Millay and Dickinson, born more than sixty years apart, were subject to vastly different influences and environments, although their homes were in the same geographic area. Their poetry reflects the difference of their times and their own temperament, but both wrote from a great depth and understanding of feeling and experience about subjects common to all mankind - death, love, anguish, the significance of nature.

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<p> The implication of the title of this thesis, Emily Dickinson's Spectrum, is that this poet had a highly individual attitude towards colour, an attitude which the analysis of colour-imagery in the poet's writings will illuminate. The first chapter of the thesis demonstrates how the poet's scientific background enabled her to set up a spectrum that differed from the "received" Newtonian spectrum in many ways. The second chapter shows how Dickinson's originality, a quality often noticed by critics, is to a large extent the product of her ability to manipulate the colours of her spectrum in a manner analogous to the practice of the pictorial artist. The third chapter explains, however, that though her use of colour was indeed original, her practice reflects the international anti-Newtonian "colour-revolution" of the era in which she lived, a revolution in which she had a significant role to play notwithstanding her apparent seclusion in Amherst. In the final chapter, Emily Dickinson's spectrum is set out, and each of its chief colours is shown to be a concise means of referring to a different complex or node of emotions that are at once personal and universal in their import.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis offers a textual analysis of Emily Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights and, to a lesser extent, her poems in an effort to understand fully the complicated relationship of gender to time that characterizes her artistic imagination. The study emphasizes the interplay of religious, psychological and sexual forces inherent in her narrative, and their effect when portraying cyclical and linear concepts of time. Narrators' and characters' interactions serve by themselves and as dyads to represent a concept of mythical or eternal time that manifests itself within historical or chronological time. These time concepts differ and complement each other through aspects of wholeness and differentiation. References to Julia Kristeva's psycholinguistic theory and to C. G. Jung's archetypes give support for a unique space and female concept of time within a male discourse. Kristeva's exemplification of time concepts as linear/chronological for the male gender and cyclical/eternal for the female gender happens to be specially relevant to the 19th century, when the patriarchal socio-symbolic order, inhibited, undermined, and/or circumscribed the participation of the feminine within the social contract. / Graduation date: 1991

The present study establishes a more full and accurate understanding of the importance of mysticism in the art and life of Emily Dickinson, and shows that because of the physiological changes endured by the mystic and the unique relationship between mysticism and madness, what might be read literally as madness (psychosis) in Dickinson's poems should be seen as a metaphor for the dark counterpoint of the mystical cycle.Chapter One establishes a necessary background on mysticism and discusses the effects of mystical experience on the mind and body of the mystic. As the mystic undergoes spiritual purification, she will be changed physiologically because the central nervous system has to be cultured and strengthened to withstand the changes created by the transcendental level of consciousness.Chapter Two chronologically documents Dickinson's mystical achievement, using her letters as the primary source and Evelyn Underhill's five stages of mystical development as the base of measurement. Dickinson achieved the first mystic life-Awakening, Purgation, and Illumination. Hints of the Dark Night of the Soul may be seen in her later years, but there does not appear to be firm evidence that it was ever fully established. Oscillating between states of pain and pleasure throughout her life, she did not achieve the perfect serenity, peace, and certitude that characterizes Union. Chapter Three examines the symbiotic relationship between mysticism and madness, to show that they share a common source and the end result depends on the preparedness of the individual. Chapter Four examines selected poems, written from 1859-65, from the perspective that Dickinson is a mystic describing mystical experience rather than a psychotic describing insanity. Chapter Four, as does Chapter Three, refers to the interpretation of Dickinson's poetry made by the Freudian psychiatrist, Dr. John Cody, because his interpretation has made the strongest argument for literal madness in Dickinson's work. Chapter Three shows the insufficiency of the argument to explain Dickinson, other mystics, and two of the parallel cases Cody used to support his thesis; Chapter Four demonstrates the same insufficiency when applied to Dickinson's poems of madness, terror, and despair. Chapter Five briefly examines the relationship between Dickinson, the mystic, and Dickinson, the poet. / Department of English