Who Carries the Legacy?

One of the connections I found in Emily Dickinsons, "My Life had stood - A Loaded Gun" really resonated with me, and I thought I'd blog about it to see if anyone else had any similar thoughts:

Throughout the poem I connected the woods as a Patriarchal society (I don't think I need to go into detail on how I found that.?), and the Mountains were men because of their big and strong appearance as well as their high position in the Patriarchal society. So when I got to the third stanza where Dickinson compares the firing of the gun to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, I thought Vesuvius had to be a man as well if it was a mountain. I took the pleasure filled explosion of a man (Mount Vesuvius) to mean the male orgasm. And for many reasons I took the firing of the gun to be the voicing or publishing of the thoughts of the female writer.

I found it interesting, if my assumptions about the symbols are correct, that Dickinson would say that a woman's voiced opinion is as satisfying as a man's orgasm: "It is as a Vesuvian face Had let its pleasure through - ". Men and women need eachother to procreate in order to continue the human race. Men need women to bear them children to carry on the male name and legacy in a Patriarchal society; to conceive a child a male orgasm (Vesuvius' eruption), or sperm is needed to fertilize the female egg (I'm sure you all know by now that babies don't come from storks, so sorry for the complete break down, I just wanted to go through this step by step so I don't miss anything).

IF Dickinson is saying that the writer or woman's thought is as powerful as a man's orgasm, then the woman has found a substitute and no longer needs the man. As the last stanza to the poem describes the gun, or writer's works as "Without - the power to die -" she implies that the writer's (female) works are immortal. If the writer's thoughts are immortal then this enforces the woman no longer needing the man because her works will carry on her legacy for her and they will be creations entirely of her own, as opposed to bearing children to carry the legacy. In saying that women can survive through time without men to aid them, women are shedding their need of Patriarchal societies.

Feminism Banns Psychological Violence

I was cooking in the kitchen the other night with the radio playing not really paying attention to it, but my subconscious must have been listening because suddenly something they were saying came to my attention. Because we have been talking about feminism in class, when I heard that word said on the radio my ears automatically piped up so I further investigated it and found there was a new law passed in France banning psychological violence between married or cohabitating couples. A person could end up with a criminal record for insulting their spouse. This was part of the article I found in the daily mail for the UK:

“The law is expected to cover every kind of insult including repeated rude remarks about a partner’s appearance, false allegations of infidelity and threats of physical violence.
Police are being urged to issue a caution in the first instance, but repeat offenders could face a fine, a restraining order or even jail.
Critics said the measure was a gimmick produced in response to lobbying by feminists and would be impossible to implement.
But French premier Francois Fillon, who announced the law, said: ‘The creation of this offence will allow us to deal with the most insidious situations – situations that leave no visible scars, but which leave victims torn up inside.’”

I just thought this was an interesting instance of feminism that I could share.