REIMAGINING EDEN: not only for her female self-affirmation but HOMOEROTIC also in her assertion as a female author.
RELATIONSHIPS IN EMILY Within the body growing as a graft, DICKINSON’S POETRY indomitable, There is an other.—Julia Kristeva, Desire 1 in Language Chutima Pragatwutisarn Ourself behind ourself, concealed- Abstract Should startle most.—Emily Dickinson, poem #670 The homoerotic relationship is one of the major themes in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Introduction Critics have constantly looked for 2 evidence of homoeroticism in the poet’s Jacques Lacan’s rewriting of the Freudian life and work. In this essay, I argue that family romance locates the subject within feminist psychoanalysis, particularly a language fabricated by men. In this theories of the mother-daughter patriarchal discourse or symbolic order, relationship, is useful to an understanding the story of the mother-daughter of the homoerotic in Dickinson’s poems. In relationship is forbidden and lost. The her rereading of psychoanalytical world is compensated for by his theories, Nancy Chodorow emphasizes the possession of paternal power signified by symbiotic relationship between the mother the phallus. The feminist revision of and daughter and the daughter’s marginal Lacan’s androcentric myth, seen in the position within the symbolic order. work of such critics as Nancy Chodorow, Chodorow’s theoretical framework has Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, focuses been applied to the analysis of female on the rediscovery of the mother-daughter writers, including Dickinson, who write plot that has been suppressed by from the position of the daughter. In “The patriarchal culture. As the epigraphs by Parable of the Cave,” Sandra Gilbert and Kristeva and Dickinson suggest, the Susan Gubar narrate the myth told by female body is not simply a locus of Mary Shelley about her search for a patriarchal control of power but also a site literary foremother, the Sibyl, from whom of subversion as the daughter, who is of Shelley derived her creative power. the same sex as the mother, is able to Dickinson’s poetry, similar to the parable retain her pre-oedipal and thus told by Shelley, depicts a speaker who is homosexual relationship with the mother. alienated from the patriarchal world of Dickinson’s poetry can be understood law and order and is looking for the lost mother world usually personified by nature. For Dickinson, the recovery of 2 My discussion of Jacques Lacan is derived Eden or the female utopia is significant from Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), Tamsin E. Lorraine, Gender, Identity, and the Production of Meaning (Boulder: Westview 1 Lecturer, Department of Comparative Press, 1990), and Elizabeth Wright, Literature, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice University (London: Methuen, 1984).
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within the context of the gynocritic myth reflects back the child image as a whole. It offered by these feminist critics. A close must be emphasized, however, that the examination of Dickinson’s poems reveals child’s discovery of selfhood as a subtext—her attempt to reconstruct a lost completeness and wholeness through its paradise, the pre-symbolic realm of the identification with the mother is mother. Many of Dickinson’s poems considered by Lacan to be a fantasy or dramatize the female protagonist’s exile illusion.4 from the Kingdom of the Father, the patriarchal culture where she is regarded The mother-child dyad breaks up when the as the Other. Seeing herself as powerless child enters the realm of signification or and her desire unfulfilled, the protagonist symbolic order governed by what Lacan is searching for the mother land of milk calls the Name of the Father or le Nom du and honey. This female utopia is Pere. In Psychoanalytic Criticism, envisioned by Dickinson in several poems Elizabeth Wright argues that the French as an Eden, a secret female enclave where word “Nom” (name) is a pun on “Non” the protagonist experiences a joyful bliss (no), indicating the suppression of the derived from a homoerotic relationship child’s desire for the mother. In the with the mother’s body in nature. symbolic realm, the male child turns away from the mother to identify with his father I who possesses the phallus, the central symbol of power. The lack of a phallus in Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s family the female child, on the other hand, allows romance focuses on the role of language in her only indirect connection with her the construction of subjectivity3. The father through having her own child who Lacanian subject is seen as an effect of will provide a phallus for her. The phallus linguistic construction, the subject of thus comes to determine the subject’s semiotics whose basic nature is defined as social identity. The child’s learning of ‘lack’. This Lacanian scheme of the gender difference is accompanied by its development of subjectivity revolves acquisition of language—the Father’s around two important stages: the pre- words which compensate for the absence symbolic or pre-oedipal and the symbolic. of the mother. However, desire originated The pre-symbolic is the realm of the by lack will never be satisfied by language Mother characterized by the mother-child which simply launches an endless chain of dyad. From its direct contact with the signification from one signifier to the next. mother’s body, the child experiences bliss While there is a ‘Paradise Regained’ for or jouissance. At this stage, the child does the male subject, the fusion with the not recognize any lack and perceives itself mother, once lost to the female child, is as whole and unitary. In the mother-child dyadic relationship, the mother functions as the other and her gaze, like a mirror, 4 Lacan calls this stage of development the mirror stage in which “the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the 3 In the Lacanian scheme, the terms “[m]other dialectic of identification with the other, and and father signify cultural positions and hence before language restores to it, in the universal, have no necessary correlation to biological its function as subject.” The I, existing in this realities.” See Silverman (1983: 182). form, is according to Lacan “the Ideal-I.” See Lacan (1977: 2).
