Sumptuous - Despair: The Function of Desire in

Emily Dickinsons Poetry

(This is a revised and substantially enlarged version of a key address delivered
at the 1995 International Emily Dickinson Conference / Washington D.C.)
1. The Deficient Subject
Recent criticism has focused intensely on the problematic status of the human
subject, and poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, following the example of
Nietzsche, Mach, Broch and others, have confidently announced its death prematurely as it now turns out. This is hardly surprising. The subject or
(disregarding terminological distinctions) the self was from the start a
contested notion in Western civilization. It never had the conceptual stability
that critics chose to attack. Even Descartes, commonly acknowledged as the
creator of the self-dependent modern subject, felt constrained to introduce into
his philosophical system some oddly inconsistent features in order to safeguard
the rational selfs alleged autonomy. The Romantics in particular were
intensely aware of the precarious status of the subject. It is to them that we
owe in large part the creation of the modern individual self. Since Dickinson
also worked within this tradition, a glance at the Romantic conception of
selfhood is in order.
Initially, the Romantics had a tremendous faith in the selfs creative potential,
but (as Manfred Frank has forcefully demonstrated) they also made the
disturbing discovery that the subject, having lost its transcendental origin,
cannot ground itself and that its autonomy is spurious. The celebration of
individual selfhood, often experienced by the Romantics in religious terms (as
conversion or rebirth), is at the same time subverted by attendant feelings of
self-alienation - a state of exile brought on by the fall into consciousness and
the ensuing loss of Edenic unity. Creative exuberance in Romantic texts thus
tends to be threatened by a dark and dizzy Abyss (an image likewise found
in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley), by a Chasm yawning
beneath the apparent plenitude of life.
With Emily Dickinson, this sense of alienation is raised to a new pitch. She
pictures her coming into existence as a mighty Crack -/ To make me visible (P891). One of her youthful letters is signed: Emily - I believe (L829).
The comical role-playing in her epistolary exchanges only serves to
underscore her nagging doubts. The poets early phase appears to culminate in
the pressing question: What is life? . . . [I] wonder what I am and who has
made me so? (L172) In the poem To be alive - is Power - (P677) existence
takes on the quality of Omnipotence, and the lyrical selfs creative Will
pretends to equal the creative power of God. However, as the poems final line
grudgingly concedes, the human subject is not self-sufficient: Such being
Finitude. In a letter addressed to her girlfriend Abiah Root, Dickinson
confesses: I am sailing upon an awful precipice (L10), and her late poetry

still probes the life-long dilemma: A Pit - but Heaven over it -/ And Heaven
beside, and Heaven abroad; / And yet a Pit -/ With Heaven over it. (P1712)
Dickinsons cultural heritage - especially the paradoxical nature of Puritan
selfhood along with the Transcendentalist emphasis on Self-Reliance radicalized the problem for her, and she was forced to look for new tactics in
her effort to reconstruct a viable New-England self.
As we may gather from the poems and letters alike, a fundamental lack or
want pervades much of Dickinsons oeuvre: I have an aching void in my
heart, she complains, which I am convinced the world can never fill (L11).
In many ways, her poetry is an expression of this void along with a bold
effort to fill it. One could indeed argue that Dickinson attempts nothing less
than to analyze and - if possible - to heal and reunify an alienated, a wounded
and fundamentally flawed self. Hence, the central importance of the notion of
desire in her work. Richard Wilburs brilliant article Sumptuous Destitution
approaches her poetry through the Romantic credo in the superiority of the
imagination over the limitations of reality. [O]nce an object has been
magnified by desire, Wilbur (echoing Blake) points out, it cannot be wholly
possessed by appetite. Desire is of course a signal feature of Romantic
literature, best instanced by A.W. Schlegels famous definition of romantic
literature as a literature of desire; in Goethes Mignon it has found one of its
most memorable incarnations. And yet, it is a New England writer that has
explored the selfs capacity for desire more deeply than any other nineteenthcentury writer, and on a level of reflection nowhere paralleled in European
and American Romanticism.
Using Wilburs notion of desire as a starting point, I propose to offer a
revision and a sharpening of this concept. By closely analyzing the structure of
desire in Dickinsons poetry, I hope to throw additional light (1) on the nature
of the lyrical selfs lack, (2) on the poets strategies in trying to fill this lack,
and (3) on the reasons why Dickinsons attempt can only succeed in the realm
of the fictive. My principal interest, throughout this paper, centers on desire
as the driving force behind the poets oeuvre.
What I cannot investigate in my essay is the exact place of Dickinsons use of
desire within the larger development of this notion whose history ranges from
Plato and Aristotle via Cicero, St. Augustin, Dante, the scholastic desiderium
naturale and Nicolas of Cues to the concept of desire as treated in the works

of modern theologians, psychologists, sociologists, feminists, literary

historians, and philosophers like Klages, Blondel, Scheler, Girard, Lacan,
Livingston, Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva among others. Nor can I do full
justice to the poetic strategies employed by Dickinson to express in language
what is present in the mind (as the object of desire), but absent in external
reality. Most regrettable of all, I am unable within the scope of this paper to
appraise Dickinsons notion of desire against the socio-cultural gender
conventions of mid-nineteenth-century Victorian America. Fortunately, this
crucial topic has extensively been discussed in feminist criticism (in particular
by Gilbert, Gubar, Homans, Juhasz, Loeffelholz, Martin, Mossberg, and
Pollak).
2. The Selfs Lack
In A loss of something ever felt I - (P959), a poem indispensable to our
topic, the lyrical self admits its ignorance as to the exact nature of this loss.
Feeling abandoned, the child-persona hankers after the lost dominion / Itself
the only Prince cast out - (Paradise lost and Adam/Eve in exile). Having
grown up and being wiser, but also more skeptical, the lyrical I is still softly
searching / For [its] Delinquent Palaces. What we notice here is a subject in
search of a home. The original (utopian) unity, childhoods citadel, is gone
once and for all, and no way leads back to it. In the poems final quatrain the
lyrical self speculates why it is looking oppositely / For the site of the
Kingdom of Heaven. The self fails to grasp what is missing; all it recognizes
is the painful truth that the Kingdom of Heaven, conventional faith, can no
longer replace this loss. John Cody has suggested that young Emily Dickinson
(dominated by an overpowering father) lacked a stabilizing and nurturing
mother figure, a view that Richard B. Sewall and Cynthia Griffin Wolff
apparently share. The many images of thirst and hunger may usefully be
interpreted against the poets biographical background (as Margaret Homans
contends, the mother is actively disappeared in the androcentric Victorian
culture), but they also point to a larger cultural lack whose nature is at once
epistemological, religious, and socially engendered.
As a result, Dickinsons lyrical self, sensing its lack, goes in search of what is
missing. Yet how is the self to know what it should look for? Plato tackles this
question in his dialogue Meno, and from The Symposium we learn that the
power mediating between the two spheres of the human (finitude) and the

