11
Elizabeth A. Petrino
Emily Dickinson clearly stands at the center of any poetic tradition in American literature. Yet her contemporaries saw her poetry as rare and perhaps too delicate for print, while the works of other American women poets filled the pages of magazines and periodicals as well as the major anthologies of the day. Despite their popularity, many female poets disappeared from the anthologies produced in the early twentieth century. As aesthetic tastes changed with the emergence of modernism, critics deemed many female poets too sentimental and mawkish. As a result, scholars relied until recently mainly on special collections of libraries, existing anthologies, piecemeal research from newspapers and periodicals, and collections of rare books. With the advent of feminist literary scholarship in the 1970s through the 1990s, however, anthologies of nineteenth‐century women’s poetry – most notably, those by Cheryl Walker (1992), Emily Stipes Watts (1977), Janet Gray (1997), Paula Bennett (1998), and Karen Kilcup (1997) – recovered many writers who had dropped out of the canon. Before their archival investigations, critics had elevated Dickinson as one of the most important of all American poets, largely with the effect of diminishing the otherwise noteworthy achievements of other female poets of her era. As early as the 1890s, William Dean Howells underscored her self‐conscious artistry, observing that her poems expressed “a compassed whole, a sharply finished point,” and that “the author spared no pains in the perfect expression of her ideals” (quoted in Eberwein, Farrar, and Miller 2015: 73). Howells thus initiated the view of a long line of critics who elevated Dickinson over her contemporary female peers, as Nancy Walker aptly summarizes: “As the major female poet of the nineteenth century in America, Dickinson represents the triumph of genius over the restrictions of culture” (Walker 1983: 231).
Since then, the Internet and digitized sources have revolutionized our understanding both of the reading practices and of the cultural context in which Dickinson wrote. The Emily Dickinson Archive, an open‐access website at Harvard for the study of Dickinson’s manuscripts, provides digitized images of her manuscripts and brings together digital repositories of her work from several institutions, including Amherst College, the Houghton Library, the Beinecke Library, and the Boston Public Library, among others. The archive gives readers an opportunity to investigate long‐standing debates in Dickinson studies about the importance of her manuscripts: Is there any inherent order or cohering principle to Dickinson’s fascicles, the groups of poems that she gathered and bound together? How do the variant phrases, ordering of words on the page, and handwriting affect the poem’s meaning? Dickinson’s decision not to publish – or, in Sharon Cameron’s memorable phrase, “choosing not choosing” – was itself a means during her lifetime to bypass the conventions of the literary marketplace, a private rebellion in the face of a largely unreceptive reading world (Cameron 1993).
But Dickinson was not alone in contending with issues of publication and mentorship, nor was she restricted to a life outside of the world of intellectual exchange and the literary marketplace, formal experimentation, and the social and political landscape that other female poets encountered. As Cristanne Miller (2012) has recently argued, reading Dickinson’s verse “‘in time’ – that is, historically and with attention to rhythms and forms,” allows us to see her evolving reading and writing practices in response to the intense formal experimentation ongoing in her era (1). Miller’s claim disables the myth that Dickinson was either wholly original or completely isolated – rather, her reading was broad, interactive, and capacious, and her writing evolved over the course of her life in conversation with other published writers of her age. Moreover, Dickinson might be situated among her female poetic peers to reassess her unique talent and their achievements, which are all the more visible against the social and political landscape of her era. Even more regionally and racially diverse figures have come into play, fueled largely by the immense number of poets recoverable in online archives.
Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney (1791–1865), Emma Lazarus (1849–1887), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), Rose Terry Cooke (1827–1892), Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885), Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836–1919), and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) also struggled with the same issues of mentorship and publication, formal complexity, and social activism as Dickinson did, though they often expressed themselves within the contemporary rhetorical discourse of their eras. While critics have often praised Dickinson as a unique talent among her female poetic peers, the received model of her work as a formally innovative and original poet has obscured the achievements of other nineteenth‐century female poets, and, simultaneously, also made more enigmatic Dickinson’s link to social and cultural issues. Building on the work of recent critics, I will explore how situating Dickinson’s work against that of other women poets has redefined our notion of her extraordinary talent and why she continued to write – not only about gender and authorship, but also about issues of national and social importance, such as race and the war, while excelling at the formal experimentation common in her era.
Gender, Publication, and Reception
Although Dickinson kept up a lifelong correspondence with her friends, her distaste for the restrictions of publication turned her away from printing her verse in favor of self‐publication. Lavinia Dickinson, the poet’s sister, recalls discovering Dickinson’s fascicles – small, hand‐bound volumes of poems copied in ink onto letter paper, punched with two holes and sewn together with string – and, based on Lavinia’s comments, R.W. Franklin theorizes that Dickinson conceived of her poems in this form from early in her career.1 “I found, (the week after her death,)” recalled Lavinia, “a box (locked) containing 7 hundred wonderful poems, carefully copied” (quoted in Dickinson 1998, vol. 1: 7). These were the fascicles, the construction of which began in 1858 and would continue until about 1862; at that time, Dickinson began to draft poems on single sheets, rather than as bound packets, a process that continued off and on until 1875. Lavinia’s discovery comprised only a portion of Dickinson’s canon of almost 1800 poems, only 10 of which were published during her lifetime She clearly conceived of her poems in a state of continual evolution, often sent to her friends and companions in letters, that would ultimately require their being copied, ordered (even for browsing purposes), and preserved for future reference.
