"Reverence for each Other Being the Sweet Aim:" Dickinson Face to Face with the Masculine

Oh, did I offend it -- [Did'nt it want me to tell it the truth] Daisy -- Daisy -- offend it -- who bends her smaller life to his (it's) meeker (lower) every day -- who only asks a task -- [who] something to do for love of it -- some little way she cannot guess to make that master glad -- .

(L248)

Emily Dickinson's Master letters have often been regarded as ultimate examples of her self-abasement before a man and they would seem to support views that she is a victim of patriarchy or unrequited love.¹ However, such interpretations do not acknowledge the insistent way that she faces and engages with a masculine other. I contend that when Dickinson addresses the Master she takes on a feminine discursive role in order to renegotiate her relegated position as the inferior other in the sexual binary. Her goal is to communicate with a man, to educate him on how to love, and to make him hear her and acknowledge her difference.

A significant discursive model that enables her project is the Song of Songs, which provides a prototype for her call for an ethical meeting between the sexes. In recent times, Luce Irigaray has delineated the features of such an ethical encounter, and her philosophy also illuminates the strategies that Dickinson uses to have her claims heard. Rather than seeing Dickinson's Master as an unknown individual or as a fantasy, it is as easy to see him as every man who made her, or every woman, his projection.

It is often assumed that Dickinson's response to the restrictions of her sex was to flee femininity or to refuse adult womanhood because of her fear of men.² In the Master letters her strategy is not to transcend her sex but to re-occupy it and draw attention to the feminine position. Recent criticism has acknowledged Dickinson's excessive appropriation of femininity but the usual trajectory is that her aim is to discard it in favor of a gender-free realm.³ Irigaray illustrates how there are advantages for a woman in deploying hyperbolic femininity to inhabit and engage with the discourses that produce her. For Irigaray, liberation is not achieved by transcending sexual difference but on the contrary, she calls for the marking of difference.

Her view is that if we move too quickly to gender ambivalence we risk replicating that same "indifference" that has always subsumed the feminine beneath the self-as-same masculine subjectivity (Speculum 26-7). The feminine is represented as the inverse, underside of the masculine (This Sex 159). Irigaray says that "the feminine finds itself defined as lack, deficiency, or as imitation and negative image of the subject"(This Sex 78). She explains that "female sexuality has always been conceptualized on the basis of masculine parameters" and this is why she suggests that the feminine must have its moment of becoming first (This Sex 23).⁴ It is only by "crossing back through" feminine inscriptions that we can do this because to transcend them is to give up the few resources we have, and besides, extricating oneself from socially regulated identity is not so easy (This Sex 77).

There has been a tendency to see Dickinson escaping from social constraints. She has been depicted as pronouncing her own laws (Runzo 65), and elsewhere she has an erotic persona that is "unfettered" by convention, and she is allegedly free from the limitations of her culture (Pagnattaro 32). However, autonomy is not always so readily attainable, and Dickinson's work is useful for illustrating how a woman can move within the restrictions of historically specific laws and conventions. She causes disturbance at vulnerable points and takes advantage of the gaps, contradictions and convergences in discourses. These instances are not about an individualistic avoidance of oppressive structures, but instead they involve an interaction with...