divine is called Eros. Eros driving force is poverty: want is the very cause
that sets the daimon on its quest for beauty. To St. Augustine and the Christian
tradition following him, it is the souls unrest (resulting from mans fallen
condition) that urges it toward God. However, the soul cannot not possibly
find God, if God does not call it through an act of grace. The motif of being
called, reinforced by the mood of religious revivalism in Dickinsons time,
plays a vital role in her poetry.
The Song of Solomon offers an additional hint: I sought him, but I found him
not. After vainly asking other people, the spouse quite unexpectedly exults: I
found him whom my soul loveth. As suggested in Platos Symposium, it is the
souls loving desire that sets the direction. In her poem Why do I love You,
Sir? (P480), Dickinson gives the irrefutable answer: The Sunrise - Sir compelleth Me / Because Hes Sunrise - and I see -. For Dickinson, as for
Plotinus and his Neoplatonic heirs, the finite selfs desire for the divine Other
is in the nature of things. The poets search for the Other thus turns out to be
the selfs search for its lacking alter ego. Whereas Kierkegaard found the
Other in the saviour figure of the Biblical God, Dickinson, at odds with
religious orthodoxy, was thrown back on the evidence of the souls desire for
the missing Other.
At this point, the sense in which I am going to use the concept of the Other
requires some clarification. Lacking space to explore the full range of alterity,
I shall have to disregard the Other in terms of Nature (the [negative] sublime),
of other people, and of the unconscious - a disturbing and upsetting Other
for Dickinson. Nor can I elaborate on the Other in the guise of death, let alone
the concomitant problem of its poetic representation (aspects I have tried to
tackle in my monograph on Emily Dickinson). After this disclaimer, I now
want to define the term more specifically. Without using the concept in a
strictly psychoanalytical way, let us agree to distinguish between an
externalized Other (that Lacan would spell with a small o), and an
internalized Other. The externalized Other is the result of a projection in that
the self looks for the Other outside itself. The internalized Other, by contrast,
is grasped as an intrinsic constituent of selfhood. In this way, the Other
assumes the twofold meaning of lack and expected fulfilment. Hence, the
curiously unstable form of the Other as absence prsente, present as the telos
of desire, but absent in reality: Within its reach, though yet ungrasped /
Desires perfect Goal - (P1430). It is the intensely self-reflexive (hence

paradoxical) quality ofhaving not having that provokes the selfs continuous
search.
As Dickinson was to discover, the method of externalizing what ought to fill
the selfs lack is bound to shipwreck. To search outside the self for a remedy
will but deepen the selfs plight. The only alternative, then, is to look for the
Other as an integral part of the self: To fill a Gap / Insert the Thing that
caused it - (P546). Yet, how can one distinguish between self and Other, if
the Other is firmly situated within the self, if it is in *a sense the selfs own
creation? As a result, confusion is almost inevitable, and it is only to be
expected that the voices of self and Other tend to get mixed up (an aspect I
shall come back to). Although, as noted before, the Other may assume
hideously frightening guises, it is at the same time the hoped-for realization of
the lyrical selfs desire. Heaven, the endpoint of the poets wishes, is as Vast
- as our Capacity -/ As fair as our idea -/ To Him of adequate desire / No
further tis, than Here - (P370). Desire, then, or rather what desire implies,
the desired Other, is Dickinsons Flood Subject.
3. The Structure of Desire
Let us now inspect the structure of desire more closely. In its movement
toward the Other the creative self houses an inexhaustible source of riches; yet
in recognizing its own finitude, its mortality, the self suffers a sense of abject
poverty. If the poets focus is on this lack, the Other appears within a cluster
of motifs centering on death. However, the same lack also opens a space for
the selfs creative desire. As such, the Other appears as Eros, variously
manifesting itself as God, Lord, or King. Eros and Thanatos - as readers of
Dickinson well know - are the two fundamental poles of her work. If one of
them prevails, the lyrical self either achieves a moment of ecstasy or else falls
into a mood of profound despair. Jointly, they produce the characteristic
paradox of sumptuous - Despair (P505). In its double quality of lack and
desired fulfilment, the selfs want functions as Dickinsons uttermost
provocation. The poets White Sustenance - Despair - (P640) is at once the
source of her creative energy (Sustenance) and the cause of her hopeless
wish, doomed as it is to a restless search for the absent object. Pursuing the
Other in its transitions (P1602) remains an unfinished quest. For that reason
(and as I have argued elsewhere), Dickinsons poetics, like Hlderlins, is a
poetics of process.