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lost forever in Lacan’s scheme. The loss of Since Lacan’s discourse of family the mother to the daughter, says Lorraine romance has had a profoundly damaging (1990: 66), is “complete since she will effect on women, the feminist revision of never have the phallus, never have the this androcentric myth by such critics as mother back.” Nancy Chodorow, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar is extremely welcome and Lacan’s theory of subjectivity reveals one indispensable. In her influential essay, important fact: psychoanalysis can be seen “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as as a discourse of power. Discourse, argues Revision,” Rich (1979: 35) says, “Re- Wright (1984: 159), “implies rules which vision—the act of looking back, of seeing define what is to be considered relevant with fresh eyes, of entering an old text and unmentionable.” Similarly, the from a new critical direction—is for discourse of psychoanalysis operates by women more than a chapter in cultural submission and withdrawal of certain facts history: it is an act of survival”. As we in order to suture any seams, smooth over have seen in the Lacanian scheme, the contradictions and finally provide mother is imprisoned, silenced and buried presentable conditions of existence. in the masculine discourse. Revision, Rich Hence, Homans (1986: 6) notes, “In the (1979: 35) further argues, “is more than a Lacanian myth, language and gender are search for identity: it is part of our refusal connected in such a way as to privilege of the self-destructiveness of male- implicitly the masculine and the dominate society”. Therefore, it is not figurative.” The order of the symbolic is surprising that the feminist project of the order of language, of culture, of revision, carried out by critics such as paternal laws that privilege the male Chodorow, Gilbert and Gubar, reveals an subject who possesses the phallus.5 Within attempt to revive the primacy of the pre- the order the bond between mother and oedipal, the realm of the Mother, and the daughter is not only forgotten and lost but bond between mother and daughter. also replaced by that between father and Describing this version of the feminist son. The Father’s law substitutes the word family romance, Hirsch (1989: 138) says it for the mother’s body and introduces is “the romance of the daughter, entangled desire as a result of the lack or absence of with the mother through identification and the mother’s body. The absence of the struggle against it, increasingly distant mother from the symbolic order makes it from the father, brother, and male lover, possible to uphold patriarchal culture. unproblematic only in the connection to Therefore, in the Lacanian model, the her sister or female lover.” This separation mother must be ‘killed’ and her story must from men and the creation of a separate be suppressed in order to launch an infinite all-female realm on the borders of chain of signification. patriarchal culture is fundamental to the feminist family romance.
5 In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray Chodorow’s The Reproductions of unmasked the “phallocentrism” embedded in Mothering offers an incisive critique and the Western system of representation, showing revision of gender development. how masculine logic has been the point of According to Chodorow, the establishment reference for the discourse of language. See of gender identity occurs well before the Irigaray’s critique of Freud’s psychoanalytic oedipal complex mainly through the discourse (1985: 68–85).
