The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Gertrude Stein (review)

Shawn Alfrey. The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Gertrude Stein. Bucknell, 2000. 183 pp.

In her article, "Against Calvary: ED and the Sublime," Shawn Alfrey described Emily Dickinson as "a partisan of the sublime," a phrase which conjures, for me, an image of the poet as a guerrilla fighter in wartime; it is an image in keeping with the experience of the sublime described in Dickinson's poetry: a moment of ontological shock, awe, and erotic violence (1998, 48). She also pointed out that many scholars agree that Dickinson reflected on and structured her poetry around the sublime's ontological intensity, but disagree on the nature and form of that sublime.

Alfrey's The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H.D., and Gertrude Stein, is a theoretical study of the history and structure of the sublime, an aesthetic mode characterized by the relationship of subject and object. In her book, she explores how these three American writers strategically challenged and revisioned the boundaries of aesthetic and rhetorical power which are associated with the traditional sublime. By tracing the history and cultural forms of the sublime (Chapter 1) and more recent investigations of the sublime's power through psychoanalytic theory and feminist theory (Chapter 2), Alfrey offers a complex philosophical framework from which to theorize how these writers create their "dynamic sociability", a female sublime characterized by empathy, intersubjectivity, and a sociable relation to otherness rather than one organized around the domination of the object. Using close readings and a synthesis of critical commentary on the sublime, Alfrey argues that Dickinson, H.D., and Stein (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) respond to and revise the sublime's patriarchal power. In her psychoanalytic approach, she joins Patricia Yaeger ("Toward a Female Sublime," Gender and Theory, 1989) and Joanne Feit Diehl (Women Poets and the American Sublime, 1990) who share her interest in the ways these women poets "confront and negotiate the gendering of the sublime" (158). In her chapter study of Dickinson, which is the focus of this review, she compliments and expands on the work of Diehl, Margaret Homans (Women Writers and Poetic Identity, 1980), Sharon Cameron (Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles, 1992), and Gary Lee Stonum (The Dickinson Sublime, 1991).

Alfrey studies the history of the sublime and the political and ideological imperatives behind the historical choice of subject matter, genre, and aesthetic mode. Not surprisingly, her historical overview of the sublime includes careful attention to its cultural associations with classical humanism, rationalism, and imperialism, which often excluded women's ontological realities. With the ambitious purpose of establishing the major positions on the sublime and the cultural forms of this aesthetic mode, Alfrey surveys how the sublime has been associated, at least since the eighteenth century, with psychological and physiological transcendence, and the primacy of the individual subject over its contemplated object. In chapters one and two, Alfrey surveys numerous critical commentaries on the sublime from Longinus, Emmanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, to the studies of the oedipal sublime by Thomas Weiskel and Harold Bloom, and to recent feminist and psychoanalytic theorists, Alice Jardine, Julia Kristeva, and others. While her synthesis of a breadth of critical commentary is admirable, her attention to the work of individual theorists, especially to the psychoanalytic and postmodern theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, is often surprisingly brief (although occasionally supplemented by excellent notes); her first two chapters, which are presented to establish the theoretical framework for her studies of the poets, are often more provocative of further study than they are completely successful for establishing her present one.

"Emily Dickinson's Hesitation: Toward an Empathetic Sublime," the title of her chapter on Dickinson suggests one of Alfrey's methods of analysis. She begins with an invocation of her critical precursors in the work of Gary Lee Stonum and Patricia Yaeger, and uses their positions to...