Feline Alter Egos in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance” and the Poetry of Emily Dickinson

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role of the feline in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story “Circumstance” and three poems by Emily Dickinson (F529, F444, and F1064). In these texts, the feline becomes an alter ego for the woman writer, leading her to reflect upon her status as a female artist in the nineteenth century in connection to the sentimental culture of the time and to issues such as race, violence and power. At once me and not-me, the feline is racialized in the two writers’ works, and its function is akin to that of the “Africanist other” as defined by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. When the female self is in the claws of the feline, or compared to the feline, she grapples with multiple snares as her voice is entangled within the contradictory impulses she strives to negotiate. Singing from this nest of snares, the female voice that we hear in these texts showcases the complexity, elusiveness and protean capacity of identification of female writers in the nineteenth-century American literary landscape.