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child’s relationship with the mother, its daughter. Discussing the works of these primary caretaker. The mother is of the women writers, Homans (1986: 16) says, same gender as her daughter and of a “19th century writers articulate different gender from her son; thus she thematically a daughter’s bond to and treats them differently. The daughter is identification with a vulnerable or regarded as an extension of the mother’s vanished mother (often figured as Mother self while the son is not. This symbiotic Nature);…these writers are writing and relationship with the mother which is practising myths of daughters’ relations to prolonged in the female child also symbolic language working out through influences the child’s formation of ego their writing the conflict in being a boundaries. If “the basic feminine sense of daughter and being a writer.” The myth of the self,” says Chodorow (1978: 95), “is women writers searching for their lost connected to the world, the basic mother country mentioned by Homans is masculine sense of the self is separate” well illustrated by Gilbert and Gubar’s (1978: 95). While the son must establish essay “The Parable of the Cave.”6 In the his gender identity in opposition to the “Parable” the mother is not simply seen as mother, the daughter’s lengthy “vanished” and “vulnerable” but also as a identification with her mother results in source of power and creativity for her her fluid ego boundaries. More important poetic daughters. One parable, included in is Chodorow’s notion that the boy’s Gilbert and Gubar’s essay, is told by Mary oedipal complex is more decisively Shelley. In this parable Shelley is led by resolved than the girl’s. In her discussion her “male companion” to the cave of the of Chodorow’s book, Homans (1986: 11– Sibyl,7 where they find “piles of leaves, 12) notes that castration never comes to fragments of bark, and a white filmy the daughter as a threat. The girl, who has substance” (Gilbert and Gubar 1989: the same sex as her mother, is not 1121). Although the cave belongs to the considered by her father as a rival and is mother goddess and female artist, the not far enough from her mother to have Sibyl, it is a man who not only finds the devised a phallus to wish for. Furthermore, cave but is able to recognize it. “This is the daughter, seeing herself as powerless the Sibyl’s cave; these are the sibylline in the symbolic order, has never been leaves,” claims Shelley’s male companion given an incentive to enter that order as a (Gilbert and Gubar 1989: 1122). The son. Allying with Homans, Kahn (1985: 75) notes that “Chodorow distinguishes two coexistent levels of gender identity [in 6 “The Parable of the Cave” is the third chapter the daughter]: one homosexually oriented of Gilbert and Gubar’s book The Madwoman towards the mother, one heterosexual in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University toward that father.” Not being completely Press, 1984). accepted in the symbolic order, the 7 The Sibyl was a prophetess of the Ancient daughter occupies a marginalized position Greek and Roman Period. It has been on the borders of the Father’s kingdom. estimated that there are as many as ten sibyls whose names appear in Greek and Latin texts. Chodorow’s work sets a theoretical However, the most famous one is the Sibyl of framework for the analysis of nineteenth- Cumae who is assigned a crucial role in century women writers, including Virgil’s Aeneid. It is also believed that she is Dickinson, who write from the position of the one who wrote nine books of prophecies. See Cavendish (1983: 2574–2575).
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parable reveals the “sad fact” about the while deciphering the sibylline leaves, that “equivocal place” of women in patriarchal she feels herself “taken . . . out of a world, culture: they are at once a part of the which has averted its once benignant face culture and yet alien to the world from me, to one growing with imagination controlled by men. However, all is not lost and power” (Gilbert and Gubar 1989: in Shelley’s case since she is the one with 1122). the power to interpret the leaves of prophecies left by the Sibyl and convey Born in 1830, Dickinson was inevitably them to a wider community. Gilbert and subject to the Victorian ideology of Gubar describe the nature of her mission: womanhood. As Joanne Dobson notes, “The cultural ideology of respectable But while the way to the cave can womanhood in mid-nineteenth-century be “remembered” by accident, the America was structured on the assumption whole meaning of the sibylline of women’s inmate and unique morality. It leaves can only be remembered defined ideal feminine morality in a large through painstaking labor: part as altruism, selflessness and translation, transcription, and reticence” (Stein 1997: 26). A woman’s stitchery, re-vision and recreation. life, especially that of a middle and upper (Gilbert and Gubar 1989: 1122) class family, was thus confined to the domestic where she was expected