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  • A Taste for "Poison":Dickinson's Departure from Orthodoxy
  • Rowena Revis Jones (bio)

Writing in 1859 to thank Mrs. Samuel Bowles for the gift of a newly published "little Book" bound in the "immortal colors" of green and gold, Emily Dickinson boldly praised its controversial author. "I never read before what Mr. Parker wrote," she confessed. "I heard that he was 'poison.' Then I like poison very well" (L213).

The small volume in question, Two Christmas Celebrations, was the work of Theodore Parker (1810-1860). Having graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1836, Parker returned to Cambridge two years later to listen attentively as Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous address. He involved himself vigorously in the fray that followed and eminently succeeded in deepening the controversy. Although subsequently in effect ostracized for his views, not only by those in the Orthodox Trinitarian camp but also by the majority of those within the Unitarian wing of his denomination, Parker insisted upon remaining within the church and in 1845 formed the Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society in Boston. Here he assumed an increasingly prominent role in current reform and antislavery movements.

While Parker alone exerted no major influence upon Dickinson and as a social activist stands in strong contrast to a poet so intensely private, nevertheless his writing strikingly exhibits those new winds of doctrine referred to by Allen Tate some years ago, when he remarked that Dickinson enjoyed a "perfect literary situation." The impact of Orthodox Congregationalism upon [End Page 47] her poems has received wide critical attention, but much less recognition has been given the fact that she lived also at a time when the religious liberalism long fostered in eastern Massachusetts had infiltrated her native Amherst. According to Tate, the resulting tension contributed significantly to the drama of her poetry.

Parker represents a major force heightening that tension. To Orthodox Trinitarian Congregationalists of Dickinson's time and place, his name indeed signalled a radical departure from acceptable doctrine, a "poison" to be expelled. Dickinson's positive response to Mary Bowles's Christmas gift, taken as more than a bit of polite correspondence and coupled with relevant poems and letters, reveals a measure of the poet's affinity to the religious liberalism of her day.

Approaching Dickinson's use of a Christ figure from within the context of her immediate religious milieu, this essay first will demonstrate Dickinson's close proximity to the Unitarian departure and to shades of "Parkerism." Then, supporting the thesis that her portrait of Christ shares a central thrust of this "new" liberalism, it will examine selected Dickinson poems pertaining to Jesus Christ.

While other readers have approached Dickinson's Christ figure from within the broad tradition of Christian devotional poetry, the context of a gradual shift away from Orthodox Trinitarianism that peaked in her own place and time helps bring into focus a more "human" portrait, as opposed to a uniquely "divine," than has always been recognized. At the same time, it makes clear that Dickinson did not, after all, stand alone in rebellion but shared in what Ursula Brumm has analyzed as the "secularization" of American culture in the 1800s, expressed in part through the "humanization of Christ" (205).

Parker's religious stance and his social activism permeate Two Christmas Celebrations, published when Dickinson was embarking on her own most productive years as a poet. The narrative itself is in two parts. The first presents the birth of Jesus Christ, the major events of his life, a brief account of his death, and highlights of the early history of the Christian church. While told with an immediacy of tone and a simplicity of language that make it appear on the surface a straightforward tale intended for children, the narrative actually is strongly satiric, clearly addressed to adult fellow Congregationalists. After Jesus's death, the narrator explains, people attached theories of their own [End Page 48] to his person, claiming that he was the Son of God in a unique sense: pre-existent, born in the flesh to a virgin mother, and sent by an angry God to expiate through his death the sin of a fallen race. To this day, he remarks, only "a...

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