My Emily Dickinson Part One
Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, solicited for Poetics Journal in 1984 and published as a book in 1985, led the way toward the feminist revision of Dickinson scholarship, both within the academy and in communities of poet-scholars and feminists. Howe’s approach demands painstaking archival research and focus on the material text of Dickinson’s poetic oeuvre—after the revolution in Dickinson scholarship inaugurated by Ralph W. Franklin’s Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981)—as it calls for a poetic rereading of Dickinson’s writing in the spirit of its letter. Her insistence that we return to the material text of Dickinson’s writings, using both archival and intertextual methods, responds to two objections. The first is to the lack of recognition of women writers in general, and especially in their treatment by male editors. The second is to normative feminist readings, for failing to understand what is both feminine and radical in Dickinson’s work. Howe insists that we acknowledge Emily Dickinson’s risk-taking strategies, her engagements with other writers, and above all her self-confidence. Grounded in a thorough rereading of Dickinson’s writings alongside her major sources—the Brontës, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Charles Dickens—Howe argues for Dickinson’s importance as a scholar-poet. She finds Dickinson’s materialist procedures at the heart of her poetry’s linguistic sublimity, and restages them in the epiphanic intensity of her own language.
King Lear: When I am through the old oak forest gone——Keats to G. and T. Keats, Letters
In the college library I use there are two writers whose work still refuses to conform to the Anglo-American literary tradition these institutions perpetuate. They are women and they are American—Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein. Among the most radical precursors of Modernist poetry and prose, they still remain strangely out of bounds, more out of bounds certainly, than James Joyce, Ezra Pound, or Samuel Beckett. To this day influential critical discussion from Kenner to Bloom persists in dropping their names and ignoring their work. Why these two should have been women is a question too often lost in the penchant for gossipy biographical detail that “lovingly” muffles their voices. Both originally destroyed the chronological linearity of poetry and prose. Both originally emphasized the illogical/logical flow of psychic babble. Both saw “space of time filled with moving.” Their writing accomplishes the disintegration of conventional meaning in the voice of a remote-seeming narrator. Although markedly different in many respects, both represent the still critically undefined anti-language dynamic in American literature. There was a chance for a radical feminist discourse to focus on the extent of the revolution of the word they achieved, to study why these two women felt it was necessary to tear apart customary syntax and lexical direction of meaning. It is particularly sad then to find that feminist literary scholarship as evidenced in The Madwoman in the Attic, although valuable in dealing with a more conventional tradition of writing, fails to discuss or come to terms with the implications of a feminine penchant for linguistic decreation and re-creation. No language experimenters here. A woman may confess all, if she does it in a logical syntax. Dickinson and Stein suggest that the language of the heart has quite another grammar.
In fairness, Gertrude Stein falls outside the time frame of The Madwoman in the Attic, but there is a chapter devoted to Emily Dickinson, and she runs as a troubling presence throughout. Although professing admiration for her “metaphorical history,” Sandra Gubar and Susan Gilbert seem perplexed by the extent of her self-renunciation. They fail to understand her mysticism and utterly misread her profound remark to T. W. Higginson:
When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person. (268)
They worry unnecessarily that she couldn’t celebrate and sing herself with Whitman, or declare confidently with Emerson that “the Poet is the sayer, the namer,” that “he is a sovereign and stands at the center.” In fact she said something far subtler.
Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted. (459)
But they haven’t been really listening to her, and such misreading has belittled the ruthless sweep of her linguistic rebellion. This acutest lyric poet, the author of scores of unforgettable lines—(most writers in a lifetime manage only a few if they are lucky)—sings the sound of the Imagination as learner and founder, sings of liberation into an order beyond mere sexual gender where:
– Love is it’s own rescue, for we – at our supremest, are but it’s trembling Emblems – (522)
[…] Wallace Stevens said that “Poetry is a scholar’s art.” It is for some. It was for Dickinson. For nineteenth-century women of her class, the word scholar echoed power, insecurity, a sense of being “other.” Scholar was “other.” Scholar was male. In the Victorian New England middle- and upper-class world of expansive intellectual gesturing, men gesticulated and wrote books and lectures, while women sat in parlors or lecture halls listening. Women like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot were the rare exception, and they suffered agonies of insecurity about daring to speak more than “Lady’s Greek, without the accents.”
