Emily Dickinson believes that conformity limits one’s ability. She has written poems about societies’ views on conformity and the containment society has on different ideas and people. She even gives examples of this by explaining how society expected women to act as a wife. Through her poems, Emily Dickinson portrayed her views of conformity through the explanation of domesticated housewives in “She Rose to His Requirement” and the views of conflicting new ideas in society in “Much Madness is Divinest Sense.”

“She Rose to His Requirement” explores what women during Emily Dickinson’s time had gone through. As the title suggests, women were expected to become a domesticated housewife to their husband. The first stanza describes that these housewives have to give up everything for the husband, “to take the honorable Work / Of Woman, and of Wife“(line 3-4). The “honorable work” Dickinson writes about is that women were relied upon to be in charge of the house. The ironic tone sets up the following stanza. It talks about everything a woman gives up when she becomes a wife. The wife loses things, “Of Amplitude, or Awe – / Or first Prospective – Or the Gold” (6-7). She loses her potential of becoming a great person when she decides to marry. She is also not given the chance to experience new things or even get a job for herself. The last stanza expresses the wasted potential of the wife. Dickinson compares a wife’s potential to a pearl that, “lay unmentioned… But only to Himself” (9, 11). The wife is hidden like a pearl and that only the husband sees the greatness his wife is able to achieve. Although being a wife is a noble job, Dickinson has seen too many women waste their potential becoming one.

“Much Madness is Divinest Sense” starts off with an inversion. Emily Dickinson calls madness the “divinest Sense– / To a discerning Eye” and calls sense “the