Mad Voices and Infected Sentences in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

Emily Dickinson is known for being the “gentle spinster”, the recluse, the poetic genius and the mad woman in the attic. Throughout her poetry, Dickinson manages a number of complex themes that speak for the silent voices of women of the nineteenth century and previous. Franz Wright claims, “..It's a commonplace that women had endured artistic isolation as an age-old norm, possessing neither models nor the incentive of a public forum or stage that would make possible taking themselves seriously”. However, what makes Dickinson stand out from her female contemporaries is the fact that she actually became the woman in the attic. However, for Dickinson, the confines of the home and its isolation become a breeding ground for feminine power and creativity. Dickinson’s poetry subtly implies those issues for all women yearning for the freedom and power to express themselves in a way that was only available for men. Themes of isolation, concealment, repression and desire for artistic and individual independence in Dickinson’s poetry become a feminist anthem for the starving artist in women over the centuries.

Dickinson’s phobia and hypersensitivity to the harshness and reality of the outside world reflects a more universal notion of women’s struggle to overcome their own phobias of their inner potential to be writers in comparison to the Dickens and the Hawthornes. According to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Those women who were among the first of their sex to attempt the pen were evidently infected or sickened by just the feelings of self-doubt, inadequacy, and inferiority that their education in “femininity” almost seems to have been designed to induce”. Dickinson denounces the conception of male intimidation and the patriarchal “requirements” women have been forced to meet. In her poems, the mad woman “enacts the part of a defiant childwoman who resents her tyrannical husband/father and longs to be delivered from his fierce Requirements” (Gilbert and Gubar). Women are forced to leave behind and abandon the things that represent her past life, her childhood, once she enters marriage. Dickinson’s poem “732”, presents an image of a young woman, so young perhaps she still holds in her possession the prized dolls of her girlhood, who must now “drop” these insignificant “Playthings” to embark on more important responsibilities of being a wife, which makes her a real woman. Gilbert and Gubar note that in this poem specifically, Dickinson “understood the social requirements, masquerading as cosmic laws, which obliged every woman in some sense to enact the role of Nobody. Her accurate perceptions are expressed in various poems and letters devoted to what she ironically described as ‘the honorable Work’ of women”. Though Dickinson never indulged in the physical toils of life, instead enjoying a sequestered, private life, she manages to give a voice to the plight of all women, privileged or impoverished. Dickinson speaks for the female artist, poet and genius whose work was considered by male counterparts hypersensitive, overly Romantic and passionate. In her own poetry, Dickinson portrays a persona that is not herself, but a supposed self that adheres to an artifice or predominate male construct, what feminist critics essentially claim is a diseased feminine authorship.

The playthings are named in the following stanza as things like “Amplitude” and “Awe”, which harbor imaginative and creative power, yet “lay unmentioned” at the bottom of the sea. According to Dickinson, such abandoned playthings that the woman now misses in her new role as wife are not completely lost, but are “absolute necessities” that “silently produces pearl and weed, though such objects (like poems in a bureau drawer) are secrets known only to the strong, assertively masculine part of the woman that must be called Himself in a patriarchal culture” (Gilbert and Gubar). In totality, the poem comments on the double life women must lead in order to endure societal standards as well as keep alive the passionate, artistic soul within. Women must take on women’s work, yet many, like Dickinson, struggle to throw away their playthings for the more “womanly” toys, like irons, pots and children, the “real” dolls.

In Dickinson’s poem “579”, through the use of stark metaphor the natural sensation of hunger combined with a quench for possession finally reaches an awareness and appreciation for a long, painful absence. Dickinson’s tone is vexed and yearnful, and the object of desire seems ambiguous, hidden beneath the meaning of her diction. The speaker of the poem can be identified as a female who hungers for something that will satisfy her desire for knowledge. The sense of lacking or poverty in this poem carries a foreboding presence. The hunger that Dickinson refers to stands for more than a lack of food, but a lack of the substances that artistic women need for livelihood. This hunger that the speaker mentions has existed for her a long time, perhaps even over centuries of women: “I had been hungry all the years.” She describes the experience of having “looked”, “seen” or “touched” the bread and wine, both religiously symbolic of the flesh and blood of Christ, but never having eaten it. The second line states, “My Noon had Come—to dine— / I trembling drew the Table near— / And touched the Curious Wine” (2-4). Dickinson seems to use the word “Noon” as symbolic for a timeless moment; the hour that stood apart from everything and everyone else. The use of a possessive noun, my noon, places the speaker in a momentary time-freeze where she, “trembling”, draws near to a table with food. Having been barred from the pleasure of eating, the pleasure of writing and being a part of the literary world, the woman trembles with weakness and anxiety once she approaches what was once only available to men. It is now the woman’s time to eat, to take possession, but since there has been an absence for so long, there is apprehension. Noon is a time when the mid-day meal is eaten, and it is at this time that the speaker must face her hunger.

In stanza three, the speaker’s consciousness has somewhat shifted to a current revelation of something previously not known. She says, “I did not know the ample Bread— / ‘Twas so unlike the Crumb” (9-10). The speaker is curious about self-fulfillment and self-satisfaction as they approach the source. The ample, or abundantly satisfying, bread is contrasted to the mere crumb. The speaker now knows, after having previously been unaware, of the vast amount of knowledge that there was to possess. Dickinson relishes in the realization that the areas of interest, the subjects for study and knowledge to be gained for her sex are much more ample than the crumbs women were used to—the subjects of cooking, sewing, and other domestic duties. As Gilbert and Gubar state, “What the lives and lines and choices of all these women tell us, in short, is that the literary woman has always faced equally degrading options when she had to define her public presence in the world. If she did not suppress her work entirely or publish it pseudonymously or anonymously, she could modestly confess her female ‘limitations’ and concentrate on the ‘lesser’ subjects reserved for ladies as becoming to their inferior powers”. Women had been isolated from a reality of possession, of knowing the satisfaction and fulfillment of being free to write and express themselves without constraint. Now, the speaker’s “trembling” indicates a physical state of astonishment and apprehension to this new found knowledge.

*Continued...see Part II