No Frame of Reference: The Absence of Context in Emily Dickinson's Poetry

This is my letter to the WorldThat never wrote to Me—

(Poem 441)

The underlying condition for lyric intonation is the absolute certainty of the listener's sympathy.

Bakhtin

In The Dickinson Sublime, Gary Lee Stonum highlights Dickinson's involvement with her audience by pointing out that nearly "all of her remarks about poetry in letters, poems, or recorded conversations imagine literature from the point of view of the audience" (10). This observation is noteworthy, because one of the most striking consequences of the silences and omissions that characterize Dickinson's texts is the absence of the provision of clues that might guide the reader through her complex and ambiguous universe. The peculiar fragmentation of Dickinson's poetry, the vacillation between disclosure and concealment, speech and silence announces from the outset the complexities of Dickinson's relationship with her social group, the interpretive community inside which and for which she is forced to write. I wish to demonstrate here the way that Dickinson's lyric poetry investigates through its peculiarities the problematic notion of context as an aspect of the feminine predicament.

In "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art," Bakhtin, focusing specifically on the relationship between the reader, the text, and the author, discusses the ways in which consciousness is formed—not only as a psychological phenomenon but also as an ideological one. Drawing a distinction between the listener who, as "an immanent participant in the artistic event," has a "determinative effect on the form of the work from within," and "the reading public," who are "located outside the work, whose artistic tastes and demands can be consciously taken into account" (Freudianism 13-14), he sees this "immanent participant" as a crucial aspect of the creative process; it exists "in the poet's voice, in the basic tone and intonations of that voice" (114). He continues:

Style is at least two persons or, more accurately, one person plus his social group in the form of its authoritative representative, the listener—the constant participant in a person's inner and outward speech. . . .

Even the most intimate self-awareness is an attempt to translate oneself into the common code, to take stock of another's point of view, and, consequently, entails orientation toward a possible listener.

The part played by the social group determines not only the selection of content, the selection of what precisely we become conscious of, but also our judgement:

This constant coparticipant in all our conscious acts determines not only the content of consciousness but also—and this is the main point for us—the very selection of the content, the selection of what precisely we become conscious of, and thus determines also those evaluations which permeate consciousness. It is precisely from this constant participant in all our conscious acts that the listener who determines artistic form is engendered

(114-15).

Bakhtin's emphasis on the ideological and social aspects of consciousness throws a very interesting light on the complexities confronting any woman writer. Although he does not directly address the question of women writers in any of his work, his stress on context inevitably foregrounds the question of what happens to the poet who has, in the first place, a highly ambiguous relationship to the social group or "common code." For a woman writer (or woman reader) whose complex relationship with the dominant culture locates her both inside and outside the "common" code, the notion of one's "own group" or of "co-participation" is extremely problematic. Feminist criticism, stressing as it does the social and historical nature of utterance, focuses inevitably on the relation between text and context, on the way in which each creates the other. Explorations of social, psychological, and political contexts recur constantly, as do questions about how women writers are received or heard, how one reads as a woman, and how reception affects texts.¹

The notion of co-participation or context is central in Shoshanna Felman's recent discussion of reading and sexual difference. Examining "the feminine predicament of the 'absence of a story' (or its counterpart...