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Dickinson, Emily,
1830-1886
from Literature
Online biography
Published in Cambridge,
2000, by Chadwyck-Healey (a Bell & Howell Information and Learning
Company)
Copyright © 2000 Bell
& Howell Information and Learning Company. All Rights
Reserved.
EMILY DICKINSON presents
particular problems for the biographer. The poet who wrote 'my life has been too
simple and stern to embarrass any' has, since her death, been transformed into
something of a cultural myth, her name conjuring up the image of a spinster
recluse who wore white and was obsessed with death. Such speculative,
sensationalist treatment of this poet's life has proved extremely damaging to
readers' responses to her work. The aim of any biographical sketch of Emily
Dickinson must be to return to the terrain of her material and emotional world,
while avoiding the seductive pitfalls of rumour and legend.
Emily Dickinson was born
on December 10, 1830 in the small Connecticut Valley town of Amherst, New
England. In the eighteenth century, the Connecticut Valley had been the scene of
a series of religious revivals led by Jonathan Edwards and known as The Second
Great Awakening. By the time of Dickinson's birth, Amherst was still viewed as
something of a bastion of traditional Puritanism, attempting to stand firm
against the forces of more liberal religious thought. Dickinson's father,
Edward, was a dominant figure both in public life (as town lawyer and as
representative in the General Court of Massachusetts) and within the family
circle. Yet the popular image of Edward Dickinson as a tyrannical patriarch, an
imposing obstacle to his daughter's creativity, is too reductive and simplistic
a view of a complex character. A more accurate image is of a man schooled in
traditional New England reticence in matters of emotional intimacy, but who
could, nonetheless, prompt his daughter to write of a visit to church: 'We spent
the intermission in mimicking the Preacher, and reciting extracts from his most
memorable sermon. I never heard father so funny' ( Letters , ed. Johnson, L
125). Similar caution needs to be exercised in relation to popular views of
Dickinson's mother. Until recently, critics tended to take literally Dickinson's
enigmatic comment 'I never had a mother,' yet recent research (Vivian Pollak,
Martha Ackmann) has challenged the view of Emily Norcross as an ineffectual and
passive influence on her daughter's life, drawing attention to the strong
tradition of female education within the Norcross family and Dickinson's close
relationship to her Norcross cousins Louise and Francis.
Dickinson's own
education was progressive for its time: from 1840-1847 she attended Amherst
Academy, whose pupils were often given access to speakers invited to address the
older (male) students of Amherst College (the eminent natural scientist,
Professor Edward Hitchcock, lectured there between 1845 and 1849, and is a
probable source for Dickinson's detailed knowledge of this area). From September
1847-August 1848 she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in nearby South
Hadley. Although committed to the conversion of souls, Mount Holyoke was also
attentive to the intellectual development of its female students and offered a
broad and challenging curriculum. The seventeen-year-old Dickinson's reasons for
leaving Mount Holyoke after just two terms are unclear, although letters from
this period point to a mixture of homesickness and a growing resistance to
pressure to give herself to Christ. Such non-conformity in religious matters was
to be a lifelong trait, and a recurring theme of her poetry.
Dickinson returned to
Amherst in 1848 and, with the exception of brief absences, was to remain in the
parental home for the rest of her life. Yet such a position was not,
necessarily, the mark of a reclusive temperament. As a college town, Amherst had
a busy, varied social life, and letters from her adolescence and early twenties
show Dickinson's involvement in that life. Then, during her thirties, came
Dickinson's much analysed retreat from public life. That Dickinson withdrew from
public life is not in dispute; what is in dispute is the tendency of some
critics to assume that this retreat was the mark of an unhinged, abnormal mind.
