Emily Dickinson and the Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: The Poetics and Politics of Reticence

Women'south literature was suppressed past the patriarchal organization of the nineteenth century, and order demanded reticence in writing by women, and the elimination of anger, sexual feelings, and ambition in their work. Many scholars of Dickinson talk nearly the ways she complied with this demand by using strategic reticence. Read this commodity advisedly to sympathise the ways in which Dickinson created a unique poetic form to claiming the conventions of her time.

When discussing nineteenth-century American women poets, the term 'reticence' has been used, most exclusively, past critics since the 1980s, to refer to poetic strategies that resulted from 'psychic conflict and anxiety' [1] : women's literary joint was suppressed by the patriarchal organization, and social club demanded reticence in writing by women (e.g. emptying of anger, sexual feelings, and appetite in their piece of work). In social club to excel without condemnation, women writers complied. [two] Critics, within a feminist framework, include Emily Dickinson and her unique literary reticence, in their assertion that strategic reticence was employed by all women writers.

Photograph of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson. Credit: Amherst College Library

Poetry by popular nineteenth-century American women writers (Dickinson was not known by most readers during her time) was typically dismissed by twentieth-century literary critics and biographers as 'sentimental tosh'. [3] Hawthorne referred to that 'damn mob of scribbling women', complaining that 'public taste is occupied with their trash'. [4] Dickinson's first major biographer, Richard Sewall, wrote that the editors who published the poems of Dickinson's female peers were 'thoroughly conventional', 'tone deaf' and only interested in 'didactic' poems with 'easy narrative'. [5]

The agenda of critics such as Dobson and Petrino is to react to these critiques by resurrecting and honouring the poetry of Dickinson's female contemporaries while showing that Dickinson shared the same limitations, subject matter, and fifty-fifty stylistic choices. 'Dickinson's poesy emanates' Petrino writes, 'from an artistic and intellectual sensibility born of her native New England and shared with other women, a recognition of whose own creative achievement has been long overdue.' [6] Achieved poets such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith, Frances Sargent Locke Osgood, and Alice Carey are held up beside Dickinson, sharing 'a feminine community of expression which mandated personal reticence'. [7] Some critics attempt to reduce the dissimilarities between Dickinson and her female contemporaries. Shira Wolosky writes in her introduction to Major Voices: 19th Century American Women'southward Poetry (2003) that she chose the versions of Dickinson's poems for the anthology that were almost like her contemporaries ('restoring' an earlier editor'southward bowdlerized spellings) in society to, 'lessen rather than increase the impression of Dickinson's idiosyncratic differentiation from other women writers'. [8] This agenda has created a blind-spot. In these critics' determination to show that the work of nineteenth-century women poets, including Dickinson, shared the same style, and were ultimately limited past expectations of reticence, they fail to come across that Dickinson chose reticence from a place of strength rather than from ane of submission.

Print of Lydia Huntley Sigourney

Lydia Huntley Sigourney. Engraver: F. Eastward. Jones. Printed, 1855

Dickinson's indirect expressive 'strategies of reticence', scholars such every bit Dobson claim [9] , allowed for a poetics in which personal disclosure was veiled through devices designed to allay anxiety about non-conformity. However, although Dickinson did suffer from the same pressures as her female person peers and indeed suppressed her writing in certain ways (i.east. non-publication), her distinctive 'camber' or reticent way was an articulation of full-throated poetic ability. She understood what poets and critics, from ancient times to today, had always recognized about the quality of reticence in poetry. The medieval Chinese poet Wei T'ai in his Random Notes on Poetry (1989) wrote that, 'poetry should exist precise almost the matter and reticent near the feeling; this is how poetry enters deeply into us'. [10] Contemporary American poet Louise Glück expressed information technology this way: 'I am attracted to ellipsis, to the implied, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts slap-up power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary.' [11] For Dickinson, the poetics of reticence was a consciously adult literary strategy foreshadowing, even anticipating, the ironies, ambivalences, and disruptions in modern verse. Dickinson invented a semiotic class of writing which disrupted the symbolic (patriarchal) conventions of logical grammar, syntax, and narrative expectation, creating an art of power through silences.

Image of a Dickinson manuscript

'Tell all the truth'. Amherst – Amherst Manuscript # 372 – Tell all the truth but tell it slant – asc:12240 – p. one

I would like to reclaim the word 'reticence'. During a time when women writers were encouraged to write with reticence (complying with expectations of modesty), Dickinson invented a radical and subversive poetics of reticence, poles apart from her peers. The post-obit iv elements brand upwardly the poetics of reticence employed by Dickinson: absence of narrative data, lack of description, disruptive pauses, and silence when sound is expected. For instance, in Dickinson's poem that begins with the line, 'After great pain, a formal feeling comes – ', [12] the reader is never told from where the 'pain' originated. There is no narrative about the cause of the hurting. The ' – ' (the calligraphic stroke which may be a dash or slash or hyphen ubiquitous in Dickinson's poems) serves to blank out that data. Rather, we are given a discrete clarification of the inner workings of the body's aftermath through simile: 'The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – ' Again, the calligraphic stroke disrupts as it strikes out expected linguistic communication and sound: the 'Tombs' are not described. Their introduction ends there. Silence radiates out of this poem. Simply information technology is reticence that truly releases the light: Dickinson does not choose complete silence. The poem holds back, withdraws, quiets itself to further its ability:

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, retrieve the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – so the letting become –

The succession of 'dashes' at the finish of the poem cancel out hidden information, narrative and expected sound.