When the first volume of Poems by Emily Dickinson appeared posthumously in 1890, her poems were presented to the public in much the way the works of other nineteenth‐century female poets were – as natural, untutored, almost child‐like, and spontaneous expressions. “In many cases these verses will seem to the reader like poetry torn up by the roots,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson observed in his “Preface,” “with rain and dew and earth still clinging to them, giving a freshness and a fragrance not otherwise to be conveyed” (Higginson 1890: iii). Higginson also singled out her solitude and self‐expression, hallmarks of a Romantic sensibility, claiming that her poems were “produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer’s own mind” (Higginson 1890: iii). Two other volumes quickly followed, in 1891 and 1896. In the “Introduction” to Poems by Emily Dickinson, Second Series (1891), Mabel Loomis Todd acknowledged Dickinson’s remarkable and unique artistry: likening her poems to “impressionist pictures, or Wagner’s rugged music,” she trenchantly notes, “the very absence of conventional form challenges attention” (Todd 1890: 7). Building on the image of her original genius, critics of the 1930s, such as Allan Tate, who praised Dickinson’s poetry as “a poetry of ideas,” privileged formal readings detached from their historical and social context (Erkkila 2002: 14). Betsy Erkkila argues that the edition of her poems edited by Thomas Johnson in 1955 only “reaffirmed both the formalist and New Critical protocols of the American academy and an ongoing tendency among editors and critics to banish or repress the social location and formation of Dickinson’s work” (2002: 16). Rather than view her poems as the product of an isolated talent, as Todd did, feminist critics have explored Dickinson’s writing as related to its history and social context as part of their recovery of American women’s verse.
While Dickinson’s early editors were intent on crafting an image of her that would conform to the mold of Victorian womanhood, other writers faced similar difficulties as they sought to create models of female authorship that could align with a suitably public image. Early in her literary career, Sigourney found the duties of teaching and domestic life became obstacles to her writing. Her “The Desertion of the Muse,” published in Moral Pieces and Verses (1815), wittily serves as Sigourney’s 8½, Fellini’s classic film about a director who is unable to make a film: she writes a poem about not being able to write, casting her lack of inspiration as an encounter between herself and a female muse. Visiting the poet at night, her muse reminds her how as a child the poet gratefully acknowledged her help, when she “deign’d to stoop that you might see / And try to reach my lyre” (Sigourney 2008: 63). Giving up readily her “light domestic toils” for the muse’s inspiration, the poet gave her full attention as a child to her muse (Sigourney 2008: 64). But her muse’s shoddy appearance and unharmonious notes take precedence later:
I come; and then with curious glance,
My scanty robe you eye,
And count my curls, and measure where,
Each flowing tress should lie:
And wonder why such tasteless wreaths
Of faded flow’rs I wear,
And chide because I could not stay,
To dress myself with care.
And when you ask to hear my song,
And I begin to play,
You utter, “that is out of tune,”
And snatch the lyre away.
(Sigourney 2008: 65)
As a poem about poetic inspiration, “The Desertion of the Muse” recasts familiar classical and Romantic tropes, such as the crown of bay leaves and the lyre, but comically inverts them. Written when she was only 23 years old, Sigourney was clearly forecasting the problem she would face as a woman writer within a largely male poetic tradition: how to claim a role as a professional writer within the strictures of woman’s largely domestic role. Like her literary predecessors, Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley, Sigourney invokes the female muse, but claims for herself the role as interpreter of her muse. Perhaps Sigourney intended to parody the way women were driven by fashion to maintain a flawless appearance, as the speaker derided her muse’s “scanty” robe and “tasteless wreaths,” leading to her eventual departure.
While Sigourney published widely and maintained a suitably domestic public persona, Emma Lazarus’s career demonstrates the publishing constraints under which nineteenth‐century women poets worked. Talented in languages and well educated, the precocious Lazarus wrote the self‐published Poems and Translations (1866) when she was “between the ages of fourteen and sixteen,” as announced on the title page of the volume. A year later, Lazarus sent Emerson the volume along with several more recent poems. Perhaps her gift served as an invitation to receive his help in securing more publications as well as a tribute. In response, Emerson wrote her an effusive letter that her biographer Esther Schor terms “unmistakably flirtatious” (2006: 25), a letter in which he calls himself her teacher: “I should like to be appointed your Professor, – you being required to attend the whole term. I should be very stern & exigeant, & insist on large readings & writings, & from haughty points of view.” While Emerson clearly acknowledges Lazarus’s formidable talent as a writer, his letter assumes his superiority as her “tutor,” even as he perhaps self‐consciously satirizes himself, concluding contritely, “I find I am to come to New York in the beginning of next week & I rely on your giving me an hour & on your being docile & concealing all your impatience of your tutor” (Emerson 1868).
