Readers and “The Soul Selects Her Society”

Abstract

This paper explores the reader’s role in interpreting Emily Dickinson’s poem 303. In “The Soul Selects,” Dickinson manipulates and puzzles her readers through the use of ambiguity and indeterminacy. She deliberately made her poetry hard because she wanted only elite readers to read and get her. Poem 303 supports this idea about Dickinson because it mentions an act of selection that is performed by a certain soul. As the reception history of the poem demonstrates, many readers have approached the poem with curiosity and with the hope that he/she could reveal the referent of the “soul” and the “society.” Those many interpretations, however, do not help us establish the “real meaning” of the poem. Rather, they help demonstrate the poem is about reading itself and that the act of selection is a figurative reference to the act of reading and interpreting as practiced by different critics and readers..