Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson

While Adrienne Rich is best known for her poetry, she also was also a prolific essayist and literary critic. Over the course of her career, she published six collections of essays and a number of individual essays in journals. During the 1970s, Rich emerged as a prominent voice in feminist literary criticism, a literary movement that arose in the United States during the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s as women’s liberation reverberated across the arts and academia. Feminist literary critics sought to understand the patriarchal roots underlying mainstream interpretations of various works of literature and examine how one’s own gender influences how one reads and interprets text. Rich advocated for lesbian and feminist readings of old texts, stating, “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history; it is an act of survival” (Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose, 1966-1978. New York, W. W Norton & Company, 1979). Throughout her career, Rich wrote a number of critical essays on both male and female poets, analyzing The Relationship Between Poet and Poem, and poet and audience, on the basis of feminist ethics.

Though not explicitly about literature, one particular essay by Rich holds special relevance to “Vesuvius at Home”: “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” This essay, published in 1980 and among Rich’s most famous works, seeks to expand the definition of lesbianism, arguing that women ought to center their lives around other women—a vision of lesbian existence in which sex is not a primary (or perhaps even a necessary) element. This claim has proven both influential and controversial, but at its core, it reflects frustration with the extent to which women are defined in relation to men. A similar frustration underpins “Vesuvius at Home” and (in particular) Rich’s discussion of Dickinson’s orientation. For Rich, the question of whether Dickinson was sexually attracted to or involved with other women misses the point and reflects a patriarchal need to pigeonhole Dickinson based on how she did (or did not) engage with men.

Rich’s feminist sensibilities strongly shaped her creative output as well as her textual criticism. Her best-known poems include works such as “Diving into the Wreck,” “Power,” “Living in Sin,” and “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” all of which speak to Rich’s interest in issues relating to gender, and several of which reflect concerns quite similar to those that animate “Vesuvius at Home.” “Power,” for example, is a meditation on another famous woman from history—Marie Curie—that concludes, “[H]er wounds came from the same source as her power” (Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1978). This line closely echoes Rich’s discussion of Dickinson’s likely ambivalence toward her own creativity as a woman writing in a deeply patriarchal society.