Among the various critical diagnoses of Dickinson's retreat have been psychotic
breakdown (John Cody) and rejection by a lover. This second thesis has attracted
the most speculation, leading to a range of possible candidates for the title of
lost lover: the popular newspaper editor, Samuel Bowles, the Reverend Charles
Wadsworth and Judge Otis Lord. Such speculation has been fuelled by the
existence of a series of letters from Dickinson to an unidentified 'Master,'
letters in which the Master is addressed in a tone of intense (and often
masochistic) devotion. Recent critics, however, (including Martha Nell Smith)
have argued that rather than reading these letters as addressed to an actual
lover (and becoming fixated on identifying this individual) readers should be
open to the possibility that these letters may never have been sent, that they
may have been imaginative exercises, epistolary performances of emotional
intensity. Certainly, the idea of using romantic loss as a way of explaining
Dickinson's retreat from public life, or the power and intensity of her poetry,
is both highly speculative and, ultimately, reduces a complex poetic process to
a kind of therapy for unrequited love.
In 1976 Adrienne Rich
proposed another way of reading Dickinson's seclusion: as a retreat into a
creative space which offered her more freedom as a writer ('Vesuvius at Home:
The Power of Emily Dickinson'). Underlying Rich's reading is the sense that
given the social position of the nineteenth-century 'spinster' (the assumption
that her life would be subsumed in charitable work) Dickinson's gravitation
towards seclusion may have been a practical strategy for gaining control over
her writing life. Certainly Dickinson's sense of herself as a poet was clear
from her early letters. Writing to her brother Austin in 1853, Dickinson
indulges in some playful rivalry:
And Austin is a Poet,
Austin writes a psalm. Out of the way Pegasus [...] Now Brother Pegasus, I'll
tell you what it is -- I've been in the habit myself of writing some things, and
it rather appears to me that you're getting away my patent [...]. L
110
Another early
correspondent was Susan Gilbert, with whom Dickinson formed a close emotional
bond, a relationship complicated when, in 1856, Sue married Austin. The
emotional consequences of Sue's marriage to Dickinson's brother have been the
subject of much critical debate with readers alert to the intensity of
Dickinson's letters to Sue, an intensity which some have interpreted as highly
eroticised (see Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart, who also highlight
Sue's role as an early reader of Dickinson's poetry). In 1862 Dickinson
initiated a correspondence with the writer and literary critic Thomas Wentworth
Higginson . Dickinson's letters to Higginson (continuing until her death) are
particularly intriguing. In many of the letters she adopts the posture of a
submissive pupil asking for creative guidance from an experienced teacher ('Mr
Higginson , Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?' L 260).
Read closely, however, the letters reveal a fully independent poet, one who,
whilst soliciting Higginson 's advice, never altered her innovative style to
suit his more conventional tastes. What these letters also reveal is Dickinson's
ability to balance intimacy and distance, inviting Higginson into her life, yet
keeping herself (in his words) 'enshroud[ed] [...] in this fiery mist' (L 330a).
It is a strategy which is repeated throughout her letters and one which means
that those turning to the letters for a clearer sense of Dickinson's character
will be disappointed. In many ways, her letters are literary experiments in
self-creation, as condensed and challenging in their use of language as her
poetry and, by the late 1860s, had become her main mode of literary expression
(Salska, The Emily Dickinson Handbook ). Certainly the range and diversity of
Dickinson's correspondence, including figures from the world of journalism
(Bowles, Dr Josiah Holland and Elizabeth Holland) and popular writers (
Higginson , Helen Hunt Jackson ), challenges an overly simplistic view of
Dickinson as a shy, retiring figure. It also challenges the assumption that
Dickinson had little desire to publish (only seven of her poems were published
during her lifetime, these with significant alterations): given that Dickinson's
numerous letters (1,049 have been recovered) often included poems, it could be
argued that these 'letter-poems' represent an alternative form of epistolary
'publication,' a way of circulating her work among a chosen readership, one
independent of the literary marketplace.