Here are the first lines of a poem by one of the most popular and beloved poets during Dickinson'south fourth dimension; Lydia Sigourney'south poem, 'Wintertime Fete' begins,

I woke, and every lordling of the grove
Was clad in diamonds, and the lowliest shrub
Did wear its crest of brilliants gallantly.
The swelling hillocks, with their woven vines,
The far-seen forests and the cleaved hedge,
Yea, every thicket gleam'd in vivid array,
As for some gorgeous fete of fairy-land. [xiii]

In contrast to Dickinson's work, Sigourney'due south verse is 'clad' with description and narrative. The conventional employ of iambic pentameter flows forth without disruption to the expected meter or hesitation. In this verse form, the story of the 'I' waking initiates the poem. And in the final lines, the message is clear: the dazzler of winter that God, 'the Rex of storms', bestows upon the world, reminds one to 'Look inside thy heart / When the poor shiver in their snow-wreath'd cell, / Or the sad orphan mourns'. If one tin show sympathy, 'An answering pity' or 'a fervent deed / Done in Christ'due south proper name' one will be sure to enter Sky, 'a mansion with the blest'. In contrast, Dickinson'due south poems remain reticent about their messages; if a message can be deciphered in a Dickinson poem, information technology is ane of doubt or contradiction (i.e. simultaneous spiritual epiphany and religious breach) or even ideas almost reticence: 'Tell all the truth tell but it slant', [14] she wrote, and 'Ashes denote that Burn was – '. [15]

Image of a Dickinson manuscript

'After great pain', Houghton Library – (26c) Subsequently great hurting, a formal feeling comes -, J341, Fr372

It is possible that Dickinson became skilled in literary reticence equally a result of her readings of the English translation she had of the Hebrew Bible (Rex James). This places her fashion of writing in intellectual conversation with a classic Western text. The women writing earlier and during Dickinson's time brought the themes and language of the Bible to their poetry, often rewriting entire biblical stories; nonetheless, Dickinson brought the reticent style of the Bible to her poems; she drew on the anti-narrative reticence of the biblical text, establishing her distinctive reticent style.

While her peers read the Bible every bit a text of seamless story-telling with instructive teachings, Dickinson detected and was influenced by what Erich Auerbach has called 'the lacunae of the Hebrew text'. [xvi] Information technology seems that Dickinson understood this aspect of biblical style which every bit Auerbach writes, leaves narrative 'obscure' and emphasizes 'abruptness' and the 'suggestive influence of the unexpressed,' 'a multiplicity of meanings and the need for estimation,' and a 'preoccupation with the problematic.' [17] Co-ordinate to Emmanuel Levinas's hermeneutics, the gaps in the Hebrew Bible are an invitation to the reader to become actively involved in the production of pregnant. 'The reader' Levinas asserts is 'in his own mode, a scribe.' [18] Levinas's words also apply to encountering the poetics of reticence in Dickinson'south poems, poems that embrace the idea that saying little communicates more, and that, in poesy, restraint creates vitality and intimacy.

Footnotes

  1. Joanne Dobson, Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence: The Woman Writer in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, p. xiii.
  2. Encounter, for example, Dobson, Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence; Elizabeth A. Petrino, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women'south Poetry in America, 1820–1885 (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1998); Cristianne Miller, Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century : A Fresh Look at a Major Poet in the Context of her T ime (Amherst: Academy of Massachusetts Press, 2012).
  3. Lyndall Gordon, Lives Similar Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family' south Feuds (New York: Penguin, 2011).
  4. John T. Frederick, 'Hawthorne'southward "Scribbling Women"', The New England Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2 (June 1975), p. 231.
  5. Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson . (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 748).
  6. Petrino, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries.
  7. Dobson, Dickinson a nd the Strategies of Reticence.
  8. Shira Wolosky, Major Voices in 19th Century American Women'southward Poetry (New Milford, CT: The Toby Press, 2003).
  9. For thorough discussion of this, see Dobson, Dickinson and  the Strategies of Reticence and Petrino, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries.
  10. The Complete Ci-poems of Li Qingzhao: A New English Translation, Jaosheng Wang Wei Tai. The Sino-Platonic Papers, xiii (Oct 1989): http://www.sino- platonic.org/abstracts/spp013_ci_poetry.html
  11. Louise Glück, "Disruption, Hesitation, Silence", Proofs & Theories: Essays on Verse (New York: Ecco, 1994, p.74-75).
  12. Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems
  13. Lydia Sigourney, Selected Poetry and Prose, Gary Kelly. Broadview Printing, Ontario, 2008.
  14. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Picayune Dark-brown and Co., 1960) p. 1129.
  15. Complete Poems , ed. Johnson, p. 1063.
  16. Erich Auerbach, 'Odyssesus' Scar,' Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. Trans. Willard Trask. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) p. 75.
  17. Auerbach, 'Odysseus' Scar,' p. 75.
  18. Emmanuel Levinas, "Revelation and Jewish Tradition", The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1989), p. 160-161.

Source: Eve Grubin, http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/emily-dickinson-and-the-nineteenth-century-women-poets-the-poetics-and-politics-of-reticence/
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Last modified: Thursday, February 18, 2021, 1:57 PM