all. There is no fear in revealing his true self to others. However, there is only one exception. According to the speaker, the “only” person with whom he has not exchanged confidences is his hairdresser. In this line, the poet uses two poetic devices. One is sarcasm and the other is anticlimax. The idea of a “hairdresser” sounds surprising because readers were expecting something more. In this way, the poet describes what kind of girl she was. Third stanza: But society did not allow her to be herself. Some recommended following the “strict standards” of mainstream society. Here, the term “severe” infers the ruthless and authoritarian side of patriarchy. Some told him to float with other women. In this line, the poet uses a metaphor to float down the river. Therefore, the flow represents patriarchal standards. To belong to this society, she must float, not knowing where this flow will take her. The following lines allude to the saying of Christ. In his testament to mankind, Christ counseled men to accept whatever comes their way. They must always be prepared for the things that the creator sends them, good or bad. The rapporteur also underlines the fact by using the expression “obviously”. It seems that the poet is portraying Christ as a symbol of patriarchy in these lines. In the fourth stanza of “Bequest”, the speaker expresses her desire to be a “wise woman.” Who is a “wise woman” from the point of view of society? A woman who only knows the art of smiling, not the art of being satisfied, she is the one that she is “Wise”. She is “Wise” because she has made a deliberate decision to unquestionably accept the rules. Otherwise, 202 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

everyone knows what would have happened to her. Now, the speaker’s smile reflects a sense of falsehood. It doesn’t matter if her heart is devoid of happiness or not, she has to keep smiling to hide the old mental scars from her. In the following lines, the poet uses a simile to compare two different ideas, a plastic flower and the speaker’s smile. A plastic flower is an imitation of reality, devoid of the spontaneity of life. Likewise, the speaker is now devoid of the emotions that make a human being “human.” In the manner of Christ, he now he teaches her son the art of heartless smiles,what else could he teach her future generation, who’s true self is crushed at a young age? In the final verse of “Legado”, the orator de Souza ironically says that he is about to perform an “act of charity” when Christ accepted the crucifixion for the good of humanity. But the speaker is not making a sacrifice for others, but to redeem himself from his mental suffering. She bequeaths her heart to him. Using a simile, she compares her heart to a “spare kidney.” In this way, the value of the most important organ in the body decreases to a lower one. It is important to note the meaning of the term “heart”. It is used as a metonymy for emotions. Eunice’s speaker tries to sacrifice her heart to ease the pain she constantly causes. The longer he is in her body, the more pain she will feel. She will continue to remind him of her mental suffering from being a woman in a patriarchal society. It is not that a woman suffers from what others say about her. She suffers more from what her loved ones say. Therefore, the speaker prefers to bequeath her heart to an enemy, rather than a friend. 9.3.4. Structure Eunice’s poem “Bequest” consists of five stanzas with irregular line counts. There are a total of 21 verses that do not follow a set pattern or criteria. Hence it is a free verse poem. It is written from the point of view of a woman speaking in the first person. Therefore, it is also an example of lyrical poetry. The lyrical quality of the poem is present in its internal rhythmic lines. de Souza creates this internal rhyme by repeating similar sounds between lines. Furthermore, the form adheres correctly to the scheme of confessional poetry. Poetic Devices In “Bequest”, Eunice uses the following literary devices that make her feministic ideas more forceful and emotive. Irony: It is used in the fourth line of the poem “I used to think, ugh.” Here, the speaker’s disgust with the image of Christ is portrayed even though she was a Catholic. Sarcasm: This device is used in the second stanza where the speaker talks about her open- minded attitude. Alliteration: It occurs in “stern standards”, “he hands”, “Wise Woman”, “time to”, etc. Allusion: There is an allusion to Christ’s sayings in the lines “He says, take it as it comes” and “saying Child, learn from me”. 203 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Simile: It is used in the following lines: “He says take it as it comes”, “smiling endlessly, vacuously/ like a plastic flower”, and “bequeath the heart, like a/ spare kidney”. Metaphor: In the first stanza, the image of Christ holding his heart is a metaphorical reference (or allusion) to Christ’s sacrifice for mankind as well as his passion. In the last line, the term “enemy” is a metaphor for a patriarchal person. 9.3.5 THEME The important themes of “Bequest” are patriarchy, female identity, femininity, and the convention against individualism. de Souza, being a feminist poet, explores the nuances of conventional and patriarchal society and its impact on a woman’s mind. She writes this piece from the perspective of a speaker whose mind is molded from an early age. Patriarchal society made her change her openness and sincerity to be a “wise woman.” Now, her smile does not reflect the true happiness of her heart. Rather, she shows the falseness of her emotions. In the last lines of her, she says that she only has her heart to bequeath to her partner as a form of sacrifice. 9.4 SUMMARY  One of the common characteristics of Das’s poetry is the honest expression of his privacy.  This honest expression of Das’s personal life is what Mary Erulkar called “the bitter service of womanhood”.  But on closer inspection it becomes clear that this is not “news in the weekly papers”, not a rampant display of “thighs and sighs”, not simply a case of “from bed to verse”, the persona of Kamala Das she is not a nympho; she is simply “every woman seeking love”; she is “loved and betrayed”.  Yet she remains the eternal Eve who proudly celebrates her essential femininity. Summary - Advice to Women  The confessional style of the poet here reveals the insecurity of his spirit.  He seems to want comfort and peace at the expense of his crushed inner desires, but there is a constant trail of tension and frustration.  The use of animal images increases the importance of the poem in addressing the problems of relational indifference. Summary - Bequest  The Indian woman has to do a lot to satisfy her family, parents and at the same time men are free and only they create the rules where women are only the adherents of those stupid rules. 204 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 So women have to face gender discrimination on a large scale in this society. 9.5 KEYWORDS • Incoherent: unintelligible, not clear and hard to understand • Mutterings: complaints expressed privately • Jilted in love had a sudden and unkind end of romantic relationship • Here and not there:to the point and not irrelevant • Incoherent Mutterings: speech in a low voice not meant to be heard by others. • Blazing: burning strongly • Categorizers: the people with traditional thinking who consider men and women as a distinct category having specific dress and roles • Schizophrenia: a mental illness in which a person becomes unable to link thought, emotion and behavior leading to withdrawal from reality and relationship • Nympho: a woman who has sex and wants to have sex very often • The hungry haste of rivers: an image through which the lover’s strong sexual passion is reflected. As river rushes towards oceans for union with the latter, so the lover moves towards the beloved for the fulfilment of his sexual desires. 9.6 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Kamala Das and Eunice De Souza, connects to their personal experiences’ psychology and Socialization – Discuss ___________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ 2. Analyse How the Quest for Personal Identity Is Explored in Kamala Das and Eunice De Souza works. ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 3. Examine Kamala Das and Eunice De Souza Confessional poet ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 9.7 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions 205 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Short Questions 1. Who is called a ‘nympho’? 2. What is the meaning of ‘schizophrenia’? 3. From which work of Kamala Das, the poem “An Introduction” is taken? 4. Explain the advice the poetess Eunice de Souza to the readers. 5. What does the speaker bequeath in the poem “Bequest”? Long Questions 1. Write a brief note about Kamala Das and her notion of the typical Indian woman and male domination in the Indian society. 2. Discuss the theme of isolation and womanhood that Kamala Dasexpresses in the poem “An Introduction”. 3. Discuss the poetic style of Kamala Das as reflected in the poem “An Introduction”. 4. Eunice De Souza’s prime focus in “Advice to Women” is on the otherness ofwomen. Discuss 5. Analyse the theme of the poem “Bequest”. B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. In the poem ‘Introduction’, Kamala Surayya claims that she can speak in three languages ____. a. Write in two, dream in one b. Malayalam, English and Bengali c. Malayalam, English and Hindi d. Malayalam, English and Tamil 2. Kamala Surayya’s autobiography is called a. Summer in Calcutta b. Her story c. My story d. The Descendants 3. Madhavi Kutti is the maiden name of ______ 206 a. Kamala Das CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