to be the There are two ramifications to this Angel in the house and a moral or spiritual statement. Firstly, the cave representing guidance for men. As a daughter who also the mother’s place is forgotten and has to wrote, Dickinson found that the main be remembered. Secondly, this is not a question for her was not simply being discovery but a rediscovery of the power female but being a female author. Writing that was once wielded and that has been her poems in a male-dominated literary subjugated and suppressed by a male- world, Dickinson, as Stein (1997: 26) puts dominated society. it, “[undertakes] a traditionally masculine role.” Feminist literary critics have noted We must also consider the words Gilbert how literary tradition legitimates the male and Gubar use. This is a “labor” of author and his authority. Citing Homans, “recreation” which connects this work to Stein (1997: 27) says, “Western literary the act of giving birth. This is the maternal tradition, beginning with Genesis, assumes role, a role that can be filled only by an Adamic male speaker and namer whose women. For Gilbert and Gubar, Mary words have a portion of God’s own verbal Shelley’s act of translating the Sibyl’s powers, whereby words create the things prophecies becomes one of birthing that they name. […] According to this view, connects the women writers to a sort of poetry is a gendered enterprise; the mother goddess. Gilbert and Gubar (1989: speaker is male and his words reenact 1122) say, “She [the Sibyl] had, in other God’s Logos that named the world into words, a goddess’s power of the male existence.” The recovery of the lost potential for literary paternity.” In maternal world was in order for Dickinson recovering and reconstructing the Sibyl’s to find herself a place for her female self- “sexual/artistic strength,” Shelley comes to affirmation and her self-assertion as a realize the creative power she shares with female author. the mother goddess. Shelley exclaims,
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II the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads Dickinson’s poetry, following the parable bowed in anguish before the told by Shelley, illustrates the poet’s mighty sun; think you these thirsty search for the lost mother country. blossoms will now need nought Although Chodorow emphasizes the but—dew? No, they will cry for prolonged relationship between mother sunlight, and pine for the burning and daughter, the inevitable fact is that the noon, tho’ it scorches them, daughter does enter the symbolic order scathes them; they have got and experiences there a sense of the lost through with peace—they know paradise of the mother’s world and an that the man of noon, is mightier alienation from the father’s kingdom. than the morning and their life is henceforth to him. Dickinson’s “As if some little Arctic (Martin 1984: 149) flower” (#180) portrays a little flower who wanders through the patriarchal Eden—a Dickinson contrasts the morning dew with place describe as “continents of summer” the heating sun. The former suggests and “firmaments of sun.” The image of maternal nurturance which satisfies the “summer” and “sun” are reminiscent of child’s needs while the latter represents Dickinson’s “man of noon.”8 In her letter the burning passion of male energy which dated June 1852 to Susan Gilbert,9 promises nothing but death. Unlike those Dickinson contemplates on the plight of flowers in Dickinson’s letter which “pine womanhood: for the burning noon,” the little flowers in the poem find themselves alienated from How dull our lives must seem to the patriarchal Eden where “bright crowds the bride, and the plighted maiden, of flowers-/ And birds” speak a “foreign whose days are fed with gold, and tongue.” who gather pearls every evening; but to the wife, Susie, sometimes In poem #959, the speaker’s sense of loss the wife forgotten, our lives and alienation is accompanied by her perhaps seem dearer than all yearning for an unnameable and others in the world; you have seen unknowable something: flowers at morning, satisfied with A loss of something ever felt I— The first that I could recollect 8 H. Jordan Landry (2004: 901) states, Bereft I was—of what I know not “Throughout her poems and letters, Dickinson Too young that any should suspect writes “noon” as the very sign under which women are subordinated and bodily threatened.” These lines suggest a child’s traumatic 9 Susan Gilbert was Dickinson’s lifelong experience of separation from her mother. friend, neighbor and sister-in-law. Gilbert The daughter feels the “loss of something” maintained a close relationship with Dickinson but cannot “recollect” any words to until she married Dickinson’s brother, Austin, describe it since the loss here is the loss of in 1986. Since Dickinson devoted a number of the mother which occurs before the child her poems to her dear friend “Sue,” many enters the symbolic realm of language. critics have pointed out the erotic love between The same experience is also mentioned by the two of them. See Hart (1990: 251–272).
