"Arguments of Pearl": Dickinson's Response to Puritan Semiology

In reading Dickinson it is helpful to consider the strategies she uses to challenge the Calvinist sign system embedded so deeply in her nineteenth-century culture.¹ John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536-1559) encodes and interprets Reformation theology, which includes a gender hierarchy signifying Christ as the head of man and man as the head of woman. In this way Puritan ideology interpellates women as subordinate to men.² Louis Althusser defines the term interpellation, in his classic essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," as calling a person into being by assigning a role within a culture's dominant ideology. The Puritan theocracy naturalizes this process of role assignment through the concept of calling, which is work that serves God on earth and so prepares the believer for eternal life. While men could engage in various worldly callings, women were called only to the role of submissive wife.

Puritans base their attitude toward women on Calvin's selection of Biblical texts ascribed to the apostle Paul, who declares that "the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man" (1 Cor. 11:3). Paul commands, "Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church: and he is the saviour of the body" (Eph. 5:22-23). Paul also uses a mirror metaphor to express gender hierarchy: "For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man" (1 Cor. 11:7). As a part of this subordination of woman-as-body to man-as-spirit, Paul orders women to be silent: "Let your women keep silence in the churches; for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law" (1 Cor. 14:34; also 1 Tim. 2:11-14). All Puritan dichotomizing, but particularly that of the "elect" predestined for heaven and the "damned" predestined for hell, assumes the parallel dichotomy, dominant-man/subordinate-woman. Thus the text of Puritan culture inscribes the necessity of subordination on every woman.

Yet Dickinson uses genealogical strategies to question a sign system that constructs meaning and so has the encoded power to assign such roles. I use the term genealogy as do Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals and Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things: An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences, as an investigation of the foundation of "truth" that uncovers layer after layer of groundless meanings imposed by some group who had power at some time in the past. Nietzsche's excavations, as an example, reveal that there are no moral laws but only interpretations of moral phenomena. By questioning whether words have the meanings naturalized by the genealogy of their signifying system, the self-examining semiological system that is poetry can challenge a construct in which signs refer only to other signs and not to a ground of "truth." Puritanism, which privileges the words of the Bible and words that interpret the Bible, is especially vulnerable to verbal examination.

Emily Dickinson's nineteenth-century Amherst was a conservative pocket of two-hundred-year-old Puritan culture. The Dickinson family of Amherst clung, like the Salem Hawthornes, with "oyster-like tenacity" to "the spot where . . . successive generations have been imbedded" (The Scarlet Letter, "The Custom-House" 10). Dickinson had properly Puritan parents in her authoritarian father and submissive mother. In response to a sign system that interpellated women as subordinate to men, Dickinson sometimes uses strategies that question, fragment, and even dismantle this verbal construct. These genealogical strategies probe Puritan doctrine at its ground level, which is the concept of a powerful and loving male god who rewards submission—both of humans to God and women to men—with eternal happiness after death. She reveals this foundation to be, as Foucault describes an excavated sign system, "a thing of...