b. Anita Desai c. Bharati Mukherjee d. Eunice De Souza 4. De Souza encourages women to look at ____ as models. a. dog b. cat c. tiger d. lion 5. Advice to women is a poem can be understood by the name is _____ a. men-centric b. both men-centric and women centric c. women-centric d. American women Answers 1-a, 2-c, 3-a, 4-b, 5-c 9.8 REFERENCES Reference books  Flexner, Eleanor. Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Coward, McGann & Geoghegan, 1972.  Mellor, Anne. “Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ and the Women Writers of Her Day.” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia L. Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002  Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-century England. Antonia Fraser. Phoenix.2002.  Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670- 1920.CatherineGallagher. University ofCambridge Press, 1995. Textbook references 207 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Wollstonecraft, Mary. (1792). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. With Strictures on political and moral subjects. London. Websites  https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1553&context=etd- project  https://uniteyouthdublin.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of- woman-by-mary-wollstonecraft.pdf  http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=etd  https://www.jstor.org/stable/3735238 208 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

UNIT – 10EMILY DICKINSON - ‘I CANNOT LIVE WITH YOU’‘I’M WIFE; I’VE FINISHED THAT’ STRUCTURE 10.0 Learning Objectives 10.1 Author’s Biography 10.2 Texts of Dickinson’s Poems and Letters 10.3 Emily Dickinson’s Ideas 10.4 Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Methods 10.5 Characterizing Dickinson’s Poetry 10.6 Text- I Cannot Live With You 10.7 Introduction to the Poem 10.8 Stanza wise Analysis 10.9 Explication Of Emily Dickinson’s I Cannot Live With You 10.10 Literary Device 10.11 I’m “Wife”—I’ve Finished That – Text 10.12 I’m “Wife”—I’ve Finished That –Analysis 10.13 I’m “Wife”—I’ve Finished That – Structure 10.14 I’m “Wife”—I’ve Finished That - Literary Devices 10.15 Summary 10.16 Keywords 10.17 Learning Activity 10.18 Unit End Questions 10.19 References 10.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, you will be able to:  Understand the loneliness in Emily Dickinson’s poems  Realize the concept of love and understanding  Appreciate the characterization of Dickinson 209 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

