‘The Heart cannot forget / Unless
it contemplate / What it declines’:
Emily Dickinson, Frank Ankersmit
and the Art of Forgetting
Páraic Finnerty
To move away from the pedestrian world of daily reality to that of art and poetry is extremely difficult, but once this step has successfully been made, one has entered a world in which everything is permitted.
F. R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (2005: 429)
Imagine the extremest possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forgetting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming.
F. Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (1997: 62)
Most critics of nineteenth-century literature would be surprised to discover that Frank Ankersmit, a renowned scholar of historiography, the philosophy of history and historical theory, uses lines by the reclusive American poet Emily Dickinson to encapsulate his ideas about how humanity relates to the past. The lines ‘The Heart cannot forget / Unless it contemplate / What it declines’ from her 1883 poem ‘To Be Forgot by thee’ (Dickinson 1998: 1405; Fr1601) are an epigraph for and discussed briefly within Ankersmit’s 2001 essay ‘The Sublime Dissociation of the Past: Or How to Be(come) What One Is No Longer’, a revised version of which forms the central and titular chapter of his book Sublime Historical Experience (2005). While many Dickinson scholars would concur with Harold Bloom’s assessment of Dickinson’s ‘startling intellectual complexity’ and ‘cognitive originality’, as well as his belief that in her ‘lyrical mediations’ she ‘rethought everything for herself’ (Bloom 1995: 291), few would expect to find in her writings ideas relevant to humanity’s relationship to and representation of the past. Ankersmit’s incorporation of Dickinson into his discussion of historical experience is, however, in line with recent scholarship of the poet that has challenged an earlier view that she ‘did not live in history and held no view of it’ (Johnson 1958: xx) and ‘epitomize[d] almost to the point of parody the gender expectations of her society: that women remain domestic, modest, and hidden’ (Wolosky 2013b: 79). Resisting ‘the tendency to privatize Dickinson’ and position the poet and her writings outside history, recent critics have shown that Dickinson was ‘vitally engaged with multiple aspects of her culture – literary, social, cultural, religious, and political’ (Mitchell 2000: 2; Miller 2012: 2).
Representative of this approach is the important essay collection Emily Dickinson and Philosophy (2013), which situates the poet ‘within the intellectual culture of her time’, such as Common Sense philosophy, Higher Criticism, German Idealism and New England Transcendentalism, and demonstrates her anticipation of concepts and perspectives associated with later philosophical movements such as existentialism and phenomenology by drawing parallels between her ideas and those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger (Deppman et al. 2013: 5). Yet the closest this collection, or Dickinson scholarship more generally, comes to a discussion of Dickinson’s ideas of history is Daniel Fineman’s essay ‘Against Mastery: Dickinson Contra Hegel and Schlegel’. ‘Dickinson’s poetic practice’, Fineman argues, draws on ‘Hegel’s method of progressive negation, of sublation, coupled with a Schlegel-like sense of the necessary systematic ironies resident in acts of comprehension’; however, she counters their shared ‘presumption of totalization and mastery that comes from a masculine orientation’ by foregrounding ‘the interplay between the immediate sensory demands of language as object and the always-frustrated desire for final meaning’ (Fineman 2013: 88, 89, 90). As Fineman puts it,
[her] lyrics appear to realize in miniature the Hegelian trajectory of history: they gain a new object and enlarged vision out of the progressive cancellation of their own initial foci . . . [; however, she] does not share Hegel’s faith that history advances because the revolutionary understanding of the last paradigm’s incomplete knowledge, its negativity, is the very means to the next period’s fuller sight. (Fineman 2013: 85–6)
Rejecting the possibility of progressive forms of comprehension, Dickinson’s writing, in form and in content, foregrounds the uncertain, fragmentary and incomplete; in her work, the ‘insufficiency of language to experience means that no depiction is ever final: ultimately finality is not attainable or even desirable’ (Wolosky 2013a: 138). Viewed within this context, Ankersmit’s orientation to Dickinson’s work is less surprising as both he, particularly in Historical Sublime Experience, and the Amherst poet are interested in experiences – complex, mysterious or sublime – which, once acknowledged, challenge orthodox conceptions of language, truth and knowledge. As Ankersmit puts it, ‘Where you have language experience is not, and vice versa. We have language in order not to have experience and to avoid the fears and terrors that are typically provoked by experience’ (Ankersmit 2005: 11). Dickinson, like Ankersmit, is fascinated and imaginatively exhilarated by the fearful and terrifying ‘void of being’, the formlessness and nothingness hidden from us by fictive ideas and reality effects, without which we would be ‘exposed to the nature of actuality plain before human beings got at it and (contingently) real-ized it’ (Jenkins 2008: 547).
