Graduation Thesis
Emily Dickinson: The Poetics of Absence
Faculty of Foreign Studies
Europe and American Studies
English Major
6103630 HIRAI Mina
2006

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1. Introduction
Emily Dickinson is an American woman poet of the nineteenth-century New England.
Although she is now regarded as one of the greatest American poets, it was only in the 1930s when scholars and critics began to read her poetry as literary texts. Until the major critics such as Allen Tate or F.O. Matthiessen made literary reevaluations of Dickinson and promoted her to a national bard, who could be equal to other celebrated male authors of the American traditional literature, her poetry had been discussed out of the curiosity about her extremely introverted character and the strangely eventless life. Readers tried to find out correspondence between the contents of her poems and her actual life, since she was regarded as a private poetess, who wrote confessional poems without intending to publish them, as
Thomas Wentworth Higginson maintains in the preface to Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890)
(Higginson 10-12).
The impact of some biographical facts, that she seldom left her house, dressed only in white, for example, were so strong that her image as a hermit fascinated scholars and critics without exception. Her works began to be discussed in the context of her historical backgrounds in the late 1920s. Such criticism sometimes treated Dickinson as if she were something sacred and depicted her as an embodiment of the traditional strict Puritanism of the nineteenth-century New England, or the most faithful follower of Transcendentalism as
Norman Foester or Conrad Aiken do in their comments on her poems (Foester 95; Aiken 114).
Following the efforts of Tate and Matthiessen and other critics of the 1930s, scholars started to pay closer attention to the textual studies of her poems in the 1950s, when Thomas
H. Johnson’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955) was published. The collection arranged
Dickinson’s 1775 poems, which were kept almost unpublished during her life-time, in

2 chronological order and recreated her original drafts without revisions or corrections. The publication made it clear that there were formal changes in her poetry, and contributed to the textual readings. It is Charles R. Anderson’s Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise
(1960) that bears the reputation of the most pioneering critical work in this period (Ottlinger
13).
Yet critics still depicted personal side of Dickinson as a strange woman carelessly, even after those new movements in the studies of her texts were initiated. In the 1970s, when the feminist criticism gathered great momentum, Dickinson’s socially isolated life came into focus for the first time in the critical history and expanded the scope of the study on her poetry as scholars and critics now have consented (Ottlinger14). It has now almost become the critical agreement that her eccentric behavior was a strategic revolt against the oppressive patriarchy, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar maintain in one of the early representative works of the feminist readings The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), for example. Feminist critics further discussed Dickinson’s poetics in the context of the history of women writings in America.
Betsy Erkkila’s work of 1992, The Wicked Sisters: Womem Poets, Literary History and
Discord , is an influential critical work written from the point of view.
The aim of this thesis is to read Dickinson’s poetry in relation to the two facts concerning her. One is that she wrote as a woman, and the other more problematic fact is that she refused to publish her poems during her life, even though it was quite possible.
Dickinson might have written her poetry as the “letter to the World” (1), to use her own

3 phrase in her poem 441 (F 519)
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, that is, as positive addresses toward the outer world. This statement, however, contradicts her refusal to be a public poetess in the actual world. It is now generally agreed that Dickinson is one of the great American poets such as Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Walt Whitman, but those two facts show clearly that she did not have any intention to pose as a “representative” poet as they did. Is it really possible to discuss her poetry in the context of the “American” literary tradition when she was apparently unwilling to be enlisted in the lines of the representative American poets?
Her poetics might be totally different from that of her male contemporaries, who discarded the existing conventions and presented themselves as models of democratic individuals to the world. She had distinct attitudes toward the concept of “the self,” partially owing to her Puritan background that might have forced her to face the overpowering superiority of God, Nature, and death over mankind, as Helen Vendler points out (Vendler
64-65). However, Dickinson’s poetry is so pagan and rebellious when it is read as an expression of a Puritan spirit. In other words, it is quite difficult to set interpretive frameworks to her poetry. Her poetry is so elusive that it is almost impossible to apply comprehensive frameworks of discussions that encompass all the traits of her poetics.
Nevertheless, it could be still practical to discuss her poetry in regard to her concept of
1
Scholars began to use the recently published reading edition of The Poems of Emily
Dickinson (1999) as the textual source which I specified in the parenthesis with the letter “F.”
This collection includes newly discovered poems and recreated Dickinson’s original drafts more faithfully by the effort of its editor R.W. Franklin, the scholar of Dickinson’s manuscripts. It can be said that the publication of the edition is one of the achievements of the critical shift that sheds light on Dickinson’s first hand textual evidence “Fascicles,” but the former edition of Johnson is still popular among the critics. Since there is no large revision on the poems I refer in this thesis, I use Johnson’s edition for my textual source. The number of the quoted poems of each edition will be specified with the letter “J” for Johnson’s, when I quote them without noting in the main body, and “F” for Franklin’s in accord with the latest critical practice. I also use The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960), the compiled version of Johnson’s edition.

4 the self. Since it is inevitably her gender and sex that required her to conform to the social convention or made her different from the male-centered literary canon, it would be justified to comment on the status of women in the mid-nineteenth-century America in the following pages. After surveying the position of female writers in the conventional Puritan community,
I will discuss Dickinson’s poetics comparing it with those of the leading figures of American literature at the time. Analyses of her poems would follow the preliminary references to her historical and cultural backgrounds.