10.1 AUTHOR’ S BIOGRAPHY Emily Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, born December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA and died May 15, 1886, Amherst, American lyric poet who lived in isolation and possessed a singular splendor of style and integrity of vision. With Walt Whitman, Dickinson is considered to be one of the two leading American poets of the 19th century. Only ten of Emily Dickinson’s nearly 1,800 poems are known to have been published in her lifetime. She is engaged in private pursuits, she has sent hundreds of poems to friends and correspondents, while keeping most of her to herself. She regularly works on suggestive lines of hymns and ballads, with lines of three or four accents. Her unusual odd rhymes of hers were considered experimental and influenced by 18th century inn player Isaac Watts. She freely ignored the usual rules of versification and even grammar, and in the intellectual content of her work she too proved to be exceptionally bold and original. Her verse stands out for its epigrammatic understanding, its haunting personal voice, its enigmatic brilliance, and its lack of brilliance. The second of three children, Dickinson grew up with moderate privileges and strong local and religious ties. For her first nine years she resided in a mansion built by her paternal grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, who helped found Amherst College but then went bankrupt shortly before her birth. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a powerful and prosperous Whig attorney who served as the university’s treasurer and was elected for a term in Congress. Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, of the main family of nearby Monson, was an introverted wife and hardworking maid; her letters seem equally empty and bizarre. Both of her parents were loving but austere, and Emily grew very fond of her brother Austin and sister Lavinia. Never married, the two sisters stayed at home and when the brother got married, he and his wife established their home next door. The very different and even eccentric personalities developed by the three brothers seem to have imposed strict limits on their intimacy. “If we had come out of two wells for the first time,” Emily once said of Lavinia, “her astonishment would not be greater at some of the things I say.” It was only after the poet’s death that Lavinia and Austin realized how dedicated she was to her art. As a child, Emily was seen by her parents and others as frail and often left at home rather than school. She attended Amherst Academy Mixed Academy, where she was recognized by teachers and students for her prodigious compositional skills. She also excelled in other subjects highlighted by the school, among which Latin and the sciences stand out. A botany course inspired her to set up a herbarium containing a large number of pressed plants identified with their Latin names. She loved her teachers very much, but when she left home to attend Mount Holyoke Women’s Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in nearby South Hadley, she found the school’s institutional tone unattractive. Mount Holyoke’s strict rules 210 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

and invasive religious practices, along with her homesickness and growing rebellion, help explain why she hasn’t returned for the second year. Whether at home, at school and in church, the religious faith that governed the poet’s early years was evangelical Calvinism, a faith centered on the belief that human beings are born totally depraved and can only be saved by submitting to a conversion that changes the life in which to accept the vicar sacrifice of Jesus Christ. By questioning this tradition shortly after leaving Mount Holyoke, Dickinson would have been the only member of his family who had not experienced conversion or joined the First Congregational Church in Amherst. However, he seems to have kept faith in the immortality of the soul or, at least, transmuted it into a romantic quest for the transcendent and the absolute. One of the reasons why his mature religious views of him elude the specification is that he was not interested in the definition of creed or doctrine. In this, she was influenced by both Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalism and the mid-century trends of liberal Protestant orthodoxy. These influences propelled her towards a more symbolic understanding of religious truth and helped shape her vocation as a poet. 10.2 TEXTS OF DICKINSON’S POEMS AND LETTERS After Emily Dickinson’s death, he left several drawers full of poems in various states of completion: beautiful copies, semi-final proofs, and drafts, all oddly dotted and capitalized. The handwriting is difficult, and many manuscripts list alternative options for words, verses, and stanzas. In 1890, T. W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd began to publish some of her poems in First series (1890), Second series (1891) and, only by Mrs. Todd, Third series (1896); these volumes included 449 poems. To gain popular audience acceptance, they often corrected grammar, punctuation, improved rhymes, omitted stanzas, and provided titles. During the following decades, Martha Dickinson Bianchi and A. L. Hampson published many other small volumes and later collected many of the remaining poems in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1937. They took less freedom with the texts, but misinterpreted many words from the manuscripts. In 1945, Millicent Todd Bingham published her completion of her mother, M. L. Todd, editing another 668 poems, under the title Bolts of Melody, a carefully edited but also revised text. (To repeat Dickinson often means to reinterpret her poems.) In 1955, Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson from all known manuscripts, including variant readings. This edition, known as the Johnson text, attempted to reproduce the manuscripts with complete precision and arranged the poems according to their composition dates, as estimated by the changing writing of Emily Dickinson, who helped establish the annual composition rates of Dickinson. This volume also provided the numbers of the poems that are now almost universally used with the opening lines to identify each poem. This edition contains 1775 poems and fragments. Faced with textual variations, Johnson chose the words and lines listed first, but reported all the others in notes. In 1960, Johnson simplified the variorum edition into a single volume, the readers 211 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

edition, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, recently reprinted in a small paperback edition. The single volume edition occasionally deviates from the textual options of the variorum. In 1961, Johnson published Final Harvest, a selection of 575 poems. The first prints of the one-volume edition and Final Harvest contain a number of misprints. As for the Dickinson letters, a body of work that many critics believe is as valuable as her poetry because of its images and ideas, two editions of selections of Emily Dickinson’s letters appeared under the direction of ML Todd in 1894 and in 1931. In 1958, TH Johnson compiled all the known letters in the three volumes The Emily Dickinson Letters. Some of Emily Dickinson’s best-known early critical essays, including those by Conrad Aiken, Allen Tate, and Yvor Winters, quote pre-Johnson texts that are sometimes tattered. Most contemporary anthologies employ Johnson’s texts, but earlier editions are still on library shelves and two selections of Emily Dickinson’s poems that remain in print, edited by RN Linscott and JM Brinnin respectively, use older texts. to Johnson. Fully or substantially, sometimes somehow mislead the reader. 10.3 EMILY DICKINSON’S IDEAS Emily Dickinson’s main ideas are readily available in her poems and letters, but on first reading they form complicated and often contradictory patterns. This is not surprising; her world was isolated and small, and she was very introspective. Furthermore, her work has its roots in the culture and society of her time, but although these can be widely explored and many parallels can be drawn between her statements and various literary and religious documents, the poems create more mutual enlightenment. that they. do not do the background itself. Orthodox Protestantism in its Calvinistic form was the mainstay of 19th century Amherst society, although it was undergoing shocks and assaults. This New England faith, often called Puritanism, was based on the idea of man as sinful and unregenerate and completely at the mercy of a loving but arbitrary God. Salvation was by predestined choice (it was entirely in the will of God), but the acceptance of God’s will and the renunciation of the world by Christ were fundamental to the test of piety and peace of the soul. Worldly success and religious faith were taken as signs of salvation, but not as its causes. By Dickinson’s time, this faith was wearing thin, and material success had long replaced deep piety as the true standard for recognizing the elect. This thinning of faith helped create the ideas of Unitarianism and New England Transcendentalism. Unitarianism having diluted the emotional components of religion, the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others elevated man’s spirituality, self-development, and union with the flow of nature to the level of the divine, never completely denying Divinity. The Puritans had seen the will of God everywhere in the signs of nature. Following in Emerson’s footsteps, Whitman, Thoreau, and certainly Emily Dickinson tended to see the spirit of man manifested or symbolized in nature, although Dickinson often only saw the human mind reading her feelings in nature. Dickinson was aware of and concerned about the surreptitious and admitted collapse of faith in her time, and doubted all measures to support it. He relied on new ideas, but sometimes he found them 212 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

