Re-playing The Bible: My Emily Dickinson

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.

(ED L 374; P 1212)

"Heaven" has different Signs—to me—

(P 575)

What happens when women poets rewrite the culture? That is the question I have been asking myself for over ten years, in one form or another. Today I would like to offer a brief sense of the connection between Emily Dickinson and my own current work as a poet and critic in the field of feminist religion, or the higher sacreligiousness, as one might call it, particularly in the area of re-imagining the Bible.

In 1985 I began a manuscript of biblical revisionism called The Nakedness of the Fathers, an experimental compound of analytic commentary, fantasy, autobiography, and poetry. This work in progress is an attempt to discover, through writing, what I love and hate in Judaism, its God, its patriarchs, its stories—stories central to the core of my own imaginative life and that of "Judeo-Christian" culture. My intention is to discover what those stories mean to me when I read them with my own sensibility as a non-observant Jew, a woman, a poet, a feminist, a human being committed to radical social change, but also someone for whom spiritual experience is real. I began the work shortly after finishing Stealing the Language. In one sense it is an extension of what I was doing with the idea of women poets as revisionist mythmakers in that book, and what I myself had done in poems on Odysseus and Penelope, Orpheus and Euridice, Eros and Psyche. But writing about the Bible is obviously much more dangerous for a woman than writing about classic myth. You can invent a new interpretation of Orpheus and Euridice and nobody much cares. If you say that God the Father swallowed God the Mother in prehistory, it is another matter.

Engaged in this project, I found myself on the one hand writing obsessively, redefining everything as I went, and on the other hand frightened. For I had no right to write; or so I feared. Biblical scholars, theologians, "real" Jews, all had some claim on this book that I lacked. They belonged to communities of intellect or ritual observance centered in scripture. They therefore had authority, where all I had was obsession.

At about this point I discovered that other women poets in America were doing similar work. This was immediately reassuring. Then it struck me that, of course, women poets had always appropriated the Bible for their own purposes. Here my critic's head joined my poet's head. In the small book that has resulted from my critical thinking about women poets and the Bible, The Bible and Feminist Revision: the Bucknell Lectures in Critical Theory, I look among other things at biblical appropriations by Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, H.D., and some contemporary women poets, including Lucille Clifton. I also develop a theory that women's biblical revisionism, takes three sometimes overlapping forms, which I call the hermeneutics of suspicion, the hermeneutics of desire, and the hermeneutics of indeterminancy. I suggest that these strategies are in fact paradigms for how we deal with male texts and male tradition in general. It is from Emily Dickinson's poetry that I was able to construct this formulation, and it is she who models the complexity of the relation of any subordinate to any dominant cultural position.

I

In her second letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, written in April 1862, Emily Dickinson describes her family: "They are religious, except me, and address an eclipse, every morning, whom they call their 'Father.'" Dickinson here is testing the waters of Higginson's tolerance for verbal mischief. This impudent representation of conventional religiousness might mean that Christians routinely lack any real notion of God; or that the God they worship remains (deliberately?) remote, invisible to them; or that they are actually worshipping their own shadows; or that there is no God. In her poems Dickinson is no less bold, no less impudent. The Bible is an antique...