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a male poet, Wordsworth, in the second the social enclosure “grows down” rather book of The Prelude: than “grows up” (1981: 18). Like a little flower threatened with being beaten down For now a trouble came into my by the mighty sun, the speaker in this mind poem, “[a] Mourner walk[ing] among the From unknown causes. I was left children,” is dwarfed by a society that both alone, suppresses and dominates her. Seeking the visible world, not knowing why. In searching for the lost paradise, The props of my affections were Dickinson questions the patriarchal myth remov’d, of Eden. In “Did the Harebell loose her And yet the building stood, as if girdle” (#213), dealing with the courtship sustain’d of the lovers, Dickinson asks: By its own spirit! (II, ii, 291–296) Did the “Paradise”—persuade— Yield her moat of pearl— Although the two poems describe the same Would the Eden be an Eden, loss10, their emphasis is different. The Or the Earl—an Earl? male poet is looking forward to the “visible world” where he becomes an Dickinson deconstructs the authority of a individual “sustained/ by [his] spirit.” The transcendent God who represents the speaker in Dickinson’s poem, on the other Word and His Paradise, which is hand, laments the loss of the mother’s suggested by the heterosexual relationship world which for her is the loss of her of the lovers. Dickinson’s tentative use of identity. the indefinite article “an” to replace the definite article “the” allows her to create A Mourner walked among the another paradise (an Eden) and another children God (an Earl). As illustrated by Lacan, the I notwithstanding went about male’s control of power is made possible As one bemoaning a Dominion by his control of language as part of the Itself the only Prince cast out— Father’s law and order. In the poem, Dickinson obviously senses that language Separated from the mother, the speaker in is a social construct, an instrument used by Dickinson’s poem experiences absolute patriarchy to create its own myth. isolation; she is a “Prince cast out” from a Dickinson therefore challenges the “Dominion.” In her critique of the patriarchal order by challenging its development of the male and female language. subject, Annis Pratt argues that while society allows growth and individuality to Dickinson’s “Four Trees—upon a solitary the female subject, a woman who enters Acre—” (#742) challenges the Transcendental God and Western phallogocentrism. In the poem, God’s 10 The lines convey the poet’s sense of loss great plan and order are substituted by the though not all critics agree that the trouble here trees which occur “Without Desire/Or is caused by the absence of the poet’s mother Order, or Apparent Action—/Maintain—.” (either literally or figuratively). See Havens The breakdown of the apparent order does (1936: 137–38)
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not bring about the chaos feared by male “growing girls come to define themselves writers who see nature as the as continuous with others; their experience manifestation of a divine plan. As in of self contains more flexible and Emerson’s “The Apology,” the poet enters permeable ego boundaries. Boys come to “the god of the wood,” where “There was define themselves as more separate and never mystery/ But’tis figured in the distant, with a greater sense of ego flowers;/ Was never secret history/ but boundaries and differentiation.” Though birds tell it in the bowers” (Stein 1997: she never clearly develops this aspect of 29). In Dickinson’s poem, the absence of her analysis, Chodorow implies here that, God’s great plan and order is not for women, lesbian relationships11 are something the poet laments. Rather, it bound to be more satisfying. Indeed signifies the poet’s rejection of the Hirsch (1989: 134) also notes that Father’s Law and her desire to become Chodorow’s theorization of these liberated from the confinement of differences in male and female structures domestic life. As the poet says of the trees has “the effect of distancing not only in the final stanza, “What Deed is Theirs woman from man in individual unto the General nature—/ What Plan—/ heterosexual relationships, but also, much They severally—retard—or further--/ more generally, feminine from masculine Unknown—.” Unlike the male subjects cultural realms; they create a myth of who manage to recover the lost maternal female separateness which underscores the world through their access to the Phallus, value of empathy and connectedness, the symbol of masculine power, the poet’s overturning traditional value structures ambivalent position—her being a part of and implying the superiority of women to and yet excluded from the male-dominated men.” world—causes her to feel alienated from the masculine world and culture. Her In poem #24, Dickinson envisions this marginal position within the symbolic feminine world of culture: order makes it possible for Dickinson to expose the natural relationship between There is a morn by men unseen— the word and the world, between God’s Whose maids upon remoter green “Plan” and material things as a man-made Keep their Seraphic May— myth. And all day long, with dance and game, III And gambol I may never name— Employ their holiday. As a daughter who writes, Dickinson appropriates the Father’s tool— 11 language—to reconstruct the lost Eden, a The term lesbian used here corresponds to what Adrienne Rich means when she talks female version of utopia characterized by about “lesbian continuum.” According to homosexual rather than heterosexual Rich, “the term lesbian continuum [is meant] relationships. In The Reproduction of to include a range—through each woman's life Mothering, Chodorow (1978: 169) argues and throughout history—of women-identified that the child’s ego boundaries are formed experience, not simply the fact that a woman by its relationship with the mother. “From has had or consciously desires genital sexual the retention of pre-oedipal attachments to experience with another woman” (Rich 2003: the mother,” explains Chodorow, 27).