superficial. He rejected the old ideas, but found in them much emotional correspondence with his mentality. For Dickinson, the crucial religious question was the survival of the soul after death. He absolutely rejected the idea of man’s innate depravity; she favored the partial Emersonian reversal of Puritanism which conceived the greatness of the soul as the source of immortality. The God of the Bible was alternately real, mythical, and improbable to her. She could neither accept nor reject his certainty of a life beyond death, and her doubts faintly led her toward transcendental naturalism or mere terror of dissolution. He alternately he declares faith and doubt with equal vehemence, surely as much because of his struggles with the idea and the need for realization as because of any intellectual battlement. His sarcastic comments about the God of the Bible are not necessarily a joke. She had an independent mindset, but did not change position in her letters to satisfy her recipientsor in her poems presumably to suit her moods; she was primarily interested in her poetic drive. In a sense, Dickinson is almost always a religious poet, if his concerns with human perception, suffering, growth, and fulfillment directed toward something permanent can be called religious concerns. These concerns are as important to her as death and immortality, and although they have doctrinal and literary sources, they stem primarily from her observations and reflections on her life. Dickinson’s reading was relatively extensive and he was familiar with Emerson’s essays and poems, such as Shakespeare, the Bible, and the works of George Eliot, Hawthorne, the Browning’s, and other earlier and contemporary classics. He often alludes to the Bible, and his combination of dense metaphors with everyday reality is sometimes reminiscent of Shakespeare’s. However, both the Emersonian form of his mind, which we will note in various poems, and his darker Puritan streak were part of the general atmosphere of his culture as much as his specific beliefs and reading material. Dickinson’s literary culture overlaps with his religious culture, but the parallels they provide with his work are often more accidental than revealing. Though proud of his contempt for wider social concerns, Dickinson occasionally comments on the social landscape, especially when his satirical gaze is drawn to him. Nature appears extensively in his work of him, as a scene of great vivacity and beauty, as the embodiment of the processes of the universe that can resemble the actions of God and the form of the human mind, and as an inexhaustible source of metaphors and symbols. for all your subjects. Nature, for her, is usually a bright and dark mystery, only occasionally illuminated by flashes of pantheism and sometimes overshadowed by a desperate fate. Her treatment of nature mixes with all of his themes. The tradition of classifying Dickinson’s poems into thematic groupings for analysis and comparison has been unfairly criticized. As we noted, it can contribute to simplification and distortion, but it is more illuminating than approaching poems by categories of technique or 213 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

