Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory (review)

Although Mary Loeffelholz is concerned here with placing Dickinson's poetry in the context of a newly emerging tradition of women poets, she wants to question that tradition or rather to investigate that tradition's questioning of itself. By close readings of Dickinson's poems that take advantage of feminist and deconstructive insights and an understanding of Lacanian theory, Loeffelholz reveals the ways in which Dickinson's poetry provides a powerful questioning of these theories as well.

The operative word in the title of this superbly discriminating reading of Dickinson's poetry is Boundaries, by which Loeffelholz means to indicate not limits but crossings. She asks, "If the border defines entities —female/male, self/other —that only exist relationally and in relation to the border, what about the border itself? Over and over in these poems and prose passages, borders and boundaries exist to be breached, or they make their existence (often painfully) felt through a breaching or violence" (111). Taking her cue from the poems, Loeffelholz herself is anxious to explore the ways in which Dickinson's works breach the boundaries not only between women's writing and the male literary tradition but also within the individual woman poet herself and within the tradition to which she belongs.

Although she takes up familiar subjects in Dickinson criticism —nature, death, the house, she reads not only with a completely new eye but selects from Dickinson's ample corpus little read and surprising poems. For example, the very early Poem 11, "I never told the buried gold," serves to introduce the way in which Dickinson desublimates or literalizes Emerson's economic vocabulary of nature. Or, treating the often discussed topic of Dickinson's withdrawal into her father's house and grounds, Loeffelholz steers clear of the debate about whether it was a liberating move, as Wendy Martin argues, or the act of a helpless agorophobic, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest, in order to explore the ways in which the retreat allowed Dickinson a peculiar purchase on the world. She examines poems in which Dickinson writes about the "organizing idea of a sound, usually melodic, overheard from within a human shelter that draws a fluid boundary for consciousness" (119). In this way, Loeffelholz is able to define what she calls Dickinson's "cure of the house" and its allied metaphysics of female identity. This chapter, entitled "An Ear Outside the Castle," displaces the primacy of the Emersonian eye with the ear in order to explore the imagination as inside one's identity and outside at the same time.

This study is informed by a reading of the tradition of women's poetry from which Dickinson emerged and to which she contributed, and it provides close readings of works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontës, as well as Adrienne Rich. The discussion is richly textured historically and delicately woven literarily. Loeffelholz has added immeasurably to our understanding of Dickinson and the whole tradition of women's writing. Her book will be essential reading for everyone interested in Dickinson's poetry, in particular, and women's poetry, in general.