"Glorious, Afflicting, Beneficial": Triangular Romance and Dickinson's Rhetoric of Apocalypse

In 1862, Dickinson wrote Higginson: "You inquire my books—For Poets—I have Keats—and Mr and Mrs Browning. For Prose—Mr Ruskin—Sir Thomas Browne—and the Revelations"

(L404).

Emily Dickinson's early letters offer us a deeper understanding of the social roots of her mature poetry. Though rarely considered in relation to her poetry, three of these letters in particular (8, 34, 36) share illuminating commonalities in imagery, style, and rhetoric with Dickinson's mature work. The poet both enjoys and is prevented from enjoying the object of her desire; much like her later poems, these letters embody comfort and torment, eternity and time, consummation and mortification, in an unstable and, to use Sharon Cameron's term, "uniquely vertiginous" textual experience (Choosing Not Choosing 177). Alluding to imagined moments of post-mortem union, expressing desire from the point of view of the third member of a triangle, Dickinson represents herself as both outsider and intimate. In these letters, Dickinson imagines a place where the strictures of time and place do not hold, where language embodies an eroticized apocalyptic presence. The three early letters that we will consider all rely on the apocalyptic as a rhetorical escape from time: the first to Abiah Root in 1845 (L8), the second a Valentine published in The Indicator (Amherst College) and addressed to a young man whom both Thomas Johnson and Alfred Habegger speculate might be George H. Gould (L34) and dated February 1850, and the third to Abiah Root and dated 7 and 17 May 1850 (L36) during a period of religious awakening, the period during which Dickinson's father pledged his life to Christ and became a member of the Congregational Church (L35n; Habegger 238-244). Habegger discusses 1850 as a year of "dazzling compositions . . . those of a young person trying out her voice, her voices . . ." (230-1). These early letters bear a striking resemblance to the attitudes and rhetorical strategies of the mature poet.

The year 1850, the date of two of the three letters, was formative for Dickinson. Unlike many of her closest friends, she refused a public confession of sin and profession of faith. At the same time, both her sister Lavinia and her father (at the relatively late age of forty-seven) participated in public conversion experiences. Lavinia attempted to persuade her brother Austin and sister Emily to join in her acceptance of Christ. ¹ Years later, in his funeral sermon at the death of Mr. Dickinson, Reverend Jenkins refers to a letter addressed to Reverend Colton in which Mr. Dickinson, now a member of Congress, looks back on that time of religious awakening in Amherst: "I am even when I write, melted to tears at the remembrance of what we saw and felt at the working of God's spirit among us in 1850" (Richard Sewall I.69n). Sewall tells us that George Gould, reportedly Emily's suitor in 1850, and the likely recipient of the one of the letters that we will consider by the young Dickinson, recorded his recollection of the conversion in his notebooks in 1877:

While Hon. E.D. of Amherst was converted—who had been long under conviction—His pastor said to him in his study—"You want to come to Christ as a lawyer—but you must come to him as a poor sinner—get down on your knees & let me pray for you, & then pray for yourself." (I.66) ²

Like her father in his youth and much of his adulthood, Emily Dickinson staves off public profession of sin and conversion. Nevertheless, she frequently represents herself, sometimes ironically and sometimes not, as "under conviction."

In the culture of the Connecticut Valley during the 1840s and 1850s, public conversion remained a criterion for social legitimation. To be fully included in the community, one had to represent in a public way one's inner experience first of conviction before...