Uncertain lease – develops luster
On Time
Uncertain Grasp, appreciation
Of Sum –
The shorter Fate – is oftener the chiefest
Because
Inheritors upon a tenure
Prize – (857)
If scholar was an uncertain word, love was more uncertain. Women of all classes risked dying every time they bore children. Sexual love too often meant their own Death. Uncertain relation of opposition—Birth and Death. For men the fusion was metaphysical and metaphorical. Centuries of tropes and clever punning in Western literary tradition married and mated the meaning. Wedding. Who was creator, what was creation? […] Was wedding epithalamion or entrapment? Death a soothing Mother or a mastiff Father, was Awe—Nature? Destruction the beginning of every foundation? Do words flee their meaning? Define definition.
Love – is anterior to Life –
Posterior – to Death –
Initial of Creation, and
The Exponent of Earth –
(917)
Initial of creation. In the beginning was the Word. Relation of oppositions, misprision double meaning and uncertain.
Titania: But she being mortall, of that boy did die….
Quince: Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated.
(A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 2, 1; act 3, 1)
That distance was between Us
That is not of Mile or Main –
The Will it is that situates –
Equator – never can– (863)
Does a woman’s mind move in time with a man’s? What is the end of Logic? […]
Staking our entire Possession
On a Hair’s result –
Then – Seesawing – coolly – on it –
Trying if it split – (971)
Is this a poem about writing a poem or cosmic speculation? Is the time before or after? is space of time constantly changing? Spenser made Mutability a woman. Staking and Seesawing. Allegorical transfusion. To balance on a precipice of falling into foolishness was often the danger of opening your mouth to speak if you were an intellectually ambitious person with a female education. Dickinson chose to stay at home when Emerson visited her brother’s house next door. One unchosen American woman alone at home and choosing. American authors reverently swept the dust of England’s domain. Meek at whose feet did this myriad American Daisy play? August sun above, below the searing heat of a New England summer. Salad days when I was green in judgement … silent judgment of the august past might silence you if you challenged it. Might and might…. Wandering through zones of tropes. World filtered through books—And I and silence some strange Race—Wrecked solitary here—I CODE and SHELTER might say one thing to mean the other. An American woman with promethean ambition might know better than anyone how to let the august traces (domain of dust)—lie.
The look of the words as they lay in print I shall never forget. Not their face in the casket could have had the eternity to me. Now, my George Eliot. The gift of belief which her greatness denied her, I trust she receives in the childhood of the kingdom of Heaven. As childhood is earth’s confiding time, perhaps having no childhood, she lost her way to the early trust, and no later came. Amazing human heart, a syllable can make to quake like jostled tree, what infinite for thee more … then? (710)
Dickinson said this in a letter to her Norcross cousins after she had seen the death notice in the paper of one of her favorite authors. Earlier she had said of George Eliot, “She is the lane to the Indes, Columbus was looking for.” What did this female Columbus crossing an uncharted fictive ocean find in George Eliot that made her the lane to the Indies rather than Harriet Beecher Stowe or Margaret Fuller, her own countrywomen, or even Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her fellow poet? Eliot’s refusal to give in to bitterness in the face of unrelenting pessimism. Her agnosticism despite her reverence for the power of mythology. Her long and lonely self-education. Her late-blooming. Her unswerving skepticism (even after she had reached the pinnacle of literary success in her own lifetime). Skepticism that made her repeatedly and ruthlessly pull the rug out from under her most attractive heroines. Eliot’s fictional scholars wandering through a wilderness of languages to encounter only reversals and false meanings. The uselessness of all theory. Constant curiosity. Camouflage as strategy. Refusal to imitate men’s literary voices. Belief that there were indeed different voices for both sexes. Fury at the double bind an educated woman, given intellectual aspiration, was placed in, expected to efface her intellectual drive in the role of servant/mother to the reigning male culture. Scorn for women who congealed into the literary mold men made for them, severe self-criticism. Icy dissection of all that was “silly” in Lady’s writing.