Sharon Cameron has astutely remarked that Dickinson invariably leaves

alternative semantic spaces open. Reinforcing her insight, I would insist that
the poet does so for an ulterior reason, namely, to keep desire - her central
motivating power - alive. With Dickinson, the movement of desire is
ineluctably a movement of language. That is precisely why Poetry -/ Or Love
- the two - coeval come - (P1247). As long as desire is alive, the Other is
alive, meaning is alive. When desire dies, the Other dies, meaning dies. The
basic tension, then. is that between stasis and dynamis, between movement
and the stopping of movement. Most poems, in one way or another, bear out
this tension. Stasis is the poets terminal threat, it is the feared dead end that
worries the Dickinsonian subject like a wasp. After great pain, a formal
feeling comes - (P341) is a striking example that pushes the sense of paralysis
to its limit. Even in extremities like these, however, Dickinson desperately
strives to keep a way open for the potential revival of desire. Ive dropped
my Brain - My Soul is numb - (P1046) is a case in point. In a bold
countermove the lyrical self - paralyzed to the core - insists: Ive still a
chance to strain // To Being, somewhere - Motion - Breath -/ Though
Centuries beyond, / And every Limit a Decade -/ Ill shiver, satisfied.
The poems amply demonstrate that, to Dickinson, reciprocity is a crucial
feature of desire. What the lyrical I seeks to obtain is, at once, the Other as
object of desire and the Others desire for itself. In religious discourse, this
reciprocity is rendered by the time-honored expression of amor Dei. De
Lauretis, from a feminist (and lesbian) perspective, perceives this doubling as
contradiction and duplicity, designating a specific quality of female desire.
However this may be, let us bear in mind that the double movement of desire desire for an object and desire for desire (desirability) - underlies much of
Dickinsons work and also affects her poetic strategies.
One might legitimately contend that Dickinsons desire for the Other reaches
its apotheosis in her Master letters. These (unsent?) letters epitomize the
poets paradoxical desire for guidance as well as for mastery, for intellectual
recognition as well
as for erotic fulfilment. Margaret Fullers letter to (the dead) Beethoven and
her (imaginary) letter to the dying Goethe offer startling parallels to
Dickinsons (quasi-)
epistolary and in many ways lyrical texts. Often resembling personal diary

entries rather than genuine letters, these texts form part of a nineteenthcentury genre that is not at all rare among educated women that - frustrated in
their ambitions - reject the subject positions constructed for them by a
patriarchal society.
4. Strategies of Selfhealing
After sketching the paradoxical form of the selfs lack along with the double
structure of desire, I now intend to examine Dickinsons tactics in filling this
lack. Passing over the multiple variations and permutations, and neglecting the
complex interplay within and among poems, we note that she basically
employs two methods in her effort to recover a complete self. The first may
be described as a method of self-totalization, the second attempts to gain the
same end through a totalization of the Other. Two alternative choices seem to
be available to the poet. In trying to assure itself of the Other, the lyrical self
either sets out to possess and absorb the Other, or else it wants to be possessed
and subsumed by the Other. Both strategies, though antithetical in direction,
aim at empowering the lyrical I so as to remedy its flawed selfhood. Hegels
phenomenology of the subject (further developed by Friedrich Schlegel): The
stoic I, the skeptical I, the split I of what he calls unhappy double
consciousness (that of the Romantics), and the modern conflictual I (a
disrupted or torn I) might offer an interesting model with which to approach
Dickinsons work. Further help could also be obtained from Bakhtins three
voices, namely, the lyrical self (the first voice), the internal Other or alter
ego (the second voice), and the external Other (or third voice). Attractive
though they are, I shall forego these options in my essay.
For reasons that we shall examine later on, both methods - self-totalization and
the totalization of the Other - run into problems, a fact of which Dickinson is
acutely aware. To achieve a viable self, the poet therefore develops a third
strategy. Avoiding the pitfall of projection (by relying exclusively on either
self or Other), she attempts a dialectical synthesis in which self and Other are
to be linked in a relationship of dynamic interdependence. The generative
principle bringing about this vital union is called love. The state of fulfilled
selfhood - variously named Heaven, Eden, Paradise, or Home - is a
state of Grace, fusing the religious, the erotic, and the aesthetic. As I
propose to show, it is only attainable in the fictive sphere of the poets
Circumference.

4.1 The Dominant Self

Let us begin by examining the method of self-totalization. In relying on the
creative self, the poetic I sets out to subsume the Other, thus hoping to become
the Other. Whatever is outside the self - nature, people, the world at large - is
absorbed into itself. Based on the Romantic faith in the creative imagination,
the method is essentially one of incremental inclusion, often in a characteristic
step by step argument. This tactic shows most pointedly in the metafictional
poem: I reckon - when I count at all -/ First - Poets - Then the Sun -/ Then
Summer - Then the Heaven of God -/ And then - the List is done - (P569).
What first appears to be an upward gradation, culminating in the capstone,
God, is in the second stanza radically reversed, with the lyrical I now trying
to incorporate everything outside itself: But, looking back - the First so
seems / To comprehend the Whole -/ The Others look a needless Show -/ So I
write - Poets - All -.
Some of the hazards that Dickinsons method entails are highlighted in the
poem The Brain - is wider than the Sky - (P632). In a totalizing move the
Brain easily absorbs the not-self, the two hemispheres (the sky and the sea),
and You beside. Toward the end, it attempts to subsume God as well. At this
point, the lyrical I begins to hesitate. Self and God, the poet muses, differ - if
they do - as Syllable from Sound. Cameron has demonstrated how Dickinson
ambiguates in her daring move to collapse Brain and God. The reason is
not hard to discover. To pronounce the selfs absolute dominance would result
in an act of self-divinizing and eliminate God as a separate entity. As a (post)Romantic, Dickinson may have felt attracted to this audacious conclusion; as a
Daughter of the Puritans, however, she must have faltered.
In what is one of her most bewildering poems, If I may have it, when its
dead - (P577), Dickinson pushes the method to its logical extreme. Sirkka
Heiskanen-Mkel has drawn attention to the poets verbal magic: If I cannot
have the Other alive, let it die. One ought to notice, however, that the lyrical I
pays with a sharp sense of guilt for its effort to wield omnipotence: Forgive
me, if to stroke thy frost / Outvisions Paradise. The term magic seems all
the more problematic as the poems semantic register is intensely religious
(the scene resembles the Piet representation of certain Baroque paintings in
which Mary appears to kiss Christ lying dead in her arms). What is at stake in