periods of your life, and the danger of simplification can be easily overcome by constantly testing your poems against categories. ; that is, you can always consider the possibility that they have been misplaced or that they need to be considered as part of different categories. For these notes, we have grouped his poems into five main titles, aware that some important poems may escape this classification: (1) Nature: Scene and Meaning; (2) Poetry, Art, and Imagination; (3) Friendship, Love, and Society; (4) Suffering and Growth; and (5) Death, Immortality, and Religion. 10.4 EMILY DICKINSON’S POETIC METHODS A glance at Dickinson’s poems reveals their characteristic outward forms as easily as a quick glance at Whitman’s poems shows us their strikingly different forms. Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems are written in short stanzas, mostly quatrains, with short lines, usually rhyming only on the second and fourth lines. Other stanzas use trios or couplets pairs, and some poems use longer, looser, and more complicated stanzas. The iambic rhythms dominate, but they are varied and loose, fast and slow, in many ways. A large number of Dickinson’s rhymes are what we call partial, distorted, or out-of-rhyme rhymes, some of them so faint as to be hardly recognizable. Of course, she was aware that she was violating convention here, but she stubbornly remained in her ways. These forms of stanzas, and to a lesser extent their poetic rhymes, drew their main source from the standard Protestant hymns of their time, largely from those of Isaac Watts. Dickinson evidently found in these forms a suitable mold for her thoughts, and her use of her partial rhymes may have helped her to quickly compose and focus on the selection of words and metaphors. Her slanted rhymes may reflect her emotional stresses (fracture would be a stronger word for that), but the most critical attempts to establish clear correlations between the types of rhymes and particular moods in her poems are relatively unsuccessful. Yet these distorted rhymes seem consistent with the melancholy and improvised quality of her mind. The relative simplicity and monotony of her verse forms contribute to the difficulty of reading Dickinson in large numbers in one-on-one sessions, but one never fails to feel and remember her unique poetic genius. Her verse shapes and rhythmic nuances continually contribute brilliantly to her effects. For example, Dickinson’s poems are often filled with images and metaphors drawn from many different sources. Nature is essential. Other sources include domestic activities, industry and war, law and economics. Images of her sometimes create natural or social scenes, but they are more likely to create psychological landscapes, generalized scenes, or allegorical scenes. It is like a deep and mysterious mine where you can find many examples of how it mixes symbolism and allegory. (Symbolism is the use of real scenes and actions to suggest universal ideas and emotions in addition to scenes. Allegory is the use of scenes and actions whose structure is so artificial and unreal that the reader comes to see that they represent people, scenes and recognizable ideas other than the representation itself.) This mixture of symbolism and allegory in Dickinson’s poems is another reason for 214 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the difficulty of some readers when they first come across his numerous poems; however, the evocative powers of Emily Dickinson are fundamental: it is always a challenge for the reader. In addition to the great conciseness of the language that we have already pointed out, the most striking signature of Dickinson’s style is its combination of the familiar and the exalted, the banal and the precious, in its images, metaphors and scenes. The main effect he gets here is to increase our examination of small-scale things and focus on the plot and meaning of the big ones. It also serves to permeate your physical world with matters of value. Dickinson’s sense of humor and skepticism help communicate the urgency of his doubts and the need to find faith. His metaphors are sometimes even telescopic; that is, they incorporate elements so condensed or disparate that they must be stretched, stretched like a telescope, to reveal the complete structure of an image or idea. Dickinson herself told Higginson that the person speaking in her poems is not herself, but an alleged person, thus anticipating the modern, perhaps too popular idea that poems are always spoken by a fictitious person. This provides a very healthy precaution for portraying Dickinson, but this idea shouldn’t stop us from using our knowledge of her life and thinking about her to interpret her poems. Equally important is the variety of tones in all of her poems, a variety linked to the problem of identifying her speakers. The main tonal problem is to distinguish between ironic and non-ironic voices. Her ironies can be very obvious or very subtle. Hints of irony are often found in the structure of a poem’s statement, where doubts and changes reveal earlier irony. The likelihood that Dickinson deliberately posed in many of her poems complicates the tone problem, but her poses aren’t necessarily sentimental. Awareness of his mask change can help us resist our doubts that he’s serious when he takes an opinion we don’t like. We also need to acknowledge his possible ferocious irony when he denounces beliefs we hold precious or when he reacts in ways we disapprove of. Again, her poems sometimes seem disconcerting, but upon re-reading, they are often suddenly illuminating. To paraphrase Dickinson, scrutiny of this problem keeps the mind sharp. You probably wanted to keep your minds and those of your readers as agile as possible. 10.5 CHARACTERIZING DICKINSON’S POETRY Emily Dickinson’s poems were not like other poems written at the time. Although they varied in length, many were quite short and had short lines. They were written in fairly simple language and often didn’t even rhyme. (Gasp!) Emily Dickinson employed a technique called oblique rhyme, which is where the lines don’t rhyme perfectly, but just a kind of rhyme, like in this poem, which seems to be my favorite: Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all. 215 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Generally, in a poem like this, you’d expect the second and fourth lines to rhyme, but they don’t here, or at least not quite. The similar, but not quite the same sounds of “soul” and “all” are a great example of a slanted rhyme and something you can often find in Emily Dickinson’s poems. What is extraordinary about this poem is that it has no title. This is another common feature of Dickinson’s work and something that also made her poetry somewhat unusual. It can also make it difficult to refer to poems when their title is unknown, although generally most people only use the first line of a Dickinson poem to refer to him. For example, the above poem would have simply been called “Hope is the thing with feathers”. While Dickinson mentioned God in many of her poems about her as did many of her contemporary gods, she did not exactly write poems worshiping God and praising her infinite wisdom of hers like other poets of her time. For Dickinson, the individual using their thoughts and senses to see and interpret the world was more important than trusting a deity. Death also appears a lot in Dickinson’s poems, sometimes even as a person. Dickinson’s attitude toward death is a little friendlier than one might expect, as one of her most famous poems of hers demonstrates, “Why I Couldn’t Stop at Death.” Nature also often appears in Dickinson’s poems, sometimes overlapping with other spiritual themes of hers. Animals such as flies, birds, snakes, and other creatures appear frequently, sometimes in leading roles. Dickinson uses nature as a means of examining different aspects of life, the self and the higher powers. By choosing images and metaphors that compare creatures and natural elements with ethereal or human aspects, you give the reader an idea of how we and the world we live in are all interconnected, although sometimes not in the most positive way. 10.6 TEXT- I CANNOT LIVE WITH YOU I cannot live with You – It would be Life – And Life is over there – Behind the Shelf The Sexton keeps the Key to – Putting up Our Life – His Porcelain – Like a Cup – Discarded of the Housewife – 216 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

Quaint – or Broke – 217 A newer Sevres pleases – Old Ones crack – I could not die – with You – For One must wait To shut the Other’s Gaze down – You – could not – And I – could I stand by And see You – freeze – Without my Right of Frost – Death’s privilege? Nor could I rise – with You – Because Your Face Would put out Jesus’ – That New Grace Glow plain – and foreign On my homesick Eye – Except that You than He Shone closer by – They’d judge Us – How – For You – served Heaven – You know, Or sought to – I could not – Because You saturated Sight – CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

