Emily Dickinson, Daughter of Prophecy (review)

Emily Dickinson, Daughter of Prophecy furthers the work of situating Dickinson in her historical context. The notion of prophecy that informs the book is wide and encompasses the whole range of prophetic styles available to Dickinson in nineteenth century New England: Biblical prophecy (including the prophetic women Miriam, Deborah, and Mary), volumes in the Dickinson family library such as George Faber's A Dissertation on the Prophecies and F. D. Huntington's Collected Sermons, the whole of New England oral prophecy including ministers such as Jonathan Edwards and Edwards A. Park, professors such as Edward Charming, Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard from 1819-1851, politicians and lecturers such as Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Doriani argues that Dickinson has more affinities with the female orators of her day than with the female poets; "authoritative, spiritually intense, willing to challenge widely held beliefs and practices," they "served as an important conduit between Dickinson and the older prophetic traditions—Hutchinson's and the Bible's" (136). With particularly strong discussions of nineteenth-century America's predilection for prophecy both sacred and secular (Chapter 1: "Prophecy, Poetry, and Dickinson's American Contexts"), the various rhetorical strategies of Connecticut Valley sermons of which Dickinson heard well over fifteen hundred (Chapter 3: "Captivating Sermons' and Dickinson's Rhetoric of Prophecy") and women orators and religious leaders (Chapter 7: "Female Prophecy in New England"), Doriani argues that:

Dickinson drew on the various roles of the prophet—traveler to eternity, indictor, consoler, and wisdom sayer—as she spoke her poetic prophecy. . . . In the figure of the prophet, Dickinson found a persona who was privileged to speak despite cultural restrictions on female public expression and whether or not an audience listened to her. . . . As a prophet, Dickinson could focus on her visionary message and choose her own form of publication, the fascicles, envisioning her ultimate audience as posterity, an anagogic audience of eschatological dimensions.

(36)

There are many fine insights in the book. Whereas nonfeminist critics like Tate and Blackmur see Dickinson as "private and eccentric, a poet who simply talks to herself," Doriani stresses that over a third of Dickinson's poems reached an audience during her lifetime and places her in the context of female prophets like Angeline Grimke, a Quaker who chose to speak to small private audiences, and Sarah Grimke who expressed her vision in letters, suggesting that "a small audience is a feature that defines female prophecy" (41). Doriani suggests that Dickinson's fascicles resemble the biblical prophets' form of publication, collection in books for future generations, and attributes Dickinson's recognition that "to renounce is to possess more" to "the idea of self denial propounded in the Bible and preached by Jonathan Edwards," a renunciation that results in empowered speech as part of her divine gain" (155). Doriani skillfully delineates the sermonic four-part structure that characterises "as many as half" of Dickinson's poems and precisely links Dickinson's proverbial and aphoristic style to that of Hebrew poetry.

While Doriani's research into the specific manifestations of the prophetic tradition in the nineteenth century is invaluable, there is a niggling sense that "prophet" is perhaps not quite the right word to attribute to Dickinson. Is she a prophet, or is she a contemplative, or is she perhaps like Lessing (in a passage underlined in Lowell's Among My Books in Dickinson's library) "a hardy follower of Thought wherever she might lead"? There is some ambiguity in the book as to whether Dickinson is speaking as a religious visionary of mobilising prophetic rhetoric against itself, punning on and against the tradition rather than writing within it. Doriani acknowledges that "Dickinson's spirituality is not creedal; hence the difficulty for—and disagreements between—scholars attempting to articulate that outlines of her religious vision or prophecy" (26).

Doriani's book is a valuable addition to knowledge about Dickinson's intellectual background. It is also a reminder that one of the least understood and most under-theorised aspects of contemporary literary...