Description
“Emily was sixteen years old when she posed for the only certain portrait of her in existence, a daguerreotype from 1846 which gives her to us sitting on a chair, wearing a dark dress, her hair gathered in a bun and a austere air. The right arm rests on a small round table covered with a Persian rug on which lies a closed book. The left hand holds a small white rose. A book, a flower. The two extreme factors of a single existential equation.” (From the chapter “Emily’s Garden”).
“Ambiente Dickinson”, the result of various collaborations and artistic intertwinings (literary criticism, poetry, sculpture, photography), is above all an investigation of the various environments in which the “myth of Amherst” lived and worked, first of which was the paternal Homestead, a huge red brick house surrounded by a large garden. It is there that between 1830 and 1886 a complex and enigmatic existence was consumed, still capable of generating questions about the relationships between human dwelling, gender roles, nature and female writing. These relationships, addressed here with an ecocritical approach, intend to demonstrate how Emily Dickinson’s irreverent poetry was a powerful vehicle for subverting the predominant ideology of domesticity and at the same time a sonorous counterpoint to the rhetoric of domination. It follows that, in order to evaluate his contribution to the discourse on the interrelationships between nature and American culture of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to place his work in a perspective of clear contrast with the tradition of the time. While never demonstrating full ecological awareness, and therefore rarely considered a full-fledged “nature poet”, Emily Dickinson offered (like all ecopoets according to the indications provided by J. Scott Bryson) “a vision of the world that recognizes the value of ‘interrelationship between two […] interdependent desires, both attempts to respond to the current divorce between humanity and the more-than-human world’, a world that the poet explored from her very personal observers (the surrounding hills and woods, the garden at home, the room on the first floor) to arrive at the modern conclusion that this “knowability” has limits that neither the patriarchy, nor the Church nor even science are able to overcome. (Daniela Fargione)