Emily Dickinson Loaded Gun

Emily Dickinson composed the poem “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” during the height of her literary career amidst a society that restricted women to certain roles and behaviors. Because poetry is a genre so intertwined with the author’s subconscious, the language within the text becomes very revealing in that Emily Dickinson’s words expose her as a woman incongruous with that of the 19th century ideal woman. She begins by essentially separating herself into two sides of a binary—namely masculine and feminine roles. She presents herself as “everything ‘woman’ is not: cruel not pleasant, hard not soft, emphatic not weak, one who kills not one who nurtures,” thereby shedding the typical layers of conventional femininity, “symbolized in the poem by the doe and the deep pillow of the ‘masochistic’ eider duck” (Bennett).
In the first stanza of the poem, Dickinson compares her life to a loaded gun, an inanimate object conventionally associated with males. Though the gun is an object whereas the narrator is a sentient being, the reverse seems to be true throughout the poem; she refers to the gun as being both her “Owner” and her “Master…,” implying …show more content…
Most importantly, her point of view in the final stanza seems to reinforce her overarching sense of female empowerment; she states that, though her lethality and independence may outlive “He”—the gun which is representative of patriarchal domination—patriarchal oppression will likely outlive her physical body. For though she personally has the power “to kill”—to engage in battle with patriarchal oppression—the overall concept of female empowerment is immortal, “without - the power to