And I had no more Eyes For sordid excellence As Paradise And were you lost, I would be – Though My Name Rang loudest On the Heavenly fame – And were You – saved – And I – condemned to be Where You were not – That self – were Hell to Me – So we must meet apart – You there – I – here – With just the Door ajar That Oceans are – and Prayer – And that White Sustenance – Despair – 10.7 INTRODUCTION TO THE POEM “I Can’t Live With you” is one of Emily Dickinson’s great love poems, close in form to the poetic plot of a classic Shakespearean sonnet. The poem shares the logical sensibilities of the metaphysical poets she admired, advancing her thoughts about her lover, slowly, from the first statement to the inevitable and devastating conclusion. However, unlike most “carpe diem” poem or sonnet arguments, this poem seems designed to argue against love. The poem can be divided into five parts. The first explains why she cannot live with the object of her love, the second why she cannot die with him, the third why she cannot get up with him, the fourth why she cannot fall with him and the last expression of impossibility. The poem begins with a sense of impossibility. 218 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

10.8 STANZAWISE ANALYSIS Stanza 1: Moving from the abstraction of the first four lines, the second and third lines enter the domestic metaphor of porcelain, variously described as discarded, broken, picturesque and cracked, put on the shelf and forgotten. If life is “behind the shelf”, it is completely outside the experience of porcelain, as is the life of the speaker. The power of the first line is temporarily disabled and the reader is equally trapped in a haunting verse of cups and shelves, haunting in its tranquility. That the porcelain is enclosed by the sacristan, representative of the official or practical face of religiosity, seems to imply that it is not only the domestic sphere in which the speaker is trapped, but also the bonds of the church, or at least the daily administrative function of the church, which Dickinson considered it quite separate from the passion behind it. The lines themselves alternate between long and short, and the disparity between the lines becomes more dramatic in the second and third verses. The delicate, undulating and “cracked” lines that describe the porcelain seem physically overwhelmed by the lines on the housewife or the sacristan. Between the second and third verses, the enjambment (pause in “cup”) combined with the hyphen, which emphasizes pause and line break, allows life to be hopefully like a “cup” during fraction of the second it takes the reader to reach the next line, where “from the housewife” is discarded. This line reads both “Housewife discards cup” and also “Sexton keeps housewife discarded cup”, as if what isn’t good enough for marriage is good enough for church. “Picturesque”, by the way, is a word Dickinson used to describe herself in her letters, when she wrote about her isolation of her; “half cracked” is a word that T. H. Higginson, her poetic correspondent, used to describe her. Stanza 2: In the second part of the poem, Dickinson imagines that the alternative to living with someone is to die with him, but that she has also been denied: these lines express not only the fact that if she cannot live with his love it is dead, but also that the “with” is removed from it; she can die, but not with him because death is necessarily a private act. First, she argues that she has to wait to “close the other’s gaze”, which could literally mean closing the eyes, but the word “gaze” also implies that there is some sustenance in the act of looking at the other. other with love; it is what creates life, and it must be actively closed for death to occur. She imagines that he wouldn’t be strong enough to do it for her. Her second argument in this section is that, after her death, if “Frost’s Right” is denied, she would wish for death. Stanza 3: In the third section of the poem, Dickinson imagines the final judgment and how he might be overwhelmed by his earthly love: she cannot see or experience heaven because she is so consumed by her vision of it, not just her face “turns Jesus’ face turned off like a candle, but he “saturated her vision” so much in life that she was unable to “see” heaven, that is, perhaps it distracted her from piety. The experience of the speaker in this poem is deeply related to sight and suggests that what cannot be seen cannot be experienced. In the verse that begins “We would judge”, there is a complete breakdown of the rhyme; when she writes “I 219 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

couldn’t”, she doesn’t rhyme, and the hesitation echoes the broken fragility of the opening lines. The combination of “sordid excellence” is both a metaphysical touch and Dickinson’s signature moment of turning an abstraction into its opposite with a strangely chosen adjective. Stanza 4: In the fourth section of the poem, the speaker describes why he cannot be in hell with his lover: just as he cannot see heaven because his face obscures his view, his perspective of hell is limited to the ‘to be without him. If she was saved and he was lost, then she would be in hell without him, and if they were both saved, but saved separately, that too would be hell. Admiringly seeking the conclusion of this radical argument, which has become increasingly impossible as he pursues it, he passionately refuses to believe that there is an alternative in which both are saved together or both are doomed. Stanza 5: The final verse acts structurally like the final couplet of a sonnet, ending the plot, but leaving the reader with a question to consider: In the verse “You there - I - here” we can see a perfect example of how the script of the poet work to keep the words and ideas of “you” and “me” separate. As in a sonnet, the rhyme scheme becomes somewhat hardened in this final section. Dickinson rhymes internally “son” with “ajar”, half rhymes “apart” and “ajar”, “despair” with “there”, “here” and “prayer”, then closes the verse in rhyme. It is as if you want the final rhyme to show the perfection of your argument at the conclusion of the poem. Furthermore, those four rhyming words express the problem itself quite eloquently, and the phrase represents its closest synonym, hope. The complexity of the rhyme leaves “support” without rhyme, emphasizing that “white support” does not feed. Among other things, the first publications of the poem replaced “white” with “pale” as if to soften the conclusion reached by changing the degree of his language; The “pale sustenance” seems somewhat more favorable. However, even when he closes the conversation, he opens up a little, because in this desperation he has found some kind of sustenance, however nourishing it may be. There is something sacred about this kind of despair, and even “white” seems to be “heavenly”, as if by losing hope in the afterlife, he found a new earthly devotion to replace it, and then raised it to levels heavenly. This verse is notably the first time he has used the word “We”, capitalized for emphasis, and creates a paradox in which “standing apart” seems possible, or at least more possible than any other alternative he has rejected. the poem. He states that the door is simply “ajar”, but then confronts it with the oceans, making it “ajar” as open as the earth itself, and then connecting it with prayer or hope. In this surprisingly clever pun, Dickinson turns it all upside down as he says it: lovers are separated but they meet; the door is ajar, like an ocean; and the speaker is somehow sustained by despair. In a final touch, he concludes the poem with an elongated cap, printed like a script, and whether it should be “ajar” or more firmly closed is as unanswered as the last question in the poem. 220 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

