Dickinson and the Poetics of Whiteness

Emily Dickinson's response to the racial rhetoric of the American Civil War has received comparatively little attention. ¹ The reclusive Dickinson, it is often thought, had turned inward to pursue no cause but her own. Or not much of one, for after all she did write a demonstrable handful of poems about the war itself, and she was in active correspondence with an Abolitionist hero for some of it. ² Yet her primary concern, many of us have said, was with an inner Civil War, with the struggle to articulate herself, and to discover in art what she called "the Art of Peace" (Fr665). I, for example, have noted that "though her most driven years as an artist included and may indeed have coincided with the period of the American Civil War -- almost half of her . . . poems appear to have been written from 1861 to 1865 -- she has almost nothing to say about its precipitating causes, its events, or its consequences. Instead, she flaunts a schismatic style which announces that she has seceded from 'their story' into hers" (Anxiety 18). Thus in my earlier work I presented a Dickinson who as an artist sought to transform a moral and political conflict in which men were the leading players into a more gender -- neutral war of words. Though I still believe that Dickinson's style mobilizes contrasts -- for example the contrast between the news she knows, the news that stays news, and the ephemeral battle reports she hasn't got time to bother with -- in this talk I would like to examine Dickinson's constructions of whiteness in order to suggest that she occupies many subject positions and that one of them is that of a white person who identifies her psychological difference from other people with racial and ethnic others. Thus when she writes, "A solemn thing - it was - I said - / A Woman - white - to be - / And wear - if God should count me fit - / Her blameless mystery" (Fr307), her language encourages us to push against the obvious reading and to liberate the perverse text embedded within her poem. Whiteness functions as an ambivalent sign of historical privilege; the poet, I intend to argue, is ambivalent about her whiteness. Let's look at this somewhat representative poem more closely.

A solemn thing - it was - I said -
A Woman - white - to be -
And wear - if God should count me fit -
Her blameless mystery -

A timid thing - to drop a life
Into the mystic well -
Too plummetless - that it come back -
Eternity - until -

I pondered how the bliss would look -
And would it feel as big -
When I could take it in my hand -
As hovering - seen - through fog -

And then - the size of this "small" life -
The Sages - call it small -
Swelled - like Horizons - in my breast -
And I sneered - softly - "small"!

(Fr307) ³

Written in about 1861 and transcribed by Dickinson into a fascicle beginning "The maddest dream - recedes - unrealized" (Fr304), this poem was first published in 1896 by Mabel Loomis Todd, who included only the first two stanzas and titled it "Wedded." ⁴ Since its fuller publication in 1947, ⁵ Dickinson's meditation on solemnity has inspired a fair amount of commentary, much of it interested in Dickinson's supposed spirituality, which in recent years has been linked to issues of sexuality and gender. Perhaps the boldest interpretation along these lines has been offered by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who theorize that whiteness signifies gender and then fit this particular poem into that comprehensive scheme. They remind us that Dickinson's habit of dressing all in white seems to date from about 1862, and along with other critics suggest that for Dickinson whiteness connotes a rejection of various forms of worldliness. I agree with this line of argument, but would like to suggest that Dickinson herself undermines the value of this rejection by figuring whiteness as a burden. To be blameless is to be less than...