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2. Preliminary References
2.1. The Social Situation of the Nineteenth-Century New England
The nineteenth-century New England had witnessed a growing tendency toward the commercialization stimulated by the trades with European countries. The latest cultural trends flourished, so that the traditional conservative systems were liberalized gradually, according to Johnson’s biography of Dickinson (Johnson 15). This liberal trend was prominent particularly in the religious aspect, and the doctrine of Unitarianism overspread the country in place of traditional Puritanism. Unitarianism is one of the Protestant faiths that denies the deity of Christ. It presents the possibility of humankind to approach God, who is traditionally deemed to be desperately distant, by the efforts of one’s reason and intelligence as Ando Shoei says (Ando 7-8). In spite of this increasing liberal tendency, however, the conservative social systems were maintained in the region around Amherst, for it was separated from the economic center of Boston. People still believed in the original sin and the elitism, which had been revived by Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century.
Amherst University was established in her birth place to preserve the traditional Puritanism against the prevailing Unitarianism by the efforts of the leading figures of the state including
Dickinson’s father. Johnson notes that Dickinson was also affected by the austere doctrine, though she always felt it impossible to become a Christian (Johnson 13-33).
According to Richard Reinitz, the Puritans believed that trivial mankind was fundamentally separated from the supreme God and one must submit to God unconditionally
(Reinitz 9-10). All individuals are assigned distinct roles to fulfill in their society in order to achieve an organic unity (Reinitz 10; 12). This was the original notion that organized the hierarchical human relationship on the basis of patriarchy in the age of the nineteenth century.

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Betsy Isreal clearly shows in her survey on the history of American women that a woman was defined as a mere property of men and deprived of any legal right (Isreal 12). As Gilbert and Gubar say, a woman was strongly required to be pure, pious, and submissive. Her supreme mission was to keep her home as a sanctuary, where her wearied husband could rest and feel secure after coming back from work (Gilbert, Gubar 23-24).
In such a convention, a female writer was regarded as a deviant both religiously and sexually. According to Sosetu Amerika Bungakusi ( A History of American Literature ), the
Puritans tended to turn away from artistic preoccupation, for it had been deemed to be the profanity since the time of Cotton Mather, who condemned it to an intercourse with a whore
(Ohashi 14). Creative and imaginative activities were supposed to be less fit for a woman than for a man, for it was related to the temptation of the Devil, who led Eve to the irreversible fault. In addition to the religious background, there was a common assumption that any creative activity was unfit for a woman, because she was not supposed to be the subject of reproduction in patriarchal order (Gilbert, Gubar 8). Contemporary discussions of the nineteenth-century literature have focused on the implied meanings of the word, “the author”; Edward Said, for example, points to the authority as the implication of the word author, and in that case, the word is invested with the image of a creator or a progenitor as a patriarch (Said 113). Therefore, a woman who engaged in public writing was defined as a sexual pervert. She was even described as “mad and monstrous” because she was thought to be “ ‘unsexed’ ” or “sexually fallen” (Gilbert, Gubar 63).
Although there were a good number of commercially successful female writers in the nineteenth century, they were excluded from the tradition of American literature. Their literary efforts were categorized as a literary sub-genre, a minor derivative of the male norm.

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These female writers, however, agreed and even advocated that the differentiation between two genres should be kept as it was. According to Elaine Showalter, they did not think that their literary achievements would go against the convention. They defined their writing preoccupation as their job separated from the aesthetic achievements of men, and tried to promote public morality with their didactic works. The theme of such a work was closely related to their everyday experience, and the central figure was usually a virtuous woman.
Although their works were excluded from the authentic literature, female writers produced works with what might be called American qualities, distinct from the convention of
European literature. In other words, they formed a different literary tradition that consisted only of female writers and female audience (Showalter 16-22).
It could be said that the female writers tried to gain their independence quite consciously in the age when there was no way for a woman to live outside of the category of the sacred femininity defined by men. In order to defer from such categorization, they boldly chose to be “monstrous,” and in the way founded the female counter norm against the male convention. Their effort would never prove successful, however, because it is still caught in the patriarchal structure. The “monstrous” image of the femininity is also produced by men in order to reinforce the submissive feminine image as the social norm.
Even if a woman chose to be “monstrous” strategically, she would end up advocating her deviation from the normal state. As long as the hierarchical distinction between a man and a woman is preserved, a woman can never gain the autonomous identity. It is the male discourse which has the authority to decide the relative values of all the components of the society in the patriarchal order.
It is of course impossible to know why Dickinson refused to publish her poems from

8 the present point of view. However, it would not merely because that she deemed publication as the “Auction” (1), which might degrade her poetic art that is supposed to be derived from her spirit (J 709, F 519). If her poetry is the contemplation on the identity of her self as critics have been argued, it is quite natural that she rejected publication when it was associated with the categorization either into the aesthetic art or the moralistic product.
There is no essential quality that justifies the hierarchical order between two genres. In other words, each literary identity is established as a genre through differentiation from each other.
It would not, therefore, fit for Dickinson’s literary inquiry to publish her poetry, for it only reinforces the contradiction between the male literature and the female sub-literature.
As Terry Eagleton points out, poetry had been centralized in literary theory as the representative model of all the literary styles (Eagleton 78-79), and as there is no woman mentioned except Dickinson as one of the great poets in Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of
Gender: A Theory of Poetry , which focuses on the relationship of successive poets of England and America on the level of their texts, it could be said that poetry is the most traditional, male-centered literary style. If so, it could have been impractical for Dickinson to carry on the traditional poetics. In the following pages, I want to analyze and discuss how she had released her own language from any definitions offered by existing frameworks. I am going to start with analyzing Dickinson’s use of language in contrast to those of Emerson and
Whitman, who also stunned the audience with their groundbreaking poetries.
2.2. The Relation between Dickinson and the Literary Trend
Transcendentalism is a literary principle that appeared in the nineteenth century and had derived some of its traits from romanticism. It praises the human soul as the supreme object