This chapter examines Dickinson’s representations of past experiences and her exploration of forgetfulness in the context of Ankersmit’s ideas about humanity’s experience of the past. For Ankersmit, historical writing stems from and attempts to remedy humanity’s experience of its separation from the past and its desire for access to this foreclosed realm. The division between the past and present becomes most pronounced and undeniable at moments of social and political upheaval, which generate sublime experiences as a former worldview disturbs the mental categories and frameworks through which a current world order is understood and perceived. He offers the French Revolution, Industrial Revolution and Death of God as examples of events which cataclysmically changed ‘the life of [individuals] in every conceivable aspect’ and represent ‘the most decisive and profound changes’ that people in the West have ‘undergone in the course of their history’ (Ankersmit 2005: 323). Such ‘historical change’ makes itself ‘felt with traumatic intensity’ in the case of individuals and resounds ‘in the collective consciousness of a whole generation’, creating ‘an insurmountable barrier between past and present that could impossibly be denied or undone’ (Ankersmit 2005: 143). At such moments of dramatic transformation, there is a collective ‘forgetting [of] a previous world and . . . shedding [of] a former identity’ as a condition of ‘entering a wholly new world’ (Ankersmit 2005: 323). Such forgetfulness is a collective response to the ‘fact of [such] a rupture with the past and [is] how this rupture is experienced by the human individual’; what is abandoned or forgotten is experienced in its absence, associated with a mythic world that is ‘forever and irrevocably outside [one’s] reach’, and sublimely encountered as an epistemological and conceptual challenge to a current worldview (Ankersmit 2005: 188, 189). Ankersmit’s ideas offer a new way of understanding much-discussed features of Dickinson’s work, especially her preoccupation with past events and experiences, loss and memory, and, most strikingly, her couching of these in imagery and language associated with the sublime and in relation to psychological self-division and incomprehensible states. These elements of her writing along with her figurations of death, violence and revolution are indicators of what Ankersmit terms sublime historical experience, reflecting her position as writing after the American Revolution and during a shift within her Anglo-American culture which, put in Ankersmit’s terms, involved the loss of a ‘former identity’ centred on religious belief, and the designation of a new secular and sceptical identity ‘precisely in terms of what has been discarded and surrendered’ (Ankersmit 2005: 13). Similarly telling of Dickinson’s sensitivity and response to her culture’s mood and collective consciousness is her specific attention to the theme of forgetfulness, which first appears in her letters to Abiah Root from the late 1840s and early 1850s. In these communications, she expresses her refusal to profess publicly her Christianity at a time of religious revival in Amherst, when all of her family and most of her friends and neighbours were experiencing the joys of a declaration of faith. Ideas about forgetting, conceptualised in these early letters, recur in later poems that explore the pain of being forgotten and the difficulty of forgetting. Her repeated concern with the concept and practice of forgetting signifies her participation in what Ankersmit calls the ‘avalanche of literature’ that poeticises change-overs from one order of things to another (Ankersmit 2005: 366)
A WORLD WE HAVE LOST
Ankersmit’s citation of Dickinson draws her into his argument about the limitations placed on our understanding of how we experience the past by the ways in which it is rhetorically, textually and narratively constructed by historical writing (see Domańska 2009: 181–2). What is left out of historical writing is historical experience, of which he predominantly discusses two main types: subjective and sublime. Subjective historical experience occurs as a reaction to the distance and difference between the past and present, for example, in ‘a direct encounter not only with the past in its quasi-noumenal attire but also with the aura of a world we have lost’ (Ankersmit 2005: 265). Sublime historical experience, in contrast, happens at a devastating and exhilarating ‘divergence of present and past’ or an ‘experience of the past breaking away from the present’:
The past is then born from the historian’s traumatic experience of having entered a new world and from the awareness of irreparably having lost a previous world forever. In such cases the historian’s mind is, so to say, the scene on which the drama of world history is enacted. (Ankersmit 2005: 265)
Sublime historical experience shapes historical consciousness and writing, but is also, for him, available to any individual (although he focuses on the historian) who witnesses or records the dramatic separation of present and past: ‘subjective historical experience may well give rise to a feeling of loss and disorientation – and then some of the sublimity of the [other] type of historical experience will be imparted to subjective historical experience’ (Ankersmit 2005: 266). In this context and while acknowledging that from the nineteenth century onwards historians have connected the identity of a nation, people or institution with establishing information and forms of knowledge about past events, Ankersmit argues that forgetting or losing a collective identity is just as fundamental to the way in which we relate to and construct historical discourse. Such forgetting, for him, is connected with the category of the sublime, which to a large extent is the ‘philosophical equivalent of the psychological notion of trauma’ (Ankersmit 2005: 318). Whereas traumatic experience can challenge our sense of identity, sublime experience requires the abandonment of a past identity and its accompanying conceptual patterns of thought, feeling and belief. Historical transformation rests on a process of forgetting: ‘one has become what one is no longer’: ‘one’s former identity, is now transformed into the identity of the person who knows (and no longer is) his former identity’ (Ankersmit 2005: 333). Our collective identity then is defined by ‘what we are no longer, by what we have forgotten and repudiated’ (Ankersmit 2005: 340). Having described the process of forgetting as ‘the lost object, is first, pulled within the subject in order to be, next, repelled again as a criticised object – where it will, lastly, forever remain part of the subject in this guise’, Ankersmit adds: ‘this is, summarized in one sentence, the entire mechanism I am describing in this chapter (and, even more succinctly, encapsulated in Emily Dickinson’s poem that I used as its epigraph)’ (Ankersmit 2005: 341). He goes on:
forgetting is possible only on the condition of a perfect memory (think again of the Dickinson poem). The past first has to be fully admitted to our identity, to be recognized as a world that we have left behind us, and only then can it be discarded and give way to a new identity. (Ankersmit 2005: 343)
Before offering a fuller interpretation of this Dickinson poem within the context of her frequent inquiry into the topic of forgetting, it is important to consider her writing’s fixation on the past and its replaying and dissection of prior experiences and events in relation to Ankersmit’s theory. Alfred Habegger, for example, notes her regular scrutiny of ‘acts of memory’ and personal history in relation to singularity, and gains and losses, a practice intensified at various points in her writing career. Typically, in these poetic ‘backward glances’, her speakers attempt but often fail to draw ‘a firm line between past and present’ (Habegger 2001: 499, 531). In one poem, ‘Remembrance has a rear and front’ (Dickinson 1998: 485, Fr1063), remembrance is presented as a gothic house full of dangerous ‘Fathoms’ and refuse, while in another, ‘To flee from memory’ (Dickinson 1998: 1161–2, Fr1343), the vault of memory is something that must be kept closed or a place from which a speaker tries but inevitably fails to flee (see Habegger 2001: 525–37). David Porter argues that in fact her poetry is dominated by this ‘back-looking view’ and speakers who record their experience of ‘living after things happen’, ‘living in the aftermath’ (Porter 1981: 9). Many of these aftermath poems centre on a retrospective explication and re-experiencing of a past crisis or profound loss that has shattered thought and language. In one such poem, the speaker struggles to delineate a past occurrence that transcended conventional categories and expectations, and caused an unravelling of identity and meaning:
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –
As if my Brain had split –
I tried to match it – Seam by Seam –
But could not make them fit –
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before –
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound –
Like Balls – upon a Floor –
(Dickinson 1998: 812; Fr867B)
Dickinson’s frequent descriptions of such scenes of former awe and terror in which epistemological and ontological connections and associations are compromised have been identified as her specific take on the Romantic sublime. In such poems, Dickinson, according to Gary Lee Stonum, is attracted to the liminal state or threshold position between the ‘actual intensity of the past moment’, either traumatic or ecstatic, and a future or imagined resolution; as such she prolongs the sublime encounter that discomposes experience and identity, skirting the closure, coherence and mastery associated with the reactive stage of the orthodox sublime (Stonum 1990: 160).
