Emily Dickinson as the Femme-Enfant: Seeing the Surreal before Surrealism

Abstract

Critic Gloria Femen lamented about the lost women of surrealism in one of her seminal research endeavours titled “Art History and the Case for Women in Surrealism”. She additionally lamented Surrealism’s founder, Andre Breton’s somewhat sexist take that for women to achieve anything in this convention, they must adopt the persona of the Woman-Child who is intact with her childhood innocence and is able to use the latter to transcend the rational world of the adult. While Femen rejected this idea claiming that it marginalized women artists whose art had noticeably entered its mature phase, this paper showcases how that may not be the case with Dickinson. After subjecting Dickinson’s poetry to close scrutiny, it was found that Dickinson might not only have inadvertently been using the Surrealistic convention at least a century before its official introduction in the world of art and literature but that the persona of the Woman-Child was, in fact, a major attribute of her poetry which imbued the latter with much of its surrealistic essence.