Ardent Spirits: Temperance in Emily Dickinson's Writing
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPPutting Dickinson into her immediate, local, contexts reveals a political sensibility that often defines itself negatively in relation to other positions without always seeming to promote a single or consistent allegiance of its own. Such contexts can yield new ways of analyzing the intersection of the political with the poetic in Dickinson, also in lyrics that have not previously been read as politically complex—such as, for example, those that take as their subject intoxication in ways that make them seem little more than jeux d’esprit. Alcohol and its consumption were not private concerns in the nineteenth-century, and Dickinson's poems on drunkenness reveal a much more set nuanced set of social and class allegiances than she is always given credit for.
There is a story told in the North of Ireland (and elsewhere, with variations) about a group of men who make their way into the carriage of a train and demand aggressively to know whether the traveller who sits there is a Catholic or a Protestant. "Neither," he answers: "I was born a Jew." And after this slight setback, one of the group-members recovers to ask: "Well, are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?"
The story is useful for two reasons. On the one hand, it conveniently illustrates the assumption many of us have that politics necessarily involves a consistent and willed alignment—and the dangers of interpreting any political position from a distance (linguistic or cultural or historical). On the other hand, it raises the possibility of a political identity that may be committed in one context but not in another, or that is not easily calibrated within conflicts between other forces.
Until very recently, discussions of Emily Dickinson's politics have tended toward the supposition of liberal alignment: the long-held view was that Dickinson's life and language embodied ideals of individualism that linked her implicitly with forms of social non-conformity.1 But some commentators have begun to complicate this picture, arguing that the same circumstances of biography and writing provide evidence of sympathies that are rather less than egalitarian.2 For example: in "I Came to buy a smile - today," Dickinson's speaker makes an offer that she claims would "be 'a Bargain' for a Jew!" (Fr258, about 1861). And in "The Day came slow - till Five o'clock" (Fr572, summer 1863), another speaker describes an orchard that "sparkled like a Jew." Dickinson appears to play on the anti-Semitic stereotype of the miserly in one poem, and on the acquisitive in the other. Both works were enclosed privately in letters to friends, but they were also recorded [End Page 95] in the fascicles.3 In other words, these are not throwaway or confidential remarks: they were preserved, which suggests a lack of self-consciousness about the images being deployed—a sense that they were acceptable to people other than herself. Had the references been made in letters only, one would have thought that Dickinson knew that they were suspect, but knew too that they would have no wider, public, impact.4 That she recorded them suggests an assumption of cultural approbation—and indeed others in her social circle felt confident enough to publish similar expressions, including Dickinson's correspondent Josiah Holland, who (under a pseudonym in Titcomb's letters to young people, single and married) wrote: "A young woman who treats every man with whom she trades as a gentleman, giving him her confidence, and throwing herself upon his honor and generosity, will stand the best possible chance to be fairly dealt by. I except Jews with China ware, and men of Celtic origin with short pipes in their mouths."5
Consider the following:
I have just seen a funeral procession go by of a negro baby, so if my ideas are rather dark you need not marvel . . . .
(L9)Father remarks quite briefly that "he thinks they have found their master...