The provocative parallels between features in Dickinson’s sublime constructions of looking back on former states of being and Ankersmit’s delineation of the sublime experience of a sundering of the past and present suggest her poetry as the unexpected ‘scene on which the drama of world history is enacted’ (Ankersmit 2005: 265). ‘I felt a Cleaving in my Mind’ along with other similar retrospective poems map the idea of language as no longer offering what Ankersmit calls ‘the shield protecting us against the terrors of a direct contact with the world as conveyed by experience’ (Ankersmit 2005: 11). Moreover, in line with Ankersmit’s ideas, Dickinson represents the experience of the past as a grappling with the sublime; it is ‘as close to death as one may come’; as ‘nothing less than an act of suicide’; as an occurrence so world shattering that ‘“normal” patterns of experience are disrupted’ and an ‘abyss [emerges] between two different historical or cultural identities’ (Ankersmit 2005: 325, 343, 346, 327). Poems such as ‘It Was Not Death, for I Stood Up’ (Dickinson 1998: 379–80, Fr355), ‘I felt a Funeral in my Brain’ (Dickinson 1998: 365–6, Fr340) and ‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –’ (Dickinson 1998: 587, Fr591) cover existential territory that correlates with what Ankersmit terms authentic experiences: ‘[w]e die a partial death at such moments since all that we are is then reduced to just this feeling or experience’ (Ankersmit 2005: 228). In these poems a former event causes ‘cognitive rupture’ and ‘the decomposition of sequential thought’, and marks a death-like ‘rupture between normal understanding and the sublimely traumatized consciousness’ (Stonum 1990: 173, 74). Connoting sublime historical experience, these speakers recall but seemingly fail to transcend the dread and thrill of prior sublime encounters, that take them beyond language and familiarity to the realm of alterity; each speaker seems ‘to objectify a former self, as if [she] had suddenly become an outsider to [her] own (former) self’ (Ankersmit 2005: 347). That these past events are over, yet they inspire a desire to explicate and re-experience them, anticipates Ankersmit’s sense of the ‘sublime discrepancy between the desire of being and that of our knowledge of the past’; such poems are in microcosm ‘account[s] of the experiences of rupture with all “the worlds we have lost”’ (Ankersmit 2005: 359).
As Ankersmit theorises it, sublime historical experience generates not only the type of epistemological and ontological dissociation in such poems, but more specifically creates a range of interrelated paradoxes connected to subjectivity:
[it] is the kind of experience of forcing us to abandon the position in which we still coincide with ourselves and to exchange this for a position where we relate to ourselves in the most literal sense of the word, hence, as if we were two persons instead of just one. (Ankersmit 2005: 347)
Dickinson’s poems on memory and aftermath conjure up what Ankersmit describes as ‘feelings of a profound and irreparable loss, of cultural despair, and of hopeless disorientation’, but also often explicitly infer that ‘a former identity is irrevocably lost forever and superseded by a new historical or cultural identity’ (Ankersmit 2005: 324). For him, however, what has been seemingly lost in this process has, on some level, also been retained:
One now is what one is, because one no longer is what one was – and this not being any longer what one was, is what one has essentially now become. It is as if something has been turned inside out. One has discarded (part of the) past from one’s identity, and in this sense one has forgotten it. But one has not forgotten that one has forgotten it, for that one has forgotten precisely this is constitutive of the new identity. (Ankersmit 2005: 333)
He goes on: ‘[c]onstitutive of the identity of contemporary Western [humanity] is [its] realization of being no longer part of a prerevolutionary, preindustrial, and still predominantly Christian [world]’ (Ankersmit 2005: 333). Complicating the notion of psychical integrity and foregrounding the idea of selves (and texts) divided against themselves, Ankersmit’s ideas evoke one the most ubiquitous attributes of Dickinson’s poetry. As Virginia Jackson puts it, self-division is ‘the signature characteristic of the subjectivity Dickinson bequeaths to literary history’ and has ‘often been understood as the sign of Dickinson’s modernity’:
a reader of Dickinson can generate a long list of chasms, fissures, maelstroms, cleavings, self-burials, and horrors that irrevocably divide one part of the ‘I’ from another. Nearly all of the commentary devoted to Dickinson has centred on the question of these self-splittings, and especially on the referent of this schizophrenic subjective representation: sheer grief, lost love, physical and psychic pain, gendered, artistic, and sexual misinterpretation and oppression have all vied as explanations for the missing referent of the crisis. (Jackson 2005: 223)
Of course, such psychological dissonance may not have a personal cause but rather represent the workings of larger cultural and social forces. Paul Crumbley argues that such thematic and imagistic self-division is reinforced formally by semantic and syntactic doubling in Dickinson’s writing, creating ‘the simultaneous presence of diverse points of view’. For him, these features reflect the tension between a cultural reticence advocated for women and American ideals of individualism and independent self-expression (Crumbley 2010: 14). Alternatively, placed within Ankersmit’s framework, Dickinson’s self-divided speakers and correlate imagery can be viewed as her mirroring the effects of sublime historical experience: when one looks at oneself ‘from the perspective of [an] outsider’ or ‘as if [one] were looking at somebody else’ (Ankersmit 2005: 349). Ankersmit writes:
sublime experience confronts us with contradictions, oppositions, or paradoxes that are utterly unthinkable within [the] ‘normal’ patterns of experience. And this is precisely what becomes a possibility if we erect the shield of representation in ourselves, or, rather between the person we are now and the one we were before. We have then made room in ourselves for the epistemological paradoxes that are the defining characteristic of the sublime. (Ankersmit 2005: 346–7)
Provocatively, in some of her representations of self-division in poems such as ‘He was my host – he was my guest’ (Dickinson 1998: 1508, Fr1754) and ‘I make His Crescent fill or lack –’ (Dickinson 1998: 788–9, Fr837), Dickinson presents the idea of a current identity being confronted by a former one: she considers the idea of a past self or event haunting or possessing the mind and bifurcating the identity (see Finnerty 1998). Such poems describe something similar to the moment when, as Ankersmit puts it, ‘we suddenly become aware of a previous identity of ourselves, of the kind of person that we had been up to now and had never realized that we were’ (Ankersmit 2005: 349).
