Emily Dickinson and Isolation
Karen Alkalay-Gut
It is fitting that I’m writing about this in lockdown. Because my subject is Emily Dickinson’s freedom in her isolation, her decision to actively set herself apart from society. The society that demands conformity on every level of existence. The poems I’ll be reading illustrate this decision.
It was not just her father, who, when he spoke to her mother she “Trembled, obeyed, and was silent.” It was not just the society that expected marriage, housekeeping, appearance, manners. It was also the literary world that demanded proper subjects. Women specifically wrote about flowers, mourning, love; they used proper grammar, proper punctuation, and their poems were confined to publication in women’s journals. The male writers were threatened by them, complaining about the diminishment of the value of literature when women are added to the list of writers. “The damned mob of scribbling women,” Nathaniel Hawthorne complained. Their names have not lasted into the twentieth century. The 10 poems that were published in her lifetime were edited: with commas and periods, removing the multi-directional force that her dashes enabled. The 1790 other poems were only published – edited – after her death.
The civil war that was going on all around her, with the south ceding from the US gave her the idea of using the word “succession.”
upon declaring independence from society, she becomes the queen of her one-room domain. To the editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who kept suggesting changes, she explained that compromises with society would not give her the fame he hinted she should work towards. “If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her – if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase.”
She had known failure, and, using the civil war analogy, saw that it helped her to understand, to feel, what it would be like to succeed. So she knew what she was giving up.
Her choice, to wear clothes devoid of color, all white, also gave her the sense of separation, of untouchability. The touch of a stranger will stain her purity, just as the touch of an editor will stain her poem.
She was not always like that. She had grown up going to school and church and all the other places that women went. She seemed to have lived a normal life. But in her late thirties, she gave up trying to fit in, and although she continued to write, and prepared her poems by hand-sewing them together as books, she showed her works to no one but her sister-in-law, who kept her secrets.
But that wasn’t the end of her anonymity. After she died, and the poems were discovered in her room, Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, though both heavily edited the content, making them available to a general audience while destroying their uniqueness.
They revised the poems to make them more conventional, more appealing to the popular reader, and it wasn’t until the poems appeared in their original form, in 1955, that their striking originality was revealed and they began to be taken seriously.
Poems I take seriously are like the ones below:
They shut me up in Prose –
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet –
Because they liked me “still” –
Still! Could themself have peeped –
And seen my Brain – go round –
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason – in the Pound –
I’m ceded — I’ve stopped being Theirs —
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading — too —
Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, of Grace —
Unto supremest name —
Called to my Full — The Crescent dropped —
Existence’s whole Arc, filled up,
With one small Diadem.
My second Rank — too small the first —
Crowned — Crowing — on my Father’s breast —
A half unconscious Queen —
But this time — Adequate — Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown —
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the Purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory
As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear.
435
Much Madness is divinist Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous
And handled with a Chain –
288
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
285
The Robin’s my Criterion for Tune—
Because I grow—where Robins do—
But, were I Cuckoo born—
I’d swear by him—
The ode familiar—rules the Noon—
The Buttercup’s, my Whim for Bloom—
Because, we’re Orchard sprung—
But, were I Britain born,
I’d Daisies spurn—
None but the Nut—October fit—
Because, through dropping it,
The Seasons flit—I’m taught—
Without the Snow’s Tableau
Winter, were lie—to me—
Because I see—New Englandly—
The Queen, discerns like me—
Provincially—