reading the poet and the poetry: critics and emily dickinson

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University of Tulsa Reading the Poet and the Poetry: Critics and Emily Dickinson Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination by Joanne Feit Diehl; The Nightingale's Burden; Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 by Cheryl Walker; Emily Dickinson: When a Writer Is a Daughter by Barbara Antonina; Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson by Suzanne Juhasz Review by: Nancy Walker Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 229-233 Published by: University of Tulsa Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463722 . Accessed: 19/12/2014 18:26 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of Tulsa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 18:26:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Reading the Poet and the Poetry: Critics and Emily Dickinson

University of Tulsa

Reading the Poet and the Poetry: Critics and Emily DickinsonDickinson and the Romantic Imagination by Joanne Feit Diehl; The Nightingale's Burden;Women Poets and American Culture before 1900 by Cheryl Walker; Emily Dickinson: When aWriter Is a Daughter by Barbara Antonina; Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson by SuzanneJuhaszReview by: Nancy WalkerTulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 229-233Published by: University of TulsaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463722 .

Accessed: 19/12/2014 18:26

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Tulsa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Tulsa Studies inWomen's Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 19 Dec 2014 18:26:18 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Reading the Poet and the Poetry: Critics and Emily Dickinson

REVIEWS

REVIEW ESSAY: Reading the Poet and the Poetry: Critics and

Emily Dickinson

DICKINSON AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION, by Joanne Feit Diehl. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981. 205 pp. $16.50.

THE NIGHTINGALES BURDEN; WOMEN POETS AND AMERICAN CULTURE BEFORE 1900, by Cheryl Walker. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982. 189 pp. $22.50 cloth; $8.95 paper.

EMILY DICKINSON: WHEN A WRITER IS A DAUGHTER, by Barbara Antonina Clarke Mossberg. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982. 214 pp. $19.95.

FEMINIST CRITICS READ EMILY DICKINSON, ed. Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1983. 184 pp. $17.50.

Not surprisingly, the maturation of feminist scholarship and a renewed interest in the poetry and the person of Emily Dickinson have converged to

produce a new generation of Dickinson criticism. In her introduction to Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, Suzanne Juhasz dates the beginning of a feminist approach to 1972?specifically to Elsa Green's essay, "Emily Dickinson was a Poetess," the first, Juhasz maintains, to "observe and declare the necessary conjunction between woman and poet" (p. 9), and most Dickinson scholars acknowledge the influence of two later works: Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979) and Margaret Homans' Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson (1980). The common thread uniting various feminist approaches to Dickinson?and helping to refine and define feminist

literary scholarship itself?is the inescapable link between the poet and the

poetry: the woman and her art. Few authors besides Dickinson have been the subject of so much my-

thologizing and misunderstanding on the part of biographers and critics. The fact of her womanhood has more often hindered than furthered an

understanding of her work, and both her reclusiveness and the non-tradi? tional character of her poetry have led to spurious and sometimes damaging speculations about the relationship between her life and her art. George Whicher's This Was a Poet: A Critical Biography of Emily Dickinson (1938) set

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Page 3: Reading the Poet and the Poetry: Critics and Emily Dickinson

the tone of much ensuing scholarship by maintaining that poetry was for Dickinson an escape from the pain and isolation caused by an unhappy love

affair, and thus directing attention away from the quality of the work and toward the aberrant nature of the poet's life. As late as 1971, John Cody's psychoanalytic approach to Dickinson in After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson similarly focuses on personal abnormality as the source of the poetry. In Cody's view, Dickinson was denied adequate identification with a female role model (her mother) and so sought the "masculine" role of

poet, with which she was necessarily, as a woman, uncomfortable. One intention of feminist literary criticism is to demonstrate how art

develops and flourishes because of, not in spite of, the writer's gender, whether the critic's approach is primarily cultural, psychological, or lin?

guistic. Instead of imposing an order or interpretation borrowed from the dominant masculine tradition, "the perspective of feminist criticism," in

Juhasz's terms, "contains the premise that the poet is who she says she is, who she shows herself to be" (p. 20). This approach necessitates a renewed

emphasis on language, particularly as that language embodies images that reveal the connections between self and art.

