Selfish Desires: Dickinson's Poetic Ego and the Rites of Subjectivity

The self that emerges from Dickinson's poems is singular yet multifarious, "columnar" yet labile, personified yet "costumeless." Observing the construction of this self allows us to see the underlying identifications Dickinson makes between her subjectivity and gender; an examination of the shifting personae of identity entitles us to speculate regarding Dickinson's experiential and interpretive understanding of self-states and her fashioning from these a poetic ego. How Dickinson constructs that poetic ego and that construction's relation to desire will be my subject here. My initial assertion is that in whatever forms the self appears, it is significantly associated with a scene of contestation, a scene that dramatizes the struggle with dependence, faces the challenge of submission, and wins through to the hard-won position of transcendence or release. Such contestatory moments occur both on an inter- and intra-psychic level. The self may ward off external adversaries or it may split into discordant or harmonious parts most commonly identified as the" soul," the" body," and" consciousness." Indeed, these aspects of the self may individually comprise a desiring subject, a self that may elude as well as submit to a specific gender identity, a subject that constitutes itself as trans-gendered, responsive to libidinous longings yet escaping the confines of gender. Before we can broach the issue of a trans-gendered poetic ego, a subjectivity that evades the specificity of gender yet constitutes a desiring subject, we need to attend to the kinds of individuated selves Dickinson presents; we need to attest to the various guises the poetic ego assumes as it emerges from the poems.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have argued that Dickinson's assumption of various personae was "essential to her poetic self-achievement;" they go on to elucidate the numerous manifestations of her poetic self. Tellingly, they note that Dickinson's "impersonating 'a woman—white' . . . gave her exactly the 'Amplitude' and 'Awe' she knew she needed in order to write great poetry. . . ." (Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 586). They discuss Dickinson's role as "defiant childwoman" (595) as well as the other images Dickinson invokes to articulate her split self. What I choose to emphasize are the psychodynamics which inform these avatars of Dickinsonian selfhood. Particularly, I am interested in the psychosexual implications of the assumption of these distinct roles and the impact of these transmutations on a theory of the self. Dickinson escapes the conflictual position she assumes in her evocations of the male-female relationship, which, as Gilbert and Gubar have observed, constitutes a "father/ daughter, master /scholar/slave" paradigm, by relinquishing the individuating attributes of gender (587). Such relinquishment is attained by two alternative strategies: a splitting of the self into autonomous entities or a decorporealizing of subjective presence.

By dissecting the self, by representing aspects of existence as themselves singular entities, Dickinson converts those entities into personae who refigure power relationships within and beyond the self. Preeminent among these aspects of the self is, of course, consciousness, which is the self-defining subject that stands in for all others. As Dickinson writes, "Captivity is Consciousness—/ So's Liberty" (384). Elsewhere Dickinson notes its inviolability: "How adequate unto itself / It's properties shall be / Itself unto itself and none / Shall make discovery" (822). Indeed, for Dickinson, "Consciousness—is Noon" (1056). Yet such cerebral autonomy may be challenged when the self is bound by an Other in an experience of identification and commitment that threatens the self's free will:

Bind me—I still can sing—Banish—my mandolinStrikes true within—

Slay—and my Soul shall riseChanting to Paradise—Still thine.

(1005)

Here the ego is at the service of the other; to whom the bound and banished self, with renewed, possibly masochistic fervor, declares her allegiance. Yet this devotion is, in other poems, not so much a question of dependence as it is one of mutuality. In "I make His Crescent fill or lack—" (909), such mutuality presents the self as a presence that has a power equal to the masculine Other:

I make His...