Despite Dickinson's
habit of circulating her work through letters, her full productivity was only
discovered after her death in 1886. Her sister Lavinia found some 1,775 poems in
a bureau in her bedroom, a substantial number sown into small booklets (termed
'fascicles' by scholars), others on single worksheets, and some scribbled on a
variety of fragments (envelopes, the back of recipes). The process leading to
the publication of these manuscripts was complicated by tensions within the
Dickinson family. Austin Dickinson's affair with Mabel Loomis Todd (the editor,
with Higginson , of the first and second series of Dickinson's work, Poems 1890
and Poems 1891) led to a situation in which Susan Dickinson retained half of the
manuscripts, Todd the other half. Consequently, the early editions of
Dickinson's poems and letters, tended to proceed either from Todd and her
daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, or from Sue's daughter, Martha Dickinson
Bianchi.
The speed with which the
first series of poems was reprinted (eleven editions by the end of 1892) and the
strong interest in the first edition of Dickinson's letters (1894), gives a
clear sense of the popularity of Dickinson's work among her first readers. Yet
(with some exceptions) these early readers appear to have been drawn to
Dickinson through the growing mythology around her life, and most early
reviewers were less than enthusiastic in their response to her innovative use of
language, viewing her highly condensed, fragmented style (with its hallmark
dash) as the mark of a writer who had failed to grasp the basic grammatical
rules of her craft ( Thomas Aldrich , The Atantic Monthly , 1890). This sense of
a poet whose culture was not prepared for her linguistic difference, is evident
in the fact that many early editions of her work standardised her grammar,
making it conform to more conventional tastes and offering titles for poems
which Dickinson had left untitled--their themes and contexts, tantalisingly
obscure.
One of the earliest
critical approaches to shift the focus away from biographical speculation and
towards the text itself, was that of New Criticism, exemplifed in Allen Tate 's
1932 essay 'New England Culture and Emily Dickinson.' The critical methods of
New Criticism (a prioritization of close textual analysis over issues of
historical or biographical context) led Tate to an early appreciation of the
technical achievement of Dickinson's poetry, yet he was also attentive to the
cultural influence of New England Puritanism upon her work. In 1955 Thomas
Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson , a huge scholarly endeavour
which attempted to reassemble and reorder all the manuscripts (numbered
according to estimated dates) and to produce versions of the poems which
included Dickinson's dashes, her capitalisation, and her variants (alternative
word choices). In 1958 Johnson (with Theodora Ward) published The Letters of
Emily Dickinson . Johnson's editions ignited a new era in Dickinson studies,
displacing the image of the poet of faulty grammar, with that of a writer in
full control of her medium.
Despite a growing sense
of the linguistic power of Dickinson's work and the variety of voices within her
poetry, many readers continued to read the poems in purely biographical terms.
Dickinson herself had foreseen this danger. In a letter to Higginson she wrote:
'When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse -- it does not mean --
me -- but a supposed person'(L268). For Dickinson, hers was not simply a poetics
of the self, but one of 'supposed person[s]', of multiple, imaginative
identities, and even a brief selection of her poems supports this claim: in P874
(Johnson numbering) we encounter the persona of a 'little Girl' confronting the
authority of her elders; in P1072, a self-crowned 'Empress of Calvary'; in P288,
a self-confessed 'Nobody'; and in P315 a speaker (whose gender is never defined)
is at the mercy of some unidentified terror. In P754, we find perhaps her most
explosive 'voice':
My Life had stood -- a
Loaded Gun --
In Corners -- till a
Day
The
Owner passed -- identified --
And carried Me away --
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods --
And now We hunt the Doe
--
And
every time I speak for Him --
The Mountains straight
reply --
. . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . (c. 1863)
While these poems do not
exclude a biographical dimension (many readers have proposed that the 'Loaded
Gun' is a metaphor for Dickinson's relationship to her own poetic power) the
relationship between the life and the poem is a complex one, mediated by the
imaginative energies of the text.
