A linguistic picture of the world: conceptualization of the human body in the poetry of Emily Dickinson

Abstract

The paper focuses on the linguistic picture of the body in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, a 19th-Century American poet. The aim is to provide a coherent linguistic picture of the body of Dickinson’s lyric subject and to reconstruct the way she conceptualized and portrayed its physical appearance with regard to the artist’s perception of the self. This research is focused on cognitive ethnolinguistics, the methodology utilizes analytic and interpretative techniques with emphasis on the cognitive definition reconstruction and facet parametrization. The research sample consists of the selected poems in which the poet refers to the body of her lyric subject. This research has allowed for the identification of the following facets into which the conceptualization of Dickinson’s perception of the body can be categorized: 1) the perspective of the body as a spirit-encompassing vessel; 2) the body as a reflection of the social oppression experienced by women in the nineteenth century; 3) the facet of the body size, and 4) the ephemerality of the physical body. The identified facets overlap to some extent, but together they form a unified picture which reveals certain aspects of cognitive metaphor theory, such as the conceptual metaphor of a container. This unified picture also reveals literary and linguistic reflections of socio-cultural aspects of the 19th-Century America such as the tendency to diminish the female lyric subject.