9 of endless spiritual inquiries, and presents an ideal image of an autonomous individual. The major figures of American Transcendentalists were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, and those traits are prominent in their writings. In their texts, they picture their ideal individuals as poets, which are nothing less than their own self-portraits.
Emerson’s most famous essay of 1836 “Nature” begins with a six-lined poem, which sings that “The eye reads omens where it goes, / And speaks all languages the rose” (Emerson
“Nature” 1). As it is clear from these lines, Emerson consistently describes his poet as one who can see and use languages. Everything that the poet gazes at is the part of the universe, which Emerson calls “Nature.” He discovers the essential of the inhabitant of Nature thorough the observation and gives it a proper name. According to Emerson’s other essays, all the things are liberated from the material world by the efforts of the poet, to return to the
“Over-Soul,” that is, the original source of the universe (Emerson “The Poets”; “The
Over-Soul”). He composes his poetry in order to praise the integrity of the universe, and to share it with all the individuals of America.
In a similar way, Whitman depicts his poet as the omnipotent observer. In the preface to 1855 version of Laves of Grass , Whitman defines a poet as “a seer,” who is “individual” and “complete in himself” (Whitman 415). According to Whitman, the eyesight is superior to other senses because it is independent form the rest and “foreruns the identities of the spiritual world” (Whitman 415). In “Song of Myself,” the poet discovers the hidden essence of an object through the observation. For him, every inhabitant of the world is “a uniform hieroglyphic” that “means” (“Song of Myself” 106; 107). He deciphers the symbol and translates its meaning into his language so that ordinary people could understand the truth.
In short, the poet is an interpreter standing between the universe and the people. Emerson

10 and Whitman share the notion that there should be a one-to-one correspondence between a particular thing and a meaning. For them, literature is defined as a practice of founding the identities of things including themselves. This underlying assumption is made clear especially when they are describing the positive self image of an individual.
In “Nature,” Emerson describes the self as “a transparent eyeball” (Emerson 10). It is his practice to relate his self image to a spherical figure, which has “no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference” (Emerson, “Circle” 304). This sphere expands itself ceaselessly involving everything it has encountered on the way. There is no danger of disruption, however, for its complete integrity is not suspected from the very beginning. As long as the self is connected to “the perfect whole” (Emerson, “Each and All” 51), its self-contained identity will be preserved.
As Emerson does, Whitman composes his poetry in the guise of an “I” narrator. In the middle of “Song of Myself,” this “I” clearly identifies itself as “Walt Whitman” (498). This
“Whitman” fuses into all the things that have entered into his sight irrespective of age, sex, race, and sometimes of biological species. Transforming into a catalogue of things one after the other, “Whitman” eventually reveals himself as the representative of the American and declares that “In all people I see myself” (402). Now that he has merged into the every presence on the land of America, he can even identify with “the United States,” which the author Whitman praises in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (Whitman 411).
In singing about their surrounding world, the poets of Emerson and Whitman gradually reveal themselves as creators in their affinity with the objects of their songs. They finally reign over their own brand-new worlds, which have been recreated through the process of naming as God-like narrators. Observing Nature, that is, to gaze upon the external presence,

11 is the necessary stepping-stone to the authority of the omniscient subject. As it could be seen from the fact that both Emerson and Whitman assume their poets as male figures, their omnipotent image of the self is closely related to the patriarchal conception of the author.
They similarly intend to reject the conventions of their time with their unprecedented poetries, yet they do not deny the authority of the tradition. Instead, they try to take the place of the preceding authors, who represent the hierarchy implicit in the concept of the tradition.
Dickinson also wrote a large number of poems of observation and refers to eyes quite frequently. However, Dickinson’s eyes are not the symbol of omnipotence. Her narrator watches things from a fixed point and keeps a certain distance from those objects. In 328 (F
359), for example, the narrator watches every movement of a bird intently and tries to reach it, offering “a Crumb” (14). In spite of the narrator’s friendly approach, the frightened bird flies away without even slightly touching the feed. In 219 (F 318), its narrator describes the scene of the sunset. The narrator portrays the setting sun as a “Housewife” sweeping the sky with “many-colored Brooms,” and calls it to “Come back” (3; 1; 4). Their meeting is never possible, however, since the sunset is an irresistible natural phenomenon. Even in the poems about vision, it is described as a temporary transient ability, which would be lost inevitably in the course of time. For instance, the narrator’s eyes have been put out before the poem begins in 327 (F 336), and the dying person in 547 (F 648) loses sight at the moment of death.
As I have noted above, the distinction between the observer and the observed is recognized clearly in Dickinson’s poetry, and it would never be blurred by any attempt by the subject.
It is still impossible to have a direct contact with other things even if the soul of the narrator is liberated from its physical part as “Walt Whitman” does in his poem. 505 (F 348)

12 could be read as the description of such experience of disembodiment. In the second stanza of this poem, the narrator transforms into the sound of a cornet and “Raised softly to the
Ceilings – / And out, and easy on – / Through Villages of Ether –” (11-13). The narrator flees from her/his
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body and the supposed confinement of “the Ceilings.” However, it is soon revealed to be a limited freedom, for the following lines state that “Myself endued
Balloon / By but a lip of Metal – / The pier to my Pontoon –” (14-16). It is clear from the word “Pontoon,” an inert ship that supports a floating bridge, that the narrator cannot move on its own. What is further suggested here is that the narrator cannot merge into the other presence as those poets of Emerson and Whitman do, for the “Pontoon” has the image of a box-shaped solid object. It must be remembered that Dickinson’s self image is always associated with the image of confinement as it is in this poem. It is, therefore, impossible for the narrators of her poems to establish their identities through the descriptions of the others while the narrators of Whitman’s poems depend on the presence of external objects in establishing their identities. In Dickinson’s texts, one must speak one’s dreams or expectations of such liberation from all the limits and of the due acquirement of superiority attributed to the subject of observation.
As the narrators are separated from their objects of descriptions, Dickinson’s poetical language does not refer to the ordinary meanings of the words. Dickinson places more emphasis on the sound of the language rather than what they refer to. In the last stanza of
505 mentioned above, the narrator expresses a desire to become a person with acute hearing senses instead of becoming “a Poet” (17). After stating that such ability is a privileged
2
If the narrator is the representation of Dickinson, it should be “she,” but I take the position not to identify the narrator of Dickinson’s poetry with the author. The narrator’s sex or gender is not made clear in this poem, so I apply her/him here.