this poem is the selfs desire to own the Other unstintedly. That this move is
ultimately self-defeating, the verse reluctantly admits.
The method founders because the totalized self, an arrogant and all-powerful
self playing God, tends to eliminate the Other. Without the Other, however,
the effort for a complete and fulfilled self must collapse. Dickinson was fully
aware of the risks she incurred: I could not care - to gain / A lesser than the
Whole -/ For did not this include themself -/ As Seams - include the Ball?
The question mark underlines the poets dilemma. In its very act of
appropriating the desired Other, the self is bound to lose it. But if the Other is
lost, all is lost: Without this - there is nought - (P655).
Despite its grandiose ambitions, the self is eventually forced to acknowledge
its finitude, usually in the form of a shattering experience. I never hear that
one is dead (P1323) is an instance among many. In this verse the lyrical I is
made conscious of its own mortality on hearing the news that somebody else
has died. To face The yawning Consciousness without vail (sic) or slant
would totally undermine human sanity. In a defensive gesture, the Daily
Mind tries to ignore lifes abyss. How dismally the self fails in its effort is
ironically proved by the poems unrelieved mood of anxiety.
4.2 The Overpowering Other
So far, we have examined Dickinsons attempt to heal the lyrical selfs lack by
trying to subsume the Other. The poets second strategy, reversing the terms,
consists in the selfs desire to be absorbed by the Other. If the former, as we
could observe, employs a process of incremental appropriation, the latter tries
to achieve its end through an act of surrender. The first is liable to dissolve
the Other, the second courts the danger of self-annihilation.
It is only natural, therefore, that the selfs longing for a union with the Other
is usually accompanied by the fear of self-loss. The Drop, that wrestles in the
Sea (P284) illustrates the point. Despite the imminent danger, the lyrical I
wishes to be one with the infinite sea: The Ocean - smiles - at her Conceit -/
But she, forgetting Amphitrite -/ Pleads Me? Amphitrite, we remember,
was raped by Poseidon, the Greek God of the sea (and became his wife). A
different tactics of self-effacement is used in Till Death - is narrow Loving -
(P907), a poem in which the lyrical I attempts a self-denying identification

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through imitation (in the manner of Thomas Kempis). As the final lines
imply, the selfs effort to reach the Other through Resemblance perfect,
through an act of self-abdication, does not quite succeed.
The theme of the seductive and insistent Other - as tempting, visiting, alluring
and, at its most intense, as overpowering Other - plays a crucial part in
Dickinsons poetry. He put the Belt around my life - (P273) and Tie the
Strings to my Life, My Lord (P279) are notable examples that demonstrate
the selfs yearning for surrender to the Others imperious and autocratic
power. Dickinsons Master letters also belong with this category. A thematic
variant is found in the selfs hopeless adoration of an unreachable and
indifferent Other. In Ah, Teneriffe! (P666) the lyrical self remains kneeling
before the mountain of eternity - a posture reminiscent of the lovers
unavailing desire in medieval minstrelsy.
A number of poems, delightfully documented by I started Early - Took my
Dog (P520), enact the Others seductive silver Call (P398), followed by an
attempt to move and overpower the self. The cluster of related motifs is, of
course, part of the Christian meditative tradition and, in particular, of what
mystics have described as the souls ravishment by God. The theme of
seduction, of Edens innuendo (P1518), climaxing in the souls being taken
by force, that last Onset -/ When the King be witnessed - in the Room
(P465), is a vital feature of Dickinsons work, supported as it is by the model
of the Puritan conversion experience as well as by the sensuous style of the
Song of Solomon, probably the most popular Biblical narrative in early New
England. Most of the poems centering on the spouse or bride depend on this
subtext and its allegorical significance. The critical view (as set forth by
Donald Thackrey and Louise Bogan, and recently buttressed by Dorothy Huff
Oberhaus) that Dickinsons oeuvre displays a profoundly religious quality,
anchored in the Western meditative and mystical tradition, finds ample
support in these poems. The mystical quality is prominent, for example, in
Dickinsons motif of the precious and sweet wound, reminiscent of Saint
Theresas Suavidad - este grandisimo dolor. Since the poets home - as she
herself claims - is to be found in language (L438), it remains to that extent a
qualified, a poetic mysticism, but this aspect is nonetheless emphatically
present in her work.
One of the most memorable instances rendering the foreplay of the divine

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rape is offered by the metapoetic verse He fumbles at your Soul (P315). The
sense of fear and pain is intolerably intense in that the divine Other - in
purifying and testing the self - threatens to vanquish it: He stuns you by
degrees -/ Prepares your brittle Nature / For the Ethereal Blow. In
scalp[ing] the victims naked soul the Other triumphs by annihilating the
lyrical self. The surreal montage of music, hammering, thunder and (Indian)
scalping creates - compositely - a mind-shattering experience that ends in
silence.
The sound of hammering, a frequent motif in Dickinsons work, echoes yet
another poem in this vein: Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat? (P365).
In this verse, the experience of purification, a major step in the souls mystical
ascent to God, results in sheer whiteness, The Designated Light, with the
adjective hinting at the fact that the self is chosen for its role, but not yet
installed. The challenge to the reader: Dare you see dramatizes the awesome
quality of the souls situation. In some poems, Doubt
Me! My Dim Companion! (P275) being a choice example, the excessive
demand for total surrender, the Life -/ Poured Thee - without a stint,
arouses the selfs anger and frustration. Although accepting and even inviting
the Others utmost testing: Sift her, from Brow to Barefoot! / Strain till your
last Surmise -, the self eventually retaliates: but hallow just the snow / Intact
. . . Oh, Caviler, for you! The final lines can only be fully appreciated if the
reader is aware that the Caviler is itself part of the lyrical I. The Soul, as
another poem affirms, may well be its own best friend, but it is also its most
relentless spy and critic (P683).
Dickinson realized that the exclusive dominance of the Other was no solution.
Her (surprisingly modern) attempt to look nothingness in the eye and thus
reach a state of comparative peace and liberty without loss of selfhood is one
way in which she tries to cope with the problem. The verse Tis so appalling
- it exhilarates - (P281) exemplifies the poets tactic to perfection. By dying
in full consciousness, without paying the price of self-loss, the lyrical I
achieves a liberation of sorts, but the result remains unsatisfactory. What the
self has gained is a Ghastly, Holiday, a ghostly kind of freedom, in fact.
Having experienced frost or total stasis, the self now knows what to expect
and is henceforth ready for it. Suspense is indeed conquered, but the desire
and the hope for a positive outcome are also gone. The poem falls into a
segment of Dickinsons work that struggles with the unbearable part of human