10.9 EXPLICATION OF EMILY DICKINSON’S I CANNOT LIVE WITH YOU “I can’t live with you,” the speaker explores the reasons why a relationship with the man she loves would result in complete failure. She is proven by four statements: she cannot live with him, die with him, go to heaven or hell with him. The speaker presents life as something tangible, stating that it remains “behind the shelf.” The compounding of Vita expresses her importance to her, conferring tragedy on her inability to obtain it. The Sexton can be seen as the church, showing Dickinson’s dislike for the excessive amount of orthodox religion controlling one’s life. From another perspective, a sacristan was tasked with digging graves. In this way, the speaker feels that she is already dead, leaving the Sexton in charge of her life: the cup. The metaphor of her life as fragile porcelain shows that she will become “Picturesque” or “Broken” to the man, thus creating a future in which he will abandon her for another woman. However, the use of porcelain to describe the speaker and the man’s life together creates the image of a beautiful and precious relationship. Dickinson uses hyphens, oblique rhymes, and fictitious diction to draw attention to critical aspects of his speaker’s plot. In stanzas four and six, the hyphens around the phrase “-with you-” not only physically separate the man, but also emphasize his role in his struggles. In the fifth verse, he plays both the words and the hyphens in the phrase “And see you -freeze-”, poetically freezing the word freeze on its line. The words, “soft glow” and “shine closer”, illustrate the sky full of light, that, if the two were together, his mistress would be distracted while she gave herself excessively to him. The oblique rhyme in verse nine between “eyes” and “heaven” draws the reader to the idea presented by the speaker in that verse: the man’s presence has so absorbed the speaker that his eyes favor his lover over his faith. In the tragic ending, the speaker recognizes herself and her lover as “We,” for the first time in the entire poem. This recognition means admitting a connection between her and the man, rather than referring to them as “you” and “me.” However, the speaker recognizes the impossibility of her union and returns to the use of separate pronouns in the next line. Dickinson physically divides “you” and “me” with hyphens to show absolute distance between the couple. Dickinson flaunts his talent in vague meanings in the contradiction between the speaker’s claim that the door is ajar, implying the closeness between her and the man, but also claims that there is an ocean between them. The one-word line that ends the poem provides an air of finality and forcefulness, giving strong emotional evidence as to why the relationship would never be successful. 10.10 LITERARY DEVICE Conceit: The presumption in Emily Dickinson’s “If I Can Stop” is that being heartless or numb is a lifestyle without purpose. You can see it when she wrote: “If I can keep a heart from 221 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

breaking, I will not live in vain; ...” This shows how putting others first and saving them from pain will give more purpose to your life. This can be seen again when she says, “Or help an unconscious robin get back to her nest.” The kind of love seen in this poem is intense due to the sense of duty that is felt. Emily Dickinson explains that if a person is freed from pain or pain, life will be much more meaningful. Structure Emily Dickinson’s poem is two stanzas long. The first stanza is a rhyming blank verse quatrain. The second stanza is a free verse tercet. There is an irregular meter throughout the poem. The first stanza has a rhyme scheme is ABAB. The second stanza had a rhyme scheme of CDB. There was some end rhyme. Style: Emily Dickinson’s tone throughout the poem is lyrical. Her poem emitted a tone full of emotion. Images in the poem include: “Or help an unconscious robin get back to her nest.” This contributed to the vanity of the poem by helping the author convey the same message using animals. Rather than helping save someone from heartbreak, they are rescuing the “passed out robin” by helping him get home. An interesting diction choice was to use cool to describe how to help the pain. This looks like the pain is hot or angry. Another is when she describes the robin passed out. This gives the impression of a sick or dying bird that cannot fly. 10.11 I’M “WIFE”—I’VE FINISHED THAT - TEXT I’m “wife”—I’ve finished that— That other state— I’m Czar—I’m “Woman” now— It’s safer so— How odd the Girl’s life looks Behind this soft Eclipse— I think that Earth feels so To folks in Heaven—now— This being comfort—then 222 That other kind—was pain— But why compare? CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

I’m “Wife”! Stop there! 10.12 I’M “WIFE”—I’VE FINISHED THAT - ANALYSIS The poem “I am” wife “and I finished it” is an extraordinary poem by Emily Dickinson. The poem deals with important themes such as independence, loneliness and femininity. In this poem, a reader can go through various states of a woman, such as single woman status, wife status, and much more. In the 19th century, when Emily Dickinson wrote this poem, there was a great conflict between these two states. Dickinson compares the life of a single young woman to the life of a wife. In the first line the poet states that her childhood is over and has now turned into femininity. Here you represent the image of the Tsar. Tsar refers to the ruler of Russia before 1947. But the poet here meant that he can never be a tsar because a married woman can never be a ruler. And she also recognizes that being a woman is safer for a girl’s life. The poet says that a girl’s life is so strange. Here you use the image of a smooth eclipse. You used this soft image of the eclipse figuratively. Here, a slight eclipse indicates a gradual transformation. It means that she is now a wife, not a woman or single. She also uses images of the earth and the sky. Here earth refers to a girl’s condition before marriage and heaven refers to a girl’s condition after marriage. She recognizes that the status of a married woman offers comfort and sometimes even pain. But on the other hand, single status also provides insecurity and pain. In the marital status, economic deprivation is the cause of the loss of identity. In the conventional way, the wife is the husband’s object or commodity. Here we can find the skepticism of marriage. When the eclipse occurs, black covers white. She is looking at the earth from the bright side of the eclipse as if she is looking from the safe side and looking from the dangerous side. There is a big difference with heaven and earth. 10.13 I’M “WIFE”—I’VE FINISHED THAT - STRUCTURE “I’m” Wife, “I’m Done” by Emily Dickinson is a three-line poem divided into a series of four lines, known as quatrains. These lines don’t follow a specific rhyme pattern, but they are quite similar when it comes to the meter. Most of the lines contain six syllables, conforming to an iambic trimetric pattern. The remaining few that are shorter are written in iambic dimeter, which means they have two sets of two syllables per line. A good example is line four of the first verse. 10.14 I’M “WIFE”—I’VE FINISHED THAT - LITERARY DEVICES Dickinson makes use of several literary devices in “I am” wife “, I’m done with this”. These include, but are not limited to, alliteration, concatenation and allusion. The last, allusion, is related to Emily Dickinson’s personal life, the “other state” referred to in the first verse and the larger social world she faced during her lifetime. The “other state” that Dickinson creatively leaves behind in this poem is that of celibacy. She herself was considered at the time this poem was written as a spinster. Therefore, it is very easy to consider Dickinson as 223 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