Many nineteenth‐century female poets found the relationship with an older male mentor tense and offputting, as did Lazarus. Dickinson wrote to Higginson, a famous critic and editor, following his publication of “Letter to a Young Contributor” (1861) in the Atlantic Monthly. As a result of their first tentative exchanges, she claimed that she anticipated his suggestion that she “delay ‘to publish’ – that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin” (Dickinson 1958: 408). Nevertheless, she also asked him to be her “Preceptor,” occasionally describing herself as his “Scholar.” But the similarities stop there. A year after Lazarus dedicated “Admetus” to Emerson, he wrote again in November 1868, noting: “You have hid yourself from me until now, for the merits of the preceding poems did not unfold this fulness & high equality of power” (Eiselein 2002: 311). When Emerson published his anthology Parnassus (1874), however, his decision not to include her poems shocked Lazarus, who in December 1874 wrote indignantly that “Your favorable opinion having been confirmed by some of the best critics of England & America, I felt as if I had won for myself by my own efforts a place in any collection of American poets, & I find myself berated with absolute contempt in the very quarter where I had been encouraged to build my fondest hopes” (Eiselein 2002: 312). Two years later, Emerson, who was 75 at the time, invited Lazarus to visit him in Concord. Despite her disappointment, Lazarus agreed. Writing to Ellen Tucker Emerson, Emerson’s daughter, after her first visit to Concord, Lazarus revealed her eagerness to befriend many literary lights of Concord, though her touching sensitivity suggests that she might have felt alone: “I think I require more expressions of friendship from those I care for than most people do, – not from any lack of confidence in their kindness or loyalty, but from my painful mistrust of my own capacity to inspire friendship” (Lazarus 1876). As the examples of Sigourney and Lazarus demonstrate, nineteenth‐century female poets were deeply frustrated by their exclusion from the literary world. At the same time, they met obstacles to publishing and mentorship by developing alternative literary networks among their peers.
“When I put them in the Gown”: Formal Experimentation
Dickinson’s own formal experimentation appears at a time when other women were also employing a wide range of verse forms, even as they were breaking free from traditional social mores and subject matter. In writing to Higginson in 1861, Dickinson responds to his criticism of her verse by noting, “While my thought is undressed – I can make the distinction, but when I put them in the Gown – they look alike, and numb” (Dickinson 1958: 404). It is precisely that Dickinson might be responding to Higginson’s criticism in terms of poetic form that signals its importance for her and her generation. To take one example, the December 1879 issue from Scribner’s contains a substantial selection of 21 poems entitled “Poems by American Women.” Among the authors included were Emma Lazarus and Sarah Piatt, as well as Helen Hunt Jackson, Rose Terry Cooke, Celia Thaxter, Mary Mapes Dodge, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others; of these, six employ the sonnet: Lazarus, Louise Chandler Moulton, Annie R. Annan, Harriet McEwen Kimball, Margaret J. Preston, and Anne Lynch Botta. Richard B. Sewall notes that the Dickinsons subscribed to Scribner’s “at its inception,” and its editor, Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland, and his wife were among Emily’s closest friends and correspondents. Nevertheless, as Sewall argues, “when Dr. Holland became editor of Scribner’s in 1870, its pages were closed to Emily Dickinson” (Sewall 1974: 609). One might wonder why that was the case, as Sewall does, and also wonder why Helen Hunt Jackson, another friend and popular contributor, did not encourage Dickinson to submit her works. While Dickinson’s poetry might be “unconventional,” in Sewall’s phrase, it is often focused on familiar nineteenth‐century themes and tropes, such as nature, birdsong, faith, and erotic desire (Sewall 1974: 608). Furthermore, Dickinson’s apparently “unconventional” rhythm, stanza lengths, and word choice are mirrored in the works of other female poets. Even those who chose traditional forms, such as the sonnet, were experimenting with topics that ranged beyond the typical ones in the period.
Lazarus’s “The Taming of the Falcon,” for instance, employs a traditional Petrarchan sonnet to offer a radical perspective on race and slavery:
The bird sits spelled upon the lithe brown wrist
Of yonder turbaned fowler, who had lamed
No feather limb, but the winged spirit tamed
With his compelling eye. He need not trust
The silken coil, not set the thick‐limed snare;
He lures the wanderer with his steadfast gaze,
It shrinks, it quails, it trembles yet obeys.
And, lo! he has enslaved the thing of air.