For Ankersmit, periods of transition not only cause an individual to see a former self as if it were ‘the self of some other person’, they also create a sense in which the ‘moving to a new and different world really is and also requires an act of violence’ and ‘hostility’ to ‘the lost object after our having internalized it and made it into a part of our own identity’ (Ankersmit 2005: 343–5). Reflecting the violence that Ankersmit associates with this process, Dickinson’s retrospective poetry often draws on forceful imagery to connote, for example, a ‘cleaving’ in the mind, signifying the destruction of thought, feeling and identity. Cataloguing some of Dickinson’s most violent imagery, Camille Paglia describes her poetry as ‘a war of personae, a clash of opposites; it is sexually, psychically, morally, and aesthetically bivalent’ (Paglia 1991: 657). Additionally, recent scholarship has pointed out Dickinson’s appropriation of imagery of social upheaval and political revolt to underline her sense of her position in the midst of competing versions of truth generated by political, industrial, intellectual and scientific revolutions that were dramatically transforming her life and the life of her community (see Crumbley 2015). Her poems feature ‘not only political revolt but also an implicit reference to the external teleological force conventionally regarded as compelling such upheaval’ and draw on a contemporary discursive ‘juxtaposition of stark, incompatible opposites, many of them defined in politically and religiously charged language’ (Kohler 2010: 29). Corroborating Ankersmit’s complication of any straightforward transition from past to present, such forceful imagery in Dickinson’s work encodes an existential wavering before entry into ‘a wholly new world’ and a level of hostility towards a former identity, but also points to the difficulty of forgetting. Just as Ankersmit makes forgetfulness a key component in periods of historical transitions when one identity is lost or abandoned for another, it is also a recurring theme in Dickinson’s writings.
I TRIED HARD TO FORGET YOU
Ankersmit’s discussion of forgetting begins with the story of Kant’s dismissal of Lampe, his once faithful and dutiful servant, for stealing:
Nevertheless, Kant was not at ease with his Roman severitas, and he kept worrying about poor Lampe. In order to get rid of this most unwelcome manifestation of Neigung, he pinned above his desk a little note with the stunning text ‘Lampe vergessen’ – forget Lampe. (Ankersmit 2005: 317)
In Dickinson’s extant letters to friends and family, she frequently uses the words forget, forgot, forgetting and forgotten (MacKenzie 2000: 260–2), usually to express either her fear of being forgotten by those she loves (Dickinson 1958: 109, 119, 189, 222, 223, 224, 302, 319, 322, 396, 430) or to reassure correspondents that she will not forget them (Dickinson 1958: 113, 136, 223, 226, 243, 367, 389, 390, 721, 843). While clearly drawing on nineteenth-century letter-writing conventions tied to promises, tokens and assertions of remembrance (Messmer 2001: 219–21), Dickinson does not merely suggest that she won’t forget her correspondents, but rather that she can’t forget them. Like Kant, she needs to be ‘helped [to] forget’; must ‘try’ to forget; or will ‘slowly forget’ (Dickinson 1958: 96, L35; 186, L79; 907, L1047). She tells one friend, ‘sometimes I shut my eyes, and shut my heart towards you, and try hard to forget you because you grieve me so, but you’ll never go away’; to another she confesses, ‘And I know I’ll remember [the time we shared], for it’s so precious to me that I doubt if I could forget it, even if I should try’ (Dickinson 1958: 176–7, L73; 197, L86). She constructs herself as someone who never forgets (see Dickinson 1958: 103, 197, 211, 215, 224, 266, 304, 713, 834): ‘I dont forget you a moment of the hour’; ‘To never forget you – is all we can’; and ‘to forget you would be impossible’ (Dickinson 1958: 223, L103; 612, L555; 620, L567). Elsewhere in her letters, her unflinching remembrance is connected with (or used as a substitute for) divinity’s omniscient memory: she writes, ‘To be remembered is next to being loved and to be loved is Heaven’ (Dickinson 1958: 487, L361) and advises against the ‘timid mistake about being “forgotten,” shall I caress or reprove? Mr. Samuel’s “sparrow” does not “fall” without the fervent “notice”’ (Dickinson 1958: 708, L724). Similarly, in other letters, Dickinson uses the word forget to assert her love or devotion to friends and implies that they have usurped God’s (or religion’s) place within her devotional hierarchy. She tells her friend Susan Gilbert in 1852:
Friends are too dear to sunder, Oh they are far too few, and how soon they will go away where you and I cannot find them, dont let us forget these things, for their remembrance now will save us many an anguish when it is too late to love them! (Dickinson 1958: 211, L94)
In another letter to Emily Fowler Ford, in 1854, she writes: ‘it makes me so happy to think of writing you that I forget the sermon and minister and all, and think of none but you’ (Dickinson 1958: 293, L161). She spells out the implications for God of her lifelong idolatry of her dearest friends in a letter from the late 1850s: ‘My friends are my “estate.” Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them! . . . God is not so wary as we, else he would give us no friends, lest we forget him!’ (Dickinson 1958: 339, L193).
She first employs the word forget and its correlates in letters to Abiah Root from the mid-1840s to early 1850s which refer to their membership of a group, known as the ‘five’, that also included Harriet Merrill, Abby Wood and Sarah S. Tracy. The letters react to the dissolution of the group owing primarily to Abiah, Harriet and Sarah moving away from Amherst. Although only her letters to Abiah are extant, Dickinson appears to have written persistently to all three in an attempt to preserve these bonds of friendships, forged while they were students at Amherst Academy (see Habegger 2001: 179–87). Wanting, as she puts it in one early 1845 letter, ‘Harriet, Sarah & your own dear self to complete the ancient picture’ (Franklin 1995: 14, L8), she sets out to remind these women of their ‘old & I fear forgotten friends’ (Dickinson 1958: 46, L15) and of ‘forgotten’ joyful times they once shared (Dickinson 1958: 67, L23). Although providing early examples of Dickinson’s often hyperbolic and witty epistolary style, these letters dwell on loss or impending loss, of times, people and seasons ‘gone’: she ‘sentimentalise[s] opon the past’ and the ‘golden links’ that bound all five together (Franklin 1995: 17, L9; 28, L39). Having promised to send Abiah a forget-me-not from her garden in one 1846 letter (Dickinson 1958: 18, L7), in the next, she refers to Harriet, from whom she hasn’t received a reply to two letters: ‘I really cant help thinking she has forgotten the many happy hours we spent together, and though I try to banish the idea from my mind, for it is painful to me, I am afraid she has forgotten us, but I hope not’; she ends the letter ‘Don’t forget your aff friend Emily E D’ (Franklin 1995: 14, 16, L8). When Abiah replies, a not-forgotten Dickinson mentions ‘a China mug with forget me not’ before inquiring: ‘Have you heard a word from H. Merrill or S. Tracy. I consider them lost sheep . . . I cant think that they have forgotten us, [but wonder] why they should delay so long to show any signs of remembrance’ (Franklin 2005: 18, L9; see also 21, L12). Dickinson’s concern about not hearing from her friends is heightened by the death, in 1844, of her close friend, Sophia Holland, which had a devastating effect; Dickinson makes clear that she will ‘never forget’ her dearly departed companion (Dickinson 1958: 32, L11).