Joanne Feit Diehl, in Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination, shares with earlier critics a conviction that Dickinson was emotionally and intellec?

tually isolated from her immediate environment, but agrees with recent feminist critics that this isolation was a result primarily of her womanhood? a reluctance to identify with conventional female images and the impos? sibility of emulating masculine dominance over either the natural or the

literary world. The intention of Diehl's book, however, is to demonstrate

through close reading of the poetry Dickinson's artistic relationship to major male Romantic poets?Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Emerson?"on the

premise that no poet can develop in isolation from the word of his or her

poetic predecessors and hope to achieve Dickinson's stature" (p. 4). Diehl contends that the extent to which Dickinson departs from the Romantic tradition is determined by her vision of the poetic muse as a potentially threatening father/lover/"Master" figure rather than the provocative female with whom the male poet could achieve a fruitful if uneasy relationship.

Although Diehl's style is sometimes so prolix as to nearly obscure her

meaning, the book succeeds as a close study of imagery in the poetry of Dickinson and her Romantic forebears, and illuminates in particular Dickinson's transformation of traditional images of nature into the materials of a private vision of reality. Whereas, for example, Keats considers the world "the Minds [sic] Bible,.. . the Minds experience," Dickinson finds the world a mystery, reluctant to yield its secrets to the poet until "Time is over" and Christ explains "each separate anguish/ In the fair schoolroom of the

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Page 4: Reading the Poet and the Poetry: Critics and Emily Dickinson

sky?" (p. 102). The male poet may see himself as the inheritor of a poetic tradition with established relations between nature and self, Muse and art, but the female poet must simultaneously absorb and deny this tradition? must guard against being "overwhelmed" by a "patriarchal lineage against which she must struggle to assert her poetic identity" (p. 83). Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination, therefore, both traces literary influence and seeks to set Dickinson apart from the Romantic tradition by virtue of her realiza? tion of herself as "other."

That American women poets as a group have written in ways that demonstrate their "otherness" is the thesis of Cheryl Walker's The Night? ingales Burden, In this first of a projected two-volume work on America's female poets, Walker considers several pre-twentieth-century writers, not all of whom have achieved Dickinson's status. Walker's title, as she explains in her chapter on Anne Bradstreet, is derived from her perception that women poets have assumed the role of prophet, acting as "wise women, midwives of a sort," to pass along a "female burden of dark and sometimes secret truths" (p. 19). Walker's purpose is to identify commonalities in the

poetry of writers such as Bradstreet, Dickinson, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Louise Guiney and others?common ways of expressing feelings of power, powerlessness, and reconciliation?that suggest a separate tradition in which to study the work of individual poets. Individual poems are, in Walker's book, seen as "signs of women's culture" (p. 2), a culture that maintains a remarkable homogeneity over several centuries.

Emily Dickinson occupies a chapter in The Nightingales Burden with Helen Hunt Jackson, one of the few people who encouraged Dickinson to

publish her work during her lifetime. Borrowing T.S. Eliot's phrase "Tradi? tion and the Individual Talent" as the chapter title, Walker proposes that while Jackson allowed her poetry to be shaped by an inherited literary sensibility, Dickinson transcended tradition to create unorthodox and

ultimately more enduring poetry. Yet the two have in common?and share with other nineteenth-century women poets?poetic imagery which reveals a "secret sorrow" or a "philosophy of renunciation" which "develops as a

strategy for dealing with balked ambition" (p. 93). Though capable of

posing, of assuming disguises in which to confront the world, Dickinson was sincere in expressing her sense of loss and deprivation?not the loss of a

specific lover, as so many biographers have insisted, but the lack of power to be a poet as defined by the patriarchal tradition. As the major female poet of the nineteenth century in America, Dickinson represents the triumph of

genius over the restrictions of culture. Barbara Mossberg's Emily Dickinson: When a Writer is a Daughter has a

narrower and deeper focus on Dickinson's work as a product of her familial

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Page 5: Reading the Poet and the Poetry: Critics and Emily Dickinson

relationships. Mossberg's deceptively simple thesis is that the themes and attitudes of Dickinson's poetry were formed by the time she was fifteen, forged by the role and relationships she experienced as a woman in the

patriarchal culture of nineteenth-century America. Mossberg argues con?