The sometimes fraught
relationship between biography and the Dickinson text, received sensitive,
scholarly treatment in Richard Sewall's indispensable biography of 1974 which
combined close analysis of the poetry with detailed research into Dickinson's
immediate family and her wider cultural environment. The 1980s were
characterised by the contribution of feminist scholars, seeking both to
challenge the gender bias inherent in earlier scholarship and to highlight the
subversive elements within this poet's work: her destabilizing of conventional
constructions of gender (Juhasz, Pollak, Smith) her questioning of cultural
authority, especially that of a traditional Calvinist God (Wolff, Eberwein), and
the ways in which gender may have influenced Dickinson's experimental use of
language (Miller). Cristanne Miller's landmark study A Poet's Grammar (one which
builds upon the linguistic analysis of critics like Roland Hagenbuchle)
describes the 'linguistic screws' Dickinson applies to conventional grammar,
producing a poetry of radical indeterminacy--particularly open to diverse
critical readings. Cynthia Griffin Wolff's 1986 biography of Dickinson
foregrounded the relationship between gender, language and religion. The 1990s
saw a greater problematization of feminist readings of Dickinson, with Mary
Loeffelholz using psychoanalysis and deconstruction to examine not only the
possibilities but also the limits of feminist scholarship.
Such feminist
interventions have reshaped the landscape of Dickinson criticism, providing the
foundations upon which later scholarship has built (even when such scholarship
is not explicitly feminist in nature). This is particularly true in recent
studies of Dickinson as a religious poet. The dominant image of Emily Dickinson
as a religious rebel (a stance which is played out again and again within the
poetry) does not account for the depth and the complexity of her use of the
Bible (the most frequently quoted text in both her poetry and her letters).
Although critics differ as to the degree of Dickinson's faith, some seeing her
as, essentially, a devotional Christian poet (Dorothy Huff Oberhaus), others as
a rather more feisty female prophet (Beth Maclay Doriani), most agree that here
was a writer who never aborted her difficult debate with the God of her Puritan
forefathers, a poet who wrestled with that God (Wolff), and his Word, to the end
of her life.
The most recent
Dickinson scholarship has been focused on the manuscripts and on the issue of
cultural context. Ralph W. Franklin's new variorum edition The Poems of Emily
Dickinson (1998) alerts readers to the differences between a Dickinson poem in
its original manuscript form and in its print translation (e.g. the way in which
the dash has different lengths and directions on the manuscript page, the fact
that Dickinson's manuscript poems, with their variant words and stanzas, raise
fundamental questions about what constitutes a 'final' Dickinson text).
Franklin's Poems has attempted to produce a print version of the poems which is
closer to the multiplicity and variety of the original manuscripts than the
Johnson edition (challenging Johnson's numbering sequence) and it is rapidly
replacing Johnson's as the most authoritative edition of Dickinson's work. Yet
for a growing number of critics, the manuscripts themselves have become the only
adequate source for analyses of this poet's work. Martha Nell Smith, Ellen
Louise Hart, Susan Howe, Sharon Cameron, and Marta Werner are among those at the
forefront of manuscript studies: for Howe and Werner, the visual quality of
Dickinson's inscriptions is essential to a full understanding of her work, and
for Smith, it is only through the manuscript that we can appreciate how
Dickinson's writing challenges conventional ideas of genre, destabilizing our
very sense of what a 'poem' is. Given the fragility of the manuscripts, Smith
and other members of the Dickinson Editing Collective are using the electronic
medium to build a hypertext of manuscript sources, accessible to a wide range of
Dickinson's readers.
The growing interest in
the materiality of the manuscripts is balanced by an interest in another kind of
materiality: that of historical and cultural context. The foundations for this
kind of work were laid by Barton Levi St Armand and by Shira Wolosky in 1984. In
Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War , Wolosky highlights the fact that Dickinson
wrote most of her poetry during the years of the American Civil War (one of the
most traumatic chapters in the history of her nation), a fact which again
challenges the popular conception of Dickinson as a private poet, disconnected
from the national events around her. Most recently, Domhnall Mitchell's Monarch
Of Perception (2000) combines close reading of the manuscripts with an
insistence that Dickinson belongs, not on the margins of her culture, but at its
very centre. Finally, The Emily Dickinson Handbook (1998) provides an invaluable
overview of the past and present state of Dickinson
scholarship.
