Deconstructing "Marriage" (the poem's first disseminated signifier)

       The poem's great aporia occurs because the speaker cannot name "Marriage."  That unspeakable signifier disseminates the even more unspeakable signifier, "Wedding Night," and that signifier disseminates "Sexual Intercourse," the Elizabethans' "little Death," a source of "Pain" for virgin "Girls." 

        "Sexual Intercourse," of course, is the signifier which literally and figuratively disseminates "Girls" for "Men" to marry.  The poem cannot name "Men," either, though they are necessary to make "Wife" in Dickinson's era, but "Men" do lurk in "Wife"'s cross-signifying claim to be "Czar."  Were we to apply Queer Theory to detect further ideological forces in the text, we would "queer the text" by drawing attention to the explicit "cross-signifying" the Wife/Czar deploys to attempt to appropriate male power (Tyson 334-6).  The Wife's second stanza's next move is to use "odd" to name "the girl's life," implicitly acknowledging an inexpressible difference which we might identify as a cognate of the modern "queer," the shining, polymorphous sexuality available to "girl" which has been "eclipsed" by Wife's descecnt into the unspeakable male Marriage.