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  • Essay / Comparing Dickinson's "Much Madness is Divinest Sense" with Rich's "Aunt Jennifer"

    Emily Dickinson's "Much Madness is Divinest Sense" (1890) and Adrienne Rich's "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" (1951) are renowned masterpieces, each unique in its own composition of sound effects, meaning, image and arrangement. Both poets were women oppressed by society in their time, Rich being a lesbian and Dickinson simply a woman in the 1800s. As a result, the stories they tell in their work often revolve around the injustice they experienced and how it affected them. However, even though these two men share a similar environment, the way they communicate their thoughts is markedly different. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay To begin, Dickinson was a woman from a 19th-century Calvinist family where men owned most, if not all, of the private property. The men who dominated society were the cause of her “inferiority” as a woman. They created a patriarchal society in which women were financially dependent on men, which was acceptable at that time. In fact, her literary works were rejected several times during her life and were not discovered and made public until after her death in 1890. In lines 7 and 8 of Much Madness is Divinest Sense, Dickinson writes: " Demur- you are immediately dangerous- And manipulated with a chain - "perhaps referring to how her efforts in the literary field went against society's norms and thus the media was forced to turn her down every time Likewise, Rich's position as a gay woman was not widely accepted in the 1950s. In fact, in 1953, Rich married Harvard professor Alfred Conrad, likely under peer pressure from her oppressive society. She later divorced in 1970. In lines 7 and 8 of Aunt Jennifer's Tigers, Rich writes "The enormous weight of Uncle's wedding ring rests heavily on Aunt Jennifer's hand" Using the words "massive",. “weight” and “heavily” is a form of organic imagery that suggests how the synecdoche of marriage since covenant is a burden to its user. This is likely a reference to how Rich's marriage seemed to bring him down. Despite their obvious similarities in social environment, Dickinson and Rich did not share a composition of the two seemingly identical horror tales, but in fact shared a composition of sound effects, i.e., image and arrangement for translate their experiences. In fact, their structure presented quite a contrast due to their different literary periods. Much Madness is Divinest Sense is a single octave stanza while The Mosquito is made up of three quatrain stanzas. In addition to this, an obvious difference between the two lies in the choice of diction. While Dickinson prefers to use abstract, non-tangible words such as "madness" (line 1), "sense" (line 1), "majority" (line 4), and "dangerous" (line 7) to construct organic imagery, Rich uses more definitive concrete verbs and nouns to create visual images. In Aunt Jennifer's Tigers, she writes: “The brilliant topazes, inhabitants of a world of green. ” (line 2) and “The tigers in the panel she made” (line 11). This is reasonable since Dickinson wrote most of her work during the late Romantic era, characterized by its emphasis on emotional input. On the other hand, Rich wrote the majority of her work within the feminist literary movement of the postmodern era. The postmodern era, well.