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existence, namely, the threatening extinction of the conscious self. In such

cases, death - wearing the delusive mask of Eros- not infrequently pretends to
accost the lyrical I like a lover; bunt being in reality a harbinger of death the
gallant suitor is intent on annihilating the self.
In review, the poets two principal strategies, the selfs desire to absorb and
possess the Other and the reverse desire to be absorbed and possessed by the
Other, are ultimately self-defeating. What may shock the reader is the fact that
both methods, in pitting self against Other, tend to display an element of raw
aggressiveness. The situation resembles Hegels fight to the death, a fight
which none can win. Leo Bersani may be right in claiming that all desire is a
struggle for power and thus inherently violent. Interestingly enough, the
element of aggression is projected both into male and female personae. Mary
Loeffelholz (like Cody, Cameron and others before her) argues convincingly
that the pervasive element of aggression also results from the poets (largely
suppressed) anger at womans reduced social status.
Although Dickinson is perfectly conscious of the risks and limitations that
accompany both methods, she continues to be tempted by them, one promising
an all-powerful self, the other the final tranquility that goes with the loss of
consciousness, a sort of easeful Death that Keats and other Romantics
yearned for but which (some rare cases apart) Dickinson could not accept,
even though she recognized its attractions.
4.3 The Self in Paradise
If pushed to their extreme, both methods discussed so far tend to eliminate one
pole of the relationship with the fatal result that the movement of desire is at
an end. It is only logical, therefore, that Dickinson searched for ways to avoid
this impasse. As suggested earlier, she managed to develop a third strategy that
allowed her to place both self and Other in a non-hierarchical and mutually
dynamic relationship. The generative power that sustains this relation is called
Love. It is through the concept of Love that Dickinson attempts (1) to
keep the movement of desire flowing, (2) to preserve both self and Other
intact, and (3) to create in poetic language what Rilke was to call
Weltinnenraum, a fictive realm for the dialectical bond between self and
Other. Although radically different in terms of space, time, and modality
from our everyday world, this utopian realm functions as an indirect critique

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of the status quo.

Dickinsons late quatrain Circumference (magisterially elucidated by Albert
Gelpi) has given this ideal situation its enduring form: Circumference thou
Bride of Awe / Possessing thou shalt be / Possessed By every hallowed Knight
/ That dares to covet Thee (P1620). The Bride, the fulfilled self-to-be, and
Awe, a metonym for the divine Other (as well as for the selfs response to
it), enact the hieros gamos in the boundless space of Circumference - the
quickening domain of poetic wholeness. In this realm the apparent
contradictions of male and female, self and Other, passivity and activity,
possession and surrender, desire and fulfilment appear to be finally
reconciled, and the broken-off hemispheres of the poets existence at last
reintegrated into the perfect sphere of a complete self. Dickinsons pairing of
Possessing and Possessed echoes Shelleys line from Epipsychidion: Even
as a bride, delighting and delighted (much as Dickinsons notion of
Circumference harks back to Shelleys use of this term), but the expression
also recalls Goethes umfangend umfangen (from Ganymed), although it
should be pointed out that Goethes poem lacks Dickinsons dialectical quality.
The poems hallowed Knight is poet and reader in one. The verb covet
throws into relief the motivating force of Dickinsons poetry: desire. When
the selfs desire for the Other and the Others desire for the lyrical I coincide,
the flawed self appears whole again. Such moments are characterized by an
emotional dynamics of incredible intensity in that both self and Other are
conjoined through and sustained by a movement of mutual desire. Wild
nights - in its very simplicity one of the great love poems of Western
literature - provides an exquisite illustration: Wild Nights - Wild Nights! /
Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our luxury! // Futile -the Winds -/
To a Heart in port / Done with the Compass / Done with the Chart! // Rowing
in Eden -/ Ah, the Sea!/ Might I but moor - Tonight -/ In Thee! (P249).
The verse celebrates the desired union between the lyrical I and the Other, an
ideal state that is perpetually held in eschatological tension without being
realized. The quality of ecstatic boundlessness - reinforced iconically (with
Martha Nell Smith rightly referring the reader to the manuscript) and
acoustically - is accentuated by the selfs decision to throw all conventional
rules overboard. The time of night, as elsewhere with this poet, denotes the
realm of the imagination, of unlimited desire. The wanting self and the wanted

14

Other are co-present here in perfect unison, each including, but not
subsuming, its counterpart. Instead of exclusive possession, there is inclusive
reciprocity. Self and Other - like rower and boat - are correlative notions:
Love thou art deep / I cannot cross thee / But were there two / Instead of one
/ Rower and Yacht some sovereign summer / Who knows but wed reach the
sun. (P453) Apart, the two prove useless and idle, but in concert they can
fulfil their roles in consummate fashion. The boat - Romantic image par
excellence - alludes to the souls being carried away, but it also hints at
poetic language as the carrier and medium for the Other.
No wind, no outward help is needed. The selfs driving force is its own desire,
love its own rescue and reward (L552). Having reached the port and being
now securely at anchor, the lyrical I has finally found home. Yet there is no
stasis. Rowing on the infinite sea of Eternity is nothing if not desire in
(erotic) motion. This state resembles Plotinuss transcendent vision where the
soul comes into its own; or Yeatss union of dancer and dance; but most nearly
perhaps it anticipates Eliots still point (Burnt Norton), a state [w]here past
and future are gatheredand where there is neither arrest nor movement.
And do not call it fixity. The lyrical self can only say: there we have been:
but [it] cannot say where.
Let us note that the encounter between self and Other takes place in the form
of an event presented in the optative mode. In writing the poem Dickinson has,
in a sense, enjoyed the experience, a veritable (Barthian) jouissance du texte.
Let us further note that the poets principal scene is not the Romantic
Willkommen und Abschied (emphasis mine), it is rather the curiously
liminal and inherently paradoxical moment of meeting as departure. A
visitor about to arrive or leave, or just having left - these are the situations
which characterize many of Dickinsons most memorable poems. One may
well wonder whether Higginson, asking for a picture of his partially cracked
poetess, could ever guess what Dickinson implied in her unforgettable selfdescription: My hair is bold like the chestnut burr, and my eyes like the
sherry in the glass that the guest leaves (L268).
The use of semantic and grammatic indeterminacy underscores the fact that
such moments of fulfilled presence can only be grasped in fictive form. The
one tense normally excluded from Dickinsons grammatical arsenal to render
these moments is the present indicative. What the poet prefers to use instead is

