Experience and Faith: The Late-Romantic Imagination of Emily Dickinson (review)

In this ground-breaking, learned and passionately argued book, Richard Brantley places Emily Dickinson within the Anglo-American literary culture of late Romanticism on the basis of the Lockean-empirical aspects of her thought interacting with Arminian-evangelical Christian faith. He takes us back to the root meaning of "re-ligio" as a tying together of disunified forces, and he does so by a process of associative and analytic thinking that links Dickinson not only to Emerson but also to Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Alfred Lord Tennyson to establish the intellectual and emotional bases for her hard-earned optimism. He also posits significant links in approaches to religious faith between Dickinson and her "dearest earthly friend" (L807), the Rev. Charles Wadsworth. Watching with admiration how gracefully this poet's "image-EYE-nation" and "image-ination" traversed "the broadly experiential common ground between sensationalist epistemology and testimonial heart-religion," Brantley envisages her standing there "resolutely, yet resourcefully, after the manner of wily Odysseus, or of resilient Jeremiah, or of both" (180, 184). She emerges as the preeminent practitioner of Keatsian negative capability in her ability to cope with mysteries and doubts.

Although dividing his introduction, seven chapters, and conclusion into relatively brief sections for ease of reading and to allow readers to browse through this study in search of particular themes, Brantley presents a complex and challenging analysis grounded in his earlier books, especially Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism, and looking forward to a planned book further devoted to Wadsworth. Allusions to British and American poets and spiritual or philosophical figures proliferate, with the reader expected to grasp how Dickinson partook in a literary-intellectual continuum running from the eighteenth century through the twentieth. As a newcomer to the Dickinsonian critical conversation, Brantley displays his wide and respectful reading through frequent references to commentary on her writings—at times, perhaps, too much so for clear exposition of his own views. Fortunately, he provides frequent reprises of his argument and justifications for his approach, which resists modernist and post-modernist readings in favor of a sophisticated history-of-ideas methodology that shows how "the broadly experiential, spiritual as well as natural epistemology of the Anglo-American world explains Anglo-American Romanticism in general and Dickinson's poetry in particular" (10).

Probably the least controversial aspect of this study will be Brantley's placement of Dickinson in an empirical tradition that subjected both science and religion to demands for sensory demonstration and experiential conviction. Edward Hitchcock's influence on Amherst and Mount Holyoke educational culture can be recognized in her many scientific references and her demands for proof. Chapters Two, "Experimental Trust," and Three, "Nature Methodized," deal with empiricist tendencies in Dickinson's approaches to both nature and faith. Also well known is her immersion in the evangelical religious culture of the Connecticut Valley during the Second Awakening, though Brantley's understanding of her religious options and choices may puzzle as well as surprise readers acquainted with Roger Lundin's Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief and James McIntosh's Nimble Believing or with Sewall's, Wolff's, and Habegger's biographies—all of which situate her in a New England more than Anglo-American theological context.

Scholars of Dickinson's religious environment tend to characterize the post-Puritan religious culture of Dickinson's formative years in terms of an arminianized Calvinism that softened the fundamental Calvinist dogma asserting depraved man's total dependence on God for salvation by allowing for a person's cooperation in the work of salvation through exercise of free will. What is unusual here is the contrast Brantley draws between Calvinism, which he considers rigidly anti-experiential, and Arminianism, which he represents by contrast as flexible, experiential and better adapted to scientific and philosophical empiricism. Themes Brantley identifies with Arminianism include Dickinson's tendencies toward "individualism, progress, breadth, exaltation, joy, love, and presence – in a phrase, prophetic...