The fixed, insistent human will is lord
Of all the earth; – but in the awful sky
Reigns absolute, unreached by deed or word
Above creation; through eternity,
Outshining the sun’s shield, the lightening’s sword,
The might of Allah’s unaverted eye.
(Lazarus 1879)
Lazarus’s poem comments on race and quite possibly the legacy of slavery after the Civil War. Probably of Middle Eastern descent, the fowler tames the hawk not through physical amputation or entrapment with “bird‐lime” but with his gaze, which subdues the bird “spelled” upon his “lithe brown wrist.” The reference to slavery (“enslaved the thing of air”) and the descriptive language that suggests the hawk resembles a slave made to submit through the threat of violence (“it shrinks, it quails, it trembles yet obeys”) underscores Lazarus’s concern that slavery turns animals into “things,” and, by extension, similarly dehumanizes human beings. In fact, although the fowler’s “fixed, insistent human will” extends his control over “all the earth,” the speaker invokes in a series of clauses suspended until the poem’s end a higher divine authority, “the might of Allah’s unaverted eye.” What seems striking here is Lazarus’s desire to foreground Islamic perspective for a periodical with a largely Christian orientation, especially since by the 1870s and 1880s she had turned, as Mary Loeffelholz argues, away from “a generalized idea of high aesthetic Euro‐American culture” toward a “cosmopolitan appreciation for both diasporic communities and the first stirrings of Jewish nationalism” (Loeffelholz 2015: 298). Lazarus demonstrates a global awareness that points beyond the heinous legacy of slavery in America to the subversion of liberty among other oppressed groups worldwide, including immigrants, the poor, and the political refugees.
In “By the Hearth,” published in the same issue of Scribner’s as “The Taming of the Falcon,” Elizabeth Stuart Phelps seems to promise a conventional celebration of domesticity but instead invokes erotic desire in a way that challenges the view that women poets could not treat overtly sexual topics. In the first stanza of this dramatic monologue, a woman speaks to her former lover, from whom she has long been separated but who has now returned:
You come too late;
’Tis far on in November.
The wind strikes bleak
Upon the cheek
That careth rather to keep warm,
(And where’s the harm?)
Than to abate
One jot of its calm color for your sake.
Watch! See! I stir the ember
Upon my lonely hearth and bid the fire wake.
(Phelps 1879)
Phelps adeptly varies line lengths and uses end rhyme (bleak/cheek, warm/harm) to create a sense of conversational immediacy and shifting emotions toward the speaker’s former lover, and her combination of iambic dimeter (“The wind strikes bleak / Upon the cheek”) and iambic pentameter (“One jot of its calm color for your sake”) evoke a similarly informal structure. Employing the familiar image of the fire for erotic desire, the speaker invites her former lover in the last stanza to “stir the ember” once again. However, Phelps inverts the romantic ideal: the speaker only tentatively accepts her former lover and the possible – but uncertain – renewal of their relationship when she claims “And though it tires / Me to think of it,” which “may” – or may not – be “found at last.” Whereas Lazarus’s sonnet suggests the degree to which poets drew on traditional forms to provide an alternative cultural point of view, Phelps’s poem employs metrical variation and breaks new ground with a more modern erotic sensibility.
Other poems in the Scribner’s issue, such as Rose Terry Cooke’s “Saint Symphorien,” Helen Hunt Jackson’s “Just Out of Sight,” and Sarah Piatt’s “Transfigured,” illustrate a range of formal and thematic experimentation. Cooke’s poem recounts a moment in the life of the first Christian martyr in Gaul, whose death was depicted in an 1834 painting by Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres. The painting depicts the saint in a dramatic pose, with his arms raised while legs outspread, gazing toward his mother, one of whose hands reaches toward him and the other points upward toward heaven. Whereas the painting encourages the viewer to make a connection between the saint’s martyrdom and Christ’s, Cooke’s poem subverts the normative Christian perspective of the self‐sacrificing mother who turns toward her child and bids him consider the promise of an eternal life. Like “Judith” and other poems of actress‐poet Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–1868), Cooke’s poem might have been meant to be performed, since the epigraph in parentheses reads like stage directions: “Led out to martyrdom: His mother speaking from the wall.” Moving from a position of certitude to increasing insecurity about faith to outright rejection, the mother, bereft of her only child, questions divine authority. The uneven lines and exclamation points underscore her increasing anxiety about the choice her son has made:
Martyr and saint? You think I care?
Oh, fools and blind! I am his mother.
What! bless the Lord and turn to prayer?
He is my child – I have no other.
No hands to clasp, no lips to kiss.
Who talks to me of heaven’s bliss?
Symphorien! Symphorien!
Come back! Come back! Deny the Lord!
Traitor? – Who hissed that burning word?
I did not say it. God! be just
I did not keep him; I am dust.
The flesh rebels; I am his mother.
Thou didst not give me any other.
Thine only Son? – but I am human.
Art thou not God? – I am a woman.
Symphorien! Symphorien!
Come back!