15

either a prospective or a retrospective point of view. If such experiences are

narrated in the form of past events, as in There Came a Day at Summers
full (P349), fictiveness is indicated by a variety of grammatical and stylistic
means. Dickinsons use of temporality is not that of linear time (in terms of
grammatical tenses) but rather the (atemporal) aspect of states of
consciousness, often expressed through non-finite forms. The poets most
effective device, however, is undoubtedly modality, be it in the form of the
subjunctive, the optative, and the hypothetical mood.
In the final analysis, then, Dickinsons recovered self is an aesthetic self. Only
in her poetic dominion does the poet manage to keep the movement of desire
between self and Other alive. Most importantly (as Margaret Dickie, Cristanne
Miller and Cynthia Hogue have variously remarked), the processual and selfreflexive nature of her poetry punctuates the fact that Dickinson had the
courage to face the unsettling truth that a stable and truly reconstituted self
cannot be achieved in life. The realization of an autonomous self - of full
presence - would in fact block the movement of desire and thus annul the
finite state of human subjectivity. A poem like On a Columnar Self -/ How
ample to rely (P789) seems to refute this claim, but on closer inspection it
actually supports it. Dickinsons work, we are led to conclude, resists all
interpretive attempts to secure a coherent and unitary self by imposing a
critical principle of harmony. The poets acute awareness of the human
subjects epistemological and existential limitations is part of her astounding
modernity.
The fulfilled self, realized in the vital union of self and Other, is
unquestionably the horizon of desire for this poet, but it is a horizon that
unceasingly recedes before the wanting self. In that sense, and in that sense
alone, Jay Leydas dictum of an omitted center is correct. From a semantic
perspective, however, the center of Dickinsons poetry is never empty; on the
contrary, it is extremely dense. What is missing in her verse is a referential
axis; fixed reference would stop the movement of poetic meaning dead.
Bearing in mind Dickinsons tenacious insistence on meaning as vital process,
we also come to understand why the poet - not infrequently usurping the place
of Mary, Mother of Jesus - tends to favor the divine Other over the
conventionally religious figure of Christ. In an act of spiritual rebirth, itself a
profoundly Protestant act, Dickinson - the undivine abode / Of His Elect

16

Content (P751) - interiorized, and in her poetry resuscitated, what must have
appeared to her as the grotesquely reductive Jesus (P646) of Calvinist
orthodoxy. Like Blake and other writers before her, she rejected the avatars
of the dominant father, the merciless banker and the legalistic judge, as false
impersonations of the Godhead - no doubt, a shrewdly subversive gesture.
5. Fuzzy Boundaries
The poem Me from Myself - to banish -/ Had I Art - (642) dramatizes the
fact that all consciousness is inherently self-reflexive: Were mutual
Monarch. The same dialectical principle that obtains for the reciprocal bond
between Me (the self as concrete, thinking subject) and Myself (the self
as mentally reflected object in the mind) holds for the relationship between
self and Other. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that boundaries tend to get
fuzzy. The verse In lands I never saw (P124) is an early illustration how the
self comes to doubt its own identity: Which Sir are you and which am I?
(P124). The lyrical self in I make His Crescent fill or lack - seems at first in
a position of limitless power but is finally forced to give up its claim to
autonomy. Self and Other hold a mutual Disk, and neither party knows
Which is the Despot . . . / Nor Whose the Tyranny - (P909). In the late
poem He was my host, he was my guest (P1721) the lyrical I still feels
puzzled: I never to this day / If I invited him could tell / Or he invited me /
So infinite our intercourse. The process is sometimes inverted. Instead of
getting confused, the lyrical selfs unstable components threaten to split apart;
madness beckons, and meaning collapses: Sequence ravelled out of Sound /
Like Balls - upon a Floor (P937).
Usually, Dickinson manages to maintain a relation of dialectical balance
between self and Other. Like Eyes that looked on Wastes - (P458) makes the
point in a paradigmatic manner: Neither would be a Queen / Without the
Other - Therefore -/ We perish - tho We reign - (P458). The following
(early) verse is a striking, if somewhat clumsy, instance: He was weak, and I
was strong - then -/ . . . / I was weak, and He was strong then - (P190).
Rendering the Other weak, a tactics used in the poem I bring an
unaccustomed Wine (P132), gives the self an opportunity to savor its own
strength by offering help; it is a tactics that Dickinson also employs in her
letters. All too often, however, death arrives first, and the disappointed self,
losing the race, tries in vain to save the Other. In view of the Others

17

indeterminate status (and potential weakness), the lyrical I feels called upon to
appropriate its place. Should the Other succumb, the lyrical I must take the
purple wheel / To show the sun the way. In her Poetic Covenant with the
Other (cf. P1005), Dickinson exhibits Jobs firmness: Though he slay me, yet
will I trust in him. No wonder, the selfs faith becomes all-important: How
dare I therefore stint a faith / On which so vast depends / Lest firmament
should fail for me / The rivet in the bands (P766). The risk is immense. If
the self fails, the Other is lost in turn, and the cosmos breaks asunder. The
conclusion seems inevitable that the stabilizing pole in Dickinsons poetry is
increasingly shifted from the Other to the lyrical self. This shift is probably
the most conspicuous single marker signaling the poets turn toward
Modernism.
Gudrun Grabher has persuasively argued that the loosening of semantic
boundaries, a hallmark of Dickinsons work, is the result of the poets Kantian
revolution. With this writer, the traditionally fixed realms of truth and
reality begin to wobble. Her innovative use of the biform (including
paradox) defeats all attempts to distinguish clearly between oppositional
concepts like truth/fiction, life/art, earth/heaven, reality/dream,
waking/sleeping. Clearly, thinking in oppositions is being replaced by
dialectical reasoning. How complicated the relation between the various
spheres has become may be studied in poems such as Make me a picture of
the sun - (P188), Doom is the House without the Door - (P475), or in the
vexing piece We dream - it is good we are dreaming - (P531). Dream,
desire, and fiction form a cluster of motifs that would deserve a separate
study.
Sweet Skepticism of the Heart -/ That knows - and does not know - perfectly
encapsulates Dickinsons epistemological stance. Uncertainty is usually
accompanied by a transport thrilled with Fear -(P1413), by a sense of
numinous suspense in the
presence of which the Certainty of facts drops into insignificance. Whereas
the term Skepticism reflects Dickinsons modernist stance, the adjective
Sweet as well as the romantic Heart evince her resistance to the nihilistic
strain of Modernism which began to make itself felt in Victorian America at
least since the middle of the nineteenth century - with the old dispensation
shaken and the new order not yet established. Allen Tate was right in claiming
that Dickinsons historical time was the perfect literary situation. It ought to

