To “Dwell in Possibility”: Finding Freedom Behind the Poetic Veil

A prison, a house, a nunnery? Perhaps just an attic— maybe none of those things. The possibilities abound. Why Emily Dickinson, the Belle of Amherst, The New England Mystic, ever sequestered herself from society continues to puzzle critics. Whether she was devastated by the death of her father, afflicted with depression, or a misanthropic genius, Dickinson avoids directly answering these questions in her poems, keeping many aspects of her life for her eyes only. But beyond her physical enclosure from society, her poetry became a kind of architecture or space where she could explore the possibilities of the self; playing with the idea of visibility, Dickinson deploys poetic devices as a threshold through which she can selectively veil, reimagine, and even destroy the self, subverting the expectations of womanhood by administering her own permeability through the window of verse.

Living in the mid to late nineteenth century, Dickinson was keenly aware that public life posed a constant threat to women, especially those yearning to express divergent opinions on the world; for the poet, perhaps the greatest threat to female agency was the oppressive and incising presence of the male gaze, a force bent on objectifying and deciding female identity outside of her control. The male gaze has the power to alienate, “separate, and even destroy the self” as the spectator defines the identity of the spectacle (Harper 27). The gaze effectively reduces her to a third person viewing the artificial impression of herself outside of her own body. In her poem “They shut me up in Prose –,” the writer admonishes the way men try to silence her with prosaic lectures, trapping her like a “little girl” still being taught what a woman ought to be (Dickinson 445). In response, Dickinson retires from male observance, both physically, in the attic of her father’s home, and artistically, in the fiction of her poetry. As a woman ready to criticize the world she is leaving behind, the writer “seizes agency for herself and creates a space” or poetic home “impregnable of eye” but with an “everlasting roof” bursting with possibility (Harper 34, Dickinson 466). There, she gains the security to explore her full potential, protecting the self from external determination and even destruction.

Within this poetic zone, Dickinson employs lines of poetry as a veil through which she can administer the gaze of outsiders. At times the space she describes feels claustrophobic, cramped enough for the reader to hear “a Fly buzz,” bouncing off the walls (591). In these moments, the reader may feel voyeuristic, making the writer vulnerable by their presence. Yet, the poet is in control of her own isolation. Just like the entity in “The Soul selects her own Society,” Dickinson “shuts the Door” but also administers if and when it is cracked open to outsiders (303). According to Dickinson scholar Lisa Harper, the poet repurposes the function of the veiled lady, the image of a partly visible women pervading commercial culture at the time (24). This advertisement technique capitalized off the titular function of the male gaze: desiring and sexualizing what is not visible. If what is veiled is what intrigues, Dickinson consciously controls the level of transparency of her verse, or poetic distance between the self and the world. A space which once seemed confining actually affords women control over the permeability of the self, a linguistic barrier “closing the Vales of her attention” to those not permitted into the exclusive chamber, or mind, of the writer (Dickinson 303). She becomes an empowered observer, gazing back out at the world as interlopers topple over one another, trying to peer in. Distancing herself with verse, the woman is no longer on show. She is on guard.

The writer addresses her grievances with the world through this cloak of language, a voice which requires work to decipher and, therefore, protects the poet against public scrutiny. Employing punctuation and rhetorical devices, the writer gains literary leeway to make radical points without reckless transparency. In poem 1079, after declaring “the title divine - is mine!” Dickinson continues to criticize marriage by employing nondeclarative rhetorical patterns. Instead of rejecting the “Born – Bridalled – Shrouded” woman with a declarative statement, the poet ends with a question: “Is this – the way?" (Dickinson 1079). The writer “generally avoids flat pronouncements,” employing italics and exclamation points rather than decisive periods (Miller 538). Through grammatical design, Dickinson implements emphasis as a means of parody, destabilizing societal norms, like women’s marital roles, as humorous rather than universal truths. Even her enigmatic dash serves as the visual indicator of the poetic veil, flecked across the page as a riddle complicating her message (Larsen 32). For instance, in “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” a poem that actually advises the indirect presentation of knowledge, Dickinson employs a dash after the first and last lines to reveal the subliminal circularity of her argument. While she advises to tell the truth slant, she never describes how one is to lessen the impact of a force comparable to the blinding flash of lightning. The words “slant,” “Success,” “Circuit,” and “surprise” are connected through alliteration, revealing that “even a circuitous or slant” approach to exposing the Truth will inevitably lead to “surprise” (Keller & Miller 538). So, one cannot really restrict lightning. One cannot completely hide the Truth. Dickinson’s poetry is underscored by “subtext that contrasts with the direct statement of the poem,” protecting her from social rejection while allowing her to make radical points (534). While she may write as if her poems are not about herself, veiling her verse in linguistic riddles, subtext reveals they are in many ways autobiographical. With careful reading, Dickinson’s opinions shine through the cracks of rhetorical indirection with refreshing contention.

