Emily Dickinson’s Views on Death in Her Confessional Poetry

Emily Dickinson is considered one of the leading 19th-century American poets, known for her bold original verse, which stands out for its epigrammatic compression, autobiographical voice and enigmatic brilliance.  One of the most captivating aspects about the literature of Emily Dickinson is her ability to present death in varying forms. Having lived a life of simplicity and seclusion she wrote poetry of great power; questioning the nature of immortality and death, with at times an almost mantic quality.  This research paper aims at studying Emily Dickinson as a confessional poet and the images of Death in her poetry which will mainly focus on the various possible theoretical explanations for her glorification and embracement of death as a “pleasure”.

The most defining characteristic of confessional poetry Byrne says is the use of first-person narration to “widen the scope of the poem” and as a “tool to increase a reader’s emotional identification with the writer” and Dickinson does it by putting primary emphasis on moments of her emotional and philosophical crisis. The mentioning of the “I”, fixing an autobiographical connection, in other words, the use of first-person point of view allows the reader to delve closely into the thoughts and feelings of the author.

Hoffman believes that the roots of confessional mode are embedded as “romantic lyrics” and the 'personal epics” which M.H. Abrams predominantly terms it as “greater romantic lyric” and “crisis autobiography”. The romantic lyrics always has a dramatic element which come from the “poetry of experience” in which the poet gives us a glimpse of the natural cause, often from personal life, thus enabling the reader to have a sympathetic eye towards the narrative. For instance, the presence of the poet in the lyrics itself makes it dramatic for the observer or reader. Many of her poems seem to be a dramatic monologue which represent the various faces of the human emotion i.e. belief and doubt, hope and despair, etc. Emily Dickinson is depicted as a colossal poet who is known for her constant dalliance with familiar tropes and utter disregard of conventional associations and her poems bristle with the spirit of wilderness and assertion. A substantial part of her protest was against the psychological impairment that patriarchy forces upon women under the discourse of conduct and wifely duty as well as rigid Calvinistic religious strictures as one of her poems writes as:

“It's such a little thing to weep —

So short a thing to sigh —

And yet — by Trades — the size of these

We men and women die! “ 

“Trades”, which is understood as commerce or is used to refer to the transaction of the business of our own lives, the negative emotions, the small or short things. Dickinson’s concern is about the literary conventions of her time where women were considered as the dainty sex, sentimental and liable to swoon or faint at any small shock. Dickinson’s unapologetic unsettling of the male dominance endows her poetry with the sense of reclusion. Moreover, confessional poets focus on subject matter once considered taboo. Death, which was romantically accepted as “beautiful” until the Nineteenth-Century had only become a taboo in the Twentieth-century making it “invisible”, “embarrassing” and an “obscene fact” that had to be hidden away. Dickinson on the other hand considered death as a “privilege”. Her poetry clearly abides by the above mentioned conventions of a confessional poet and therefore is not wrong to say that Emily Dickinson is a romantic yet confessional poet. 

She describes the different emotional responses that death has on human soul and mind and enables the readers to view death from a different perspective. The ambiguous meaning of death that Dickinson uses gives the audience a choice to have their own interpretations about death. Through the varying descriptions of death, the author explains the many types of death that individuals experience. In the subsequent argument I will be exploring how manifested ideas of Christian after-life, Freudian concept of pleasure, homosexuality, the American Civil War are some of the aspects that give grounds to the Romanticisation of death in her poetry.

According to Aries’, the men and women belonging to the Christendom “accepted death as a part of life of the community and dies secure in the knowledge of their eventual resurrection.” Christianity believes in the spiritual world of the souls after life on Earth and the vitality of good deeds which is rewarded with the gateway to Heaven as it rightly said “For the wages of sins sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal Life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Dickinson was not fond of formal religion and had never allowed herself to join the church. However her poems gives the readers a very elegant understanding of her of the Bible and the fervor of faith which did not allow her to dismiss altogether the possibility behind the Christian idea of afterlife, the existence of God or spiritual dimension. She takes us through the Christian lifecycle through rebirth and resurrection. She excuses herself away from her beloved because she believes that their union could be “thwarted” for she would fail to meet the “exalted standards” because she fears that her Jesus’s Grace would be eclipsed by her lover’s affection and beauty which is “That New Grace”. She declares that that even if God’s Grace were to befall her and she became the one God elects her for salvation and paradise, heaven would be hell without her beloved alternately if he is saved and she damned, such salvation would be pointless as they would still be apart.

In the aspect of Freudian theory which concerns us, the psyche embraces the “least exertion possible”. Smith in “The Death- Drive does not think” brings up the question of cogitative or thoughtful nature of a psychic mechanism when compelled to repeat. The compulsion to repeat this mechanism makes it “mechanical” and eventually this mechanism starts playing a structural role thus consequently getting noted and theorized. Then theoretically, the now mechanical nature of the ‘death-drive’ is tactfully done away with. This happens because by repeating patterns of mental and social behavior one minimizes the psychic expenditure. Therefore death-drive becomes a state of minimum exertion which is the key to the Freudian “Pleasure-Principle”. Dickinson in “I cannot live with you” clearly shows how she considers death as a “privilege” whose advantage she cannot let her beloved have first and wishes death to come to both of them simultaneously so that she does not have to bear the loss alone. Her recurrent images of death in most of her poetry could be thus assumed as “mechanical” which might have resulted out as “Pleasure” thereby not “risking any authentically new investments”. 

