Time-Space and Audience in Dickinsonis Vacuity Scenes

You'd scarce suspect
It was a Pit - with fathoms under it -

(J1712)

Dickinson's obsession with figuring negative space(s) is attested to by her literalization of the abyss: "chaos," "chasm," "fissure," "circumference," "notch," and "blank" are some of the terms that she uses to articulate her sense that experience is both a plunge into the abyss and a controlled crossing over it. ¹ The terms also interrelate with wider patterns, as when she telescopes psychic processes into a tangible moment in which the speaker is threatened with annihilation by a black hole inside and/or outside her, or when she juxtaposes existential, psychological, and sometimes metaphysical opposites that accompany these processes. Such devices affect the reader's perception of space and often reverse our spatial hierarchies and our sense of life's movement in time. As she puts it in one poem: "Do we die - / Or is this Death's Experiment - / Reversed - in Victory?" (J550). Thus reordered, or "Reversed," those patterns of development in time and co-existence in space have a multifold effect. They bear not only upon poetic arrangement (into sequence, repetition, circularity, line, and poem-format), as noted by some of Dickinson's best critics, ² but also upon the perception and sometimes even the ontology of reality itself.

The shift in Dickinson criticism over the last decades, from the mythologization of the poet and the question of her biography to new (historical, feminist, and linguistic) aspects, has also given us a fresh perspective on the role of space in her poetry. ³ Of special interest are Susan Juhasz's The Undiscovered Continent and Margaret Freeman's "Metaphor Making Meaning." Juhasz treats Dickinson's exploration of the self, through the materialization of the "landscape" of the mind, as a setting, an analogue, and a vehicle for Dickinson's multi-dimensional experience. Freeman's cognitive study examines Dickinson's replacement of the temporal metaphors current in her religious environment by spatial schemes that accord with the latest scientific discoveries of her day.

Each of these different concerns with space points to a specific rapport between a focus of interest in Dickinson's world and the forms and means by which this new interest is produced. For Juhasz, the focus is the language of the mind as a new tangible and ontological option; for Freeman, it is space as an aspect of Dickinson's physical and conceptual universe. They also differ concerning the relations between the axes of time and space. Juhasz does not find the two mutually exclusive; on the contrary, she sees them as mutually dependent. She treats time as a tool with which to lend tangible dimensionality to Dickinson's mental space. But in another context, she regards the spatial dimension of the mind as among the chief ways to form "settings for Dickinson's most significant experience," and surely "experience" occurs both in space and time (Undiscovered Continent 1). If Juhasz suggests that these dimensions, with their striking mutual influence, perform divergent functions, Freeman, by contrast, argues for the operation of one axis at the expense of the other. This replacement of time by space allegedly occurs via the substitution of the "Life is a Journey through Time" metaphor—which entails the idea that life is a path that has a specific, predetermined destination—by the metaphor "Life is a Voyage in Space." But, although Freeman presents this shift between metaphorical mappings as a shift in Dickinson's conception of time, I think it ought to be understood as a poetic device that, like other devices in Dickinson's work, figures neither as an end in itself (i.e., as "spatial" conceptualization per se), nor as a weapon against temporal thinking. On the contrary, I would argue, space in Dickinson's poetics is used as a major tool with which to materialize time, and it interacts with the time-axis in several ways. ⁴

First, Dickinson...