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  • "Sumptuous—Despair:"The Function of Desire in Emily Dickinson's Poetry
  • Roland Hagenbüchle (bio)

Recent criticism has focused intensely on the problematic status of the human subject, and poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, following the example of Nietzsche, Mach, Broch and others, have confidently announced its death—prematurely as it now turns out. This is hardly surprising. The subject or (disregarding terminological distinctions) the self was from the start a contested notion in Western civilization. The Romantics in particular were intensely aware of the precarious status of the subject. Although they had a tremendous faith in the self's creative potential, they also made the disturbing discovery that the subject, having lost its transcendental origin, cannot ground itself and that its autonomy is spurious. With Emily Dickinson, this sense of alienation is raised to a new pitch. Dickinson's cultural heritage—especially the paradoxical nature of Puritan selfhood along with the Transcendentalist emphasis on "Self-Reliance"—radicalized the problem for her, and she was forced to look for new tactics in her effort to reconstruct a viable New-England self.

As we may gather from the poems and letters alike, a fundamental lack (or want) pervades much of Dickinson's œuvre. In many ways, her poetry is an expression of this lack along with a bold effort to "fill" it. One could indeed argue that Dickinson attempts nothing less than to analyze and—if possible—to heal and reunify an alienated and fundamentally flawed subject. Hence, the central importance of the notion of desire in her work. Using Wilbur's notion of desire as a starting point, I propose to offer a revision and a sharpening of this concept. By closely analyzing the structure of desire in Dickinson's poetry, I hope to throw additional light (1) on the nature of the lyrical self's lack, (2) on the poet's strategies in trying to fill this lack, and (3) on the reasons why Dickinson's attempt can [End Page 1] only succeed in the realm of the fictive. My principal interest, throughout this paper, centers on desire as the driving force behind the poet's œuvre.

From early on, Dickinson's lyrical self, sensing its lack, goes in search of what is missing. Yet how is the self to know what it should look for? Plato tackles this question in his dialogue Meno, and from The Symposium we learn that the power sustaining the self is called Eros. Eros' driving force is poverty: "want" is the very cause that sets the daimon on its quest for beauty. To St. Augustine and the Christian tradition it is the soul's unrest (resulting from man's fallen condition) that urges it toward God. However, the soul cannot find God, if God does not call it through an act of grace. The motif of being called, reinforced by the mood of religious revivalism in Dickinson's time, plays a vital role in her poetry.

As suggested in Plato's Symposium, it is the soul's loving desire that sets the direction. In her poem "'Why do I love' You, Sir?" (P480), Dickinson gives the irrefutable answer: "The Sunrise—Sir—compelleth Me—/ Because He's Sunrise—and I see—." For Dickinson, as for Plotinus and his Neoplatonic heirs, the finite self's desire for the divine Other is in the nature of things. Whereas Kierkegaard found the Other in the saviour figure of the Biblical God, Dickinson, at odds with religious orthodoxy, was thrown back on the evidence of the soul's desire for the missing Other.

At this point, the sense in which I am going to use the concept of the Other requires some clarification. Lacking space to explore the full range of alterity, I shall have to disregard the Other in terms of Nature (the sublime), of other people, and the "unconscious" (a disturbing and upsetting Other for Dickinson). Nor can I elaborate on the Other in the guise of death, let alone the concomitant problem of its poetic representation (issues I have tried to cover in my monograph on Emily Dickinson). After this disclaimer, I now want to define the term more narrowly. Without using the concept in a...

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