MS , 2000 | |
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Dickinson, Emily,
1830-1886
from Literature
Online biography
Published in Cambridge,
2000, by Chadwyck-Healey (a Bell & Howell Information and Learning
Company)
Copyright © 2000 Bell
& Howell Information and Learning Company. All Rights
Reserved.
EMILY DICKINSON presents
particular problems for the biographer. The poet who wrote 'my life has been too
simple and stern to embarrass any' has, since her death, been transformed into
something of a cultural myth, her name conjuring up the image of a spinster
recluse who wore white and was obsessed with death. Such speculative,
sensationalist treatment of this poet's life has proved extremely damaging to
readers' responses to her work. The aim of any biographical sketch of Emily
Dickinson must be to return to the terrain of her material and emotional world,
while avoiding the seductive pitfalls of rumour and legend.
Emily Dickinson was born
on December 10, 1830 in the small Connecticut Valley town of Amherst, New
England. In the eighteenth century, the Connecticut Valley had been the scene of
a series of religious revivals led by Jonathan Edwards and known as The Second
Great Awakening. By the time of Dickinson's birth, Amherst was still viewed as
something of a bastion of traditional Puritanism, attempting to stand firm
against the forces of more liberal religious thought. Dickinson's father,
Edward, was a dominant figure both in public life (as town lawyer and as
representative in the General Court of Massachusetts) and within the family
circle. Yet the popular image of Edward Dickinson as a tyrannical patriarch, an
imposing obstacle to his daughter's creativity, is too reductive and simplistic
a view of a complex character. A more accurate image is of a man schooled in
traditional New England reticence in matters of emotional intimacy, but who
could, nonetheless, prompt his daughter to write of a visit to church: 'We spent
the intermission in mimicking the Preacher, and reciting extracts from his most
memorable sermon. I never heard father so funny' ( Letters , ed. Johnson, L
125). Similar caution needs to be exercised in relation to popular views of
Dickinson's mother. Until recently, critics tended to take literally Dickinson's
enigmatic comment 'I never had a mother,' yet recent research (Vivian Pollak,
Martha Ackmann) has challenged the view of Emily Norcross as an ineffectual and
passive influence on her daughter's life, drawing attention to the strong
tradition of female education within the Norcross family and Dickinson's close
relationship to her Norcross cousins Louise and Francis.
Dickinson's own
education was progressive for its time: from 1840-1847 she attended Amherst
Academy, whose pupils were often given access to speakers invited to address the
older (male) students of Amherst College (the eminent natural scientist,
Professor Edward Hitchcock, lectured there between 1845 and 1849, and is a
probable source for Dickinson's detailed knowledge of this area). From September
1847-August 1848 she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in nearby South
Hadley. Although committed to the conversion of souls, Mount Holyoke was also
attentive to the intellectual development of its female students and offered a
broad and challenging curriculum. The seventeen-year-old Dickinson's reasons for
leaving Mount Holyoke after just two terms are unclear, although letters from
this period point to a mixture of homesickness and a growing resistance to
pressure to give herself to Christ. Such non-conformity in religious matters was
to be a lifelong trait, and a recurring theme of her poetry.
Dickinson returned to
Amherst in 1848 and, with the exception of brief absences, was to remain in the
parental home for the rest of her life. Yet such a position was not,
necessarily, the mark of a reclusive temperament. As a college town, Amherst had
a busy, varied social life, and letters from her adolescence and early twenties
show Dickinson's involvement in that life. Then, during her thirties, came
Dickinson's much analysed retreat from public life. That Dickinson withdrew from
public life is not in dispute; what is in dispute is the tendency of some
critics to assume that this retreat was the mark of an unhinged, abnormal mind.