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Dickinson’s female utopia is that of the her writing. Stein (1997: 37) notes the green world, the one women both connect primacy of Mother Nature over God’s and identify with. “For the young girl, for Logos in a number of Dickinson’s nature the woman who has not fully abdicated [to poems: “[N]ature’s maternal presence, the symbolic realm],” says de Beauvoir rather than God’s paternal power, is (1953: 710–711), “nature represents what represented as the constant, sustaining woman herself represents for man, herself force of life.” In the poem #790, and her negation, a kingdom and a place of Dickinson personifies Nature as a exile; the whole in the guise of the Other.” nurturing mother A woman’s relationship with nature is described in terms of her relationship with Nature—the Gentlest Mother is, the mother. Homans (1980: 32) also Impatient of no Child— argues that “the child learns to love nature The feeblest—or the waywardest— by gradually extending his love for his Her Admonition mild— mother, and nature takes on a maternal configuration—the borders between nature ------and mother are permeable: the ‘one beloved Presence’ is the one manifestation With infinite Affection of ‘Presence Nature.’” In Dickinson’s And infinite Care— poem, the “mystic green” is a no-man’s Her Golden finger on Her lip— land where women “live aloud.” They are Wills Silence—Everywhere— engaged in “dance,” “game” and “gambol” which the poet may “never name.” This The personification of Nature as a mother secret female enclave reminds us of the figure is in sharp contrast with the cold Greek Mysteries—the worship of mother and revenging nature of the Calvinist goddesses such as Demeter and Isis. All God.12 In the poem, Dickinson female participants in these secret rituals denaturalizes the relationship between are initiated into some esoteric knowledge man and God. Stein (1997: 39) writes, about which they must close their lips. “As a ‘waywardest’ believer, unwilling to According to Rabuzzi (1988: 23), the accept much contemporary theological goddess’s power is closely associated with doctrine, Dickinson creates an alternative the cycle of life and death also found in maternal deity who revises God-the nature: “one of [the goddess’s] primary Father’s failings; this beneficent maternal attributes is chthonicity, that is, earth- image, projected throughout nature, rootedness. This attribute not only links embraces the wayward, transgressive her to the fertility of earth…but also with behavior of the nonconforming woman its opposite—death.” Celebrating the poet who knows herself damned within power of the goddess she finds in nature, Dickinson exclaims with wonder: “Ne’er saw I such a wondrous scene-/ Ne’er such 12 The image of the Calvinist God as an angry a ring on such a green.” and unpredictable God is vividly portrayed in Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an In her discussion of Dickinson’s nature Angry God.” In this sermon, one finds “The poetry, Stein (1997: 26) argues that the God that holds you over the pit of hell, much poet expresses her “passion, intellect, and as one holds a spider, or some loathsome heterodox theoretical assertions” through insect, over the fire…” (See Gallagher 2000: 211).
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prevailing Christian doctrine, and this wine and symbolically celebrating figure interrogates by ironic contrast our union with Christ’s body but by acceptance of a grim and absent male literally “quaffing” the nectar of God.” flowers and symbolically sipping woman’s vaginal juices. IV (Landry 2004: 901)
The Eden reimagined in Dickinson’s Dickinson’s poem #211 describes the poetry is an exclusive place for women emergence of the lost mother country—the where they find a life nurturing force in land of milk and honey suggested by the same-sex relations. The Father’s Law and poet’s use of flower and bee imagery: Order are substituted by the female body and the mother’s language of touch, taste Come slowly— Eden! and sound (humming). Through her use of Lips unused to thee— bird and bee imagery, Dickinson redraws Bashful- sip thy Jessamines— female desire from a heterosexual As the fainting Bee— economy to a homosocial, even homoerotic, economy. Discussing how Reaching late his flower, Dickinson “overlays the Puritan triangle Round her chamber hums— with a zoological frame in order to Counts his nectars— lesbianize the process of conversion,” Enter—and is lost in Balms. Landry (2004: 901) similarly maintains: As de Beauvoir (1953: 711) says, “It is Within Dickinson’s poem, the when she speaks of