18

be recalled, however, that this opportunity came to Dickinson at a heavy

price.
6. A Test Case
Using the concept of desire as an interpretive key may help us solve some of
the puzzles that have teased readers and critics alike. Choosing the balladesque
My life had stood - a Loaded Gun - (P754) as a test case, I hope to reveal
the poems figure in the carpet.
Starting out with the premise that the flawed self needs the Other, that it
desires to be found and identified by the Other, and that such desire is a
central motif of Dickinsons poetry, we can hardly deny that the verse presents
these features in a superb manner. The image of the loaded gun expresses the
lyrical selfs poetic potential that must first be recognized - and activated - by
the Owner, before it can actually speak. The ecstatic moment of
identification is evoked through the selfs (ravished) sense of being carried
away. Self and Other, Gun and Master, belong intimately together - just
as in popular parlance the gun is called the bride of the soldier. Singly, they
would remain inert and ineffective. Jointly, however, they become powerfully
alive, with the Gun now speak[ing] for its Owner and Master. The
poetic word is not the selfs exclusive property; language (as the French
symbolists were to discover) radically depends on the Other; indeed, what the
gun speaks is in a vital sense the Others voice.
The chase takes place in Sovereign Woods, in the aesthetic domain of
Dickinsons univers potique, with the adjective Sovereign hinting at the
forest as the Masters (the Kings) property. Hunting creates the (e)motion
indispensable to Dickinsons supreme moments. The element of desire appears
most graphically, perhaps, in the doe which the two are chasing, but it is also
noticeable in the (female) Eider-Duck that has first to be killed before the
Pillow can be stuffed (at the same time, the Eider-Ducks filling her nest
with her own feathers alluedes to the self-reflexive act of poetic creation). The
pervasive element of killing has frequently been interpreted as the
murderous quality of language, an aspect mentioned in a number of
Dickinsons poems. However, the metapoetic quality of the verse (the
linguistic chase) should not obscure the attendant element of desire. And it is
this element that will help us unravel the curious paradox with which the

19

poems final stanza confronts the reader.

A prominent feature of this poem is the simultaneous presence of Eros and
Thanatos. From this perspective, the deadly aim of hunting, the act of
wording as killing, reveals itself as a metonym for desire. Sheer desire, as the
poem contends, is superior to the fulfilment of desire: Tis better than the
Eider-Ducks / Deep Pillow - to have shared -. What the poet and what poetic
language in their quest for the Other can accomplish is to give expression to
this desire. What is totally beyond the authors power, however, is the art to
still desire: For I have but the power to kill, / Without - the power to die -.
If we set these lines against the final verses of yet another (and equally
intriguing) poem, I
would not paint - a picture - Id rather be the One (P505), the desire to lay
desire to
rest once and for all becomes fully explicit: What would the Dower [a brides
dowry or a widows inheritance] be, / Had I the Art to stun myself / With
Bolts of Melody! It is the only art denied the poet - else she would have
ceased writing.
What is pondered, elaborated, and reworked in Dickinsons oeuvre - from all
angles and in all its complexities - is the poets desire to be a full self: I deem
Myself what I would be - (P801). Her poetry, as Chase was the first to point
out, centers on the selfs hope for change. The desire to achieve status is
underscored by adjectives like new, royal, different, changed, by
nouns denoting social rank such as Bride, Wife, Queen, Empress, and
by a plethora of other stylistic and thematic devices. What this essay has tried
to clarify is the role that the dialectical relation between self and Other plays
in the poets search for self-identity: Till it has loved - no man or woman can
become itself - Of our first Creation we are unconscious. (L575) Dickinson
knew that her pursuit of wholeness could find no rest. Desire, then, is both
the generator and the matrix of her poetry: Perhaps you laugh at me. Perhaps
the whole United States are laughing at me, too! I cannot stop for that! My
business is to love. . . . My Business is to sing(L269).
7. Post Script
The term desire should not mislead us to restrict its meaning to emotion
alone. The longing for the Other is both a search for emotional fulfilment and

20

a quest for knowledge. To this poet, desire has a distinctly cognitive

dimension. Thought and feeling, The Heart and the Mind, form A single
Continent - (1354). What Eliot admired in Donnes poetry, namely, the
sensuous apprehension of thought, is no less Dickinsons achievement. For
her as for Donne, A thought was an experience. In many respects, she is a
metaphysical poet writing in the Romantic tradition. The fusion of thought
and feeling, we ought to remind ourselves, is among the most ambitious aims
of the English high Romantics. Why it is possible that desire, being the result
of a fundamentally flawed self, yet tends to award this New-England writer
with a powerful sense of self-confidence, is a paradox I can only speculate on.
Dickinsons question, addressed to Mrs. Holland: is there more? More than
Love and Death? Then tell me its name! (L873) may well be a rhetorical
question, but it is a question that touches the poets whole existence. To her,
death is the selfs ultimate threat, love the victorious antagonist of death:
Love - is anterior to Life -/ Posterior - to Death - (P917). To Whitman as to
Dickinson, a kelson of the creation is love. Love, as one of her poems
phrases it, is the worlds Initial and Exponent (P917). Yet it is death,
finally, that remains the poets deepest provocation. In anticipating the process
of dying Dickinson tests to the utmost how Conscious Consciousness - could
grow - (622). In the last analysis, deaths cool - concernless No - (P287) is
the very cause of her desire for self-transcendence; it is also the source of her
creative drive and the originator of meaning. If the selfs lack reminds
Dickinson of her mortality, the souls desire to fill this lack is evidence of her
immortal existence, it is proof that she is of the sky (P1643). Once,
however, death comes to be viewed as meaningless, existence reveals itself as
trivial, and desire is demystified as an ignis fatuus (P1551), as lifes grand
illusion, inviting the specter of nihilism. As her verse throws in bold relief,
the poet - in her lifelong fight with the angel (P59) - was intensely conscious
of her daring gamble.
Reading Dickinsons poetry today makes us painfully aware of what our
culture has lost - or forgotten. To the reader, her work operates like a litmus
test, a fact of which the poet herself was not unaware: The Voice that stands
for Floods to me / Is sterile born to some - (P1189). With this author, the
sense of want still arouses the contrary desire to fill this want. Contemporary
writers and critics, by contrast, start out with the Lacanian assumption that
desire is a derangement of instinct, that the subjects fundamental lack

