Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson's Poetic Development (review)

Aliki Barnstone's Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson's Poetic Development sets itself up as a deliberate challenge to those critics who see no traceable evolution of ideas and forms in the poet's oeuvre. Barnstone's introduction lays much of the blame for this tendency at the door of Dickinson's reputation as the "myth." The poet, she argues, was—and to some extent is still—known as a genius who

always wears white, the color of virgins, brides, and mourning, and has never changed. In her appearance, which stands symbol for her work and spirit, she remains untouched by time or stuck in one particular year. Immortality, the focus of her poetry and philosophy, was conferred on her in life as a kind of changelessness. . . . Even in death, she was regarded as unchanged.

(1-2)

Barnstone's contention is that this perception of Dickinson has led to some rather patronising, dismissive, or simply inadequate readings of Dickinson's poetic development. She writes: "Critics who argue that Dickinson's poetry did not develop assume her notorious withdrawal from society was absolute, making her poetry timeless and untouched by the outside world" (5). But, because Dickinson continued to read and correspond widely throughout her reclusion, the belief that her isolation was total is misplaced. This leads Barnstone to the appealing and original thrust of her argument: Dickinson did develop, and her development needs to be read as a culturally engaged and aware process: her isolation as part of a literary tradition of reclusion, perpetuated in nineteenth-century America by notions of individualism, self-reliance, and the desire to be new.

Barnstone discerns four major developmental changes in the poet's life. Dickinson's first crisis comes as she externalizes her arguments with Calvinism through satire. Barnstone identifies a second turning point in the year of 1863, when Dickinson composed or completed four hundred of her poems and "performed a kind of ritual mastery over the forces she felt could master her" (9). In this phase, Barnstone claims, she internalized her struggle with Calvinism, writing poems of self-conversion and transforming the religious process into a poetic one. After 1863, Barnstone argues, Dickinson moves to a struggle with Emerson's transcendental connection with nature, embracing "the subjectivity of perception and the possibility of relatedness that subjectivity creates" (21). In the period around 1876, Dickinson all but completely ceased to make fair copies and fascicles. The poems from this stage of her life are gathered mostly from letters and scraps found among her papers after her death. Building on work by leading Dickinson scholars including Martha Nell Smith and Virginia Jackson, Barnstone argues that Dickinson no longer saw the genres of poetry and prose as distinct.

Thus far, Barnstone offers a clear trajectory that may appeal to, and enlighten, many Dickinson scholars; however, much of her approach will be familiar. Her analysis is motivated by Dickinson's personal relation to her Calvinist heritage and cultural context. This will be old ground for many, especially since, in the first half of the book, Barnstone doesn't stray far from the idea that Dickinson's poetry reflects her personal struggle with, and eventual rejection of, the Calvinist God. At times, this can seem simplistic. When Barnstone writes, "Dickinson responded to Calvinism as a formidable foe; Emerson, by contrast, served as a playful sparring partner," she does away with the playfulness found in many of Dickinson's poetic explorations of traditional Puritan and Calvinist thought (21). On other occasions, however, the conclusions are astute: "Paradoxically, by refuting religious doctrine, she restores God's unknowability and thereby asserts a fundamental tenet of Puritanism" (75).

In her contextualization of Dickinson in regard to Emerson, Barnstone offers some excellent readings of well-known poems, including "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (Fr340) and "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - " (Fr591). Through repeated contradictions, Barnstone argues that Dickinson questions ways of knowing and "tells the story of what happens beyond annihilation, when...