Monday, February 12, 2007
Midterm # 2, Winnemucca and Dickinson
Katja
ENGL 48 B
Journal # 17, Winnemucca & Dickinson
12 February, 2007
Informed by the religious doctrines that guided their schooling, both Winnemucca and Dickinson feature the opposing forces of good and evil or light and dark to shape the content of their literature.
One of Sarah Winnemucca’s techniques in Life among the Paiutes is to contrast the good deeds her people did for the whites with the evils the whites inflicted upon the Paiutes in return for their goodness.
On page 10 we see such an example. First, Winnemucca argues against the widely held notion that the Paiutes and other Native American tribes were violent by stating the true facts of the event: "You call my people blood-seeking. My people did not seek to kill them, nor did they steal their horses – no far from it. During the winter my people helped them. They gave them as much as they had to eat." (Sarah Winnemucca 10). Banking on that white audiences may have been misinformed, Winnemucca took the time to educate white people about how the contributions of her people led to the success of the whites in the West.
Second, she addresses the serious and seemingly unnecessary actions on the part of the settlers. "While we were in the mountains hiding, the people that my grandfather called our white brothers came along to where our winter supplies were. They set everything we had left on fire." (10). By refraining from addressing her tribe’s misfortunes at the hands of white settlers first, she lends moral weight and integrity to her argument, and also mitigates any potential controversy of affixing the good label to the Paiutes and the evil label to the whites.
Unlike Winnemucca, Emily Dickinson does not apply the good and evil labels to people, but rather lets the representative imagery of light and dark serve as a foil for something tempting, dangerous or uncouth. Harking back to standard Biblical imagery, Dickinson writes in poem # 593, "I think I was enchanted when first a sombre Girl — / I read that Foreign Lady — / The Dark — felt beautiful — /" (Emily Dickinson 188). By using an easily recognizable metaphor to illustrate her inappropriate love for the poetry of the somewhat scandalous British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning "that Foreign Lady" (188), Dickinson becomes more approachable and human. She desires that which is decidedly off-limits to a pious American girl.
Even more contentiously, in poem # 249, Dickinson writes "Wild Nights — Wild Nights! / Were I with thee wild Nights should be Our luxury! /" (175), using the dark imagery to represent a perhaps illicit sexual encounter. What makes Dickinson’s light and dark, good and evil imagery so effective is the common knowledge that she personally preferred to wear a favorite virginal white dress, a stark contrast to Emily’s dark aspect in the only known photograph of her.
ENGL 48 B
Journal # 17, Winnemucca & Dickinson
12 February, 2007
Informed by the religious doctrines that guided their schooling, both Winnemucca and Dickinson feature the opposing forces of good and evil or light and dark to shape the content of their literature.
One of Sarah Winnemucca’s techniques in Life among the Paiutes is to contrast the good deeds her people did for the whites with the evils the whites inflicted upon the Paiutes in return for their goodness.
On page 10 we see such an example. First, Winnemucca argues against the widely held notion that the Paiutes and other Native American tribes were violent by stating the true facts of the event: "You call my people blood-seeking. My people did not seek to kill them, nor did they steal their horses – no far from it. During the winter my people helped them. They gave them as much as they had to eat." (Sarah Winnemucca 10). Banking on that white audiences may have been misinformed, Winnemucca took the time to educate white people about how the contributions of her people led to the success of the whites in the West.
Second, she addresses the serious and seemingly unnecessary actions on the part of the settlers. "While we were in the mountains hiding, the people that my grandfather called our white brothers came along to where our winter supplies were. They set everything we had left on fire." (10). By refraining from addressing her tribe’s misfortunes at the hands of white settlers first, she lends moral weight and integrity to her argument, and also mitigates any potential controversy of affixing the good label to the Paiutes and the evil label to the whites.
Unlike Winnemucca, Emily Dickinson does not apply the good and evil labels to people, but rather lets the representative imagery of light and dark serve as a foil for something tempting, dangerous or uncouth. Harking back to standard Biblical imagery, Dickinson writes in poem # 593, "I think I was enchanted when first a sombre Girl — / I read that Foreign Lady — / The Dark — felt beautiful — /" (Emily Dickinson 188). By using an easily recognizable metaphor to illustrate her inappropriate love for the poetry of the somewhat scandalous British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning "that Foreign Lady" (188), Dickinson becomes more approachable and human. She desires that which is decidedly off-limits to a pious American girl.
Even more contentiously, in poem # 249, Dickinson writes "Wild Nights — Wild Nights! / Were I with thee wild Nights should be Our luxury! /" (175), using the dark imagery to represent a perhaps illicit sexual encounter. What makes Dickinson’s light and dark, good and evil imagery so effective is the common knowledge that she personally preferred to wear a favorite virginal white dress, a stark contrast to Emily’s dark aspect in the only known photograph of her.
# posted by Katja @ 4:07 PM 
