We have a tendency to take for granted that wherever a boundary is drawn a wild frontier is formed. Because even keeping house was an act of primitive human survival for Anne Bradstreet, her poetry is there to remind us that meaning occurs at the borderland, or frontier, overlapping designated poetic spheres. In this thesis collection of poetry, I set out to explore the formation of identity as a boundary event where a sense of self is established through the construction of borders. In this collection, identity presents its own frontier, where boundaries of the body, of gender, class, and race intersect and overlap. This collection explores not just the frontier spaces between wilderness and domesticity, girlhood and womanhood, but also explores the possibility of reshaping borderlands to construct a sense of unity across boundary lines that would overlap the spheres or domains bounded and fragmented by the construction of borders.
American Literature, Poetry, girlhood, femininity, domesticity, wilderness, gender, relationships
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