Among the various critical diagnoses of Dickinson's retreat have been psychotic
breakdown (John Cody) and rejection by a lover. This second thesis has attracted
the most speculation, leading to a range of possible candidates for the title of
lost lover: the popular newspaper editor, Samuel Bowles, the Reverend Charles
Wadsworth and Judge Otis Lord. Such speculation has been fuelled by the
existence of a series of letters from Dickinson to an unidentified 'Master,'
letters in which the Master is addressed in a tone of intense (and often
masochistic) devotion. Recent critics, however, (including Martha Nell Smith)
have argued that rather than reading these letters as addressed to an actual
lover (and becoming fixated on identifying this individual) readers should be
open to the possibility that these letters may never have been sent, that they
may have been imaginative exercises, epistolary performances of emotional
intensity. Certainly, the idea of using romantic loss as a way of explaining
Dickinson's retreat from public life, or the power and intensity of her poetry,
is both highly speculative and, ultimately, reduces a complex poetic process to
a kind of therapy for unrequited love.
In 1976 Adrienne Rich
proposed another way of reading Dickinson's seclusion: as a retreat into a
creative space which offered her more freedom as a writer ('Vesuvius at Home:
The Power of Emily Dickinson'). Underlying Rich's reading is the sense that
given the social position of the nineteenth-century 'spinster' (the assumption
that her life would be subsumed in charitable work) Dickinson's gravitation
towards seclusion may have been a practical strategy for gaining control over
her writing life. Certainly Dickinson's sense of herself as a poet was clear
from her early letters. Writing to her brother Austin in 1853, Dickinson
indulges in some playful rivalry:
And Austin is a Poet,
Austin writes a psalm. Out of the way Pegasus [...] Now Brother Pegasus, I'll
tell you what it is -- I've been in the habit myself of writing some things, and
it rather appears to me that you're getting away my patent [...]. L
110
Another early
correspondent was Susan Gilbert, with whom Dickinson formed a close emotional
bond, a relationship complicated when, in 1856, Sue married Austin. The
emotional consequences of Sue's marriage to Dickinson's brother have been the
subject of much critical debate with readers alert to the intensity of
Dickinson's letters to Sue, an intensity which some have interpreted as highly
eroticised (see Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart, who also highlight
Sue's role as an early reader of Dickinson's poetry). In 1862 Dickinson
initiated a correspondence with the writer and literary critic Thomas Wentworth
Higginson . Dickinson's letters to Higginson (continuing until her death) are
particularly intriguing. In many of the letters she adopts the posture of a
submissive pupil asking for creative guidance from an experienced teacher ('Mr
Higginson , Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?' L 260).
Read closely, however, the letters reveal a fully independent poet, one who,
whilst soliciting Higginson 's advice, never altered her innovative style to
suit his more conventional tastes. What these letters also reveal is Dickinson's
ability to balance intimacy and distance, inviting Higginson into her life, yet
keeping herself (in his words) 'enshroud[ed] [...] in this fiery mist' (L 330a).
It is a strategy which is repeated throughout her letters and one which means
that those turning to the letters for a clearer sense of Dickinson's character
will be disappointed. In many ways, her letters are literary experiments in
self-creation, as condensed and challenging in their use of language as her
poetry and, by the late 1860s, had become her main mode of literary expression
(Salska, The Emily Dickinson Handbook ). Certainly the range and diversity of
Dickinson's correspondence, including figures from the world of journalism
(Bowles, Dr Josiah Holland and Elizabeth Holland) and popular writers (
Higginson , Helen Hunt Jackson ), challenges an overly simplistic view of
Dickinson as a shy, retiring figure. It also challenges the assumption that
Dickinson had little desire to publish (only seven of her poems were published
during her lifetime, these with significant alterations): given that Dickinson's
numerous letters (1,049 have been recovered) often included poems, it could be
argued that these 'letter-poems' represent an alternative form of epistolary
'publication,' a way of circulating her work among a chosen readership, one
independent of the literary marketplace.
