The Importance Of Selfhood In Jane Millay's Poetry

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social constructs. So it seems that selfhood is something one is or has and not an action. The speaker’s selfhood is clearly her dislocation as she addresses the death of a lover in her own personal way, and it does not make her less human but maybe more human for the sake of being honest.
Millay chooses to construct her poems by making the narrative as personal, internal, and articulate as humanly possible for the reader. Her ability to engage the reader in reflecting not only on the characters notion of self, but also their own, is made possible by her realistic and accessible construction of selfhood within her poems. Millay writes about an internal reaction the speaker has when discovering, in a public setting, that her lover has died. The speaker does not show actual emotions as much as she offers up hypothetical ways in which people would most likely expect her to react. Yet, she seems unaffected emotionally. By using the description of common expressions of emotion as examples but not physical actions, Millay may be hinting that an awareness selfhood is an inner understanding...

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