By a peculiar theometric adjustment, when a woman’s talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than simmer heat; and if she ever reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point. Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell, and Mrs. Gaskell have been treated as cavalierly as if they had been men…. In the majority of women’s books you see that kind of facility which springs from the absence of any high standard; that fertility in imbecile combination or feeble imitation which a little self-criticism would check and reduce to bareness ….
A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but among the very finest;—novels too, that have a precious speciality, lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements—genuine observation, humour, and passion. (George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”)
[…] Emily Dickinson took the scraps from the separate “higher” female education many bright women of her time were increasingly resenting, combined it with voracious and “unladylike” outside reading, and used the combination. She built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy. Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory; a “sheltered” woman audaciously invented a new grammar, grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking. “He may pause but he must not hesitate”—Ruskin. Hesitation circled back and surrounded everyone in that confident age of aggressive industrial expansion and brutal Empire building. Hesitation and Separation. The Civil War had split America in two. He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, emotional, and geographical separation was at the heart of Definition. Tragic and eternal dichotomy—if we concern ourselves with the deepest Reality, is this world of the imagination the same for men and women? What voice when we hesitate and are silent is moving to meet us?
The Spirit is the Conscious Ear
We actually Hear
When We inspect – that’s audible –
That is admitted – Here –
For other Services – as Sound –
There hangs a smaller Ear
Outside the Castle – that Contain –
The other – only – Hear – (733)
5. Services] purposes |
7. Castle] Centre-/ City |
6. smaller] minor |
7. Contain] present— |
At the center of Indifference a soul feels her own freedom … the Liberty in wavering. Compression of possibility tensing to spring. Might and might … mystic illumination of analogies … instinctive human supposition that any word may mean its opposite. Occult tendency of opposites to attract and merge. Hesitation of us all, one fire-baptized soul was singing. A poem must always stand in peril, to be saved, each line, at the brink of Invisible. Necessity is the mother of Invention.
In many and reportless places
We feel a Joy –
Reportless, also, but sincere as Nature
Or Deity –
It comes without a consternation –
Dissolves – the same –
But leaves a sumptuous Destitution –
Without a Name –
Profane it by a search – we cannot –
It has no home –
Nor we who having once inhaled it –
Thereafter roam. (1382)
6. Dissolves] abates-/ Exhales— |
9. a search] pursuit |
7. sumptuous] blissful |
11. inhaled it] waylaid it |
On this heath wrecked from Genesis, nerve endings quicken. Naked sensibility at the extremest periphery. Narrative expanding contracting dissolving. Nearer to know less before afterward schism in sum. No hierarchy, no notion of polarity. Perception of an object means loosing and losing it. Quests end in failure, no victory and sham questor. One answer undoes another and fiction is real. Trust absence, allegory, mystery—the setting not the rising sun is Beauty. No titles or numbers for the poems. That would force order. No titles for the packets she sewed the poems into. No manufactured print. No outside editor/“robber.” Conventional punctuation was abolished not to add “soigné” stitchery but to subtract arbitrary authority. Dashes drew liberty of interruption inside the structure of the poem. Hush of hesitation for breath and for breathing. Empirical domain of revolution and decreation where words are in danger, dissolving … only Mutability certain.
I saw no Way – the Heavens were stitched –
I felt the Columns close –
The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –
I touched the Universe –
And back it slid – and I alone –
A Speck upon a Ball –
Went out beyond Circumference –
Beyond the Dip of Bell – (378)
American jump, American jump,
One—two—three.
Under the water, under the sea,
Catching fishes for my tea.
—Dead or alive?
(“Nursery Rhyme”)
Did you ever read one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have – A something overtakes the Mind – (Prose Fragment 30)
We must travel abreast with Nature if we want to know her, but where shall be obtained the Horse –
A something overtakes the mind – we do not hear it coming. (Prose Fragment 119)
Found among her papers after her death, these two fragments offer a hint as to Emily Dickinson’s working process. Whether “her” was Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Emily Brontë is unimportant. What is interesting is that Dickinson found sense in chance meeting of words. Forward progress disrupted, reversed. Sense came after suggestion.
