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Singing Off Charnel Steps: the War Poetry of Emily Dickinson

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Singing Off Charnel Steps: the War Poetry of Emily Dickinson SINGING OFF CHARNEL STEPS: THE WAR POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON AND ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING by LEIGH-ANNE URBANOWICZ MARCELLIN (Under the Direction of Douglas Anderson) ABSTRACT Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are not known primarily as war poets. However, Dickinson addressed the American Civil War in both her letters and in a substantial number of poems, while Barrett Browning wrote extensively about the Risorgimento, the struggle of the Italian states for independence and unification during much of the nineteenth century. The first chapter of this project treats Dickinson’s letters that refer to the war, revealing how the poet engaged with this conflict in her correspondence with her Norcross cousins, Samuel and Mary Bowles, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In the second chapter, Dickinson’s war poetry is examined in detail. These poems about the soldiers who fall in battle and those who mourn them do not present a coherent political view, but rather suggest multiple stories and meanings. The third chapter includes poems less directly related to the war: poems about peace, revolution, patriotism, race, and the wars within nature and within ourselves. These works show how integral the Civil War was to Dickinson’s world view. The fourth and final chapter investigates Barrett Browning’s political and martial poems, focusing on three areas: her hero-worship, her position as an English poet writing about Italy, and her treatment of gender in these works. An examination of these themes illuminates the complexity of Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento poetry and the extent to which she wrestled with the political, philosophical, and social issues the Risorgimento brought to the fore. Though the two poets produced war poetry that often looks quite different, both approached war and politics from a similar angle. Both were keenly interested in the human heart, representing what Emerson terms “The republican at home” and wishing for a state based on “the principle of right and love.” Dickinson was greatly influenced by Barrett Browning; both “sang off charnel steps,” but believed fervently in humanity and its possibilities. INDEX WORDS: Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, War poetry, Nineteenth-century poetry, Women’s literature SINGING OFF CHARNEL STEPS: THE WAR POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON AND ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING by LEIGH-ANNE URBANOWICZ MARCELLIN B.A., University of Virginia, 1992 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2003 © 2003 Leigh-Anne Urbanowicz Marcellin All Rights Reserved. SINGING OFF CHARNEL STEPS: THE WAR POETRY OF EMILY DICKINSON AND ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING by LEIGH-ANNE URBANOWICZ MARCELLIN Major Professor: Douglas Anderson Committee: Tricia Lootens Anne Williams Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2003 iv DEDICATION To Mike, always v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project simply would not exist were it not for the inspiration of Margaret Dickie. I hope it would have made her proud. I cannot thank my dissertation director Doug Anderson enough for his kindness, patience, and dedication to this project. I also greatly appreciate the example and effort provided by my committee members Tricia Lootens and Anne Williams. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the reference and interlibrary loan staffs of the University of Georgia library and Eastern Loudoun Regional library. I also received invaluable help with my research from Kristin Nielsen, David N. Harrison, and Chris Marcellin, and technical support from Jeff Tiller. Special thanks are due Marisa Pagnattaro, Mary Marcellin, Ioline Henter, Lindsey Marcellin, and my parents Tom and Grace Urbanowicz for much-needed childcare. And I have to thank Ioline too for her confidence in me. I am forever indebted to my parents, without whose love and encouragement this would not have been possible. I want to thank my mother for always believing I could do it and for providing so much of the help that allowed it to be done. There are simply no words to thank Mike Marcellin, my husband, for all of his help with this project and for his unceasing support during this long process. I could not have finished without him, my partner in everything, now and forever. And thanks to my children, Colette Suzanne Marcellin and Alec Thomas Marcellin, for never letting me forget what is really important. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 LETTERS FROM THE HOMEFRONT: “WAR FEELS TO ME AN OBLIQUE PLACE”............................................26 2 THE CIVIL WAR POEMS: “SEESAWING – COOLLY – ON IT” ............................................................88 3 DICKINSON’S WORLD OF WAR: “THAT CAMPAIGN INSCRUTABLE” ......................................................139 4 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING’S ITALIAN WARS: “THIS COUNTRY-SAVING IS A GLORIOUS THING” ...........................182 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................269 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................272 1 INTRODUCTION [. .] Sorrow seems more general than it did, and not the estate of a few persons, since the war began; and if the anguish of others helped one with one’s own, now would be many medicines. ’Tis dangerous to value, for only the precious can alarm. I noticed that Robert Browning had made another poem, and was astonished – till I remembered that I, myself, in my smaller way, sang off charnel steps. Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous. (L298) Emily Dickinson wrote these words to her Norcross cousins in December 1862, the year after the Civil War began and Elizabeth Barrett Browning died. She wonders why losses suffered by a nation and an individual do not stun them into silence, until she recalls what certainly was never far from her thoughts – that her writing springs from that loss. Emily Dickinson read Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s war poetry and even quotes from it in an earlier letter to her cousins. Dickinson identifies herself here as a poet of war too. It is a role born of “sorrow,” but its “power” is indeed “stupendous.” Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are not known as war poets. One can hardly imagine Thomas Wentworth Higginson including war in his original groupings of Dickinson's poems, and only a handful of critics since Higginson suggest that the American Civil War is a major subject of her poetry. Politics and war were definitely major subjects of Barrett Browning’s poetry. She wrote extensively about the 2 Italian Risorgimento, the struggle to free the Italian states from foreign and papal influence and unite them in a single nation that lasted most of the nineteenth century. This poetry, however, was not well received at the time it was published, and it has not yet attracted the full attention it deserves. Firmly establishing war as an integral part of Dickinson’s and Barrett Browning’s work is vital to a more complete understanding of these poets. The lens through which they are viewed is still too narrow. With some important exceptions, critics simply have not focused enough attention on their political and martial work. Dickinson biographers Richard Sewall and Alfred Habegger firmly establish the supposedly elusive link between Emily Dickinson herself and the Civil War.1 Dickinson’s father Edward was a respected Whig politician in Massachusetts. Habegger explains his politics at the time of the Civil War as well as his daughter’s knowledge of public life (400-401). Sewall affirms that Dickinson had a detailed grasp of Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s political activities concerning abolition and women’s rights from her extensive reading of periodicals, most notably her friend Samuel Bowles’s Springfield Republican. Dickinson was in contact with Higginson as he traveled south to command a black regiment in South Carolina, and she was also aware of her brother Austin’s paying a substitute to take his place in battle. More importantly, the deaths of the Adams boys, acquaintances of the Dickinsons, and of their friend Frazar Stearns, whose father was a president of Amherst College, deeply affected Emily Dickinson and her family (535-36). Habegger acknowledges that the war touched Dickinson, and he mentions some of the letters in which she addresses it, but he does not discuss any poems 3 in this context. Sewall reduces her extensive, complex war canon to a few letters and some “marvelous little elegies” (536) for sons of Amherst who perished in battle.2 Other critics, even those interested in history, completely remove Dickinson from it. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, in a study focusing on abolition and feminism, views the enslavement of Africans and the oppression of women in Dickinson’s poetry “not as politics but as imagery” (129). “Her poetry flamboyantly insists on privacy, on its internalization of social concerns” (11), Sánchez-Eppler argues, concluding that Dickinson is “actively antipolitical” (130). Joanne Dobson similarly claims that “A discussion of Dickinson and public issues is to some degree a discourse in negative
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