vincingly that as a means of creating and preserving her identity as an artist, Dickinson had by that age created a "daughter construct": a way of relating to the world which required rejection of the passivity represented by her mother and the authority represented by her father. The dualistic stance of Dickinson's public persona?alternately dutifully childlike and scornfully rebellious?is seen in this study to originate in Dickinson's position as "a

daughter trying to commune with and break away from a patriarchy that

eclipses women" (p. 11). Instead of attempting to construct yet another Dickinson family portrait,

Mossberg uses Dickinson's poems and letters as the primary materials of her

study and traces Dickinson's responses to both female and male adult

figures?primarily her own parents, but also other manifestations of adulthood?in order to posit a poetic imagination rooted in Dickinson's womanhood. As a daughter rather than a son, she felt alienated from both the dutiful life of the "ideal" woman and the independence and power of

men; thus homeless, she creates a poetic residence in which she can not only live ("I dwell in Possibility?/A fairer House than Prose?") but also create her own identity and define her own relations with the world.

To illustrate the characteristics and the effect of the "daughter construct," Mossberg analyzes Dickinson poems not always considered "major" by traditional critics. Considering the canon as a whole, rather than the

approximately ten percent of the poems ordinarily considered her best, Mossberg contends that Dickinson "has essentially one protagonist, herself; one 'plot,' her hopes, fears, and problems as a woman artist" (p. 7). Poems from early and late in Dickinson's career as well as from the "flood" period of the early 1860s show a consistent feminine sensibility that alienates her from both a public professional life and acquiescence to traditional wom? anhood. Like Walker and Diehl, Mossberg argues that Dickinson's struggles with identity, though sources of great anguish, are also the sources of her

poetic strength. The collection of essays edited by Juhasz, Feminist Critics Read Emily

Dickinson, is the most widely useful recent work of Dickinson criticism,

largely because it includes essays by most major feminist Dickinson critics. As this collection was being completed, Diehl's and Mossberg's books were still in press; only Karl Keller's The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty: Emily Dickinson and America (1979), among those full-length works that Juhasz identifies as "feminist," had been published. The fact that Feminist Critics

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Page 6: Reading the Poet and the Poetry: Critics and Emily Dickinson

includes essays by all three scholars indicates the range of approaches that

may be subsumed under that designation. Keller's book is a study in affinities

(rather than influences) between Dickinson and other major American

writers; it is characterized by a casual, even breezy style and an enormous

respect for Dickinson's genius and individuality. Thus it is no surprise that Keller's essay in this collection, "Notes on Sleeping with Emily Dickinson," contains the following comments: "A man trying to write well about Emily Dickinson is an honest case of intellectual drag. The gender doesn't change, the role does. You must come off looking right, you are self-conscious, you dissemble. It is show biz" (p. 67).

Yet neither Keller nor anyone else dissembles in this collection. Sandra Gilbert maintains that to "deconstruct" the mythology of Dickinson's life

may be less useful than to "decipher" the myths that she consciously developed as a way of understanding Dickinson's exploration of the "myste? ries" of nineteenth-century womanhood. Joanne A. Dobson deals with the

archetype of masculinity in Dickinson's poetry. Both Adalaid Morris and

Margaret Homans are concerned with Dickinson's love for men and for women: the extent to which heterosexual love is, as expressed in the "Master poems" and letters, hierarchical, requiring dominance and submis?

sion, whereas the love of one woman for another may involve a comfortable

equality (Morris) or an unproductive stasis (Homans). Christanne Miller and

Joanne Feit Diehl concern themselves with linguistic structures, Miller

arguing that Dickinson's disruption of traditional linguistic structures is emblematic of her desire to disrupt existing (male) authority structures, and Diehl suggesting that the poet uses words as a defense against "limitation,

orthodoxy, and a hostile world" (p. 159), and using as the significant poem #1651: "A Word made Flesh is seldom/ And tremblingly partook."

Near the end of her introduction to this collection Juhasz says, "We are

hardly finished with Dickinson." No, indeed. One hopes, though, that feminist criticism of the sort considered here does not become an end in

itself, but rather a stage on the way to humanistic literary criticism, in which

gender is regarded as a potent element of the creative process rather than as the sole explanation for great art. The function of literary criticism is to

illuminate, as these works do, not to provide final answers.

Nancy Walker

Stephens College

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