21

cannot be filled, and that the selfs longing for the Other (le sujet suppos
savoir) in the hope of making up for its lack is vain and illusory. Meaning, it
is claimed, peters out in an endless chain of metonymic substitutions, and all
we are left with is a free-floating signifier. Mean something! one of
Becketts characters sneers, Ah thats a good one.
In Dickinsons eyes, we are all permanent temporarily. Our brief existence
is but the Hyphen in-between. Like Pascal. she defines man as the hiatus
between nothingness and eternity, as Finite infinity (P1695). For Edward
Taylor, writing a century and a half before Dickinson, Infinity and Finity
Conjoind (Meditation One) is the central Christian paradox that sets forth
Christs double nature. Dickinson would have felt unable to accept Taylors
dogmatic assumptions, but in their love and desire for the Other both writers
engage in a common quest. Its my desire, Taylor exclaims, Thou shouldst
be glorified (First Series, Meditation 22). And again: Oh! that thy love
might overflow my Heart! / To fire the same with Love: for Love I would.
In the terminology of contemporary criticism, the literary subjects of Taylor
and Dickinson are both desiring subjects.
Whereas the Puritan Taylor firmly expected to encounter a transcendent
reality after death, Dickinson never tired of pursuing the Other in her poetry,
enacting the transcendence of limited selfhood in the here and now through the
souls movement of desire. This (she wrote in a letter) was her way of
praying. Unlike Taylor she could never decide whether Desire, or Grant Be wholly beautiful - (P801). In the end, it was desire, not grant, that turned
Destitution and Despair for Dickinson into sumptuousness: How sweet I
shall not lack in Vain -/ But gain - thro loss -/ Through Grief - obtain -/ The
Beauty that reward Him best -/ The Beauty of Demand - at Rest - (P968). At
rest? Yes, in the house of language (L438), and in deaths White Exploit
(P922) - possibly.
Delays and digressions, as in a successful narrative plot, or in love, are
necessary to the suspense that augments, by deferring, the pleasures of the end.
But if the hoped-for end is never reached at all, then, the souls innate desire,
as several poems complain, would be unmasked as a cynical joke, and the quest
for the Other as a mocking mirage. The nagging suspicion that she might be
trapped by consciousness within a self-enclosed fictive realm never stops
troubling Dickinson, much as it continues to worry Hawthorne, Melville and

22

Poe. In addition to the poets unrivalled artistry, it is the unsettling tensions of

her oeuvre - situated as it is in the historical threshold period between
Romanticism and Modernism - that keep challenging the reader.
Roland
Hagenbchle

23

List of Works Cited (a Selection)

Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature
(Boston, 1969).
Cameron, Sharon. Choosing not Choosing: Dickinsons Fascicles (U of
Chicago P, 1992).
Chase, Richard. Emily Dickinson (New York, 1951. American Men of Letters
Series).
Cody, John. After Great Pain. The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge
UP, 1971).
De Lauretis, Teresa. Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation.
Theatre
Journal 40.2 (1988): 155-177.
Dickie, Margaret. Dickinsons Discontinuous Lyric Self. American
Literature 60
(1988); 537-553.
Eliot, T.S. The Metaphysical Poets. Selected Essays (London, 1932). 281291.
Foucault, Michel, Les mots et les choses (Paris, 1966).
Frank, Manfred. Das Problem Zeit in der deutschen Romantik (Paderborn,
1990).
Gelpi, Albert. The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet
(Cambridge, 1975).
Grabher, Gudrun. Emily Dickinson: Das transzendentale Ich (Heidelberg,
1981).
Hagenbchle, Roland. Das mythische Du. Emily Dickinson: Gefahr der
Selbstbegegnung / The Risks of Self-Encounter (Tbingen, 1989).
---. Emily Dickinsons Poetic Covenant (extended and rev. version). Anglia
112. 3-4
(1994): 309-340.
Heiskanen-Mkel, Sirkka. In Quest of Truth. Observations on the
Development of Emily Dickinsons Poetic Dialectic (Jyvskyl, 1970).
Hogue, Cynthia. I didnt Be - Myself: Emily Dickinsons Semiotics of
Presence. Emily Dickinson Journal l.2 (1922): 30-53.
Homans, Margaret. Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth,
Emily Bront, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton 1980).
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (repr.
Harmondsworth, 1979).
Leyda, Jay. The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. (Yale UP, 1960).
Loeffelholz, Mary. Violence and the Other(s) of Identity. Dickinson and the
Boundaries of Feminist Theory (Urbana and Chicago, 1991).
Miller, Cristanne. Emily Dickinson: A Poets Grammar (Cambridge, 1987)
Oberhaus, Dorothy, Huff. Emily Dickinsons Fascicles: Method and Meaning
(Pennsylvania State UP, 1995).

24

Sewall, Richard, B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. 2 vols. (New York, 1974).
Tate, Allen. Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical
Essays.
Ed. Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963). 16-27.
Taylor, Edward. The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, ed. Thoms H. Johnson
(repr.
Princeton UP, 1971).
Thackrey, Donald. Emily Dickinsons Approach to Poetry (Lincoln, 1954).
Wilbur, Richard. Sumptuous Destitution. Emily Dickinson: A Collection of
Critical
Essays. Ed. Richard B. Sewall (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963).
127-136.
Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Emily Dickinson (New York, 1986).
For an excellent introduction to the concept of desire, see Elizabeth Wright,
Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary (Oxford, 1992), vide
desire.
Acknowledgments
This essay has greatly benefited from the stimulating criticism of my
students. In particular, I wish to express my thanks to Gudrun Dreher,
M.A., to Marietta Memer, M.A., and to Dr. Josef Raab.