Dickinson's Bawdy: Shakespeare and Sexual Symbolism in Emily Dickinson's Writing to Susan Dickinson

The idea that Emily Dickinson's sexually charged love lyrics might have been written for a woman shocked the academic community when Rebecca Patterson published The Riddle of Emily Dickinson in 1951 . Patterson argues that the primary love and poetic inspiration of Dickinson's life was her female friend Kate Anthon—a thesis that provoked some scathing critical responses. ¹ Now, five decades later, scholarly elaboration on Patterson's breakthrough revelation has made the homoeroticism in Dickinson's letters and verse impossible to ignore. Most Dickinson scholars will concede that at least one of the loves and poetic inspirations of Dickinson's life was indeed a woman; however, the focus has shifted from Kate Anthon to Dickinson's sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, as the primary object of Dickinson's desire. ² At this point, John Cody, Lillian Faderman, Vivian R. Pollak, Paula Bennett, Judith Farr, Ellen Louise Hart, and Martha Nell Smith have all argued convincingly that Susan was one of the central, if not the central erotic relationship in the poet's life. The recent publication of Hart and Smith's Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson should eliminate any doubt as to the life-long intimacy between Emily and Susan Dickinson and forever put to rest the myth of an unreconciled rift between them after Susan's marriage to Austin Dickinson in 1856 . ³

How we should characterize Dickinson's desire for Susan still incites debate almost as passionate as the love lyrics themselves, however. Many critics continue to reject the term "lesbian," preferring to place Dickinson's homoerotic feelings under the rubric of "romantic friendship." They maintain that female friendships of Dickinson's era were often passionate and even erotic, but ultimately free of both sex and self-consciousness. ⁴ Faderman has been the most influential proponent of this classification because Dickinson remains a centerpiece of her "romantic friendship" thesis. ⁵ Despite the inclusion of Dickinson in her "lesbian" anthology of literature, she writes in the headnote, "Perhaps [Dickinson] was somewhat self-conscious about this poetry, not because she formulated it specifically as lesbian (she would have seen it as an expression of romantic friendship), but because it revealed so much of her" (Chloe Plus Olivia 44 ). Similarly, Farr likens Dickinson's "affection" for Susan to that of a "lover," but carefully qualifies her claim in a note that reads, "I do not mean to suggest, as some recent critics have, that this affection was distinctly lesbian, though Dickinson's wistful delight in both Susan's appearance and her kisses have their measure of eros" ("Emily Dickinson's 'Engulfing' Play" 237 , 249 n16 ). Pollak suggests, "Within some letters and some poems, Dickinson probably views herself as a suppressed lesbian," but she continues, "Carnality . . . was not a major focus of her relationship with Sue," and adds shortly thereafter, "Lesbianism, for Dickinson, was one of the roads not taken" (79-80).

Other critics, more liberal in their interpretations of Dickinson's sexual allusion and willing to use the term "lesbian" or "homosexual," have been reluctant to confirm her conscious use of sexual imagery and metaphor, often qualifying their claims of homoeroticism in letters and poems with the suggestion that it was probably produced unconsciously. For example, in her second book on Dickinson's imagery, Patterson titles her chapter on the sexual "Geography of the Unconscious," and she asserts, "[Dickinson's] unconscious mind dwelt obsessively on certain deprivations, and the images plucked from that unconscious mind betrayed her obsessiveness in clusters of genital symbolism" (Emily Dickinson's Imagery 45 ). Cody's psychoanalytic biography discusses Dickinson's "bisexuality" at length, but he also views it as largely "repressed." Cody argues that the "Austin-Susan-Emily triangle was, in essence, a revival of the old oedipal dilemma," and he suggests that Dickinson suffered from "split identifications...