SOURCE: Mayer, Ruth. “‘Arousing the Slumbering Woman's Nature’: Poetry, Pornography, and Other Nineteenth-Century Writing on Female Passion.” Nineteenth Century Studies 13 (1999): 83-101.

In the following essay, Mayer discusses the problematic nature of writing on female passion in the nineteenth century and the assessment of erotic literature by or for women as pornographic.

Wild Nights—Wild Nights! Were I with thee Wild Nights should be Our luxury! 

Futile—the Winds - To a Heart in port - Done with the Compass— Done with the Chart - 

Rowing in Eden— Ah, the Sea! Might I but moor—Tonight! - In Thee! 

(Dickinson 114)

A poem on passion written in the conditional mood. It dwells not so much upon fantasies but rather speculates about what might be, should be. The conditions that made Emily Dickinson endorse the conditional were subject to many speculations in turn. Yet even if we refrain from a biographical...