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“License” (19), the narrator further wishes to have “the Art to stun myself / With Bolts of
Melody” (22-23). For Dickinson, poetry is not the means to create what is called a work of art, which is supposed to have a definite meaning. A poem is not an accumulation of meanings, but rather a floating “Melody.” In 448 (F 446), which has been read as
Dickinson’s declaration of her attitudes toward writing, a poet is defined as a person who
“Distills amazing sense / From ordinary Meanings –” (2-3). The poet not only suggests another possible meaning of the word, but she/he also extracts “so immense” a thing “From the familiar species / That perished by the Door –” (5-6). Unlike the poetics of Emerson and
Whitman that creates new definitions of things through the process of naming, Dickinson’s poetics releases words from their existing connections with particular meanings and let them float among the lines, suggesting endless possibility of making surprising senses. Now I am going to see these traits in 465 (F 591) as an example.
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away

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What portion of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –
Apparently, the frequent appearance of the words beginning with capitals is one of the characteristics of Dickinson’s poetry. A capital letter is usually applied to a proper noun, but
Dickinson uses it in common nouns such as “Fly,” “Room,” or an abstract noun like
“Stillness.” In this poem, she also capitalizes the initial of the verb “Signed,” and an adjective “Blue.” The rule for applying the capital letter is not clear here as it is in many other poems. The usage of the capital letters confuses the referential correspondence between the words and the things designated. Take the word “King” for instance. The king might be the representation of the dying narrator, or of God or Death as Kamei Shunsuke explains in the comment on this poem (Kamei 124). In each case, it is supposed that the narrator is referring to a certain king, for the definite article is taken in addition to the capitalization of the initial. There is no further references to him, however, so it is impossible to discover who “the King” is from the text. The characteristic of the poem suggests that it is also impossible to identify the contents of Dickinson’s poems with her actual life. The narrator of this poem might be Dickinson herself, and the scene of this deathbed might derive its origin from the death scene of someone she knew. These

15 interpretations are just possibilities, however, which might not be true. In this manner,
Dickinson refuses to connect her language and poetry to any experience in the actual world.
In addition to this function of bringing about confusion, the use of the capital serves to obscure the presence of the “I” on the visual textual surface. The capitalization of “I” indicates the subject of a speech or writing clearly in general. In this case, the short lines of this short poem are so crowded with those provisional proper nouns that the narrator “I” nearly disappears into an obscurity. The predomination of the narrator is thus attenuated in
Dickinson’s poetry.
Another characteristic prominent in her poetry is the frequent use of a dash, which indicates a pause or an omission. The superficial meaning of this poem is not difficult to understand. The narrator recollects the scene of her/his death, which was intruded by a buzzing fly. Since the dash firstly means a pause, however, the narrator fails to achieve the fluency of speech. As if the lines reflect the heaving breaths of the dying person who cannot speak but only at intervals, a word or a sentence, or even a stanza is not linked to the next one directly. As a result of this stumbling speaking, the fluent linkage of the meanings is deterred. Even the death of the narrator, that is, the virtual conclusion of the poem does not complete the meaning of the whole text, because of the other function of the dash that indicates an omission.
All the sentences and stanzas of this poem are closed with a dash, not with a period.
3
Therefore, it is quite possible to suppose that there could be hidden sentences or deleted descriptions of scenes. The third and the last stanza are typical examples. From the third
3
In this case, I use the word “sentence” to indicate a unit of words that seems to be divided from the next in its meaning. For example, I read the first line “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – ” as a sentence independent form the following three lines.

16 line of the third stanza, the sentences are linked with “and then.” Such repetitions of “and then” suggest that the ending would be found in the future, but it also could suggest endless continuities, because those repetitions occur no less than three times at short intervals. The last stanza closes stating “And then the Windows failed – and then / I could not see to see –,” but because the dash is placed in place of a period, the conclusion of the poem is obscure.
Dickinson seems to reject the concept of completion, for the poem ends with a dash.
What is remarkable here is that this poem is the recollection of the death of its narrator.
There are a number of poems narrated by the dead besides this poem actually. Death is supposed to be the end, the conclusion of the whole process of life. Considering that
Dickinson thus rejects the apparent conclusion of a text, it is supposed that she also uses the motif of death in connection with her endings that do not end with period. In the next chapter, therefore, I am going to discuss several poems analyzing how Dickinson treats this motif of death.

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3. Dickinson’s Poetry: The Motif of Death
Given the fact that Dickinson writes many poems in the guise of dead narrators, it could be said that she escapes the conception of the physical death as an absolute end. 712 (F
479) describes the narrator’s dying as a travel with gentlemanly “Death” and begins as follows:
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality. (1-4)
It is clear from the start that death is presented not as a goal to be attained, but as a process or a movement itself. What is more important is that there has already been another traveling companion “Immortality” before the narrator joins the party. In other words, there is a tension between death and life in the carriage, for “Immortality” is the opposite of “Death.”
On the contrary to such a speculation, they keep quiet all thorough the journey and the carriage pauses in front of a half buried “House” (17), that is, a grave. It should be noticed that the “House” is not the destination of their traveling, for they just “paused” temporarily and did not stop (17). In the last stanza the narrator recollects as follows:
Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity – (21-24)
It is revealed that they have been traveling for hundreds of years toward “Eternity” without stopping. Death is not the end but the beginning of the eternal time beyond, and because of

18 this timelessness of “Death,” “Immortality,” the state of living forever, can coexist with him peacefully. This association of death and eternity can be found in one of the poems on death
216 (F 124). The 1861 version of this poem describes death as follows:
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers –
Untouched by Morning –
And untouched by Noon –
Lie the meek members of the Resurrection –
Rafter of Satin – and Roof of Stone!
Grand go the Years – in the Crescent – above them –
Worlds scoop their Arcs –
And Firmaments – row –
Diadems – drop – and Doges – surrender –
Soundless as dots – on a Disc of Snow –
It is not indicated in the first stanza, but the dead sleep in the middle of the night. Night is closely associated with death, for it comes at the end of a day.
The second stanza describes the outside of the white chambers. In contrast to the static inside, there is a dynamic movement of time. “Diadems” and “Doges” represent a certain period of their reigns, and their surrender means the successions of their reigns in the transition of time. The serenity of the dead in the chambers is never disturbed, for the overpowering time moves “above” them. The image of the ascending time is further emphasized by the words “Crescent,” “Arks,” and “Firmaments.” The firmament revolves around the earth naturally, so that the dead are left behind in the state of timelessness. In this

