Emily Dickinson's, poem, "The Wife" reveals the poet's concerns for domestic femininity in middle-class families through expressing the gender roles of females and using the term "wife" frequently. Although she could never be a wife in her lifetime, the reflection of self-private and the domesticity of household females could be seen in the poem through the contrasts in the three stanzas. Evidently, the persona of the poem is female, and conventionalities of marriage are expressed from the perspective of a female. At some stage, Dickinson has the notion that to be a woman, who comfort the idea of being a "woman", marriage is an inevitable part of a girl's life as "it's safer so". As a matter of fact, Dickinson's notion of marriage would have treated as a norm of a woman's life in the early 19th century of American society. Once a woman was married, her life would be confined and bounded by the domestic sphere since the mainstream back then had the tendency of indicating that it was the man who brought home the bacon whilst the woman was mostly maintaining a household and taking care children ultimately. .
Dickinson illustrates the subtle femininity change of females from women to wives. They usually become more masculine. In the first stanza, Dickinson starts the poem with "I'm 'wife'"the image of a traditional female persona is created as someone who "finished that-/That other state/" and essentially turned to be the "Czar" or, in other words, the woman becomes the ruler of herself, after she gets married. As we can see in this stanza, Dickinson quotation marks the femininely inflected words "wife", "woman". Furthermore, there is a dash connecting "Woman" to the masculinely inflected word "Czar", which is not in quotation mark. She uses the word Czar as a metaphor for emphasizing that to get married was a crucial step to have access to societal status back in the 19th century.