The way to understand Emily Dickinson is through careful study of her reading. This sort of study, standard for male poets of her stature, is only recently beginning. Ruth Miller and Joanne Fiet Diehl have written interesting books on the subject, but the surface has only just been tapped. Why have Feminist scholars failed to concern themselves, so far, with her working process? Is it because a poet-scholar in full control of her voice won’t fit the waxwork they, with the help of John Cody’s reprehensible biographical psychoanalysis, have modeled? John Cody’s After Great Pain is the rape of a great poet. That Gubar and Gilbert would mention it favorably is a sorry illustration of the continuous vulgarization of the lives of poets, pandering to the popular sentiment that they are society’s fools and madwomen.
Day and night
I worked my rhythmic thought, and furrowed up
Both watch and slumber with long lines of life
Which did not suit their season. The rose fell
From either cheek, my eyes globed luminous
Through orbits of blue shadow, and my pulse
Would shudder along the purple-veined wrist
Like a shot bird.
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Aurora Leigh, book 3, lines 272–79)
To recipient unknown |
about 1861 |
If you saw a bullet hit a Bird – and he told you he was’nt shot – you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word.
One drop more from the gash that stains your Daisy’s bosom – then would you believe? … (233; second “Master” letter)
‘You’ll take a high degree at college, Steerforth,’ said I, ‘if you have not done so already; and they will have good reason to be proud of you.’
‘I take a degree!’ cried Steerforth. ‘Not I! my dear Daisy—will you mind my calling you Daisy?’
‘Not at all!’ said I.
‘That’s a good fellow! My dear Daisy,’ said Steerforth, laughing, ‘I have not the least desire or intention to distinguish myself in that way. I have done quite sufficient for my purpose. I find that I am heavy company enough for myself as I am.’
‘But the fame—’ I was beginning.
‘You romantic Daisy!’ said Steerforth, laughing still more heartily; ‘why should I trouble myself, that a parcel of heavy-headed fellows may gape and hold up their hands? Let them do it at some other man. There’s fame for him, and he’s welcome to it.’ (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chap. 20)
Much discussion has centered around the three enigmatic “Master” letters written in the early 1860s and found among Dickinson’s posthumous papers. Written when she was at the height of her creative drive, there is no evidence that they were ever actually sent to anyone. Discussion invariably centers around the possible identity of the recipient. More attention should be paid to the structure of the letters, including the direct use of ideas, wording, and imagery from both Aurora Leigh and David Copperfield; imagery most often taken from the two fictional characters, Marian Earle in Barrett Browning’s poem and Little Em’ly in Dickens’s novel, who are “fallen women.” Dickinson’s love for the writing of Charles Dickens has been documented, but not well enough. It is a large and fascinating subject, beginning with the chance similarity of their last names, and the obsession both writers shared for disguising and allegorical naming. Her letters to Samuel Bowles, in particular, are studded with quotations and direct references to characters and passages from Dickens. There is only space to touch on certain resemblances here.
—so she spoke.
She told me she had loved upon her knees,
As others pray, more perfectly absorbed
In the act and inspiration. She felt his
For just his uses, not her own at all,—
His stool, to sit on or put up his foot,
His cup, to fill with wine or vinegar,
Whichever drink might please him at the chance,
For that should please her always: let him write His name upon her … it seemed natural;
It was most precious, standing on his shelf,
To wait until he chose to lift his hand.
(Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Aurora Leigh, book 6, lines 903–15)
In David Copperfield, Little Em’ly writes three disjointed, pleading letters after her elopement with Steerforth, addressed to her family. Ham, and possibly Master Davy/David/Daisy—the recipient is never directly specified, and the letters are unsigned.
Oh, if you knew how my heart is torn. If even you, that I have wronged so much, that never can forgive me, could only know what I suffer! I am too wicked to write about myself. Oh, take comfort in thinking that I am so bad. Oh, for mercy’s sake, tell uncle that I never loved him half so dear as now. Oh, don’t remember how affectionate and kind you have all been to me—don’t remember we were ever to be married—but try to think as if I died when I was little, and was buried somewhere…. God bless all! I’ll pray for all, often, on my knees. If he don’t bring me back a lady, and I don’t pray for my own self, I’ll pray for all…. (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chap. 31, from Little Em’ly’s first letter)
To recipient unknown early 1862(?)