Her above reference to her friends as ‘lost sheep’ and a later reference to ‘that prodigal – Hatty Merrill’ who has ‘entirely forgotten us’ (Franklin 1995: 21, L12) are noteworthy as she had recently told Abiah of her penchant for quoting from the Bible (‘Excuse my quoting from Scripture, Dear A for it was so handy in this case I couldnt get along very well without it’), as well as of her identification with Eve (‘I have lately come to the conclusion that I am Eve, alias Mrs Adam’) (Franklin 1995: 14, L8; 18, L9). These allusions are provocative considering that Dickinson composes these letters at a time of a religious revival in Amherst when she resisted the pressure on her to convert. The attenuation of these early female friendships, conceptualised through the topic of forgetfulness, is inextricably connected with their affirmations of faith and her refusal. Her letters interconnect her frustrated desire for and resistance to such a profession with her, at times, desperate attempt to preserve a world of female companionship that is being destroyed by spiritual as well as physical distance. Dickinson confides that although she recognises that she will never be happy or find peace ‘without I love Christ’, she soon ‘forgets’ the practices that faith requires:
I was almost persuaded to be a Christian. I thought I never again could be thoughtless and worldly – and I can say that I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior. But I soon forgot my morning prayer or else it was irksome to me. One by one my old habits returned and I cared less for religion than ever. (Dickinson 1958: 27, L10)
Sceptical and then devotional, she records her hopes that ‘the golden opportunity is not far hence when my heart will willingly yield itself to Christ, and that my sins will be all blotted out of the book of remembrance’ (Dickinson 1958: 28, L10). Here, combining faith and doubt, hope and despair, we have a fledgling example of a representative feature of Dickinson’s writing: its yoking together and offsetting of ‘stunningly opposed options’ and ‘unruly set[s] of contesting impulses’ (Crumbley 2010: 45, 5). Moreover, the letter foreshadows a growing connection between her forgetting Christ and sense of being forgotten by Him (in the sense that her sins will be remembered) and her friends.
After Abiah converts in 1846, not long after their mutual friend Sarah Tracy also declares her faith, Dickinson presents herself as the isolated figure who ‘did not give up & become a Christian’; she confides: ‘I had quite a long talk with Abby while at home, & I doubt not she will soon cast her burden on Christ. She is sober, & keenly sensitive on the subject & she says she only desires to be good’ (Franklin 1995: 25, L23). After Abby converts, in 1850, the painful personal and spiritual consequences of Dickinson’s resistance are apparent: ‘I am feeling lonely; some of my friends are gone, and some of my friends are sleeping – sleeping the churchyard sleep’; when she walks among the graves, she wonders who will ‘come and give me the same memorial’, adding:
but I never have laid my friends there, and forgot that they too must die; this is my first affliction, and indeed ’tis hard to bear it – to those bereaved so often that home is no more here, and whose communion with friends is had only in prayers, there must be much to hope for, but when the unreconciled spirit has nothing left but God, that spirit is lone indeed. (Franklin 1995: 26, L39)
Ironically, she draws on the language of religion – communion, prayers, spirit – to express her ‘unreconciled’ spiritual revolt; she is not only forgotten by her friends, but is even more alone because her only alternative is to turn to a God she cannot embrace. Without heavenly salvation and its human equivalent, memory, she feels truly forgotten. Her rebellion is figured as immaturity and immorality, suggesting, on the one hand, levels of uncertainty about the personal stand she is taking, yet, on the other, showing her wittily pitching her defiance in the terms of the religious discourse she is rejecting. She tells Abiah:
You are growing wiser than I am, and nipping in the bud fancies which I let blossom – perchance to bear no fruit, or if plucked, I may find it bitter. The shore is safer, Abiah, but I love to buffet the sea – I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but Oh I love the danger! You are learning control and firmness – Christ Jesus will love you more – I’m afraid he dont love me any! (Franklin 2005: 29, L39)
She goes on also to contrast her danger-loving seafaring scepticism with the newly devotional Abby, who is ‘more of a woman than I am, for I love so to be a child – Abby is holier than me. . . . she will be had in memorial when I am gone and forgotten’. Drawing on sermon language of unity, spirit and bonds, she pledges herself to her holy friends as a means of counteracting religion’s eclipsing of their friendship: ‘we are growing away from each other, and talk even now like strangers. To forget the “meum and teum” dearest friends must meet sometimes, and then comes the “bond of the spirit” which if I am correct is “unity”’ (Franklin 1995: 28, L39). Like other nineteenth-century writers, she creates writing that presents a double vision of religion, giving a traditional or conventional language a radical and sceptical twist (Morgan 2010: 19–22). Yet Dickinson is not simply appropriating and reformulating religious discourse, sermons or dogma for her own artistic, even parodic purposes (Morgan 2010: 93–8, 178–218); her letters equate lost female friendships with a loss of certainty and a sense of community that went along with a religious outlook, which she cannot accept and yet is constitutive of her identity.
Commenting on these letters, Habegger suggest that ‘Abiah and Abby’s retreat to the safety of standard beliefs and feelings posed a challenge to the poet’s expressive drive, helping explain both her sentimental returns to the past and her teasing recklessness’ (Habegger 2001: 181). Considering the role Ankersmit assigns to myth in the developing of historical consciousness and the historical sublime, it is provocative that Dickinson’s discourse of forgetting coincides with her creation of the myth of a ‘collective’, idyllic female-centred past ‘outside the course of history’, an identity-defining realm prior to a world of socialisation (Ankersmit 2005: 368). The preoccupation of her poetry, as already noted, with re-visiting and re-experiencing sites and moments from the past is, at times, accompanied by the idea of a utopian world of girlhood that, as she told Susan Gilbert, for the bride and ‘plighted maiden’ ‘seem[s] dearer than all others in the world’ (Dickinson 1958: 210, L93) (see Eberwein 1985: 103–6; Messmer 2001: 180–90). In a similar manner, her love poems tend to re-play a past loss and to idealise and desire reunion with the lost object, person or time period. The sublimity of such poems ‘originates from this paradoxical union of the feelings of loss and love, that is, of the combination of pain and pleasure in how we relate to the past’ (Ankersmit 2005: 9). This trajectory confirms Ankersmit’s association of the past with lost love – absent and ‘precisely because of this, always so very much and so very painfully present’ – and with ‘lost worlds’ that take on the characteristics of ‘myth’ by being that to which we cannot return, ‘however strong the nostalgic yearning for these lost paradises may be’ (Ankersmit 2005: 325). Interestingly, as in these early letters, in some of these poems, Dickinson draws on religious discourse – imagery of churches, sacrament, conversion, vows, crucifixes, martyrdom and heavenly reunion – to represent human love, blurring the line between love and faith, a loved figure and Christ. In so doing, Dickinson is not merely connecting moments of loss with sublimity (via an inextricable divinity), but also using religious discourse to reflect on some level the dissociation, difficulty and pain Ankersmit associates with abandoning a former self, associated in this case with orthodox religion, and the way in which such ‘discarded identities’ remain present not only in their absence, but through acts of imaginative appropriation (Ankersmit 2005: 367).
