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Emily DickinsonWhat Soft — Cherubic Creatures
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1896A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
In terms of Dickinson’s own body of work, the confidence in the “Deity” (Line 8) or Jesus stands out. In other poems, Dickinson’s speakers doubt the role of God and Christ. In “‘Heavenly Father’—take to thee” (ca 1862), the speaker accuses God of “Duplicity,” and in “Those—dying then” (ca 1882), the speaker describes God as missing in action because he “cannot be found.” Concerning Jesus specifically, the speaker in “So well that I can live without” (ca 1862) asks for proof that Jesus loved humans as much as he said he did. The speakers in these poems use a confrontational tone toward God and Christ, which is similar to the speaker’s tone toward the "Gentlewomen” (Line 2) in “What Soft—Cherubic Creatures.”
For a larger literary context, Dickinson’s poem aligns with other 19th-century poets who countered the “Brittle Lady” (Line 11) trope. In 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning published the epic poem Aurora Leigh, where the eponymous character rejects marriage and chooses independence and engagement with “freckled Human Nature” (Line 7). Emily Brontë, too, challenged the notion that women were “Cherubic Creatures” (Line 1) in her unsentimental poetry and her classic novel Wuthering Heights (1847).
Dickinson’s poem also pertains to Transcendentalism, the 19th-century American movement where authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne championed minimizing individual identity and obtaining a deeper relationship with nature and the spiritual world. In this context, the speaker takes umbrage with the gentlewomen’s inability to transcend their social status or form a union with “Human Nature” (Line 7) or the “Deity” (Line 8).
Historical Context
Based on her handwriting and the type of paper used, Thomas Johnson believes Emily Dickinson composed her poem around 1862, which means she wrote it during a time when women generally faced extensive marginalization. Dickinson’s image of gentlewomen as “Cherubic Creatures” (Line 1) alludes to the Victorian idea that women were the “Angels in the House.” The term comes from English poet Coventry Patmore’s long poem The Angel in the House (1854), where he, without irony or satire, depicts his wife as a submissive, delicate, soft gentlewoman.
The idea that women were fragile, otherworldly creatures carried over to America. In her seminal study of Dickinson, My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe writes:
Women of Dickinson’s class and century existed in a legal and financial state of dependence on their fathers, brothers, or husbands that psychologically mutilated them. Excluded from economic competition (hunting), they were forced to settle for passive consumerism (Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. New Directions, 1985, p. 84).
Based on Howe’s findings, “[t]hese Gentlewomen” (Line 2) couldn’t engage with “freckled Human Nature” (Line 7) due to sexist norms. Yet Dickinson’s speaker doesn’t blame men but upper-class women. Her speaker treats gentlewomen like they have agency and can control their identity and role.
The speaker’s attitude reflects debates about how 19th-century sexism impacted Dickinson. In the canonized, feminist text The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that Dickinson was a victim of oppression. Yet Howe maintains that Dickinson’s life and work are “[f]ar from being the misguided modesty of an oppressed female ego” (Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. New Directions, 1985, p. 49). Howe sees Dickinson’s isolation as a deliberate spiritual choice, which might be why her speaker in “What Soft—Cherubic Creatures” aligns herself with the “Deity” (Line 8).
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