Beneath the cloak covering her biting criticism, Dickinson reserves her true form for herself only, representing personhood in endless iterations of the imagination. She protects her identity with the veil of language, disguised in contradictory literary personas: male and female, adult and child, human and object. While the poet’s speakers may emanate from her lived experiences, no "I" in a Dickinson poem is “ever simply the poet” herself (Miller 15). Poetry, as a product separated from the author, gives Dickinson the creative freedom to shapeshift beyond her gendered body and its social implications. In poem 1096, the writer morphs into a young and explorative “Boy” in the grass (Dickinson 1096). She employs a child’s persona to subvert the saying children should be seen and not heard, meaning she turns herself into a child so that “she may be heard and not seen” (Harper 24). The poet’s voice stands apart from that of the recluse, the woman, or even the ex-socialite. When alienated from a body marked by the social prejudices of womanhood, her words can speak for themselves. While men have historically served as judges of female identity, the poet embraces a kind of “spectatorial cross-dressing” in which she takes on this role of the male gaze itself: she adopts the power of self-determination (22). At times Dickinson literally writes from the voice of a male, and at others she takes on “femininity as a masquerade” to alienate herself from the object of male desire (22). When she calls herself “Wife!” or “Woman” in quotation marks, she mocks marital titles as purely social appellations assigned by men (Dickinson 199). There is a self beneath these social brandings and advertisements. Her “masculine power” to determine her own identity allows her to create personas. Meanwhile, readers constantly grasp for a “Dickinson” they can understand.

Besides her masculinized ability to determine identity, Dickinson also takes on the male role of the desirer, using literary allusions to express her own sexual nonconformity and criticize male aggression. Within her poetic space, Dickinson can extend her vision of eroticism because verse protects her from flatly pronouncing sexual deviancy (Harper 39). In “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun,” Dickinson embodies a traditionally masculine object emblematic of violence, the gun, to hunt a stereotypically passive female, the doe. The poet may use this role reversal to reveal her own bisexuality. Both the male and female actors contribute to her sexual consummation, the male owner of the gun endowing it/her with “male power and phallic, aggressive sexuality” while the doe serves as the recipient of her violent expulsion of bullets (Larsen 75). While the poet allows herself to embody traditionally masculine modes of dominance, this is by no means Dickinson’s attempt to glorify female victimization. The gun is sadistic, almost satanic, as it smiles with “cordial light” at the fleeing female deer, finding sexual and aggressive fulfillment in violence towards women (Dickinson 764). Ide Larsen asserts that this chilling smile is the writer’s way of mocking pioneer men of the period, only capable of recognizing women by “killing and raping” the female other (79). While rejecting masculine pleasure in the aggressive objectification of women, the poet reveals female desire can be real and dominant. It can be extreme and intense— it can even be directed towards other women. The poetic space becomes the site of erotic liberation, allowing Dickinson to play with language to criticize men and explore her own sexuality.

Disguising her identity, the poetic veil allows Dickinson to assume conflicting roles of dominance and submission, giving her the freedom, and security, to explore erotic fantasies with other women. Several poems refer to women in roles of regality and dominance. Dickinson even calls herself both a “Czar” and “Woman” in the same line (199). Yet, these roles of dominance

and submission are in constant flux, sometimes dramatically shifting within the poems themselves. In poem 1670, she describes a phallic fantasy in which the “He” is a sniveling worm, intriguing but easily entrapped by the speaker’s simple string. While this force metamorphizes into a speaking serpent, by the end of the poem the speaker is in control again when she reveals the vision was a just a dream. She is the creator of the bestial fantasy herself. The writer uses her poetic space as an arena where the “master and slave continually trade places,” exploring idiosyncratic sexual orientations (Smith 117). Even in correspondence spanning four decades, Dickinson wrote to Susan Gilbert, her brother Austin’s wife and her own presumed lover, with poems in which she addresses “a literary female with terms customarily reserved for males” (116). In these letters, the poet calls herself a boy, bachelor, brother and even Uncle Emily, experimenting unabashedly with her own gender expression (117). Dickinson’s role reversals have caused academics to speculate about the unidentified addressee of her “Master letters,” a series of written messages to an unknown lover. While the recipient is referred to as a dominant partner, the poet’s frequent gender-bending language complicates the identity of the “Master.” They may be a woman, possibly Sue herself. Or perhaps the master is not a lesbian lover and is instead a man, as members of a patriarchal world might be inclined to suspect. Yet the fact that Dickinson’s poetic veil leaves room for many interpretations reveals the empowering possibilities of poetry. Poetic language allows Dickinson to secure the self through the fictive label of her craft while liberating the writer to explore her own nonconformist sexual desires.

