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Invisible Mink, Jessie L Janeshek

Doctoral Dissertations

Emily Dickinson, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Sarah Piatt render the nineteenth-century “women’s sphere” ironically Unheimliche while simultaneously conveying it as the “home sweet home” the sentimental tradition prescribes it should be. These American women poets turn the domestic milieu into, as Paula Bennett phrases it, “the gothic mise en scene par excellence…the displacements, doublings, and anxieties characterizing gothic experience are the direct consequence of domestic ideology’s impact on the lives and psyches of ordinary bourgeois women (121-122).”

Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath continue to represent the Unheimliche home in their poetry through the middle of the twentieth century, specifically by …