Emily Dickinson's Erotic Persona: Unfettered by Convention

The female is continually obliged to seek survival or advancement through the approval of males as those who hold power.

(Millet 54)

You think me "uncontrolled"—I have no Tribunal.

(L265 to Higginson)

Emily Dickinson: Is she "a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in a room in her father's house" (Gilbert and Gtibar 583), a lesbian in love with her sister-in-law (Martha Nell Smith 25), or "Amherst's Madame de Sade" (Paglia 673)? Apostles for each camp use their vision to understand Dickinson's poems, yet any answer can only serve to clamp limitations on her lyric. A critical aspect of Dickinson's biography is her self-imposed exclusion from the rigid society of New England, which, as one critic has noted, "freed her from the limitations of that culture, from the identity it might have allowed, and from the poetic language it would have encouraged" (Dickie 171). By writing outside of the patriarchal forces that would have forced her to "adjust and conform" (Millet 33), Dickinson escaped the mainstreaming hand of an editor; she explored her sensuous impulses as a woman poet without censorship. Through her verse, Dickinson created an erotic persona unfettered by conventional notions of propriety for women and, therefore, she was free to express passion for men, women, and mysterious unnamed lovers.

Dickinson's persona speaks beyond the bounds of her sex, liberated from what Elaine Showalter calls the "social, cultural, and psychological meaning imposed upon biological sexual identity" (1-2). Her speaker exemplifies what Hélène Cixous names the "repérage en soi "—the location in the self of both sexes, which Cixous asserts multiplies "the effects of the inscription of desire" (254). Through this speaker, Dickinson explores a "certain bisexuality" which Julia Kristeva argues "opens the possibility to explore all the sources of signification" (165). Dickinson invented a "new poetics and new politics" by reappropriating her speaker as subject (Suleiman 7), creating a voice able to express a vast "spectrum of possibilities" (Morris 98) and emotional intensity.

In the words of Michel Foucault, "If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression" (6). In Dickinson's case, either with or without her conscious effort, by speaking of sex from different points of view, she upset what Foucault saw as a "certain established law" (6). The range of eroticism in Dickinson's work suggests that by, to quote Sharon Cameron, "choosing not choosing" (21) through the textual variants and sexual ambiguity surrounding her speaker and lovers, Dickinson releases her poetry from the limits imposed by the sexual repression of her time. Indeed, she has gone so far as to give her erotic persona an androgynous position. Dickinson's poetry suggests a "spiritual or psychological state of wholeness and balance arrived at through the joining of masculine and feminine conceived of as complimentary and symmetrically opposed" (Weil 63). In Androgyne and the Denial of Difference, Kari Weil considers androgyny and poses the question, "What are the consequences for an image of androgyny and/or sexual difference of choosing one side or the other, or of not choosing at all?" (159). In Dickinson's case, by "not choosing," her verse is open to a wide range of eroticism.

Critical inquiry largely ignores this expansive possibility in Dickinson's poetry. For example, the widely noted poem "Wild Nights—Wild Nights!" is frequently dismissed with an editorial smirk in the tone of Thomas Higginson's famous comment: "One poem only I dread a little to print—that wonderful "Wild Nights"—lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there" (Bingham 127). The eroticism is acknowledged, yet the possibility of the words remains untapped. Both the speaker and the object of the longing are without gender in the first stanza, which is saturated with sumptuous indulgence. In the third stanza the sense of self-abandonment is underscored by the mystery and power of the sea; moving through this inherently unpredictable paradise anything is possible. By isolating...