(Cooke 1879)
Overhearing a voice that calls her a “Traitor,” the mother responds in a colloquy with God that he sacrificed His only Son, but, as a “human” and a “woman,” she cannot be held to the same standard.
Jackson’s sonnet “‘Just Out of Sight!’” raises similar questions about a truism meant to console mourners. In a series of Spenserian lines with interlocking rhymes, the first stanza describes a “reverie one winter’s day,” during which the speaker imagines “the narrow vista of a street / Where crowds of men with noisy, hurrying feet / And eager eyes went on their restless way.” Consumed by their material lives, they hurry toward a “boundary” in the distance, “Past which each figure fading fast did fleet” and vanish. The alliteration and interlocking rhymes emphasize the relentless pace of those who disappear. “Like a flash of light,” a familiar thought returns to the speaker: that we should be comforted since the dead continue their existence “just out of sight.” “Take comfort in the words, and be deceived / All ye who can, and have not been bereaved!” Jackson writes. For her, reversals in life – suffering, famine, and poverty – may arise unexpectedly and the phrase “just out of sight” provides little comfort for those sufferers (Jackson 1879).
Piatt’s “Transfigured” depicts a southern artist whose act of painting a deformed and blind woman raises questions about the status of race and social class in post‐Civil War America. Invoking the world of fairy tales, Piatt highlights the woman’s physical defects, calling her “a dwarf more piteous none could find,” “withered,” as well as “wan and blind” – defects that frighten the painter who “scarce could look at her.” When the artist asks, “What am I to paint?” an otherworldly voice responds “Raphael, a saint,” prompting him to create a radiantly transformed image:
Ah, that was she in veriest truth –
Transcendent face and haloed hair;
The beauty of divinest youth,
Divinely beautiful, was there.
Herself into her picture passed –
Herself and not her poor disguise
Made up of time and dust. At last
One saw her with the Master’s eyes.
(Piatt 1879)
Piatt’s linguistic redundancy (“veriest truth,” “The beauty of divinest youth, / Divinely beautiful”) typifies her experimentation and highlights the illogic of a world that judges human beings by arbitrary signs, such as disability, race, and gender, rather than inner being. As suggested in the phrase “Master’s eyes,” invoking both an artist and deity’s heightened perspective, she dramatizes how vision obscures or reveals the inner self beneath the “poor disguise” of a physical body.
Piatt, Jackson, and Cooke typify the rebellion against religious doctrine and social roles that often appeared in late nineteenth‐century women’s poetry. Many of Dickinson’s poems recontextualize well‐known biblical passages in a way that reframes them in secular terms. To take one example, “A little East of Jordan,” poem F 145B, portrays Jacob wrestling with an angel in one of the few biblical passages in which a figure rebels against divine authority. Vesting authority in the poet‐gymnast figure, she subverts the account given by the “Evangelists” who originally tell the story:
A little East of Jordan,
Evangelists record,
A Gymnast and an Angel
Did wrestle long and hard –
Till morning touching mountain –
And Jacob, waxing strong,
The Angel begged permission
To Breakfast – to return!
Not so, said cunning Jacob!
“I will not let thee go
Except thou bless me” – Stranger!
The which acceded to –
Light swung the silver fleeces
“Peniel” Hills beyond,
And the bewildered Gymnast
Found he had worsted God!
(Dickinson 1998, vol. 1: 186)
In the biblical account, Genesis 32:22–31, Jacob wrestles with the angel, who touches the socket of Jacob’s hip to overcome him. Nevertheless, Jacob’s fight earns the angel’s respect and ultimate submission, leading him to agree to one of Jacob’s two requests: that he tell him his name and that he bless him. Following the angel’s blessing, Jacob names the place “Peniel,” which means “face of God.” By describing the place as “a little East of Jordan” rather than using the name Jacob gives it, Dickinson signals geographically that she also shifts the story away from the triumph of Jacob (whose name means “grappler”) toward the disappointment he feels upon his realizing that he has “worsted” the image of God as all‐powerful in the battle. Her reworking of the scene makes Jacob into a force of nature: “waxing strong,” rather than waning, as does the moon, he gains in strength during the struggle. Instead of submitting in battle, he insists on receiving a blessing from divine authority. “Stranger” may refer to his incongruent desire to be blessed by his opponent or to the angel’s even odder capitulation, which negates God’s omnipotence in the face of human struggle. Jacob’s triumph leads to his inevitable disappointment: by besting the angel, the “bewildered gymnast” found that he had damaged his own vision of divine authority. With its themes of wounding, both physical and psychological, and naming, “A little East of Jordan” explores how the resistance to literary authority that is part of writing poetry both liberates and defaces one’s idols.