moors and gardens Puritan metaphor of the marriage that [the woman] will reveal her ceremony is replaced by the queer experience and her dreams to us most metaphor of the bee’s ritual of intimately.” In Dickinson’s Eden, the pollination. In turn, the minister’s garden of pleasure, the poet enjoys the persuasion of the convert to a heavenly bliss derived from her exercise belief in the phallicism of Christ is of erotic imagination and her delight in the replaced by the masculine female body and sexuality as is implied by woman’s guidance of the such words as “Lips,” “Bashful,” “sip,” uninitiated woman to an and “Jessamines.” Bennett (1990: 165–66, awareness of the power of lesbian emphasis added) in her book Emily sexuality. And, finally, the Dickinson notes the homoerotic mode of memorializing of the Puritan Dickinson’s sexual fantasy inherent in convert’s successful acceptance of many of her poems including this one: Christ’s phallic power through eating bread and drinking wine is Profoundly attracted to the female exchanged for the celebration of body, Dickinson lets her love for it the lesbian convert’s embrace of inform her erotic poetry even the power of lesbian sexuality by when she is, or seems to be drinking “Nectar.” […] As the writing heterosexual verse. Not female vagina replaces Christ’s only does she focus on female phallus though, conversion is not sexual power but her ‘lover’ who experienced by literally drinking is invited to share this power, is
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rarely specified with a human Here the poet offers the letters to her male. Most often, he is a male bee reader (likely to be Susan Gilbert to whom and, hence, being small and round, many of Dickinson’s poems and letters are ambiguously, a covert female addressed). But the letters/words are not symbol. phallocentric; they are “Syllables of (Bennett 1990: 165–166) Velvet” and “Sentences of Plush” that break boundaries, refusing to be confined Not only is the physical appearance of a to any order or category. Also, the bee associated with the female body but confusion of the terms “write,” “play” and also a bee is historically linked with “sipped” reveals that writing is indeed an ancient mysteries organized by women. erotic activity associated with female According to Hall (1980: 25), the bee is a pleasure. The phallic word is substituted symbol of immortality, the regenerative by the female body—the vagina or the and destructive force attributed to both “Ruby, undrained,/ Hid, Lip, for Thee—.”13 nature and the mother goddess. “In Thus, in offering the letters to “Thee”, the keeping with the bee metaphor,” Hall poet also conveys a hidden message—“the (1980: 26) further says, “the initiate was invitation to cunnilingus—a form of erotic called an incubant, from incubare or ‘to activity to which, consciously or dwell in a hive.’ A set of instructions says unconsciously, Dickinson appears to have that the first temple was, like a hive, been most drawn” (Bennette 1990: 167). constructed of bees’ wax and birds’ feathers: ‘Brings feathers, ye birds, and V wax, ye bees.’ The temple attendants were priestesses called melissae, or ‘bee Reconstructing the lost mother country maidens.’” The association of the bee with becomes important for the daughter’s an esoteric group of female cultures gives consciousness of her poetic identity. In a spiritual import to Dickinson’s use of Mary Shelley’s version of the cave bee imagery. The poet, usually comparing parable, the mother goddess, the Sibyl, is herself to a flower (in her letters and portrayed as a female artist whose poetic poems), welcomes the bee, an agent of the works, the sibylline leaves, are “shattered mother goddess, who provides for her a and scattered” by men. Gilbert and Gubar spiritual renewal. (1989: 1122) write, “Surrounded by the ruins of her own tradition, the leavings and In poem #334, Dickinson uses the bird and unleavings of her spiritual mother’s art, flower imagery to describe transgressive she [Mary Shelley] …like someone female sexuality: suffering from amnesia. Not only did she fail to recognize—that is, to remember— All the letters I can write the cavern itself, she no longer knows its Are not fair as this— language, its message, its form.” Syllables of Velvet— Chodorow’s model of the symbiotic Sentences of Plush, relationship between mother and daughter Depths of Ruby, undrained, Hid, Lip, for Thee— Play it were a Humming Bird— 13 In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray And just sipped—me— also uses the vagina-lip as a metaphor for the female autoerotic desire. (See Irigaray 1985: 205–218).
