Emily Dickinson: Background and Her Writings

 

Emily Dickinson did not provide titles to her poems. We do not find any reasons behind it but then, we consider the title as either the first line of the poem or the numbers allotted to them in Thomas H. Johnson’s standard edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson was born in the year 1830 at Amherst, in the Connecticut Valley, Massachusetts. She was devoted to her home and from her late twenties showed the trait of seclusion and hardly met any visitors. Because of this tendency, people in Amherst considered her an eccentric. She was a perceptive, critical, hard working person who knew how to balance between a busy family and writing. She regularly kept writing poems and neatly arranged them in chronological order. Her poetic oeuvre was a markedly individual style that uses skilful imagery. It includes the imagery of death, desire, despair, immortality, nature and hope. The distinctive features of her poems are: they lack titles, often use slant rhymes (half-rhyme), punctuation, and unconventional capitalization, hyphens, pauses. At a young age, she had faced the troubles of losing her close ones. Her poems thus reflect the deepening menace of death. How much her religious faith was shaken can be read in one of her poems that was written after she stopped visiting the church, in about 1852. She writes, “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church/ I keep it, staying at Home/I, just wear my Wings /So instead of getting to Heaven, at last/I’m going, all along.”

 

Dickinson had five important male preceptors who guided her throughout her literary writings: Benjamin Franklin Newton, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Edward Everett Hale, Reverend Charles Wadsworth and Samuel Bowles. Dickinson’s earliest preceptor was Benjamin Franklin Newton. He was a twenty six years old young law student who studied under her father, Edward Dickinson. He was a learned and artistically sensitive man and used to exchange long literary conversations with Dickinson. In one of her letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she laments over Newton’s death and writes, “My earliest friend wrote me the week before he died. If I live, I will go to Amherst – if I die, I certainly will” (L457). Higginson was one of the important male preceptors in Dickinson’s life. He worked as a Unitarian minister, ardently supported in movements related to women’s rights and Abolition.  He was also a literary editor and writer. She was a sensitive poet who felt anxious about the loss of her close ones and wondered about mortality and immortality. She grieves over death but tries consoling herself by believing in the afterlife or soul in paradise. At the time of one of her trips with her father to Philadelphia, she visited Arch Street Presbyterian church and there she heard the speech of Reverend Charles Wadsworth. Impressed by his lectures, she wrote to him seeking for guidance and thus she got her another preceptor. Another preceptor was Samuel Bowles, the owner and an editor of the Springfield Republican.

 

“Emily Dickinson acted out historical and cultural movements in a personal way… Dissent, revivals, and the formations of new Churches created an era of religious multiplicity” (Martin 24). Scholars believe that she was a religious rebel, who denied conversion, liberated herself from church and adopted a personal type of religion. Reading her poems, we find that unlike accepting the fixed guidelines of the religion, she had created her faith that could suit her relationship with friends, family and her own self. She writes, ‘“Faith” is a fine invention/For Gentlemen who see!’(185) Often during inner turmoil and emotional outburst, she questions the acts of God also, “Of Course – I prayed/And did God care? /He cared as much as on the Air/A Bird – had stamped her foot /And cried ‘Give Me’” (376).

 

The literary writing period of Emily Dickinson was 1855-1865. The scholars consider this period to be a significant one in American nineteenth-century history. The major events that Dickinson saw in her lifetime include the Mexican– American War (1846-1848), the California Gold Rush (1848-1855), the first American women’s rights convention (July 19, 1848), Seneca Falls Convention, Harriet Tubman’s escape on the Underground Railroad (Harriet Tubman was an escaped enslaved woman. She worked as a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. She led and worked for the freedom of other enslaved people. She was also a nurse, a Union spy and a women’s suffrage supporter), the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852, an abolitionist novel), the Civil War (1861-65), and the shootings of American President Abraham Lincoln, in 1865. Also, we find that some of the scientific inventions were going on such as steampowered locomotives, gas lamps, revolvers, the telegraphs, bicycles, anaesthesia, and dynamites. “In addition to political and technological advances, a religious and spiritual revolution was also gaining momentum” (Martin 24). As America struggled for its existence, expansion, the rights of its citizens, Dickinson also struggled to establish her identity as a successful writer.

“Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which allowed President Jackson to negotiate treaties with Native Americans to exchange land in the Eastern states for land west of the Mississippi River. One of these treaties led to the expulsion of Cherokee Indians from their lands in North Carolina and Georgia. Their 1838 exile to Indian Territory became known as the “Trail of Tears” (Martin 28). The US was working on its expansion and seeking new opportunities. Many of Dickinson’s friend’s departed to new places, leaving her bereft and alone. Along with religious and abolitionist movements, the Second Great Awakening was also evolving. The Northern people believed that slavery needed to be prohibited, while Southerners argued that it was not mentioned in the Bible anywhere that slavery was a sin. It had an integral role in the economy and social belief. Apart from the abolitionist movement, debates on individual rights and personhood were also going on. At the same time, women also argued for their rights. These events had some impressions on her mind and she started contemplating about women education, their societal status, freedom, their solidarity and sisterhood. “Later in life, Dickinson befriended Samuel Bowles, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, three people who supported women’s writing and shared liberal views about women’s rights” (Martin 31).

 

 

Transcendentalism was flourishing in mid-nineteenth-century America as an idealist philosophy. It was influenced by Christian Unitarianism of 1830s. The important writers of this movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Other writers were Nathaniel Hawthorn, Herman Melville. The members of the transcendental club included Amos Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller and William Ellery Channing. They adhered to Kant’s philosophy of intuitive knowledge and celebrated individualism and self-reliance. It is believed that an individual could attain sublimity by studying nature and becoming the mortal embodiment of God. They believed the notion that individuals could have direct relationship with God without having any religious masters as mediators. Dickinson enquired about the Puritans, who believed in original sin, a hostile world, and a predestined universe. To her, Unitarianism was a way out that believed the world was good and that people could attain salvation through good works. Like Dickinson, the Transcendentalists believed that the country’s materialistic views were rejecting to acknowledge the value of an individual’s craftsmanship and alienating them from their own society. In simple terms, Transcendentalists sought to restore the vital connection between the nature, people and God. Though not a transcendental writer, the worldview Dickinson constructs in her poetry reflects the influences of a transcendental legacy. Like Emerson’s poetry, Dickinson’s writings show the resistance to organized religion, the fixed conventions, set of rules and doctrines. Her poetry attempts to seek eternal truth in the natural world with the power of human consciousness and not through God or blindly following a set religious doctrines. The same attitude of experimentation could be seen in her style of writing where she abandoned the use of standard meter and rhyme. She also twisted traditional grammar to suit her needs and in a way compelled her readers to try understanding the meaning of her works.

Her poetic style differs from her contemporaries because we find in her poetry the use of “circumference.” In one of her letters to Higginson in 1862, she declares, “My Business is Circumference” (L 412). The Circumference is derived from Latin which means ‘to carry’ or ‘to go around’. It gives the sense of encompassing. It is a double metaphor signifying extension as well as limit. Here Dickinson uses it in the sense of spirit in action where the consciousness negotiates between ‘me’ and ‘not me’. In a way, it draws a thin line or perimeter between man and God. She uses it for sublimity, mixing awe and fear with aesthetics. Circumference helps to embrace the idea of life within its most complete and comprehensive manner. It’s not the traditional notion of religion but gives a way to connect to God and evolve as a divine-human being. Another key feature of Dickinson’s letters is the use of personas. . The names she used for herself  include “Emilie,” “Judah,” “Phaeton,” “Brooks of Sheffield,” “Cole,” “Samuel Nash,” “Antony,” and “Uncle Emily.”