Oh, I did offend it – … Daisy – Daisy – offend it – who bends her smaller life to his (it’s) meeker (lower) every day – who only asks – a task – (who) something to do for love of it – some little way she cannot guess to make that master glad – …
Low at the knee that bore her once unto (royal) wordless rest (now) Daisy (stoops a) kneels a culprit – tell her her (offence) fault – Master – if it is (not so) small eno’ to cancel with her life, (Daisy) she is satisfied – but punish (do not) don’t banish her – shut her in prison, Sir – only pledge that you will forgive – sometime – before the grave, and Daisy will not mind – She will awake in (his) your likeness. (248; third “Master” letter)
Attention should be paid to Dickinson’s brilliant masking and unveiling, her joy in the drama of pleading. Far from being the hysterical jargon of a frustrated and rejected woman to some anonymous “Master”-Lover, these three letters were probably self-conscious exercises in prose by one writer playing with, listening to, and learning from others.
The Martyr Poets – did not tell –
But wrought their Pang in syllable –
That when their mortal name be numb –
Their mortal fate – encourage Some
The Martyr Painters – never spoke –
Bequeathing – rather – to their Work –
That when their conscious fingers cease
– Some seek in Art – the Art of Peace –
(544)
3. name] fame 8. Some] Men—
Facts of an artist’s life, while interesting, will never fully explain that particular artist’s truth. The more work thrusts itself into the Extraordinary, the more strange and solitary it becomes. Poets and poems of the first rank remain mysterious. Emily Dickinson’s life was language and a lexicon her landscape. The vital distinction between concealment and revelation is the essence of her work.
For a Tear is an Intellectual thing;
And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King
And the bitter groan of a Martyr’s woe
Is an Arrow from the Almighties Bow!
(Blake, from Jerusalem, chap. 2,
“To the Deists”)
[…]
PRIMARY SOURCES: PART ONE
The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Thomas H. Johnson, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University, 1955).
The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Thomas H. Johnson, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, Harvard University, 1958).
Mrs. Browning’s Complete Poetical Works. Cambridge ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1900).
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
I have used Johnson’s system of numbering and listing all of Dickinson’s variations to her poems throughout. She added them herself very carefully to the fascicle manuscripts. They were marked by a neat + sign over the word to be changed. Then the possible changes were listed at the end of the poem.
PUBLICATION: Excerpted from Women and Language (1984), 4:20–34.
KEYWORDS: material text; feminism; intertextuality; readings.
LINKS: Susan Howe, “Robert Creeley and the Politics of the Person” (PJ 9); Rae Armantrout, “On Pythagorean Silence” (PJ 2); Steve Benson, “Close Reading: Leavings and Cleavings” (Guide; PJ 2); Carolyn Burke, “Without Commas: Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy” (PJ 4); Tina Darragh, “Error Message” (PJ 5); Michael Davidson, “‘Hey Man, My Wave!’: The Authority of Private Language” (Guide; PJ 6); Erica Hunt, “Beginning at Bottom” (PJ 3); Leslie Scalapino and Ron Silliman, “What/Person: From an Exchange” (Guide; PJ 9); James Sherry, “Dreyer’s Step Work” (PJ 4); Ron Silliman, “The Dysfunction of Criticism: Poets and the Critical Tradition of the Anti-Academy” (PJ 10).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1985); The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993); The Western Borders (Berkeley: Tuumba, 1976); Pythagorean Silence (New York: Montemora, 1982); The Defenestration of Prague (New York: Kulchur, 1983); Articulation of Sound Forms in Time (Windsor, Vt.: Awede, 1987); A Bibliography of the King’s Book; or, Eikon Basilike (Providence, R.I.: Paradigm, 1989); The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1989); Singularities (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990); The Nonconformist’s Memorial (New York: New Directions, 1993); Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974–1978 (New York: New Directions, 1996); Pierce-Arrow (New York: New Directions, 1999); The Midnight (New York: New Directions, 2003); Souls of the Labadie Tract (New York: New Directions, 2007); That This (New York: New Directions, 2010).