The Poem “The Wife” by Emily Dickinson reveals the poet’s concerns for domestic femininity in middle-class families by expressing the gender roles of females and using the term “wife” frequently. Although she could never be a wife in her lifetime, the reflection of self-private and the domesticity of household females could be seen in the poem through the contrasts in the three stanzas. Evidently, the people of the poem are female, and the conventionalities of marriage are expressed from the perspective of a female. At some stage, Dickinson has the notion that to be a woman, who comforts the idea of being a “woman”, marriage is an inevitable part of a girl’s life as “it’s safer so”. As a matter of fact, Dickinson’s notion of marriage would have been treated as a norm of a woman’s life in the early 19th-century of American society. Once a woman was married, her life would be confined and bounded by the domestic sphere since the mainstream back then had the tendency to indicate that it was the man who brought home the bacon whilst the woman was mostly maintaining a household and taking care of children ultimately. But she also demonstrates how the institution of marriage perpetuates systems of privilege and inequality for women, and the observing the language and strategic structuring of this poem, the ways in which the institution of marriage contributes to totalitarianism.
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