A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson, and: The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (review)

At least partly in response to the advent of cultural studies, Dickinson scholars have attempted to reconstruct the cultural and historical milieu in which she wrote. Recently, A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson and The Gardens of Emily Dickinson have argued that Dickinson's personal trials and stylistic innovations intersect with a pattern of religious doubt, political theology, conservatism, female creativity, and poetic innovation in the culture at large.

A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson features essays by noted scholars who illuminate the poet's work by examining her historical era. Vivian Pollack and Marianne Noble, for example, engage the biographies of Habegger, Wolff, and Sewall, but fault critics who wish to argue that Dickinson chose certain ways of responding to the psychological trauma that inspired her art. Rather, they contend that "Dickinson's freedom was historically situated . . . and the choices she felt compelled to make were arduous indeed" (45). Like the other essays in the collection, this chapter makes the poet "representative of her socioeconomic and sexual class" (55). Responsible and somewhat conservative in their claims, Pollack and Noble place Dickinson historically, helping to explain many perennial questions about her life—including her refusal to marry Judge Otis "Phil" Lord, a Massachusetts Superior Court judge, despite their "gratifying sensual and emotional relationship" (51). This essay ultimately inspires "a curiosity about those personal and social histories that shaped her imagination of 'heaven,' including the various heavens she renounced, some of them more final than others" (55).

Other essays describe the theological controversies and political rhetoric that underlie Dickinson's poetry. Jane Donahue Eberwein gives a subtle and revealing account of the pressures to which evangelical Protestant orthodoxy was subject, including the theological legacy of Congregationalism, the Great Awakening, and the "higher" biblical criticism. Like Melville, Eberwein explains, Dickinson broke free from doctrinal beliefs as scientific and philosophical shifts began to crack the façade of her era's belief in salvation. The "unprecedented printing and distribution of scriptural texts in editions that often featured illustrations, maps, glossaries, and other apparatus to assist the reader" perhaps led the poet to invoke the sacred text as literary, as in "The Bible is an antique volume" (Fr1577) (83). Other poems, such as "I never saw a moor" (Fr800) and "Wild Night—Wild Nights" (Fr269), suggest heaven is accessible by a railroad ticket or navigational chart. Similarly, Shira Wolosky contends that Dickinson employs many registers of language—economic, theological, political—to resolve the disjunction between self and community evident in the Civil War. Invoking a typological model of American history, a "biblical and providential vision, encoding events in nature, history, and the self in an overarching divine pattern" (114), Wolosky's most insightful moments come when she reads individual poems. For example, "Robbed by Death" (Fr838) displays the paradox or contradiction of principles inherent in military conflict, which has been "Robbed by Liberty / For her Jugular Defences" (Fr838).

Other essays address the poet's politics, literary influence, and the reading practices of the period. Betsy Erkkila reconstructs the poet's conservative Whig politics and uncovers manifold allusions to political life. Here she explains the centrality of George Washington, icon of republicanism and late Federalism, for Dickinson and others, who believed "their authority, status, and power were being eroded by the new forces of democracy, party, self-interest, money, vulgarity, and demagoguery" (135). According to Erkkila, Dickinson's poems on "whiteness," "color," and "caste" would profit by similar analysis: for instance, "The Lamp burns sure—within—/ Tho' Serfs—supply the Oil" (Fr 247) "assumes the naturalness of the master/slave relation and the invisibility of slave labor—black, Irish, or working class—in the cultural production of white genius and American civilization" (151). Cheryl Walker traces the echoes of other nineteenth-century American women poets, however...