“The Ethiop within”: Race, Abolition, and the Civil War
Besides their formal and thematic experimentation, Dickinson and other nineteenth‐century female poets were fully immersed in social issues and events of their era. Cristanne Miller notes that between 1858 and 1881 “Dickinson wrote over seventy poems referring to the ‘Orient’ or mentioning people, animals, or products from Asia – sometimes echoing popular stereotypes and sometimes countering them” (Miller 2011: 248). Her awareness of race was often linked to news at home and abroad, for example Britain’s invasion and conquest of Egypt in 1882. But nowhere is Dickinson’s awareness of tragic events and the failure of larger political or religious narratives to address them better represented than in her poems and letters about the Civil War. Imbibing the reports of the war that were published in journals she read, such as the Atlantic Monthly, the Springfield Daily Republican, and Harper’s Magazine, Dickinson in her poems and letters frequently used imagery associated with the war – for instance, sunsets, crucifixion, wounding, and bleeding. At the same time, as Eliza Richards argues in her study of the impact of reportage of the Civil War, Dickinson’s wartime poems “warn of the dangers of assuming one can fully know the experience of another” (Richards 2008: 164).
Soldiers and slaves provide Dickinson an opportunity to meditate on the remoteness – both affectively and geographically – of the war for most readers. Her coded language, such as “Berry” to represent a black man, “exaggerates the dehumanizing tendencies of racist rhetoric, highlighting the way the news of slavery travels and lodges in the psyche of speakers who fail to imagine African Americans as human” (Richards 2008: 164). Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, in their website “Dickinson, Slavery, and the San Domingo Moment,” argue that “Domingo” (a frequent word in her canon) refers to the potential for a bloody slave insurrection. In the years preceding the Civil War, newspapers and magazines referred to San Domingo as the site of a slave rebellion (Price and Folsom 2001). Rather than ignore or refuse to confront issues of war and race, Dickinson often absorbs the language of her contemporaries, and her poems raise questions for us about how nineteenth‐century female poets intersect with ideologies of race before and after the Civil War.
As early as the 1830s, female poets were contending with the failure of promises for equality and republican values that had issued from the American Revolution. Sigourney’s “Difference of Color” (1834), for instance, demonstrates the poet’s pacifism and evangelical beliefs that underscored her activist tendencies:
God gave to Afric’s sons
A brow of sable dye,
And spread the country of their birth
Beneath a burning sky,
And with the cheek of olive, made
The little Hindoo child,
And darkly stain’d the forest‐tribes
That roam our western wild.
To me he gave a form
Of fairer, whiter clay;
But am I, therefore, in his sight
Respected more than they?
No, – ’tis the hue of deeds and thoughts
He traces in his Book,
’Tis the complexion of the heart
On which he deigns to look.
Not by the tinted cheek
That fades away so fast,
But by the color of the soul,
We shall be judged at last.
And God, the judge, will look at me
With anger in his eyes,
If I my brother’s darker brow
Should ever dare despise.
(Sigourney 2008: 140–141)
Characterizing African Americans’ color as a “sable dye,” Sigourney echoes Phillis Wheatley, who similarly used “sable” to avoid the derogatory terms used during the period. Also like Wheatley, Sigourney supported educating and converting both African and Native Americans, goals she envisioned as necessary both to the nation’s democratic principles and evangelical Protestantism. Playing on the term “complexion” both as color and temperament, she puns on the difference between race and morality: the color of the soul, rather than skin color, will be the marker by which we are judged. When originally published in Parley’s Magazine for Children and Youth in 1834, Sigourney substituted the “righteous Judge” for the neutral phrasing of “God, the judge,” adding that he will look “with sorrow in his eyes” (Sigourney 1834: 24). The Puritan God of Wrath has been replaced with a more benevolent figure. “Difference of Color” dwells on the preservation and religious growth of children and demonstrates her evolving belief in Christian gradualism.
While Sigourney addressed race from an evangelical perspective, African American female poets wrote against and within a tradition that defined white Protestant selfhood as the central identity position against which all others were measured. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an African American poet who lived in Philadelphia, was lecturing throughout the North and also writing poetry with an explicitly political, abolitionist perspective. Harper argues against slavery and racial inequality by inverting racial stereotypes. In “The Tennessee Hero,” which appeared in the 1857 edition of her Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, she depicts a horrific scene – the beating and murder of a male slave who refused to reveal the identities of others planning their escape from slavery – and reverses the portrayal into “a triumphant statement of subversive agency” (Sorisio 2000: 58). By emphasizing the heroic qualities of the African American man, who faces a “savage” crowd, Harper reverses the derogatory characterization typically given to slaves.