Despite Dickinson's
habit of circulating her work through letters, her full productivity was only
discovered after her death in 1886. Her sister Lavinia found some 1,775 poems in
a bureau in her bedroom, a substantial number sown into small booklets (termed
'fascicles' by scholars), others on single worksheets, and some scribbled on a
variety of fragments (envelopes, the back of recipes). The process leading to
the publication of these manuscripts was complicated by tensions within the
Dickinson family. Austin Dickinson's affair with Mabel Loomis Todd (the editor,
with Higginson , of the first and second series of Dickinson's work, Poems 1890
and Poems 1891) led to a situation in which Susan Dickinson retained half of the
manuscripts, Todd the other half. Consequently, the early editions of
Dickinson's poems and letters, tended to proceed either from Todd and her
daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, or from Sue's daughter, Martha Dickinson
Bianchi.
The speed with which the
first series of poems was reprinted (eleven editions by the end of 1892) and the
strong interest in the first edition of Dickinson's letters (1894), gives a
clear sense of the popularity of Dickinson's work among her first readers. Yet
(with some exceptions) these early readers appear to have been drawn to
Dickinson through the growing mythology around her life, and most early
reviewers were less than enthusiastic in their response to her innovative use of
language, viewing her highly condensed, fragmented style (with its hallmark
dash) as the mark of a writer who had failed to grasp the basic grammatical
rules of her craft ( Thomas Aldrich , The Atantic Monthly , 1890). This sense of
a poet whose culture was not prepared for her linguistic difference, is evident
in the fact that many early editions of her work standardised her grammar,
making it conform to more conventional tastes and offering titles for poems
which Dickinson had left untitled--their themes and contexts, tantalisingly
obscure.
One of the earliest
critical approaches to shift the focus away from biographical speculation and
towards the text itself, was that of New Criticism, exemplifed in Allen Tate 's
1932 essay 'New England Culture and Emily Dickinson.' The critical methods of
New Criticism (a prioritization of close textual analysis over issues of
historical or biographical context) led Tate to an early appreciation of the
technical achievement of Dickinson's poetry, yet he was also attentive to the
cultural influence of New England Puritanism upon her work. In 1955 Thomas
Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson , a huge scholarly endeavour
which attempted to reassemble and reorder all the manuscripts (numbered
according to estimated dates) and to produce versions of the poems which
included Dickinson's dashes, her capitalisation, and her variants (alternative
word choices). In 1958 Johnson (with Theodora Ward) published The Letters of
Emily Dickinson . Johnson's editions ignited a new era in Dickinson studies,
displacing the image of the poet of faulty grammar, with that of a writer in
full control of her medium.
Despite a growing sense
of the linguistic power of Dickinson's work and the variety of voices within her
poetry, many readers continued to read the poems in purely biographical terms.
Dickinson herself had foreseen this danger. In a letter to Higginson she wrote:
'When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse -- it does not mean --
me -- but a supposed person'(L268). For Dickinson, hers was not simply a poetics
of the self, but one of 'supposed person[s]', of multiple, imaginative
identities, and even a brief selection of her poems supports this claim: in P874
(Johnson numbering) we encounter the persona of a 'little Girl' confronting the
authority of her elders; in P1072, a self-crowned 'Empress of Calvary'; in P288,
a self-confessed 'Nobody'; and in P315 a speaker (whose gender is never defined)
is at the mercy of some unidentified terror. In P754, we find perhaps her most
explosive 'voice':
My Life had stood -- a
Loaded Gun --
In Corners -- till a
Day
The
Owner passed -- identified --
And carried Me away --
And now We roam in Sovereign Woods --
And now We hunt the Doe
--
And
every time I speak for Him --
The Mountains straight
reply --
. . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . (c. 1863)
While these poems do not
exclude a biographical dimension (many readers have proposed that the 'Loaded
Gun' is a metaphor for Dickinson's relationship to her own poetic power) the
relationship between the life and the poem is a complex one, mediated by the
imaginative energies of the text.