Death is personalized and also given gendered identity ‘he’, who made her elope with the help of a friend named “immortality”[footnoteRef:5] with whom she gets carried away as if she was allowed herself to do so. She implies that most people do not think or talk about death because they are busy with their lives aiming to achieve and therefore are afraid of death which would separate them from their ambitions and families. Emily had thought about death so much that it no longer remained a psychic apparatus. However, the possibility of death of her beloved is so shattering for her that she abandons it, almost in a state of terror. While Emily is unable to confront the horror of the possibility which can happen to her beloved, death when it came to the poet has a very rational definition which is bound to come to all living beings. By expressing the desire for the demise of the self but not the other, Dickinson hints the readers with a suicidal tendency. 

While Martha Bianchi, her niece had already disclosed the fact about her aunt’s numerous heart breaks, Ray introduces us to these gentlemen as just “male mentors”. Her poems are taken as a token of lost love in this field. Patterson advances a new theory without really sweeping away the old ones: “the lost lover was not a man at all. It was a woman”. In one of her letters to Abiah Root, Dickinson expresses her views about the women in Amherst:

“We really have some most charming young women in school this term. I sha'n't call them anything but women, for women they are in every sense of the word.”

The published works of Emily Dickinson contain some forty poems which are addressed without subterfuge, to another woman. Patterson believes that women might have had conceivably written love poems to an imaginary man, assuming to be a lover, which then patriarchy demanded from women of that time. But habitual letters from the view point of a man’s love was not usual. No woman would ever write poems describing a love affair between herself and an imaginary woman. Only a strong sense of truth would dictate poems that were so opposed to conventions of the Nineteenth-Century. Dickinson taps on her lyric through her poetry which includes fragments of her personal life including her relationship with Susan Huntington Gilbert who was her sister-in-law. One of her personal letters to Susan read as follows:

“I love you as dearly, Susie…...I miss you, mourn for you…..I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face…..If it is finished, tell me, and I will raise the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay one more love in; but if it lives and beats still, still lives and beats for me, then say me so, and I will strike the strings to one more strain of happiness before I die.” 

It is not that female homosexuality was completely rendered unnoticed in that American century but the connotations over Lesbianism during that time was recognized on medical or psychological phenomenon which proposed to explain its ‘etiology’, characterization, adjustment and even a ‘cure’ of lesbianism. The treatment was possibly seemed to be a more humanitarian way of dealing with homosexuality than classifying an individual as morally deficient and criminal, but it also allowed the psychiatrists to retain and reinterpret this medical model to keep 'deviant' sex under their purview. Dickinson’s poetry was fully published only after her death; this suggests her reluctance and fear to give the audience even the slightest hint of her individual identity to the world that treated homosexuality as a disorder. Her ineligibility to fit in the society may have psychologically affected her due to the isolation that she was forcing herself into and therefore her personal life truly justified her mentioning of ‘death’ several times in her poems.

Emily Dickinson wrote at the tail end of the Romantic period, and even though she was influenced by some of the ideals of Romanticism, she is most commonly known as a writer from the Realist era. And during this period no subject was more central to America than the Civil war in the Nineteenth- Century. According to Drew Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering, the Civil War changed American attitudes toward death in three ways out of which one was that the experience of the war has completely changed the people’s attitude towards death completely. American life had become “inseparable” from death, and was now a nation where, in Faust’s words, “everyone had lost a loved one” and so did Dickinson, a close family friend of hers named Frazer Stearns, plunging her family into mourning. Even though war did not find any direct reference in her poems the scholars have pointed out the crystallization of the brutality of wars in her poem which focused on some of her central ideas of “suffering and God’s will, life’s transient nature, the salvation that art can provide, and the eternal mystery of life and nature. In short, war becomes a lens through which she reappraises her central preoccupation.

It is a therefore the transparency of death in Dickinson’s poem through which a new horizon of life emerges. Its gift of intimation of death indicates something that which is actually causing it to disappear within the lyric. I strongly believe that it is Dickinson’s grave internalization of her personal experiences and affection towards poetry which brings forth to us an unbroken company. This “unbroken company” of her mind and body from the soul is what takes the readers to the depth of her being. Death for Emily meant daybreak whose rays she wishes to share with everyone and she succeeds in breaking the tabooed notion behind paradoxes of death bravely and what she leaves behind for us is Death as an experience of life’s greatest adventure.

References

1. Thornton, Tamara Plakins. “Habeas Corpus: Death in Nineteenth-Century America.” Reviews in American History, vol. 25, no. 3, 1997, pp. 433–438. JSTOR.
2. Comment, Kristin M. “Dickinson's Bawdy: Shakespeare and Sexual Symbolism in Emily Dickinson's Writing to Susan Dickinson.” Legacy, vol. 18, no. 2, 2001, pp. 167–181. 
3. Dickinson, Emily. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Theodora Ward. Harvard University Press, 1986.
4. Duggan, Lisa. “Lesbianism and American History: A Brief Source Review.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, 1979, pp. 80–83. JSTOR
5. EDIS Bulletin. “Approaching Emily Dickinson” edited by Cuihua Xu. The Emily Dickinson International Society, Vol. 23, No. 2, November 2011, Lexington.
6. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, edited by Ernest Jones. The International Psycho-Analytical Press. London.
7. Hoffman, Steven K. “Impersonal Personalism: The Making of a Confessional Poetic.” English Literary History (ELH), vol. 45, no. 4, 1978, pp. 687–709. JSTOR.
8. Lamgbaum, Robert. “The Dramatic Monologue: Sympathy versus Judgment.” The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition. W.W. Norton and Company, 1963, New York.
9. Smith, Robert Rowland. “The Death-Drive Does Not Think.” Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.