Ankersmit’s ideas illuminate the ways in which in these letters Dickinson’s new identity as non-conformist and religious sceptic emerges out of the orthodox identity that she presents herself as forgetting and abandoning. Drawing on and undercutting religious discourse, her sentimentalisation of the past and determination never to forget her friends transform her into a faithful friend. She asks Abiah Root: ‘Have you forgotten your visit at Amherst last summer, & what delightful times we had? I have not’ (Dickinson 1958: 57, L23). Again, after Abiah attended Mount Holyoke’s Commencement in August 1848 and ignored her, Dickinson makes her position clear: ‘Slowly, very slowly, I came to the conclusion that you had forgotten me, & I tried hard to forget you, but your image still haunts me, and tantalizes me with fond recollections’ (Franklin 1995: 27, L39). Having made the difficulty of forgetting clear, in one of her last letters to Abiah, dated 1852, she hyperbolically reprimands her friend, underlining her faithfulness to their past friendship and ‘school day memories’:
Hard hearted girl! I dont believe you care, if you did you would come quickly and help me out of this sea, but if I drown, Abiah, and go down to dwell in the seaweed forever and forever, I will not forget your name, nor all the wrong you did me! (Franklin 1995: 29, L69)
These letters reveal Dickinson’s participation in her culture’s incorporation of identities tied to religious faith and authority into new secular subjectivities and the translation of religious notions such as heaven and an afterlife into new less dogmatic and even non-religious concepts (see St Armand 1984). More precisely, following Ankersmit’s work, we see Dickinson position herself rebelliously and nostalgically within ‘an idyllic, pre-historical, and quasi-eternal and quasi-natural past’ as a means of escaping a future marked by female conformity and the end of personal freedom and characterised by religious compliance (Ankersmit 2005: 366).
In Dickinson’s epistolary discourse on forgetfulness, there are traces of the mechanics of a powerfully emergent discourse of modernity tied to materialism, empiricism and science which is already challenging religion for cultural dominance. Her writings, in Ankersmit’s terms, are an ‘externalization of a drama that was, in fact, enacted in the mind’ as ‘a previous world’ tied to Christian faith was being ‘forgotten and repudiated’ to the point that individuals were experiencing what Freud would later call a ‘melancholic reaction to traumatic loss’ (Ankersmit 2005: 340–1). The lost friendships Dickinson mourns and can’t forget are, on one level, what is traumatically being lost, yet, on another level, what is also vanishing is a once dominant religious world picture. The letters show that neither loss can be easily forgotten: one is mourned explicitly, the other implicitly. Interrelating these losses, she substitutes preservation through human memory (and writing) for immortalisation through religious faith and presents herself as usurping God and/or Christ’s place as the eternally faithful friend who will never forget.
THE ART OF FORGETTING
The theme of forgetfulness in Dickinson’s poetry, which exemplifies her career-long attention to neglected, unnoticed and inconsequential events, objects, creatures and people, has not been fully explored. Perceptively, Jane Eberwein notes that although ‘[d]eprivation is, after all, a universal human experience though one easily forgotten’, ‘[s]uch forgetfulness would be unlikely for Emily Dickinson’, who presents herself as ‘a lifelong quester searching for a treasure already experienced but lost long ago’ (Eberwein 1985: 65). The image of the quester of a past treasure is a fitting one, suggesting that her poetry’s exploration of deprivation is, like historical writing, ‘situated in the space enclosed by [the] complimentary movements of the discovery (loss) and the recovery of the past (love) that constitute together the realm of historical experience’ (Ankersmit 2005: 9). The speakers of her aftermath poems cannot forget: from a present instance, they articulate a previous ‘moment of loss’, when the past having ‘broken off’ became something to know or describe rather than experience (Ankersmit 2005: 9). Expanding on the topic of forgetting in the Abiah Root letters, Dickinson’s poetic exploration of this subject focuses on the pain of being forgotten, as well as attempts to complicate power dynamics between the person who forgets and the person forgotten. As in her earlier letters, forgetting is interconnected with larger questions about death, the afterlife and God, but also presented as a difficult but advantageous activity, which is defined as an art or discipline, something that could be learnt or taught as if it were a lesson at school.
Two early poems, both dated 1858, tackle the topic of forgetting in a sustained way. The first of these, ‘Oh if remembering were forgetting –’ (Dickinson 1998: 65, Fr9), is a riddle-like poem in which the speaker reverses the meaning of forgetting: ‘Oh if remembering were forgetting – / Then I remember not! / And if forgetting – recollecting – / How near I had forgot!’ (Dickinson 1998: 22, Fr9). Despite the inversion, the speaker is someone who can only reach the enviable position of having ‘forgot’ or ‘remembered not’ if these now mean having remembered. The poem underlines the connection between the conscious process of forgetting and the activity of remembering, which first drew Ankersmit to Dickinson’s poetry. Revisiting these oppositional terms in a later poem, from 1874, Dickinson’s first stanza distinguishes between the slightly less offensive idea of never having been remembered and the more obnoxious one of having been forgotten, which stems from a deliberate and conscious practice:
Or are forgetting now
Or never remembered –
Safer not to know –
(Dickinson 1998: 1154–5, Fr1334)
The poem ends with the suggestion that if one has been forgotten, it is better not to know: the ‘miseries of conjecture’ are softer than ‘a Fact of Iron Hardened with I know’.
The other 1858 poem on forgetfulness, ‘There is a word’ (Dickinson 1998: 93–4, Fr42), also uses hard, forceful imagery, in this case martial imagery, to emphasise the power of the word ‘forgot’, whose ‘barbed syllables’ can wound even those who are ‘armed’; this word divides the world into the fallen (the forgotten) and ‘the Saved’ (the remembered). The word ‘saved’ provocatively summons up a religious context for the poem’s second stanza:
Wherever runs the breathless sun –
Wherever roams the day,
There is it’s noiseless onset –
There is it’s victory!
