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"The Eyes accost -- and Sunder:" Unveiling Emily Dickinson's Poetics
- The Emily Dickinson Journal
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2000
- pp. 21-48
- 10.1353/edj.2000.0003
- Article
- Additional Information
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The Emily Dickinson Journal 9.1 (2000) 21-48
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"The Eyes accost - and Sunder:
" Unveiling Emily Dickinson's Poetics
Lisa Harper
Emily Dickinson's life is intimately bound up with questions of seeing and being seen. Her problematic and complex seclusion after 1860 has been the subject of considerable speculation and theoretical inquiry, and it has informed the reading of her poetry by critics both sympathetic to and critical of her withdrawal from society.1 Biography aside, much of Dickinson's poetry can be read as a response to being the object of visual scrutiny. As Cynthia Hogue claims, "Dickinson perceived the dynamics of the gaze" and its objectifying, controlling effects (30-1). Repeatedly, Dickinson interrogates the consequences of being a "being who [is] looked at, in the spectacle of the world" (Lacan, Four 75) and her poetry develops defensive strategies in response to being so positioned. In so doing, Dickinson's poetry represents a gendered relation to vision and visibility and proleptically responds to two questions central to feminist theories of spectatorship: What does the woman under the gaze, behind the veil, experience? How does she look back at the spectator(s)? Significantly, Dickinson's speaker must defend herself against the consequences of spectatorial violation; while at the same time preserve her poetic voice. Thus, the problems associated with being a spectacle and claiming spectatorship are intimately linked with the problem of being heard as woman poet.
Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its concept of the "gaze," has offered critics and theorists a compelling and useful model for analyzing the dynamics of spectatorship. For Lacan, the gaze calls attention to the lack, or what is missing from the visual representation. It calls attention to what lies beyond it, to what eludes the subject, and, therefore, it marks the emergence of the subject's desire. It seeks what cannot fill the eye, what spills over or exceeds the range of the visible: "what one looks at is what cannot be seen" (Four 182). [End Page 21] And because the gaze is not "clear or penetrating" but rather "turned back on itself," Lacan's model of the gaze also offers a way to understand the anxiety produced by in the spectator by the spectacle (Copjec 36). The gaze reveals the spectator's originary lack, the split that founds his identity. However, structured as it is around the dynamics of lack, Lacan's model has little to say about the gaze of a woman. Moreover, historically, Lacanian-inspired models of spectatorship have implicitly or explicitly taken the perceiving subject to be male, and the desiring gaze is constructed as the gaze of a male subject at a female object. This model of desire and lack, constructed around the present/absent phallus, clearly and misogynistically assumes that the heterosexual male is the actor in the psychosexual drama. "Woman" remains the passive spectacle at the center, never to assume spectatorial agency.
In an early and widely cited critique of early models of spectatorship and cinema, Laura Mulvey articulates the problem for the female subject within Lacanian-inspired models of spectatorship.2 Approaching such theories of spectatorship through Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Mulvey argues that narrative cinema structures visual pleasure through Freudian models of voyeurism and fetishism. The spectator's pleasure is thus dependent on the image of "woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man" (25). The woman's lack, she argues, "produces the phallus as a symbolic presence" (14). "Woman," therefore, "can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it" (14). This position condemns her to remain a "bearer, not maker, of meaning" (15), and it roundly excludes her from entering the symbolic order.3
Within these theoretical models of spectatorship, rigidly constructed around the privileging of the phallus, there is little room for the active gaze of a desiring woman and no place for her desire. In response to this theoretical blind spot, a number of feminist theorists have attempted to theorize a response to the question that is at the...