In “Eliza Harris,” first published in The Liberator in 1853, for instance, Harper capitalized on the enormous popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–1852). Mary Louise Kete has argued that Harper uses ekphrasis – usually, a literary description or commentary on a work of art – to create a visual image of a scene in a well‐known fictional work into an extended commentary (Kete 2015). The escaping slave Eliza, carrying her young son, flees across the ice floes on the Ohio River, a scene that was widely depicted in illustrations and stage adaptations. “Eliza Harris” extends Stowe’s two‐paragraph description of Eliza’s escape into 14 stanzas written in anapestic tetrameter – a light, rushing verse – with rhyming couplets that celebrate the mother’s heroism. Portraying Eliza’s face as “pale” and “fair in its grace,” Harper diminishes her African physical features and highlights instead her domestic, maternal feeling and the bodily characteristics that would have resembled those of her white female readers. Idealized as “fragile and lovely,” her body becomes a vehicle for the racial projections of a largely white audience. Similar to “A Tennessee Hero,” Harper’s “Eliza Harris” directs the reader’s gaze away from a scene that exposes the slave’s body to titillation or exposure and places the responsibility squarely on the nation for endorsing the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850:
But she’s free – yes, free from the land where the slave
From the hand of oppression must rest in the grave;
Where bondage and torture, where scourges and chains,
Have plac’d on our banner indelible stains.
(Foster 1990: 61)2
The neo‐gothic elements of “bondage and torture, the scourges and chains,” mark the flag with her blood, with “indelible stains,” not her body or the ice floes, as in Stowe’s novel. In portraying Eliza’s maternal instinct, Harper forges an emotional connection that makes the reader a collective witness to the nation’s tragedy.
Dickinson’s racial attitudes were shaped in response to the characterizations of race in the period, but unlike Sigourney and Harper she radically ignores their social or political implications and imports racial terms instead to explore our inner human dimensions. Critics have found Dickinson’s references to race disturbing, largely due to her apparent appropriation of racist terms. Expressing the views of many readers, Paula Bennett argues that “the failure to acknowledge Dickinson’s racism speaks to the reading of her generally and to the risks taken when a single writer (no matter how deserving) is canonized in a field that is otherwise understudied at best” (Bennett 2002: 53). To take one example, Dickinson refers to “the Ethiop within,” an ambiguous phrase that locates blackness within the self. Ed Folsom notes that, since the eighteenth century, “Ethiopians” or “Ethiop” had become shorthand in the West for Africans, terms often overlaid with derogatory and racist associations (Folsom n.d.). Frances Harper’s “Ethiopia,” written perhaps as early as 1853, personified the nation as a woman who “yet shall stretch / Her bleeding hands abroad” (Foster 1990: 62). On a hopeful, visionary note, Harper’s “yet” predicts that Ethiopia, a country beset by civil war, would eventually become free through divine intervention. As Folsom notes, Walt Whitman and other poets would have been familiar with the image of Ethiopia’s outstretched hands from Frederick Douglass, who echoes Psalm 68:31 in his famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”: “There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. […] Africa must rise and put on her yet unwoven garment. ‘Ethiopia shall stretch out her hand unto God’” (quoted in Folsom n.d.).
Written about 1862, Dickinson’s poem #415 employs the “Ethiop” to explore the inner life of an exemplary person:
More Life – went out – when He went
Than Ordinary Breath –
Lit with a finer Phosphor –
Requiring in the Quench –
A Power of Renowned Cold,
The Climate of the Grave
A Temperature just adequate
So Anthracite, to live –
For some – an Ampler Zero –
A Frost more needle keen
Is necessary, to reduce
The Ethiop within.
Others – extinguish easier –
A Gnat’s minutest Fan
Sufficient to obliterate
A Tract of Citizen –
Whose Peat lift – amply vivid –
Ignores the solemn News
That Popocatapel exists –
Or Etna’s Scarlets, Choose –
(Dickinson 1998, vol. 1: 438)
In her elegy, Dickinson compares the man to anthracite, a type of coal that appears lustrous and burns with a clear, steady light. In his Reveries of a Bachelor (1850), which we know Dickinson read, Ik Marvel (Donald Grant Mitchell) contrasts two types of people by distinguishing the weakness of sea‐coal – fanciful and undependable – from the steady, strong light of anthracite. In Dickinson’s poem, the exemplary man is “lit with a finer Phosphor,” implying that he perhaps contained purer motives than others. Only a “Power of Renowned Cold” could bring down his vital force: the blizzard or bone‐chilling temperature might bring fame either to the man or to the “Climate of the Grave” that made the man yield. Furthermore, an “Ampler Zero” is needed to “reduce” the tropical heat associated with Ethiopia. In that sense, the “Ethiop within” might suggest an inner core of heat, rather than a person’s race. Or, perhaps, extending the term to the nation at war, “Ethiop” suggests that the Union carries within it a self‐destructive division, much as slavery promised to divide the country. In another hyperbolic comparison, Dickinson contends that others might “extinguish easier,” since they might be decimated by a gnat beating its “minutest Fan.” These less stalwart people are laid in the peat and form part of a “Tract of Citizen,” a phrase that unites individuals based on their location but refuses to distinguish northern or southern affiliation. Like the “Ethiop within,” the exotic images of volcanoes from Mexico and Italy, Popocatépetl and Mount Etna, submerge a foreign geography within the domestic landscape. “Choose” seems ambiguous: does the speaker imply Etna chooses when to overflow, or is she offering a directive to “others” (or the reader) who should be more attentive to the “solemn News” that danger lurks beneath the ground? In that sense, we “choose” whether our course of life will be heroic or average. More radically than either Whitman’s or Harper’s poem, Dickinson’s elegy ignores the racial implications of the term “Ethiop” altogether. Insofar as the term is exotic, she also acknowledges that difference both in gender and race was a constitutive part of the makeup of every individual.
