(Mis)Reading Emily Dickinson

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The first time I read Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” was in a graduate course.  Previous to that, I did not enjoy Dickinson’s poetry.  But I had mostly only read and taught poems like “A narrow fellow in the grass” or “I’m Nobody!  Who are you?”  These and poems like them, at least the way they were taught to me, seemed shallow and sentimental.  They were the kinds of poems that ended up on refrigerator magnets, classroom posters, and Hallmark cards. 

But that class began to change my attitude toward Dickinson, which was further altered after I read Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat, which chronicles Dickinson’s semi-erotic epistolary relationship with the writer and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  If you haven’t read it, do. I think even Dickinson fans will never think of her the same way again.

In my American Literature To 1880 course, we just read ten poems by Dickinson and had some terrific conversations.  I selected “‘Faith’ is a fine invention,” “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—,” “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted,” “The Soul selects her own Society,” “I dwell in Possibility,” “Much Madness is divinest Sense,” “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” “The Bible is an antique volume,” and “My life closed twice before its close.”

I think the students were most surprised by the Loaded Gun and the Haunted Chamber poems.  The students were familiar with the same mousy, eccentric, house-bound Emily Dickinson I had known, too.  They were not expecting Gothic Emily Dickinson or gun-toting Emily Dickinson.

We read her poems in the context of the course theme of Deviance in Early American Literature, after we had already read Poe’s treatises on the human capacity for perverse behavior, Hester’s questioning of the whole relation between man and woman, Emerson’s critique of historical Christianity, Thoreau’s assertion that in an unjust society the only place for a just man is a prison, and Whitman’s celebration of the working class and of female and male homosexual desire.  So the students were primed for a Dickinson who called religious leaders “faded men” and who called the mad divine.

The students saw in the Loaded Gun poem a latent anger that was evident elsewhere, as in Much Madness, where she says that those who deviate from the opinions of the majority will be regarded as a threat and taken away in chains.  As the narrator of The Scarlet Letter says of Hester’s revolutionary ideas in “Another View of Hester,” had the ministers and magistrates known her thoughts, they would have considered them “a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the letter.”

The Haunted Chamber brought us back to Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the attic scene of “The Custom-House.”  (Yes, I made them read “The Custom-House”).  When we read those works earlier in the semester, we had talked about the trope of the building as a body, in which hallways and rooms represent aspects of the human psyche, where haunted attics and labyrinthine halls and dark basements are the abodes of our guilt and fears and repressed desires—the realms of the id, to use the language of early psychology not yet available to those writers.  And there is Dickinson telling us of sequestering oneself behind a bolted door to hide from the assassin that is our spectral self.  This is not quite the Dickinson who critiques the admiring bog.

And as I have alluded to, we also talked about the representation of authors, how they—as well as descendants, editors, marketers, and teachers—present themselves to readers.  Recently, scholars authenticated the second known photograph of Emily Dickinson.  Up to then, the only photo we had of Dickinson was the ubiquitous one of her just shy of her seventeenth birthday, in which she looks young and frail and demure.  This image jibes with the persona of the harmless, inoffensive writer I thought I knew.  But the new photo is of a more attractive and confident looking 28 year-old Dickinson.  This photo looks like the image of a woman who could be angry and challenging and haunted, even.  Writing about the new Dickinson photo, Dustin Illingworth says that it causes us to attribute to Dickinson a “previously unseen strength and serenity.”

I don’t suggest we should allow a photo to shape our reading, but likewise we should resist the standard interpretations that have been presented to us of any author’s work.  As Emerson says in “The American Scholar,” “Each generation … must write its own books.”