Mad Voices...Continued Part II

Dickinson’s poem “435”, which beings “Much Madness is divinest Sense”, speaks for the hidden and oppressed literary genius of women. Dickinson was considered deeply emotional and hypersensitive to the outside world. It troubled her so that she assigns herself to an incurable illness and lives the rest of her life in isolation. Phoebe Pettingell further elaborates on Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist theory of madwomen in the attic and the female authors who write about them, asserting that “the American poet Emily Dickinson, a devout admirer of these female English novelists, was so impressed by the figure of the madwoman in the attic that she decided to take the role upon herself. Dressed ever in white, she kept to her room, writing "half-cracked" notes or poems to people she refused to see. This persona was deliberately cultivated, Gilbert and Gubar insist, because so long as she knew that others thought her crazy, she did not need to worry about the unorthodoxy of her verse; madness was a pose that gave her artistic freedom”. Dickinson’s poem declares that what seems “Much Madness” is actually the most “divinest Sense”. Those with a “discerning Eye” are those that understand the plight of the woman who feels imprisoned by her own society and can see the reality of the oppression of the creative soul and mind that yearns for freedom. Gilbert and Gubar define this “double bind” as the woman poet’s dilemma “on the one hand, the necessity of self-assertion for a woman, on the other hand, the necessity of self-assertion for a poet”. Dickinson includes the “double bind” of women in this poem. In the face of the majority, which is unidentifiably male, the woman must either “assent” and be sane or “demure” and be mad. Either case is defined by a “Chain”—locked in the grip of society’s expectations or in the chains of an insane asylum.

Dickinson understood the power of the pen. For many women, writing kept them alive and kept them from going completely mad inside their inescapable homes. The threat of total madness is thwarted by the refuge found in authorship and writing to free the mind and spirit. In her poetry, Dickinson explores the anxiety of authorship that many women felt in attempting to write and the affliction of disease, quarantine and elusiveness that plagues their writing. In the poem “A Word dropped careless on a Page,” Dickinson alludes to “what literary women have hidden or disguised,” that is the “story of the woman writer’s quest for her own story” (Gilbert and Gubar). The poem speaks of the effortless delivery of a single word, which does not apply to women writers, because they struggle to even pick up the pen. The reference is to the words of powerful male writers, the “Wrinkled Maker”, whose stimulating language tells lies of the female sex. The effortless power of male authorship has a great impact on the literary world, creating a masculine mold that all writing must fit. Dickinson claims this patriarchal bias in literary culture is responsible for the breeding of infectious sentences in women’s writing. The poem states, “Infection in the sentence breeds / We may inhale Despair / At distances of Centuries / From the Malaria—” (“A Word”). Gilbert and Gubar claim that “to heal herself, […] the woman writer must exorcise the sentences which bred her infection in the first place; she must overtly or covertly free herself of the despair she inhaled from some “Wrinkled Maker”. Dickinson predicts the devastating effects of the spread of disease in women’s writing, ultimately ending in despair. However, in order for women to finally rid themselves of the disease of secrecy and concealment, the infectious fear of authorship and authority, she must incorporate the realities of her experiences into her texts and live through her stories.

In Dickinson’s poem “613”, the foreshadowing of women’s liberation in writing is expressed with declaration and pride. The poem, written in 1862 by Dickinson, states:

They shut me up in Prose—
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet—Because they like 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—
Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Abolish his Captivity—
And laugh—No more have I— (1-12)

The female voice in the poem declares that no longer will the female writer be forced to remain silent in the limited confines of “womanly” subjects that keep her childlike, innocent, and immobile. The poem gives voice to the “captive” predicament of the female artist, who has always struggled to release her voice and show the genius trapped in the brain labeled with madness. The tone of the poem is rebellious, fighting against the constraints of “stillness” so inbred through the societal expectations of the quiet, well-mannered, submissive female of the nineteenth century. This rebelliousness will not be underestimated or quieted, just as it is impossible to capture the spirit of a bird, so too the woman’s will to be free from “the Pound” may trap her corporeal body, but the recesses of her mind are untouchable and unchainable. Emily Dickinson’s poetry provides the madwoman in the attic with a powerful voice that speaks for the oppression of all female artists and writers. From the confines of her own home, Dickinson’s infected sentences stem from a place of feminine power and creativity that was often dictated by male influence, turning palsied verses into blatant manifestos. Her poetry resonates within the plight female authors to use their so called weakness as powerful expressions of identity and the self.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 2000. Print.