Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson

Adrienne Rich begins her essay “traveling at the speed of time” (178)—attempting to enter the world of a 19th-century female writer. “Vesuvius at Home” is not a historical essay, and Rich does not elaborate at length on the status of women in 19th-century America. Nevertheless, that status underpins her exploration of what might have motivated Dickinson to write as she did.

Much of Rich’s essay concerns the psychological effects of life under patriarchy, including the way in which strict delineation of gender roles results in a fractured psyche. Ambition, anger, desire, and other traditionally “masculine” feelings all become elements that women must either repress or give voice to only in sublimated form, and this idea is central to Rich’s exploration of how Dickinson uses the male pronoun and other “masculine” language. However, the essay’s title suggests a more concrete aspect of women’s subordination in 19th-century America: the expectation that they would be homemakers.

Rich emphasizes that this is precisely what Dickinson was not, even as she spent most of her time at home: “Her sister dedicated herself to the everyday domestic labors which would free Dickinson to write” (180). Consequently, a place that many women might have found imprisoning became a source of liberation and even rebellion for Dickinson.