18 pages • 36 minutes read
After great pain, a formal feeling comes
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Background
Authorial Context: Representations of Emily Dickinson and Pain
As a renowned and enigmatic poet, many people have created narratives about Emily Dickinson’s life, and their varying depictions relate to pain. In “Neither Mad Nor Motherless,” the contemporary Dickinson scholar Jerome Charyn engages with John Cody’s book After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (1971). Charyn argues that Cody “presents Dickinson as a mental case whose only manner of survival was writing her cryptic and very private poems” (Charyn, Jerome. “Neither Mad Nor Motherless.” LitHub, 2016). In My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 1985), a collage-like assessment of Dickinson by American poet Susan Howe, Howe criticizes scholars like Cody, who distort Dickinson’s life to fit “the legend of deprivation and emotional disturbance” (Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. New York, New Directions, 1985, p. 24). While Charyn and Howe contest the “legend,” the feminist scholars Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, following Cody, advance it. In Gilbert and Gubar’s canonical text about 19th-century female writers, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), they refer to Dickinson as “truly a madwoman (a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in a room in her father’s house)” (Charyn).
Scholars like Cody, Gilbert, and Gubar argue Dickinson’s pain was psychological. They believed she had a mental illness, and as she never left her family home and lived on her own, there was no “letting go” (Line 13). The pain stayed with Dickinson until her death. Gilbert and Gubar also present Dickinson as a victim of sexism. Thus, Dickinson’s imputed distress wasn’t only psychological but a product of her society’s unequal gender norms. Presumably, if Dickinson had been a man, she wouldn’t have been “trapped […] in her father’s house” (Charyn).
Meanwhile, scholars like Howe and Charyn present Dickinson as a capable, cogent person. Her pain isn’t exclusively a product of sexism or a mental condition, but it’s a part of her scholarly life. Dickinson isn’t the passive recipient of distress, but she actively engages with the struggles inherent in life and thought, and she confronts them as a confident philosopher. Dickinson’s niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, reinforces the erudite attitude toward pain in her memoir Emily Dickinson Face to Face (1932). As with Howe and Charyn, Bianchi doesn’t depict her aunt as a victim. Rather, Dickinson is a playful person who intentionally limited her social circle so she could explore fraught, abstract issues like pain.
Philosophical Context: The Fragmentation of Trauma and the Spirituality of Pain
Dickinson’s portrayal of acute distress links to The Problem of Pain (1940)—a book by the European writer and theologian C. S. Lewis. In Dickinson’s poem, the pain suddenly appears. Her speaker doesn’t assign the pain a cause: It’s simply there. Lewis, too, tries to grapple with the reason behind pain. He connects suffering to Christianity. People experience distress not because the Christian god is malevolent but due to the inherent imperfection of human life. By confronting trauma, people build character and heighten their spirituality. Dickinson’s poem features a reference to Jesus Christ, and a positive reading of the Christ lines (Lines 3-4) suggests pain is spiritually enlightening, bringing the person close to Jesus. Dickinson also compares pain to “Freezing persons” (Line 12) surviving extremely cold conditions. In keeping with Lewis’s argument, the simile implies that surviving and absorbing pain makes people stronger.
In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), the contemporary American theorist Judith Butler touches on the impact of “great pain” (Line 1) or trauma. Butler argues that trauma often transcends a coherent narrative. In other words, deep distress precludes any sort of cogent representation. Dickinson’s portrayal of pain in a nonstandard lyric poem correlates to Butler’s presentation of trauma. Dickinson doesn’t address pain directly. Her speaker doesn’t say what it is but shows it through similes and metaphors. The figurative imagery reinforces the claim that people can’t represent their trauma directly.
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