Even with the power to embody a dominant force, the poetic space can also be used to destroy and diminish the self for fear of violation by an outside force. Dickinson knows that the public eye can “accost – and sunder” the female body, even through the supervised portal of her verse (Harper 27). At times, this looming threat of visibility endows her with dark desire to commit a kind of literary suicide. Although the poet dwells in a house of possibility, with “numerous windows” or veils she operates through verse, there are also many ways to lock the self away (Dickinson 266). Windows and doors are just as much gateways as they are latches which can be bolted shut. Verse is both a doorway and a fortress that can completely isolate the self. Beyond shrinking to a childlike or even non-human form, the poet maintains an “astonishing, subversive, and even satanically ambitious” ability to completely erase the corporeal self (Harper 30). In an act of ultimate self-preservation, Dickinson finally pronounces “I’m Nobody!” (Dickinson 260). Nothing at all. Disembodied and genderless, she locks the doors to her poetic home in her most exclusive stance yet. Only readers willing to cede their bodily baggage, agreeing that they are “nobody – too,” will be ushered inside and accepted into the writer’s small circle of associates (260). Perhaps this is what Claude Weisbuch has aptly called Dickinson’s "sceneless" poetry (Miller 15). In some poems, the self or speaker she describes appears otherworldly, existing beyond human conceptions of time. The poet opacifies the veil, pushing her poetic persona to the limits. Using verse to adopt a state of nothingness, Dickinson reveals the very “fiction which founds the self” (Farr 87). When she completely destroys her human form, she shows us the veil, and nothing more. For outsiders, there is only a literary version of the self represented in shapes which form letters that form words. Poetry allows her to become completely invisible, protected from the eyes of the outside world and free to imagine within the safety of her poetic home.

Without name and without form, this house provides the poet the freedom and security to explore the vast potentiality of her mind—and in doing so, the writer seizes the Adamic power to name herself. In calling herself nobody, she is not restricted to being “somebody,” reducing the self into an intelligible form (Dickinson 260). Existing in a quantum realm, language seemingly

cannot even express the many iterations of the self existing in the mind of the poet. She is many things at once. Dickinson scholar Judith Farr compares the poet to the American landscape painters of the early 19th century as she acknowledges and plays with “outlines of the real in order to suggest their evocation of the unseen” (50). In order to safeguard the self, Dickinson works within language to suggest a multiplicity that is immeasurable outside of it. She has to use language because poetry is a discursive medium and humans understand personhood through linguistic titles and descriptions. However, by contradicting and complicating identity through the veil of poetic devices, Dickinson’s indirection and fluctuations suggest that the real drama of her poetry lies with the “speaker's idiosyncratic mental processes” (Miller 545). When measured or described in a poem, she appears a single entity. But she exists as many “Dickinsons” at once, changing form in each poetic unit. Within her closet, her attic, Thunderdome, or the confines of language, her brain spins perpetually, churning out unlimited ways to portray the self.

Both a safeguard and a sanctuary, the poetic space endows Dickinson with an almost spiritual mystery beyond the experience of a woman simply frustrated with her time. The gaze, or the reader, is curious, and frightened, as if looking upon “her” directly might be shocking. Maybe even blinding. Then again, slipping through riddled phrases, a slant of light escapes every now and then under the attic door. It whispers a truth about a cruel world. It offers a way to surmount it. Can you grasp it? Do you dare?

Works Cited

Sources

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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49909/a-narrow-fellow-in-the-grass-1096.

Dickinson, Emily. “I dwell in Possibility – (466).” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52197/i-dwell-in-possibility-466.

Dickinson, Emily. “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died— (591).” Poetry Foundation,

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45703/i-heard-a-fly-buzz-when-i-died-591.

Dickinson, Emily, and Thomas Herbert Johnson. “In Winter in My Room (1670).” Complete Poems, Little, Brown, Boston, 1960.

Dickinson, Emily, and Thomas Herbert Johnson. “I’m “wife” – I’ve finished that – (199).” Complete Poems, Little, Brown, Boston, 1960.

Dickinson, Emily. “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun (764).” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52737/my-life-had-stood-a-loaded-gun-764.

Dickinson, Emily. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant (1263).” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56824/tell-all-the-truth-but-tell-it-slant-1263.

Dickinson, Emily. “The Soul selects her own Society (303).” Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/soul-selects-her-own-society-303.

Dickinson, Emily. “There's a certain Slant of light (320).” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45723/theres-a-certain-slant-of-light-320.

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Dickinson, Emily. “Title divine – is mine! (1072).” White Heat Emily Dickinson in 1862: A Weekly Blog, https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/whiteheat/title-divine-is-mine-f194a-and-b- j-1072/.

Dickinson, Emily. “I'm Nobody! Who Are You? (260).” Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/im-nobody-who-are-you-260.

Scholarship

Dickinson, Emily. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Edited by Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart, Paris Press, 1998.

Farr, Judith. The Passion of Emily Dickinson. Harvard University Press, 2004.

Harper, Lisa. “‘The Eyes Accost -- and Sunder:" Unveiling Emily Dickinson's Poetics.” The

Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, 2000, pp. 21–48., https://doi.org/10.1353/edj.2000.0003.

Keller, Lynn, and Cristanne Miller. “Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Rewards of Indirection.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 4, 1984, p. 533., https://doi.org/10.2307/365061.

Larsen, Ide Hejlskov. “Emily Dickinson Challenges American Myths:” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 4, no. 2, 1995, pp. 62–86., https://doi.org/10.1353/edj.0.0073.

Miller, Cristanne. Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar. Harvard Univ. Press, 1987.Smith, Martha Nell. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. University of Texas Press,

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