the speaker, exploring what the differences in privilege and happiness are between being alone or being a “wife”. Chaining is a very common technique in poetry. Occurs when a line is cut before its natural stop. Chaining forces the reader to move to the next and next line quickly. You have to move forward to comfortably solve a sentence or phrase. For example, the transition between verses three and four of the second verse, as well as one and two of the third verse.Another important technique is alliteration. It occurs when words are used in succession, or at least appear together, and begin with the same sound. For example, “life seems” on line of the second verse and “hear” and “people” on lines three and four of the second verse. 10.15 SUMMARY  Emily Dickinson’s famous love poem “I cannot live with you” explains various reasons why we cannot live with the lover together.  She expresses in this poem that her heart is fragile, but love is one of the greatest feelings which shared between two people, the lover and the beloved.  Dickinson wants a life which will not be confined and restricted behind the shelf.  She wants freedom for herself and she also wants to keep her creativity.  She is rejecting love for her art.  Though they do not meet physically, they will meet in her poetry.  The poet needs solitude and loneliness to write poetry.  She puts here the image of a porcelain cup which is kept behind the shelf by sexton.  The cup is beautiful but at the same time it is confined.  The poet compares her life with the cup as her life is also confined behind the shelf.  She says that life is over there behind the shelf.  The first point is that she cannot live with her lover because it would be life and she does not want to have access to life so for that reason she rejects him.  Here she compares herself with an old cup which will be replaced by the new cup, like that she would be replaced with someone new. 10.16 KEYWORDS  Enjambment – Literary Device  Figurative – symbolic  Solitude – loneliness 224 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

 Abstraction – thought  Gaze - there is something sustaining about the act of looking upon another with love  sordid excellence - a metaphysical touch  eclipse - compared to the difference between heaven and earth 10.17 LEARNING ACTIVITY 1. Analyse that I‘am wife; I’ve finished that is an intricate approach towards marriage. ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 2.When reading Dickinson’s poem “I cannot live with You,” it left a feeling of isolation, a sense of loneliness and separation from her loved one – Justify. ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 3. Examineindependence, solitude and womanhood as a theme of I‘am wife; I’ve finished ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ 10.18 UNIT END QUESTIONS A. Descriptive Questions Short Questions 1. What are the literary devices used in Emily Dickinson poem I’am wife; I’ve finished that? 2. How would you describe Emily Dickinson’s poem I Cannot live with you? 3. What does the poem I Cannot live with you mean? 4. What type of poem I cannot live with you? 5. What is the poem I cannot live with you about? Long Questions 1. Discuss the Stylistic Analysis of the Poem I’am wife; I’ve finished that. 2. Critically analyse the poem I’am wife; I’ve finished that. 3. Summarise the poem I cannot live with You about. 4. Describe the final judgment that overwhelmed the earthly love in I cannot live with You about. 225 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

5. Emily Dickinson wanted to compare between being a woman and a wife – Explain with reference to I’am wife; I’ve finished that. B. Multiple Choice Questions 1. I’m “wife”—I’ve finished that is a poem written by _____ a. Emily Dickinson b. Walt Whitman c. Allen Ginsberg d. Robert Frost 2. Emily Dickinson was born on __________. a. December 10, 1829 b. December 08, 1839 c. December 11, 1839 d. December 10, 1839 3. Emily Dickinson wanted to compare between being a woman and_______. a. a man b. a wife c. woman d. male 4. “I cannotlivewithyou” is one of Emily Dickinson’s great ______ poems. a. love b. elegy c. sonnet d. Petrarchian sonnet 5. The poem begins with a sense of_______. 226 a. possibility CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

b. optimistic c. certainty d. impossibility Answers 1-a, 2-d, 3-b, 4-a, 5-d 10.19 REFERENCES Reference books  Flexner, Eleanor. Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: Coward, McGann & Geoghegan, 1972.  Mellor, Anne. “Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ and the Women Writers of Her Day.” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia L. Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002  Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-century England. Antonia Fraser. Phoenix.2002.  Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670- 1920.CatherineGallagher. University ofCambridge Press, 1995. Textbook references  Wollstonecraft, Mary. (1792). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. With Strictures on political and moral subjects. London. Websites  https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1553&context=etd- project  https://uniteyouthdublin.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of- woman-by-mary-wollstonecraft.pdf  http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=etd  https://www.jstor.org/stable/3735238 227 CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)