19 way, they enjoy the eternal tranquility in the space separated carefully from the turmoil of the actual world by the double boxes.
Death is not a fearful end but the necessary step to enter into the world of eternal tranquility. In this world, one can enjoy the privilege of waiting for the future recovery of one’s life without worrying about the worldly affairs. It is a common practice among
Christians, however, to anticipate the everlasting spiritual tranquility in the world after death.
It is a characteristic attitude especially of the Puritans to regard the actual life as the condemned world of hardness and to look forward to the posthumous consolation as an only hope. The fulfillment of their wishes is possible only in the kingdom of God. These beliefs are reflected in the literary writings of the Puritans such as Anne Bradstreet,
4 or the romantics like William Cullen Bryant.
5
As Leslie A. Fiedler discusses in Love and Death in the American Novel , this motif of the fulfillment of the impossible wishes after death has been also used in the later genres such as the sentimental novel and historical romance (Fiedler
204).
It should be noticed that Dickinson shared the Puritanical concept of death as a possibility of escaping the physical disturbance and of enjoying the everlasting mercy of God.
4 In her poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” Bradstreet wishes that their strong matrimonial unity would last for their lives. The poem is concluded with the expectation of the eternity after death as follows: “That when we live no more we may live ever” (12). For
Bradstreet, the life in the heaven is more precious than the actual one, for the mortal world is all “vanity” as she laments in another poem “Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July
10th, 1666” (36).
5 In “Thanatopsis”, Bryant depicts one’s death as the glory of joining the lines of the patriarchs as follows: “[….] Thou shalt lie down / With patriarchs of the infant world – with kings, / The powerful of the earth – the wise, the good, / Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, / All in one mighty sepulcher. […]” (33-37). Bryant assures audience that there is nothing that should be worried, and that they would die “Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch / About him, and lie down to pleasant dreams” (80-81).

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The poem 461 (F 185) depicts the death of the narrator girl as the glorious marriage to
“Savior” whose name might be “Eternity.” The girl seems to anticipate the moment when she becomes his “Wife” and calls to him “Eternity, I’m coming – Sir, / Savior – I’ve seen the face – before!”(1; 12-13). However, she never describes the future scene of their bridal. In many other poems about such expectation of the unification, narrators similarly refuse to describe the moments of their conjugal meetings.
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Considering these points, it could be said that Dickinson avoids quite deliberately representing death as a positive affair, that is, the fulfillment of impossible dreams.
As I have argued, Dickinson’s poetry has the tendency to deviate from the conventional use of language that is supposed to refer to certain meanings or signifieds. When the narrator of Whitman, for instance, refers to “The Yankee clipper,” “a red girl,” or “The runaway slave” (“Song of Myself” 180; 185; 189), readers are reminded of images shared by the public. When he refers to a specific name of a place such as “Manhattan” (“Song of
Myself” 496), he indicates the real city found on the map of the United States. Because his aim is to represent America, it is inevitable for him to depend on idioms shared and understood by the public. Dickinson’s words, on the other hand, would not necessarily be shared with other people as I have said on her usage of nouns with capitalized initial letters such as “King” or “Fly.” When she introduces common symbols to her poetry such as a spider or a bee, she attaches to them unfamiliar images or even erases their ordinary implications. Her spider, for example, is neither a widow nor a spinster but is a male seamster in 1138 (F 1163). Her bees, which frequently appear in her poems, represent
6
One fit example is 249 (F 269), which could be one of the most sensual poems of
Dickinson. In this poem, the narrator calls to “thee” passionately that “Were I with thee /
Wild Nights should be / Our luxury!”(2-4) and that “Might I but moor – Tonight – / In
Thee!”(11-12), yet the moment of their unification never visits in the text.

21 movements that do not refer to anything. Furthermore, while Whitman intentionally bestows commonness on his poetry with the portrait of a man, supposedly himself, with his “hat on, shirt open, head cocked, arm akimbo” (Folsom 139), Dickinson does not employ a narrative figure that “invites us to read this figure symbolically, to place it in a social context” (Folsom
139). If her language is identical with the traditional language, for instance, of Puritanism, her language would be deprived of its potential power. Dickinson’s language disturbs the equilibrium and tranquility that ordinary use of language would bring about. To describe death as a state of serene sanctity would not be applicable to her poetics, because her poetry engenders conflicts of language against itself.
What is the effect of speaking in the guise of the dead? According to David Porter,
Dickinson describes the “aftermath” of her crucial experiences in the actual life (Porter 9).
Most experience referred to in a poem is not the experience itself, but is its effects. Her poems on death are typical examples, because to speak from the viewpoint of the dead is to describe things as something past as it is in 712. As I have noted above, death is usually suggestive of eternity, and Dickinson never deviates from that principle of equation.
Nevertheless, there is a difference between her use of the motif of death and the traditional ones. While most Puritan writers tend to comment on what could happen in eternity,
Dickinson is more keenly attentive on the association of the time with the posthumous eternity or immortality. In other words, she does not necessarily believe in the spiritual tranquility or the possible wish fulfillment after death, but she places more emphasis on the timeless aspect of eternity. As Helen Vendler points out as the most fundamental point in understanding Dickinson’s poetry, Dickinson “alters ‘normal’ temporal organization” in order

