The scarlet experiment : Emily Dickinson's abortion experience

Ever since Emily Dickinson began writing, a blanket of protectiveness has encircled the poet. This study strives to peel away the glossing of Dickinson's life and art as it undertakes to answer the question: Did Emily Dickinson suffer an abortion around 1861-1862?

Chapter I, "Death, Heaven, the Victorians, and Emily Dickinson," presents the literary and sociological contexts for the argument. It gives an overview of nineteenth-century America's interpretations of death, examines the age's conception of Heaven and the afterlife, and discusses the popular nineteenth-century genre of death literature, consolation literature, a tradition in which this study argues that Dickinson wrote the poems capturing her abortion/bereavement experience.

Chapter II, "The Master Letters: Intimations of Intimacy, Pregnancy, and Death," looks at Dickinson's characteristic behavioral pattern within relationships and examines her friendship with Charles Wadsworth (this study's nominee for Dickinson's "Master" and father of her unborn child) by way of the relationship's only written substantiation in the three extant "Master Letters."

Chapter III, "The Abortion Sequence," establishes the historical, sociological, and biographical data that would allow for a Dickinson abortion, and documents the experience through close analysis of twenty-eight poems that appear to narrate events leading analysis of twenty-eight poems that appear to narrate events leading up to, during, and immediately following the abortion.

Chapter IV, "Denial: 'That Dull--Benumbing Time'," recognizes the intense undercurrent of grieving in the poetry following 1861 and posits that the poems result from Dickinson's intense bereavement following her child's death. The chapter surveys the five stages of grief as determined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and focuses on the first stage of denial--the most different of the stages because of its lack of emotion and feelings--as it manifests itself in a group of Dickinson poems after 1861.

Chapter V, "'Tis Good-The Looking Back on Grief," gives close reading to poems concerning the active stages of grieving as Dickinson works her way to acceptance of the child's death.

This holistic study concludes that Dickinson very probably experienced an abortion/bereavement experience that she captured and sought consolation for in her poetry following 1861.