Insane in the Membrane: Emily Dickinson Dissecting Brains

This essay examines a major (but hitherto neglected) focal point of Dickinson’s poetry: the brain. Reading Dickinson’s cerebral poetry through the psychiatric discourses of her time, it argues that her explorations of the human mind—especially in states of aberration—disclose not only current medical knowledge but an ongoing poetic debate over the organic limits of consciousness, reason, and the soul in Dickinson’s work. By contextualizing the vivid images through which Dickinson analyzes the mind, we find her actively negotiating medical theory. Instead of reading disorder or psychosis into the poet’s enigmatic life and oeuvre (thereby inevitably recasting Higginson’s “partially cracked” poetess), we can then see Dickinson experimenting with dualism and monism, religion and materialism, free will and biological determinism.