Behold the keenest marksman –
The most accomplished shot!
Time’s sublimest target
Is a soul ‘forgot’!
(Dickinson 1998: 92, Fr42A)
‘Forgot’ is a forceful and injurious word because it conceptualises the idea that one has been forgotten by a victorious and powerful other. Provocatively, considering the religious connotations of ‘saved’ and ‘soul’, the poem, like the letters to Abiah, connects human forgetfulness with God’s. The idea is that the forgotten soul abandoned by God or a god-like figure is the ‘sublimest target’, inspiring awe and terror. These ideas are repeated in other poems: one poem speculates that ‘There dwells one other Creature / Of Heavenly Love – forgot –’ (Dickinson 1998: 567–8, Fr570), while another imagines ‘a meek apparreled thing’ ‘forgot by Victory’ (Dickinson 1998: 111, Fr67). Additionally, the afterlife circumstances of the dead, a recurring subject in Dickinson’s poetry, are considered in relation to forgetfulness. One speaker reassures that the dead have not forgotten the living: ‘Though in another tree’ they look ‘just as often / And just as tenderly’, noticing all from ‘above’ (Dickinson 2005: 171, Fr130). In ‘My Wars are laid away in Books –’, the speaker declares that although she has battled throughout her life, she expects an encounter with a final foe who has already taken the ‘best’ and neglected her. Although it is unclear if the foe is death or God, what most concerns her is that she is ‘not forgot / by Chums that passed away’ (Dickinson 1998: 1385, Fr1579). Challenging these suggestions, other poems depict heaven as a realm of forgetfulness. In ‘I shall know why – when Time is over –’, the speaker imagines lessons being taught by Christ in the ‘fair schoolroom of the sky’ that will explain and justify ‘each separate anguish’ and help the speaker ‘forget the drop of anguish / That scalds me now – that scalds me now!’ (Dickinson 1998: 243, Fr215). Without the last line’s mocking repetition, other poems suggest that if among the ‘Redeemed’, one’s ‘Barefoot time [will be] forgotten’, or that through ‘faith’ ‘The Mold-life’ will be ‘all forgotten – now – / In Extasy – and Dell –’ (Dickinson 1998: 507, Fr496; 559, Fr559). But, in other poems that gloss forgetting, not remembering one’s earthly life once in heaven may represent a loss of one’s personal identity, individuality and ‘boundaries’ (Dickinson 1998: 275, Fr255; 523, Fr513). Certainly, forgetting is connected with Death’s ‘diviner Classifying’ and ‘Democratic fingers’ that remove ‘Color – Caste – Denomination –’ and brand; ‘all [are] forgotten –’ (Dickinson 1998: 788, Fr836).
If God and death are associated with forgetfulness, then the forgetful beloved wields a god-like power over the one who fears being or has been forgotten. In ‘Poor little Heart!’, the speaker reaches out to a figure who has been forgotten, addressing a heart, either her own or another’s, that has been forsaken by others (Dickinson 1998: 242–3, Fr214). As in her letters to Abiah, such poems express the pain of being forgotten by those who are precious and valued: ‘Precious to Me – She still shall be – / Though She forget the name I bear’ (Dickinson 1998: 710–11, F751). While other poems foreground forgetfulness within unequal relationships between speakers and addressees (Dickinson 1998: 624, Fr635; 781, Fr827), one poem shifts the balance by having its speaker identify with a forgiving Christ in the aftermath of his betrayal by Peter, a friend and disciple who had so vociferously expressed the expanse of his fidelity:
He forgot – and I – remembered –
’Twas an everyday affair –
Long ago as Christ and Peter –
‘Warmed them’ at the ‘Temple fire’.
‘Thou wert with him’ – quoth ‘the Damsel’?
‘No’ – said Peter – ’twasn’t me –
Jesus merely ‘looked’ at Peter –
Could I do aught else – to Thee?
(Dickinson 1998: 256, Fr232)
In one final example, ‘That she forgot me was the least’, Dickinson adds the experience of humiliation to her discussion of this topic; her speaker states that what injured her most was the idea that she was ‘worthy to forget’ and that her continued assurance to her beloved of ‘Faithful[ness]’ and ‘Constancy’ was transformed into ‘something like a shame’ (Dickinson 1998: 1490–1, Fr1716). The poem ‘To be forgot by thee’, from which Ankersmit quotes, reverses the disregard associated with forgetfulness in so many of her other forgetting poems, with the speaker redefining it not as evidence of neglect, but rather as an indication of remembrance and attention. In line with Ankersmit’s ideas, forgetting is constituted by remembering; to be forgotten is to be raised from oblivion into renown, to leave ordinary time and enter the realm of myth:
To be forgot by thee
Surpasses Memory
Of other minds
The Heart cannot forget
Unless it contemplate
What it declines
I was regarded then
Raised from oblivion
A single time
To be remembered what –
Worthy to be forgot
My low renown
(Dickinson 1998: 1405, Fr1601)
As part of her analysis of the nature of forgetting, in a series of poems Dickinson considers what ‘helps us to forget –’ (Dickinson 1998: 334, Fr315). As Ankersmit puts it, ‘Not forgetting but being able to forget is the real issue here, for we should realize that it is truly part of our identity, of the kind of person that we are, that we are capable of forgetting a certain part of our past (or not)’ (Ankersmit 2005: 333). He goes on: ‘we are not only the past that we (can) remember . . . but we are also the past that we can forget’ (Ankersmit 2005: 333). These Dickinson poems examine forgetting as an intricate practice that if learned could offer an alternative to the obsessive remembrance and memorialisation that stifle change in so many of her aftermath poems. In the first of these poems, a self-divided speaker makes a deal with her heart:
Heart! We will forget him!
You and I – tonight!
You may forget the warmth he gave –
I will forget the light!
When you have done, pray tell me
That I may straight begin!
Haste! lest while you’re lagging
I remember him!
(Dickinson 1998: 109, Fr64)
Forgetting means a conscious endeavour that involves the prospect of self-betrayal and further self-division; it underlines the foolhardiness of any conscious practice of forgetting which is, as other poems have implied, merely a form of remembering. The same idea is presented in another poem where the speaker considers how happy she would be if she could only forget her sadness, a prospect made more fraught because of her recollecting of summer (‘Bloom’) in November. The poem ends with the speaker imagining a ‘bold’, deadly act, in defiance of learning and with a child-like forgetting of implications, of searching in coldness for a summer’s blossom:
How happy I was if I could forget
To remember how sad I am
Would be an easy adversity
But the recollecting of Bloom
Keeps making November difficult
Till I who was almost bold
Lose my way like a little Child
And perish of the cold.
