I’m reading two books at once. The book Emily Dickinson’s Imagery by Rebecca Patterson, published in 1979, is, so far and hands down, the best book I’ve read on Dickinson (among books from the 50s, 60s, & 70s) that is not also a biography. (Patterson was the first to propose, to the indignity of many, that Dickinson’s principle love interest may not have been a man.) The books I’ve been reading from that time period (when Dickinson criticism was still green) have generally been poorly written, unreadably academic, and frequently too beholden to the various and faddish critical schools that, in those days, were ideologically re-interpreting everything in their paths. Patterson’s book, written in 1979, is refreshingly free from all that nonsense. The other book that I’ve just started is Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science by Renée Bergland. This latter book is brand new, just published earlier this year. As I read them concurrently, I thought I might pass long some of the most interesting passages.

As a child, Emily wondered who “the Father and the Son” were and what they had to do with her. When told in a “portentous” manner, with an inference “appalling” to childhood, she reflected that at least the two could be no worse than they were painted. In an earlier version, it is still clearer that the child, hitherto protected by the infant sense of immortality, is now introduced to the idea of its own death as the consequence of original sin (1258). Another poem demands whether heaven is an “Exchequer” since men are so often reminded of what they “owe”, adding brusquely that she is no “Party” to the negotiation (1270). As a member of the Trinity, Jesus fares little better than God. He shares in the responsibility for that negotiation—original sin—mortality—atonement—to which she refused to be a party. Remembering the punishment she and her sister Lavinia relieved for a childish bit of sacrilege, she observes with ferocious humor that the little girls thought Jesus hateful to get them into trouble when they “had done nothing but crucify him and that before [they] were born” (PF51). In her childhood, she writes to Mrs. Holland, when the clergyman asked those who loved Jesus to remain for communion her flight kept time to his words (L412). But on another occasion, or the same one remembered differently, she could hardly refrain from thanking the clergyman for his courteous invitation, although she now believes the name of Santa Claus would have evoked much livelier transports (L926). [p. 20]  

Dickinson was born in 1830, during a brief window of time when people in Massachusetts thought the physical sciences were the most appropriate topic for girls to study. Indeed, one of the reasons for coining the word “scientist” was to make room for the accomplished women who could not readily be described as men of science. The historian Tim Tolley has documented that in the United States in the first decades of the nineteenth century “female higher schools placed a greater emphasis on scientific subjects than did similar, contemporary, institutions for males,” Dickinson’s formal education included botany, geology, astronomy, and chemistry, She wrote most of her poems after Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Yet although Dickinson found ways to breathe natural magic back into scientific thought, few readers were able to recognize the science in her poetry. In 1890, when the first edition of her poems was published, it was almost impossible for readers to see that this very private Massachusetts woman could have been a profound philosophical, theological, and scientific thinker as well as a major poet. By the time readers caught on to her importance as a poet, poetry had come to be viewed as largely irrelevant to science. [p. 8]

The two paragraphs, from books written almost fifty years apart, work together to paint a picture of Dickinson that is (or was in my case) quite different from my teen-aged impressions of Dickinson (in the 80s) when I thought her to be a mousy, Victorian poet writing devout little hymns to God. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Turns out she was and is the complete opposite, in every way, and so much more interesting.

upinVermont | Sept. 24th 2024