Sewing and writing in the poetry of Emily Dickinson

Abstract

It is common knowledge that in Western societies, the nineteenth century defined people’s social roles depending on the individual’s biological sex, which means that men and women performed different activities based on the ideals of womanhood and man- hood. In short, men acted in the public spheres of work, politics, economical relations, and other public spaces; in contrast, women used to be responsible for the tasks related to family care, household and keeping with the principles of puritanism, which means they were lim- ited most of the times by the domestic space and its activities. Among the female domestic obligations there used to be tasks related to the clothing of the whole family group, such as washing, bleaching, ironing, sewing – making the garment and fixing it, besides embroidery, were daily activities for women. Within this context and through the close reading tech- nique, we aim to analyze the poem “Don’t put up my Thread & Needle – ” and “To mend each tattered Faith”, by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), an important voice of the North-American poetry in the nineteenth-century; our literature essay seeks to comprehend how the speak- er uses the semantic field of sewing activities and, therefore, connects to the womanhood stereotype in order to subvert literarily the speech of domesticity and thus represents the artistic process of the poetic writing in the images of the sewing universe.