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  • Dickinson's Threshold Glances, or, Putting the Subject on Edge
  • Sabine Sielke (bio)

Quite frequently, Emily Dickinson situates her speakers at the threshold of existence and consciousness, at the edge of eternity, on the margins of subjectivity and representation. For the poet who herself never travelled far, such excursions entailed more than the thrills of a tightrope walk over the abysses of being. The edges she ponders are not points in time but oftentimes painful processes of border-crossings. This makes Dickinson's boundaries not limitations but possibilities that open vistas. As she transforms lines into wide open views, her speakers peep into the unknown, into paradise—abroad, if you like.

Considering the cultural context in which Dickinson was immersed, such preoccupations with death and eternity come as no surprise. The author's treatment of such popular themes, however, is breathtakingly unique and insightful, motivated, as it was, by a "Love for the absent" (L31). Knowing that any attempt to grasp eternity in time "Were hopeless, as the Rainbow's Raiment / To touch—" (P680), Dickinson still found "The Impotence to Tell—" the "Ultimate of Talk" (P407). The project to materialize bodiless states: eden and eternity in language thus became a predilection which, not surprisingly, has preoccupied Dickinson scholarship from new critical readings to poststructuralist analyses.

Central to all of these inquiries has been the sense of self inhabiting Dickinson's disruptive dialectics of pain and paradise—a sense of self whose assessment has changed as the theoretical conceptions of self or, more recently, gendered subjectivity themselves have changed. Accordingly, my own curiosity concerning Dickinson's "threshold glances" stems from tackling the following two questions: in what ways have American women poets constructed female subjectivity over the last one hundred [End Page 93] and fifty years? And, more particularly, how do such constructions interrelate destabilized poetic discourse with representations of the body? Approaching these questions through a revisionist perspective on the subject theories of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, I hold that this work—these perspectives from abroad so to speak—continue to be important first, because they acknowledge subjectivity as a position in language, while also recognizing the function of the material body in subject constitution; and second because, despite all claims to the contrary, they enable an analysis of the historical development of (female) subjectivity in American women's poetry. American women's poetry in turn has its own repercussions on the claims that subject theories—and their readers—have made.

With regard to Dickinson's poetry, Kristeva's notion of subjectivity has proven particularly productive, though not because it entails a conception of female subjectivity but because, like Dickinson's poetry, Kristeva's theory in fact lacks such a concept. Kristeva's sense of the subject as process of the semiotic and the symbolic instead captures the crisis of the male philosophical subject in the second half of the nineteenth century—a crisis dramatized in Dickinson's poetry and fundamental to the emergence of the historical female subject (which we encounter in Marianne Moore's poetry of mimicry and the maternal, for instance, and which can be conceptualized by the work of Irigaray). Kristeva's conception of the semiotic, however, defined as a heterogeneous flow of preoedipal energies which retraverse the symbolic and return in poetic language as disruptive discourse, allows us to redefine the destabilizing elements of Dickinson's poetry as a fundamental part of the processes of subjectivity. Moreover, Dickinson and Kristeva are similarly aware that subjectivity depends on acts of separation. Kristeva's account of potential failures of early subject constitution in Powers of Horror (1982), her descriptions of the phobic subject who falls short separating from the maternal love object by means of language show significant parallels with Dickinson's poems of extreme states. For Kristeva the impact of such rejection of paternal agency on subjectivity is a tendency toward abstraction and desemantization as well as toward physical effects: "the borderline patient," she explains, "speaks of a numbed body, of hands that hurt, of paralyzed legs" (49). Similarly, in Dickinson's verse the subject's connection to the objective world is frequently cut: paralysis and numbness are recurrent sensations; desemantization, abstraction, and scenelessness are...

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