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is thus applied by Gilbert and Gubar to strength,” claim Gilbert and Gubar (1989: female aesthetics. As the daughter models 1122), is “the female equivalent of the her femaleness on her mother, the female male potential for literary paternity.” artist inherits a literary tradition from her Although the cave may be a place of poetic foremothers. confinement, it is also a place where the work of art is conceived. As the cave Dickinson’s “To my quick ear the leaves- combines both creation and recreation, the conferred” (#891) illustrates her version of poet’s return to the cave enables her to the cave parable. Unable to find a Privacy/ discover not only her lost selfhood but also from Nature’s sentinels,” the poet is exiled her artistic identity. to an earthen cave: According to Northrop Frye (Gilbert and In Cave if I presumed to hide Gubar 1989: 1123), a revolutionary The Walls— began to tell— “mother-goddess myth,” which allows Creation seemed a mighty Crack— power and dignity to women, “is anti- To make me visible— hierarchal,…[and] liberate[s] the energy of all living creatures.” Frye’s statement is The poet’s resignation is far from being reinforced by Rich’s Utopian vision at the passive. Since “Creation seemed a mighty end of her article “When We Dead Crack” to make her “visible,” the poet Awaken”: hides herself in a cave, allowing her “Privacy” to create her own craft. Kher A new generation of women poets (1974: 62) argues that Dickinson’s is already working out of the psy- withdrawal is part of her poetic strategy: chic energy released when women begin to move out towards what Absence as withdrawal embodies the feminist philosopher Mary a special type of retreat from the Daly has described as the “new world, a retreat in which the artist space” on the boundaries of cultivates his or her own mode of patriarchy. Women are speaking encountering the world. This to and of women in these poems, withdrawal is not a running away out of a newly released courage to from reality but a process by name, to love each other, to share which the artist ripens to a deeper risk and grief and celebration. perception of reality. Dickinson’s (Rich 1979: 49) own “deliberate and conscious” seclusion and aesthetic privacy Dickinson’s poetry prefigures Rich’s should be interpreted as creative utopian vision. What is seen to be devices to meet the world on her retrieved here is the matriarchal myth, own terms. namely, the myth of the Sibyl, the woman (Kher 1974: 62) artist and prophetess, that has been suppressed by patriarchal society. What is not mentioned in Kher’s argument is the place of the poet’s withdrawal. In In Dickinson’s poem #1677, the womblike the poem, Dickinson’s return to a cave of the earlier poem is replaced by a womblike cave is also a return to the volcano. While in the earlier poem the mother goddess whose “sexual/ artistic female artist escapes from the outside
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world into the cave, in this poem she have pointed out, the daughter’s becomes the cave itself—a volcano, and marginalized position in the symbolic inherits from her mother goddess her order—her being alienated from “sexual/ artistic” energy: patriarchal culture and her prolonged relationship with the mother—enables her On my volcano grows the Grass to play the subversive role of A meditative spot— deconstructing the Father’s law and re- An acre for a Bird to choose membering the lost mother continent. As a Would be the General thought— daughter who also writes, Dickinson describes this lost Eden as a green world How red the Fire rocks below— of nature which is equated to the lost How insecure the sod mother’s body. However Dickinson Did I disclose occupies a reserved position since this Would populate with awe my resurrected continent, though conceived by solitude. the poet, remains separate and hidden from the masculine world of culture. An attempt In her article, “Vesuvius at Home,” Rich’s to bring this female world and its lost discussion of Dickinson’s “creative and tradition into a relationship with the powerful” self hidden within a publicly Father’s kingdom and its culture is the acceptable persona focuses on the poet’s challenging task awaiting the poets of the use of imagery including the volcano. next generation to undertake. Describing Dickinson, Rich (1979: 169) says, “The woman who feels herself to be Vesuvius at home has need of a mask, at References least, of innocuousness and of containment.” In the poem, Dickinson Bennett, Paula. 1990. Emily Dickinson: paradoxically finds her artistic freedom Woman Poet. New York: Harvester. within limited boundaries. Just as the cave is a place of confinement and artistic Cavendish, Richard. 1983. Man, Myth creativity, the volcano is simply “A and Magic. New York: Marshall meditative spot” but contains “the General Cavendish Ltd. thought.” Conscious of the violent and explosive power of the mother goddess Chodorow, Nancy. 1978. The she is assuming, Dickinson keeps it secret Reproductions of Mothering: from the male culture. Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of In short, reimagining Eden—the lost California Press. mother’s country—becomes an important task for a daughter who enters the De Beauvoir, Simone. 1953. The Second symbolic realm of the Father. While a Sex.. New York: Knopf. woman suffers from the psychic loss of the mother’s world which has never been Dickinson, Emily. 1960. The Complete compensated in the symbolic order, the Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by son who enters the same order comes to Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, identify with the Father and inherits his Brown. law and power. As many feminist critics
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