Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare

Chapter Five - "Pity me, however, I have finished Ramona. Would that like Shakespeare, it were just published!": Shakespeare and Women Writers

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [First Page] [95], (1) Lines: 0 to ——— 4.05pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TE [95], (1) c h a p t e r f i v e “Pity me, however, I have finished Ramona. Would that like Shakespeare, it were just published!” Shakespeare and Women Writers I n a November 1871 letter to Higginson, alluding to Helen Hunt Jackson ’s recently published Verses (1870), Dickinson wrote, “Mrs. Hunt’s Poems are stronger than any written by Women since Mrs - Browning, with the exception of Mrs. Lewes - but truth like Ancestor’s Brocades can stand alone” (L368). Despite her praise for the achievement of these women poets, she concludes by noting, “While Shakespeare remains Literature is firm - An Insect cannot run away with Achilles’ Head.” It appears that compared with Shakespeare even her favorite women writers are no more than pathetic and ludicrous insects. This is strange considering the poet’s admiration for Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot.1 And Dickinson makes this remark to Higginson , a great supporter of women’s writing, who regarded his protégée, Hunt, as “one of the most gifted poetesses in America” (Leyda II 131). Perhaps ambivalence , envy, and competitiveness accompanied her praise of and gratitude toward these women.2 Dickinson’s relationship with Helen Hunt Jackson is particularly interesting : they shared a common mentor, exchanged letters, and met at least three times.3 Jackson offered Dickinson much encouragement to publish, begging her to “sing aloud” (L444a) and pleading with her to “send a poem” for inclusion in the No Name series, A Masque of Poets (L573a); later, in 1884, Jackson even asked to be Dickinson’s literary executor (L937a).4 Jackson, however, herself had an ambiguous attitude toward the poet. In 1879, after receiving two of Dickinson’s poems about birds, “One of the ones that Midas touched” (F1488) and “A Route of Evanescence” (F1489), she wrote, “We have blue birds here - I might have had the sense to write something about one myself, but never did: and now I never can. For which I am inclined to envy, and perhaps hate you” (L601a). In 1884, after having read Jackson’s new novel, Ramona, Dickinson told her, “Pity me, however, I have finished Ramona. Would that like Shakespeare, it were just published!” (L976). Ramona was about the plight of Native American tribes in America, and Jackson sought political change 95 96 c h a p t e r f i v e 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [96], (2) Lines: 19 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Short Page PgEnds: [96], (2) by presenting the disgraceful way they were being treated by Americans and their government.5 The meaning of Dickinson’s remark surely baffled Jackson6 ; were Ramona like Shakespeare’s works, could she then read it repeatedly and find it remained new and exciting? In 1895 Lavinia suggested that Emily “considered Mrs. Jackson’s intellect very rare . . . [and] often spoke in praise of Ramona.”7 But perhaps, like Lowell, Dickinson felt that “the highest office of a great poet is to show us how much variety, freshness, and opportunity abides in the obvious and familiar,” and believed that Shakespeare “invents nothing , but seems rather to re-discover the world about him, and his penetrating vision gives to things of daily encounter something of the strangeness of new creation.”8 She may have been harshly contrasting the continuing readability of Shakespeare, his infinite novelty, with Jackson’s recently published but already “finished” novel. Perhaps, unlike the plight of the Native Americans, the suffering of Shakespeare’s characters was unendingly alive for her. Dickinson’s contrasting of Shakespeare with women writers was timely, considering that women like Browning and Eliot were often, as a compliment , termed “female Shakespeares.”9 Like Shakespeare, they were specifically praised for their skills at characterization, their powers of sympathetic identi fication, their moral insight, and their representation of complex emotional states.10 In 1850, unaware at the time that Jane Eyre had been written by Charlotte Brontë, an essayist in The Indicator...