22 to practice her poetic principles (Vendler 65).
At first, it should be taken into consideration why Dickinson avoids the “‘normal’ temporal organization.” Her recognition of the normal time structure can be found in the poem 287 (F 259). This is the poem about a clock. The clock has stopped at the very beginning of the first stanza, but neither the most skillful craftsman nor a doctor can repair it.
The last stanza states as follows:
Nods from the Gilded pointers –
Nods from the Seconds slim –
Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life –
And Him – (14-18)
In this stanza, the clock is described as an object that is composed of hands that point to the dial and therefore to time. In other words, a clock is recognized as a circular entity that unified fragments of present moment cut away from the stream of time. This organic figure of the clock is similar to the image of the self presented by Emerson and Whitman that unifies diverse personalities into one individual. As this structural resemblance of time and the self shows, the construction of the self is associated with the concept of time. One is assigned a certain role at each stages of one’s life such as a daughter, wife, or mother in relation to the other components of the society. One grows up taking up those separate personalities and dies as an individual, who has such a history of growing. Taking at such roles means an active participation into the categorizations that the society defines rather than the natural attributes, so the moment one declares in the present tense that “I am ~,” she/he is involved in the structure of the society. The normal temporal structure, that is, the accumulation of the

23 present that makes the definition of things in the formula of “A is B,” is quite an authoritative system. It is this temporal structure that attributes the authority of continuous creation to a literary work, as Said says (Said 254). To use a language is to declare oneself as the beginning, which justifies a work as a derivative from an original author (Said 254).
Dickinson detests such language system as “of Arrogance” and does not allow her narrators to speak simply in present tense.
Dickinson chiefly employs two strategies to avoid the present. One is to sing about one’s future prohibiting the procession toward that future as she does in 461. As I have already seen, Dickinson closes the poem just before the narrator girl and her future husband are joined with each other. The poem does not suggest the possibility of narrating any succession to the episode, for the closure of the last sentence is emphasized by an exclamation mark, not by the ambiguous dash mark. Another strategy is to employ the dead narrator and describe the things as the absolute past. The merit of using the past tense could be found in
199 (F 225). Dickinson begins this poem using the definition formula of “A is B.” The narrator starts singing that “I’m ‘wife’” (1), but immediately denies it by saying that “I’ve finished that –” and continues the rest of the first stanza as follows: “That other state – / I’m
Czar – I’m ‘Woman’ now – / It’s safer so –” (2-4). The past tense shows that the present fact is different from the statement. By denying her lower-case “wife” state as the past, the narrator can presently call herself a capital lettered “Czar” and “Woman,” and declares quite strongly at the end of the text that “I’m ‘Wife’! Stop there!”(12) There is no time for her to rest, even though she seems to have acquired a superior position. She has to transform herself incessantly from “Czar” to “Woman” and to “Wife.” If she settles on one state, her identity would be fixed as such, and in that case she identifies herself with a “Czar,” the

24 emperor of ancient Russia, she could be condemned for the transgression of her gender or national identity. As long as she intends to avoid being caught in any definition, she has to reject each of them as the past immediately.
The description of the aftermath is the strategy to escape the authoritative time that would prohibit Dickinson’s language from presenting numerous possibilities. Death is neither the possibility of wish fulfillment nor the state of eternal serenity protected by the existing discourse of the authorities. Dickinson rather disturbs such tranquility and changes this peaceful paradise into the field of everlasting alteration on the level of the language.
The thorough achievement of this procedure can be seen in 449 (F 448).
I died for Beauty – but was scarce
Adjusted in the Tomb
When One who died for Truth, was lain
In an adjoining Room –
He questioned softly “Why I failed”?
“For Beauty”, I replied –
“And I – for Truth – Themself are One –
We Brethren, are”, He said –
And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night –
We talked between the Rooms –
Until the Moss had reached our lips –
And covered up – our names –

25
As it is clear from the text, this poem is based on the famous statement that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” presented by John Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (49). It seems that this
449 might also be read as a poem about this aesthetic equation. Contrary to such supposition, the equation is not the center of this poem. The narrator “I” and the talking companion “He” do not have any necessary linkage with the two words “Beauty” and “Truth,” though they seem to be their names at the first sight. “I” and “He” are just someone who has died for those words. In other words, they are not the representations of “Beauty” and “Truth.” As the narrator says, they already have the lower case “names,” which could be different from the capitalized “Beauty” and “Truth” in fact. Nevertheless, it is too hasty to conclude that the original affinity of “Beauty” and “Truth” is denied in this text, for “He” says that “Themself are One.” The identity of the two words is emphasized by the irregular word “Themself” and the capitalized “One.” The irrevocable definition of Keats is not rejected, but set remotely apart from the text by the fact that the two speakers are not identical either with
“Beauty” or “Truth.”
Similar to the tenuous connection between the talking figures of this poem and Keats’ aesthetic definition, the relationship of “I” and “He” is a remote one as well. There is no actual evidence such as blood in their relationship, because they are just “Brethren,” who are united only through a spiritual empathy. The line flows into the next one, where “I” recollects properly that they talked “as Kinsmen.” These complete strangers happened to be acquainted because of the affinity of their authorities, that is, “Beauty” and “Truth,” for which they had sacrificed themselves. As long as the relationship of “I” and “He” is interpreted as a variation of “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” what is revealed is that such equation is not the given essence, but is an artificial definition that has become authoritative through repetitions

26 in literary works. Such discourses could be denied and deleted in the course of time as the conversation between “I” and “He,” that is, the seemingly representatives of “Beauty” and
“Truth,” is eventually prohibited by the growing moss. What is suggested by this description is the fragility of the language that loses its authenticity lest there is the consensus among the subjects that use it. This poem is not, however, just the denial of the language.
Between the lines of the ironical conversation, several fragments are inserted that cannot be explained with a general framework, and there seems to be presented another possibility for using a language.
There are two strange phrases in this poem. One is the question made by “He,” “‘Why
I failed’?” It is apparent from the preceding phrase “He questioned softly” that this sentence is supposed to be read as an inquiry, yet it seems to be rather far-fetched to accept it so. It should be “Why you failed” if “He” addresses to “I.” Even if it happens to be a grammatical failure, it is still not clear why Dickinson puts the question mark out of the parenthesis when she applies the form of direct discourse. These three words assume a fragmental impression which has been cut out from a continuing speech of “He” that explains a cause of his death.
In recollecting his confession, the narrator “I” extracts the three words and twists them into an inquiry in order to have a voice. Although once “I” was an active subject who could choose even death, now that “I” is dead, she/he is deprived of its independence. Through the process of recollections and restatements, “I” recovers its autonomy and takes up the position of the narrator in this text temporarily.
The other notable point of this poem is the second line of the last stanza, “We talked between the Rooms –.” Assuming that the two are laid in the connecting but divided chambers, this line shows that there is a wall between them. Taking it literally, however,

