Looking Into the "Torrid Eye:" Negotiating the Limits of Selfhood in Emily Dickinson's Maelstrom Poems

Abstract

Abstract: This article offers new ways of interpreting Dickinson's maelstrom poems. I turn to recent critical interest in the word "Domingo" to argue that Dickinson's maelstroms reveal the gendered questions underlying revolutionary new concepts of personhood. Identifying various historical, political, and geographical referents for Dickinson's maelstroms, I argue these poems depict white femininity as an idealized, isolated, and often therefore horrifying condition. By demonstrating how Dickinson uses the maelstrom to think together the oceanic sublime and Gothic tropes of enslavement, I locate in these poems a repeated fantasy about the possibility of escape—however painful—from these gendered and racialized circumstances.