The Passion of Emily Dickinson (review)

In The Passion of Emily Dickinson Judith Farr furthers the long-overdue revisionist project of locating Emily Dickinson's imaginative vision, language, life and loves within the fertile cultural matrix of her own era. It is Farr's contention that Dickinson's imagination was a profoundly allusive one, immersed in, enriched by, and transformative of the visual and literary iconography of her culture. Indeed, Farr says that Dickinson was "one of the ablest iconographers of major nineteenth-century themes" (82). Farr sees Dickinson as primarily concerned with love, with nature, and with "Eternity in Time" (247). These concerns find representation in a body of poetry and prose enriched by a profusion of potent images drawn from sources as disparate as nineteenth-century American landscape painting, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, the British Romantic poets, the writings of John Ruskin, and the novels of Charlotte Brontë.

One of the most significant contributions of this study is its demonstration of the truly transatlantic nature of the wide range of Dickinson's allusion. Images and language drawn from British and American painting, literature, and philosophical and critical essays reveal Dickinson to be a cultural sophisticate whose lively integration of the ideas and images of her time belies the stereotype, at times self-constructed, of the simple Nun of Amherst. The cultural icon of the nun is one Farr investigates to good advantage, and her uncovering of the multiple imaginative ramifications of that image and others demonstrates that Dickinson's self-imposed seclusion from the world was most likely not chosen to afford her the narrow and protected life necessary to shield a sensibility so refined it could not endure exposure to disturbing stimuli.

Farr suggests that cultural images, both popular and elite, informed Dickinson's emotional life and contributed to the "fiery mist" of her literary style. "The sophisticated allusiveness of her literary sensibility helped to contrive [an aura of literary and personal mystery], as well as the difficulty that many find in believing that so 'stern and simple' an existence could give life to such poems as hers" (332).

Probably the most intriguing of Farr's speculations involves what she considers to be the two great loves of Dickinson's life: that for Susan Gilbert Dickinson and that for Samuel Bowles. In chapters entided "The Narrative of Sue" and "The Narrative of Master," the author details distinct and disparate narratives of love and loss for each beloved, with characteristic bodies of allusion which encode the peculiar quality of the passion she feels for each. For Sue, predominating tropes are drawn from Antony and Cleopatra and from Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. The body of letters and poems written for "Master" and for Samuel Bowles (Farr considers them one and the same) draws heavily upon Jane Eyre and upon the painter Thomas Cole's vastly popular and widely reproduced four-part allegory "The Voyage of Life."

While I have no problem believing that Dickinson's romantic imagination may well have been strongly influenced by Antony and Cleopatra or by Jane Eyre, the specifics of Farr's reading do not always convince me. This is due in part to a tendency toward making unqualified one-to-one attributions that the evidence simply does not support. For instance, in a discussion of the Master letters, she says:

. . . when Dickinson writes . . . that "God built the heart in me," that is, her propensity for sentiment, she continues "bye and bye it outgrew me—and like the little mother—with the big child—I got tired holding him" (L 2.3733-374). The image is an allusion to Jane Eyre's dream before her impending marriage, where Jane carries a "little child" that she "might not lay . . . down anywhere, however tired were my arms."

(198)

Although at times Farr nods toward a common central image bank from which Dickinson, Brontë, Thomas Cole, and others drew, all too often this type of absolutist attribution is characteristic of her readings. Dickinson's allusion to the little...