(Dickinson 1998: 942, Fr1080)
Drawing on similar nature imagery, another poem suggests a preference for a setting as opposed to a rising sun, for a dramatic exit rather than staying on stage, for dying rather than waning. Yet essentially the speaker wants the perspective of a natural world associated with ‘beautiful forgetting’, sweetness and sorrow and loss (Dickinson 1998: 1187; Fr1366A). In another poem, nature offers the ‘promise [of] return’; however,
One thing of it we covet –
The power to forget –
The Anguish of the Avarice
Defrays the Dross of it –
(Dickinson 1998: 1325; Fr1516b)
The speaker covets nature’s unconsciousness of its own patterns and processes: its power to forget.
In two other forgetting poems, Dickinson uses schoolroom imagery to underline the difficulty of forgetting. Such imagery is alluring considering the happiness and friendship Dickinson associated with her time at Amherst Academy, and the pressure placed on her to convert while she was studying at Mount Holyoke (see Habegger 2001: 139–66, 191–212). While the idea of having forgetting as a subject on the school curriculum is suggestively counterintuitive, it may tap into aspects of her formative education that she wanted to forget. Moreover, although both institutions were religious in ethos, Dickinson was given a broad education in which science featured strongly and the poet enjoyed and clearly benefitted from studying botany, geology and astronomy. In other words, her schooling was a site of historical transformation that pitted Christianity against science, while officially attempting to reconcile the two. Do these poems anticipate Nietzsche’s sense of the liberation, possibility and opportunity that forgetting brings and the horror of not being able to forget? Or Ankersmit’s belief in the importance of forgetting for historical progress and cultural and personal advancement? In the first of these poems, the speaker is unable to obey a powerful male instructor’s charge to forget and becomes the ‘Dunce’ of the class. But, the poem claims, it is the ‘dull lad’ who should be loved best; his failure to learn to forget is a sign of his devotion:
Did we disobey Him?
Just one time!
Charged us to forget Him –
But we couldn’t learn!
Were Himself – such a Dunce –
What would we – do?
Love the dull lad – best –
Oh, wouldn’t you?
(Dickinson 1998: 320, Fr299)
Even more explicitly, in ‘Know how to forget’, which has two versions, one written in 1862 and the other in 1865, Dickinson reverses the idea of school as a place of education and learning, making it a place where students unlearn and where the art of forgetting should be taught. The earlier version asks an instructor:
Knows how to forget!
But – could she teach – it?
’Tis the Art, most of all,
I should like to know –
Long, at its Greek –
I – who pored – patient –
Rise – still the Dunce –
Gods used to know –
Mould my slow mind to this Comprehension –
Oddest of sciences – Book ever bore –
How to forget!
Ah, to attain it –
I would give you –
All other Lore –
(Dickinson 1998: 415, Fr391)
The speaker suggests that despite her patient efforts at studying forgetting, she remains a ‘Dunce’, failing at its ‘Comprehension’; it is more challenging than Greek and the ‘Oddest of sciences’. The speaker would literally give up all other knowledge to master forgetfulness. Here, forgetting is positioned within the context of oppositional forms of knowledge evident in her own schooling: Greek, a language associated with an ancient world of ‘Gods’, superstition and myth, is opposed to science, centring on empiricism, experiment and categorisation. Implicit here is the idea that while forgetting may lead the child into error, it also offers emancipation from past mistakes and particularly from those who have forgotten her. In the longer 1865 version of the same poem (Dickinson 1998: 416), Dickinson makes the same overall point in a more effusive and detailed way. The speaker implies that forgetting is the ‘Easiest of Arts, they say / When one learn how’, yet one that, as with ‘Science’, requires ‘Sacrifice’: ‘Dull Hearts have died / In the Acquisition’. These lines indicate that science has appropriated a concept so central to Christianity: ‘Sacrifice for Science / Is common, though, now’. Having gone to ‘School’, the speaker is no wiser about how to forget: ‘Globe did not teach it / Nor Logarithm Show’, and she turns to a Philosopher and Rabbi for advice and ‘to be[come] erudite / Enough to know!’. Full of questions, the speaker asks if there is a particular book that would teach it, if forgetting, like astronomy, requires ‘Telescopes’, or if it is an invention and therefore has ‘a Patent’ (Dickinson 1998: 416, Fr391B). The poem stresses that despite its importance, forgetting is unteachable because of its inextricable relationship with remembering; it is much more complex than the process of acquiring a body of knowledge, it is about discarding, abandoning and shedding an identity.
CONCLUSION
The Ankersmit sentence used as an epigraph for this chapter offers one way of thinking about Dickinson as the Romantic artist who removes herself from the ‘pedestrian world’ to a world of art and poetry and the possibility they offer (Ankersmit 2005: 429). In contrast, reading Dickinson in the light of Ankersmit’s theories suggests that her representations of loss, past experience, self-division, the incomprehensible, violence and death, along with her discourse on forgetfulness, tap into and reflect her culture in the midst of radical transformation as religious authority is being cumulatively undermined by the influence of science, as well as by new political, social and cultural ideas. The parallels between Ankersmit’s theories about sublime historical experience and the Dickinson sublime stem from the common influence of the Romantic sublime on their work. In other words, Ankersmit’s ambition to rehabilitate ‘the romanticism moods and feelings as constitutive of how we relate to the past’ (Ankersmit 2005: 10) means he conceptualises historical experience as a nineteenth-century poet might. As Dickinson puts it, ‘Did we not find (gain) as we lost we should make but a threadbare exhibition after a few years’ (Dickinson 1958: 923, PF71). Such a movement of loss and gain calls to mind Ankersmit’s overarching claim about historical experience: that each time ‘humanity or a civilization enters a truly new phase in its history, a new mythical sublime comes into being as this civilization’s cold and fossilized heart that will forever be handed on to those living in all its later phases’ (Ankersmit 2005: 366). Dickinson’s writings are marked by these trajectories and point to her ambivalence about such transition: while she certainly embraces the freedom that cultural forgetting can bring, there are also hints in her work of her concerns about the moral, social and political repercussions for her culture of losing its anchorage to the metaphysical order and authoritative structure that religion provided.
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