This thesis investigates Emily Dickinson's spatial imagination. It examines how her
poetic landscape responds to the conditions of modernity in an age of modernization,
expansionism, colonialism and science. In particular, I look at how the social and
cultural representations of nature and heaven are revised and appropriated in her
poems to challenge the hierarchical structure of visual dominance embedded in the
public discourses of her time. Although she seldom travelled, her writing oscillates
between experiential empiricism, sensationalistic reportage, and ecological
imagination to account for the social and geographical transition of a rapidly
industrialized and commercialized society. The notion of transcendence, progress and
ascension in Enlightenment and Transcendentalist writings, based upon technological
advancement and geographical expansion, characterized the social and cultural
imagination of her time. Alternatively, an increasingly cosmopolitan New England
registers a poetic contact zones as well as a Bakhtinian carnivalesque space, in which
colonial relations can be subverted, western constructions of orientalism challenged,
and capitalist modernity inflected. Dickinson voiced in her poems her critical
reception of such a phantasmagoric site of a modern world. I explore how her
cartographic projection registers the conflicting nature of modernity, while resists the
process of empowerment pursued by her contemporary writers, presenting a more
dynamic poetic vision of the world.
In the first chapter, I explore her use of empirical mapping as a poetic approach to
challenge the Enlightenment notion of progress and modernity. I look at her poems
of social transitions, especially her poems of the Bible, the train, the pastoral, and the
graveyard, to show how she addresses the issue of modernization. Her visit to Mount
Auburn and the rural landscape movement are explored to show her complex poetic
response toward modernity. In the second chapter, I focus on her poems of
emigration and exploration to see how she appropriates frontier metaphors and
exploratory narratives that dominated the discourses of national and cultural projects
of her time. The colonial expeditions and national expansionism of her time are
examined to show her revision and deconstruction of quest narratives. In the third
chapter, I examine her commercial metaphors in relation to cosmopolitanism. I
discuss her metaphors of tourism to see how her poems are based upon the notion of
consumption as a poetic mode that is closely related to the violence of global
displacement and imperial contestation. Her tourist experiences and reading of travel
writings will be examined to show her critical response towards the dominant visual
representations of her time. In the last chapter, I explore her poems of visitation and
reception to show her elastic spatial imagination through her notion of neighbouring
and compound vision. In particular, I discuss her poetic reception and appropriation
of the theories of Edward Hitchcock and Thomas De Quincey. I conclude suggesting
that her spatial imagination reveals her poetic attempt to account for the conditions of
modernity