27
“between the Rooms” indicates a space existing between the two separate rooms. It is an inconceivable space, for their rooms are adjacent to each other. Yet conceding that the existence of such a space is possible, the line suggests that they actually meet each other inside the very walls. Not only have they escaped from being caught in the “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” definition, “I” and “He” also escape from their own “names” by stealing out of chambers buried under each gravestones. Before the growing moss deletes their epitaphs, it had already been proved that the rooms are vacant in fact. There is no word that designates them any longer in the text and the narrator finally enjoys the freedom of speech with “He” behind the prescriptive reading standards of their audience.
It should not be concluded that Dickinson replaces the speech with the writing as given precedence, for the growing moss covers the mouths of the speakers without exception.
Dickinson does not intend to decide the relative merit between any styles of the language expression. What is practiced in this poem is the alteration of a language with the full recognition of its limits. There is no necessary correspondence between a word and its meaning, and such one-to-one referential relationship could be altered along with the change of the norms of a society. In short, there is always a subject that uses a language. As Betsy
Erkkila argues, Dickinson probably realized “that it is on the level of language that she can resist subjection to the system of masculine power […] by questioning and distibilizing its terms” (Erkkila 24).
Nevertheless, it cannot be concluded simply that Dickinson’s poetry is the strategic practice to establish her identity or originality through the active denial of the male-centered convention. There is a more problematic and seemingly the most crucial point in her poetry, which is also apparent in the poem 446. The narrative of the dead that is frequently

28 employed in Dickinson’s poetry is an impossible speech that cannot happen in the actual world. For its state of being exterior to the actual temporal structure, the speech of the dead narrators can alter the narrowness of the existing language system. The dead and Dickinson herself escape the oppressive interpretation of the common knowledge, and enjoy the self-contained freedom of exercising their voices, as it has already been argued above.
However, the same interpretation does not apply fully to 446.
The narrator of 446 is caught in a fundamental contradiction. The conversation between the narrator and “He” is interrupted at the end of the poem, for their mouths are covered with the growing moss. The narrator ends up losing its ability of talking, and it means naturally that the narrator cannot talk any longer after the end of the poem. This text is, therefore, an impossible narrative that could not have existed from the beginning. This basic contradiction of the text discloses the impossibility of its own narrative, and nearly denies the validity of the language. Dickinson’s poetry is also an insistent denial of the language as a means for communication, for she did not publish her poems despite the blessed environment and of her full consciousness of her audience. Her poetry was virtually nonexistent to the reading public of her time. What is really under suspicion here is the presence of the subject who uses the language, for what the readers confront is only her texts.
It is not the narrative that is impossible in this text but the narrator. Only the words definitely exist as a text, which has been generated from nowhere. The question on the certainty of the dominance of the subject over the language seems to form the basis of
Dickinson’s poetry, for it is connected to the inquiry of her identity as a poet.
Instead of presenting their thoughts and feelings directly to the readers, Dickinson and her narrators choose to express them through the language and the texts, which postulate that

29 any authorial presence is a void. Her language techniques reveal her full consciousness of the potency of the literary language. What Dickinson intends to find through her writing of poetry is neither the means to master her own language nor the proper themes that satisfy her requirements. It is the stance towards writing that Dickinson contemplates thoroughly in her poetic preoccupation. Her blurring of the central presence of the narrator “I” by the capitalization of other words that stand as the peers of “I” and her employment of supposedly dead narrators tend to produce the impression that the presence of the authors and the narrators is quite tenuous in her poetry. The characteristic might be a reflection of the status of women in the nineteenth century, who were deprived of subjectivity as beings inferior to men. In addition to that, if her poetry is the practice of annulling ordinary referential correspondences between words and things, the weakness of the presence of the author saves her poetry from being caught in any fixed interpretations that confront the literary qualities of her texts. Unlike Whitman, who sang of the democratic poetics “with a significant look, a glance: eye/I contact” by printing the portrait of a common man (Folsom 163), Dickinson’s poetry and its language refuse to identify with any conventions or politics.
A published book is different from a “Letter” that Dickinson intends her poems to be.
There was the literary market place that had already been commercialized in her time.
Literary texts circulated among the general readers and consumed by them one-sidedly. In the market place, in addition, presenting oneself as an artist before the public paradoxically leads to the cancellation of the artistic authenticity as the origin of the writings because the image of the author would be exposed to interpretations by the consumers along with the texts.
It would be possible to understand Dickinson’s choice to keep her poems from the public in her life-time as a positive choice to protect her literature, the field of interactions on the level

30 of the language. By making her poetry deliberately unconventional, that is, publicly illegible both in forms and contents, Dickinson disturbs the originality of the authoritative language and saves herself from using limited languages that equate words and things. In one of her letters to Higginson, Dickinson says that her poetry is the engagement with the
“Circumference” (Dickinson 412). “Circumference” is neither the center nor the outside, but the field bounded closely on the outside. “Circumference” would not exist unless there was a boundary that separated it from the outside. In other words, this space is generated from the full recognition of the outer space. It is a field of possible conflicts, for there could be chances to shift the boundaries or to escape beyond them. In the poem 1099, Dickinson describes the anxiety of a hatching butterfly that is trying to fly toward the outside world:
My Cocoon tightens – Colors tease –
I’m feeling for the Air –
A dim capacity for Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear –
A Power of Butterfly must be –
The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of Majesty implies
And easy Sweeps of Sky –
So I must baffle at the Hint
And cipher at the Sign
And make much blunder, if at last

31
I take the clue divine – (F 1107)
The moment of presenting oneself out of the “Cocoon,” for example, involves the risk of degrading one’s beauty. “Circumference” suggests conflicts between the inside and the outside, and points to the possibility of escaping in the future. Exactly as the butterfly in this poem does, Dickinson finds the moment for expressing herself through a language that generates frictions between itself and the public convention, which is the outside for her. In order to satisfy the requirements of her literary ideal, that is, to make her texts into fields where the productive multidimensional aspects of language interact, Dickinson resigns to keep herself absent.

