Amy Huynh
December 20, 2013
Language Arts 3

Today is different than the nineteenth-century. Societal roles were different; women were seen as weaker than men therefore they had more domestic roles while men did hard work labor.

Emily Dickinson, a female poet, was raised in a different environment. Dickinson grew up disliking her mother due to her absence in Dickinson’s life. (Biography of Emily Dickinson. http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/ED303/emilybio.html) Many young women forced to into the domestic sphere once they are married. Dickinson was never married; instead she lived in her father’s home her entire life. Due to this, she was never forced to assume of role of a domestic house wife. Dickinson’s lifestyle was different from an average woman in the nineteenth-century, which gave her more freedom to make her own beliefs.

During the nineteenth-century there was inequality, in Color - Caste - Denomination Dickinson explains how a person’s race, color, gender etcetera does not determine their faith. Dickinson wrote “Color - Caste - Denomination/ These - are Time’s affair/ Death’s diviner Classifying/ Does not know they are” (1-4), which does not reflect the time period in which she lived. Society believed that if you look different you would be treated different. Dickinson thought differently than the society she lived in. In her poem Much Madness is divinest Sense, she defines “Much Madness” (1) as people who stay away from the crowd. Dickinson believed that individualism was shamed on by society; her isolation led her to believe this because she was never forced into the domestic