The sometimes fraught
relationship between biography and the Dickinson text, received sensitive,
scholarly treatment in Richard Sewall's indispensable biography of 1974 which
combined close analysis of the poetry with detailed research into Dickinson's
immediate family and her wider cultural environment. The 1980s were
characterised by the contribution of feminist scholars, seeking both to
challenge the gender bias inherent in earlier scholarship and to highlight the
subversive elements within this poet's work: her destabilizing of conventional
constructions of gender (Juhasz, Pollak, Smith) her questioning of cultural
authority, especially that of a traditional Calvinist God (Wolff, Eberwein), and
the ways in which gender may have influenced Dickinson's experimental use of
language (Miller). Cristanne Miller's landmark study A Poet's Grammar (one which
builds upon the linguistic analysis of critics like Roland Hagenbuchle)
describes the 'linguistic screws' Dickinson applies to conventional grammar,
producing a poetry of radical indeterminacy--particularly open to diverse
critical readings. Cynthia Griffin Wolff's 1986 biography of Dickinson
foregrounded the relationship between gender, language and religion. The 1990s
saw a greater problematization of feminist readings of Dickinson, with Mary
Loeffelholz using psychoanalysis and deconstruction to examine not only the
possibilities but also the limits of feminist scholarship.
Such feminist
interventions have reshaped the landscape of Dickinson criticism, providing the
foundations upon which later scholarship has built (even when such scholarship
is not explicitly feminist in nature). This is particularly true in recent
studies of Dickinson as a religious poet. The dominant image of Emily Dickinson
as a religious rebel (a stance which is played out again and again within the
poetry) does not account for the depth and the complexity of her use of the
Bible (the most frequently quoted text in both her poetry and her letters).
Although critics differ as to the degree of Dickinson's faith, some seeing her
as, essentially, a devotional Christian poet (Dorothy Huff Oberhaus), others as
a rather more feisty female prophet (Beth Maclay Doriani), most agree that here
was a writer who never aborted her difficult debate with the God of her Puritan
forefathers, a poet who wrestled with that God (Wolff), and his Word, to the end
of her life.
The most recent
Dickinson scholarship has been focused on the manuscripts and on the issue of
cultural context. Ralph W. Franklin's new variorum edition The Poems of Emily
Dickinson (1998) alerts readers to the differences between a Dickinson poem in
its original manuscript form and in its print translation (e.g. the way in which
the dash has different lengths and directions on the manuscript page, the fact
that Dickinson's manuscript poems, with their variant words and stanzas, raise
fundamental questions about what constitutes a 'final' Dickinson text).
Franklin's Poems has attempted to produce a print version of the poems which is
closer to the multiplicity and variety of the original manuscripts than the
Johnson edition (challenging Johnson's numbering sequence) and it is rapidly
replacing Johnson's as the most authoritative edition of Dickinson's work. Yet
for a growing number of critics, the manuscripts themselves have become the only
adequate source for analyses of this poet's work. Martha Nell Smith, Ellen
Louise Hart, Susan Howe, Sharon Cameron, and Marta Werner are among those at the
forefront of manuscript studies: for Howe and Werner, the visual quality of
Dickinson's inscriptions is essential to a full understanding of her work, and
for Smith, it is only through the manuscript that we can appreciate how
Dickinson's writing challenges conventional ideas of genre, destabilizing our
very sense of what a 'poem' is. Given the fragility of the manuscripts, Smith
and other members of the Dickinson Editing Collective are using the electronic
medium to build a hypertext of manuscript sources, accessible to a wide range of
Dickinson's readers.
The growing interest in
the materiality of the manuscripts is balanced by an interest in another kind of
materiality: that of historical and cultural context. The foundations for this
kind of work were laid by Barton Levi St Armand and by Shira Wolosky in 1984. In
Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War , Wolosky highlights the fact that Dickinson
wrote most of her poetry during the years of the American Civil War (one of the
most traumatic chapters in the history of her nation), a fact which again
challenges the popular conception of Dickinson as a private poet, disconnected
from the national events around her. Most recently, Domhnall Mitchell's Monarch
Of Perception (2000) combines close reading of the manuscripts with an
insistence that Dickinson belongs, not on the margins of her culture, but at its
very centre. Finally, The Emily Dickinson Handbook (1998) provides an invaluable
overview of the past and present state of Dickinson
scholarship.
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