{"id":10,"date":"2020-02-07T20:16:08","date_gmt":"2020-02-07T20:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eportfolios.capilanou.ca\/brendacervantes\/?page_id=10"},"modified":"2021-12-14T21:26:10","modified_gmt":"2021-12-14T21:26:10","slug":"close-reading","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/eportfolios.capilanou.ca\/brendacervantes\/university-writing-strategies\/close-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Close Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For this assignment we had to choose a poem and practice the five steps of close reading; identifying repetitions, strands, binary oppositions, an anomaly and finally select one of them to discuss in more detail. It has been a while since I last analyzed or read poetry, so this was a big challenge for me. Nevertheless, after doing the class exercise on Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m ‘wife’\u2013I’ve finished that”, I got a clearer image of the piece and what stood out for me was the questioning of the speaker’s identity through the use of quotations and what this tells the readers about the writer. The way this poem from the 1860s is written feels like a contemporary piece of self-reflection monologue, which I found very interesting.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Quotations as a form of questionning in Dickinson\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m \u2018wife\u2019\u2013I\u2019ve finished that\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Emily Dickinson\u2019s poem uses different literary resources to deconstruct the zeitgeist around women\u2019s identity of her time. For the purposes of this close reading, I will focus specifically on the use of quotations as a form of questioning \u2013and perhaps, mocking\u2013 identity labels and what they imply. The two words that the author quotes are \u201cwife\u201d and \u201cwoman\u201d. \u201cWife\u201d (Dickinson 1) is the second word that appears in the piece, right after \u201cI\u2019m\u201d (Dickinson 1), and it\u2019s also contained in the title. This is the theme and central idea of the dramatic monologue: What does it mean being a wife? The fact that \u201cwife\u201d comes right after \u201cI\u2019m\u201d, without an \u201ca\u201d, makes an unfamiliar and powerful introduction of the speaker. Wife is used as a name, it is not just another social label or state of the being, such as being a student or a sister. By stating \u201cI\u2019m wife\u201d (Dickinson 1), the speaker is reducing her whole identity to the role she chose to transform into. The words that come after, \u201c\u2013I\u2019ve finished that\u2013\u201c (Dickinson 1), support the culmination of other aspects of her identity. On the other hand, \u201cWoman\u201d (Dickinson 3) is used as a synonym for \u201cwife\u201d in the piece. By being compared to a high-level monarch, \u201cI\u2019m Czar\u2013I\u2019m \u2018Woman\u2019 now\u2013\u201c\u00a0 (Dickinson 3), the metaphor seems to imply that being a wife is the ultimate goal and power position for a female-gendered human being of that time; Only by becoming a wife, a girl is transformed into a woman, according to the speaker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, by the use of quotation marks around these specific words, the author is distancing herself from the ideals attached to them. Quotations tell us the meaning for these labels \u2013as stated in the poem\u2013 don\u2019t correspond to the writer\u2019s opinion on the matter or personal identity, rather society\u2019s expectations for a woman represented by the speaker, giving the piece a tone of verbal and structural irony. Quotations, therefore, are the key to question and revise everything the poem states with words, as well as a hint to reveal the persona created by the author is not Dickinson herself. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For this assignment we had to choose a poem and practice the five steps of close reading; identifying repetitions, strands, binary oppositions, an anomaly and finally select one of them to discuss in more detail. It has been a while since I last analyzed or read poetry, so this was a big challenge for me. … Continue reading Close Reading<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11106,"featured_media":0,"parent":45,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-10","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eportfolios.capilanou.ca\/brendacervantes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eportfolios.capilanou.ca\/brendacervantes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eportfolios.capilanou.ca\/brendacervantes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eportfolios.capilanou.ca\/brendacervantes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eportfolios.capilanou.ca\/brendacervantes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/eportfolios.capilanou.ca\/brendacervantes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178,"href":"https:\/\/eportfolios.capilanou.ca\/brendacervantes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10\/revisions\/178"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eportfolios.capilanou.ca\/brendacervantes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/45"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eportfolios.capilanou.ca\/brendacervantes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}