ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Dickinson's poetic performance of Death. It highlights both her provocative deployment of a deathbed model inherited from her Victorian culture and her modification of the Romantic Liebestod model. The chapter draws some rough distinctions between Arnim's and Dickinson's constructs of death. The 'Bed' alludes to a ritual of both death and love. The female addressee is called upon to 'Ample make this Bed', to extend her quotidian female identity. The death ritual's role in identity formation is central to Dickinson's world, making the space of her poem, as Suzanne Juhasz and Cristanne Miller argue, 'into a stage, where on poet may play a multitude of self-positionings'. The Romantics, who take up the theme from medieval Dances of Death, animate Death with new erotic, but also temporal, overtones that undermine the Enlightenment's nature/culture dichotomy. The erotic violation that disrupts the individual's assumed plenitude and dismantles her controlled, fixed self-containment is vital for her emergence as a subject.
