Wedding Belles?

Yesterday I posted “A Lady red – amid the hill,” and then posted five other poems by Dickinson that this poem suggested to me.  For example, in the second stanza, Dickinson mentions the breezes with their brooms and then asks, “Prithee, My pretty Housewives! Who may expected be?”

I then drew a contrast to another poem in which Dickinson mentions a housewife, “How long have these low feet staggered.” In this poem, the housewife is anything but “pretty,” and she neglects her daily duties and responsibilities due to her indolence – because she’s dead.

So what was Dickinson’s view of housewives?  The traditional and expected role for women does not come across all that favorably in Dickinson’s works – I’m sure not for her disdain of a woman’s desire to marry and keep a house – but for the “social conventions created by a patriarchal society, which continued the division of both genders into different spheres of society.”  BTW, that quote is from this site, HERE.

The poem below, “Ourselves were wed one summer – dear,” is another poem about a housewife – though it never uses the word “housewife.”

This poem is thought to be more than somewhat autobiographical and that it was about Emily Dickinson (who never married) and Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson (who married Emily’s brother Austin) – and how (as viewed by Emily) Susan’s marriage relegated her to the position of “wife” and brought her loss of self-identity. And how Susan’s marriage would now interfere with their own (intimate?) relationship (after all, the first line states, “Ourselves were married one summer – dear”). 

To be honest, I misinterpreted this poem when I first read it because at the start, I made the assumption that the poem was about a couple who married (“Ourselves were wed one summer”) – and when one of the spouses died (“when Your little Lifetime failed”), the surviving spouse was broken-hearted (“I wearied – too – of mine”).  

I continued with this interpretation through the second stanza, but then the third stanza made me realize I was on the wrong track:  Instead of a couple who married each other, the speaker is talking to a friend – and both were married to others?  Their “Futures different lay,” and one lived in a cheerful, sunny cottage; the other lived in a cold, remote location.

“But You – were crowned in June” – so did only one of them get married?

A lengthier discussion of the poem is HERE.