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4. Conclusion: The Significance of Being Absent
It was probably because her poetics is very similar to those of the modernists that
Dickinson was discovered and reevaluated in the twentieth century. It is impossible to define the characteristics of the modernist movements in simplified terms, for they have myriad aspects and the aims and achievements are varied with each practitioner. Against the risk of simple generalization, it could be said that representative modernists found it necessary to cut away from the literary tradition when they faced the collisions of “the underlying value systems that had shaped centuries of art” at the time of turning centuries (Ruland, Bradbury
240). Modernist poetics tends to do away with the conventional forms and focus on the use of the languages that construct literary texts. Of various achievements of the modern poetics, it is the Imagism advocated by poets such as H.D. or Marianne Moore, who might be called successors to Dickinson, that has close affinities with Dickinson’s poetry. As David Perkins shows, Imagist poets recast the conventional long verse and compose poems rather musically than accumulating the meanings by redundant massive words (Perkins 333-336). Although they are also attentive to images as their appellation represents, they avoid using “symbol as ornament or a figure for something other than itself” (Ruland, Bradbury 260).
It is clear that Dickinson’s poetry foreruns all these characteristics of modern poetics.
It might be said that she has been discovered as the founder of another tradition of American poetry that sets “language prior to reality” (Ruland, Bradbury 261), distinct from the successors of Emersonian, Whitmanian poets such as Robert Frost, Charles Olson, and Allen
Ginsberg who believe that the poems are forms of the vocal expressions breathed forth from their bodies. Dickinson’s poetry might embody what T.S. Eliot tries to achieve through his literary practice. As it can be seen in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot advocated

33 the establishment of the new tradition of art, which accompanies the denial of the authoritative identity of each artist who is supposed to be unique. It is clear from the text that Eliot still believes in the conventional premises on the literary tradition, because he takes it for granted that the tradition should be established by male artists. He designates a poet
“he” and mentions only male authors such as Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, and John Keats.
What is remarkable is that he has deprived the fixed authenticity from the tradition and defined it as a flexible system, which is renovated continually by the entry of new artists.
Participating in the tradition, however, does not reinforce the originality of the artists, for their discourses have already been founded by their predecessors. To put it briefly, being an artist is “a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” in Eliot’s terminology
(Eliot 40).
Although Dickinson and Eliot are different in their methods of composition, they similarly try to erase the presence of the authors from their texts. Dickinson deletes the figure of the author by writing short discontinuous poems that do not possess the integrity of organic form that Whitman aims at in Leaves of Grass , which has been supposedly written by a single author present in the actual history as Walt Whitman. Eliot, on the other hand, composes lengthy poems by quoting preceding literary texts. Through the appropriation of the existing texts, Eliot denies originality of his literary language. The poetries of Dickinson and Eliot thus demand that the readers should focus “not upon the poet but upon the poetry,” for the poetry is not “the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (Eliot 40;
43).
Because of the “subversive” characteristics that Dickinson’s poetics has, contemporary feminist criticism, for example, often find her use of language favorable to their causes.

34
Dickinson preferred to write as an unpublicized absent poet in an age when being an author almost immediately meant to be the representative of the society. However, she could have been aware of the advantages of being an absent author, as those feminist critics point out.
As I have discussed in the preceding chapters, her language deviates from the conventional use based on the idea of referential correspondences between words and things, and in a consequence, counters the conventional language system that was mostly patriarchal. Her supposedly dead narrators reveal the narrowness and fragility of the speech directly derives from the author whose language might be subverted by another language that emphasizes the disconnection between the author and her/his language.
However, all the speculations are vein in the face of Dickinson’s insistence on being absent. It therefore means that my own speculations are only valid as one of the versions of possible interpretations of the absence. My reading could be a political one as the feminist interpretations necessarily are. Yet, while political and ideological criticisms tend to reduce the languages of the artists to meanings defined in their frameworks and insist that those meanings are present in the literary texts, my argument aims at evoking a poet, whose absence is radically subversive of productions of “meanings” within the political and ideological frameworks. Dickinson probably knew that any political action or presenting herself in public would be inconsistent with her poetic language, for her poetry, which was written in the affluent environment of the upper middle class, is not basically “egalitarian.” Unlike her contemporary female writers who were forced to write for their living, Dickinson did not have to worry about economical affairs and therefore could commit herself to “literary art” totally, as David S. Reynolds clearly says (Reynolds 419).
Apparently any frameworks for interpretation cannot encompass all the possibilities

35 that lurk in Dickinson’s poetics. Reynolds declares that Dickinson’s supposed
“representativeness lies in her incomparable flexibility, her ability to be by turns coy, fierce, domestic, romantic, protofeminist, antifeminist, prudish, erotic” (Reynolds 421). An attempt to find an author speaking from behind the lines invariably falls into a dilemma between contradictions that Reynolds underlines. Likewise, any attempt to apply a single interpretative framework to all or most of her texts would end up in failure, since her poems are often quite different from each other and different personae are adopted in nearly 2000 fragmental pieces. Readers are required to transform their reading strategies along with her shifting elusive texts and are almost banned from reading them according to any literary or critical principles. If there is something left for the readers could turn to for the basis of their readings, it is only her language and her texts that are there and would not be the figure of the author who is called Emily Dickinson.

36
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