calebprime
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Jul 5, 2006
- Messages
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I found the passage by Camille Paglia in _Sexual Personae_.
Paglia devotes a whole chapter to Dickinson. Just a paragraph to this poem,
but it supports Pup's reading.
Paglia devotes a whole chapter to Dickinson. Just a paragraph to this poem,
but it supports Pup's reading.
In a poem with the same sexual pattern, "I started Early --- Took my Dog," a sociable shoreline scene turns into a rape, as the sea assaults the incautious tourist. He rises up her apron and bodice and threatens to eat her. She flees; he follows: "I felt His Silver Heel / Upon my Ankle -- Then my Shoes / Would overflow with Pearl" (520). The glutted vaginal shoe is a conceptual sexual restraint (cf. 340). ... Second, the sea overflows Dickinson's "simple Shoe" because the revelation of nature's coarse reality is always a rape of sentimental illusions.