About spring of 1863, in poem #543, Dickinson meditates on the war with remarkable formal innovation in terms that would have fitted the general mood:
Unit, like Death, for Whom?
True, like the Tomb,
Who tells no secret
Told to Him –
The Grave is strict –
Tickets admit
Just two – the Bearer –
And the Borne –
And seat – just One –
The Living – tell –
The Dying – but a Syllable –
The Coy Dead – None –
No Chatter – here – no tea –
So Babbler, and Bohea – stay there –
But Gravity – and Expectation – and Fear –
A tremor just, that All’s not sure.
(Dickinson 1998, vol. 2: 546–547)
“Unit” seems particularly detached and remote, a convenient fiction regarding death or national narratives about victory in war that keeps its reality at an arm’s length. The word might refer to a soldier in a military squadron, who acts as an individual regarded as a component of the whole. “Unit” might also refer to a fixed measurement, as of time, but its comparison to “death” seems disjunctive at best. Furthermore, the opening line poses a rhetorical question: can death be measured in “units” or does the enormity of loss prevent its calculation? Who are we mourning in the poem, and whose grave is occupied? Rather than provide an answer to the initial question, the poem meditates on and forecloses communication with the “Coy Dead.”
If one considers the poem’s formal experimentation, moreover, Dickinson emphasizes the duality of mourner and mourned in its sonic effects. Similar to Phelps’s “By the Hearth,” the dimeter and tetrameter verse (“True, like the Tomb / Who tells no secret / Told to Him”) and rhyming couplets (“The Grave is strict / Tickets admit / Just two—the Bearer / And the Borne—”) appear to link the living and dead. Yet the lack of rhyme in the succeeding lines undoes their supposed similarity. Instead, the alliteration linking “Bearer” and “Borne” is ultimately undercut by the lack of rhyme (“And seat—just One—”). In contrasting the silent dead with the living, then, Dickinson recalls a scene of misplaced conviviality that may allude to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel Aurora Leigh, in which the speaker condemns idle chatter over “Bohea,” a black tea imported from China:
A good neighbour, even in this,
Is fatal sometimes, cuts your morning up
To mince‐meat of the very smallest talk,
Then helps to sugar her Bohea at night
With your reputation.
(Browning 1864)
The satirical portrait of a nosy neighbor makes conversation a lethal event, stealing precious time from the poet. In Dickinson’s poem, “Bohea” (pronounced “Bo‐hee”) and “Babbler,” through alliteration, form a sense unit, but the lack of rhyme serves to undercut the poem’s resolution. Judy Jo Small explains that Dickinson’s concluding lines “have a certain closural value, but the inconclusiveness of the issues they report operates against closure” (Small 2010: 189). As the pun on “Gravity” implies, death must be treated seriously, but its evidence of finality rests in the ground. A “tremor just” might allude to an earthquake that unsettles the land; the phrase also understates the fear and uncertainty of the mourners left behind, as if their anxieties “that All’s not sure” were justified.
Conclusion
By focusing on Dickinson in the context of Sigourney, Harper, Lazarus, Phelps, Jackson, Cooke, and Piatt, I have only gestured toward a selective history of nineteenth‐century American women’s poetry, but these poets demonstrate the richness and innovativeness of an era that, following Cody Marrs (2015), we might now refer to as “the long Civil War.” From the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 to the later part of the nineteenth century, American writers were fully immersed in resolving questions of equality, democracy, race, sectarianism, nationhood, and religion. Examining women’s verse from the year of Dickinson’s birth through the publication of her first volume of poems, we can see how women writers contended with similar issues, including gendered notions of authorship, formal experimentation, and social and political engagement. Nineteenth‐century American women poets invoked traditional forms – the sonnet, elegy, epic, lyric meditation, and so on – in order to explore their existence “outside” of civic life or religious community. Yet, in identifying with marginal groups, such as Native Americans, slaves, immigrants, or the differently abled, these female poets express their views within traditional verse forms while exploring their situation as “others” within the national literary tradition. By reading the nineteenth‐century American female poets within their literary tradition, we might appreciate better both their substantial contribution and Dickinson’s unique talent.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 8 (WOMEN WRITERS AT MIDCENTURY); CHAPTER 9 (POPULAR POETRY AND THE RISE OF ANTHOLOGIES); CHAPTER 10 (WALT WHITMAN AND THE NEW YORK LITERARY WORLD).
Notes