Emily Dickinson and the Origins of Language

Emily Dickinson's intellectual milieu devoted considerable attention to the origins and development of language. A 52-page essay on the topic appeared in Thomas Upham's Elements of Mental Philosophy (416-68), used as a textbook at Amherst Academy. ¹ That the fifteen-year-old Dickinson reports studying "mental philosophy" in a letter to Abiah Root suggests her introduction to Upham (L6). Upham in turn refers frequently to Dugald Stewart, another denizen of the Amherst curriculum, whose essay on language takes up much of the third volume of his seven volume Works. Additional writers available to Dickinson, such as Jonathan Edwards, Isaac Watts, Samuel Johnson, Henry Home, Lord Kames and Samuel Newman, deal importantly with the subject, as do Thomas De Quincey and, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson. ² Dickinson's letters also mention Francis Bacon (L721), Jeremy Bentham, to whom she compares her brother Austin (L107), and Adam Smith (L76), all of whom, along with thinkers she would have read about -- James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Johann Gottfried Herder -- wrote on the origins and growth of language. ³ It is impossible to imagine that Emily Dickinson, who claimed "for several years, my Lexicon -- was my only companion" (L261) and invoked "loved Philology" (Fr1715), would not have been familiar with the main lines of current thought on the subject. Her treatment of linguistic motifs in her poems (Fr277, 431, 638, 1102, 1476, 1689, 1715) substantiates her interest and sophistication.

Our understanding of Dickinson's willfully creative diction, syntax, grammar, and punctuation rewards the effort of piecing together what she was encouraged by her education and milieu to think about the origins of language. For one thing, the tradition in which she was raised offered powerful alternatives to the scant and linguistically jejune speculations of Emerson, whose theoretical influence on her was, in this area, limited. Enlightenment and early Romantic reflections on the origins of language reinforced and focused Dickinson's coalescing poetic intuitions; there is no reason not to suppose that her stylistic program drew to a significant degree on her understanding and application of the body of theory available to her. The Emily Dickinson whom this paper describes was well-read, intelligent and at least as interested in language as in religion, nature, gender, and other ostensible touchstones for her art.

The tenet of linguistic theory most important to Dickinson's art is the idea of natural signs. Natural signs take center stage in the history of ideas because they carry over from religious theories of "Adamic" language accepted by Watts and Edwards to empiricist psychology after Locke. Natural signs also bridge the gap between the enlightenment views of Upham and Stewart and the romanticism which Emerson and De Quincey derive from Herder and other German philosophers. In brief, the theory of natural signs posits motivated signifier-signified relationships in primitive linguistic acts like the cries and grunts of early humans, the gestures of the deaf, the facial expressions of infants, hieroglyphics, and the names given by Adam to the animals. When Emerson asserts in Nature that "words are signs of natural facts" (1:17), he is invoking a doctrine reaching directly back to the enlightenment theories of Etienne Condillac and William Warburton. ⁴ Dugald Stewart pinpoints the formula which permits the theory to carry contradictory ideological freight by pointing out that discussions of early language amount to "conjectural history," philosophical inquiry into the principles of human nature rather than study of the documented past (3:34). As complex and controversial as the doctrine of natural signs is in the century and a half of speculation Dickinson inherits, it continually reiterates the notion that certain linguistic forms come earlier, and thus are more basic to human thought and communication, than others.

The theory of linguistic origination and growth available to Dickinson almost universally gives primacy to nouns over other parts of speech. Indeed Jeremy Bentham conceives such a hatred for verbs that he...