Emily Dickinson and Hymn Culture: Tradition and Experience (review)

It is a pleasure to read a book as informed, intelligent, and comfortable as Victoria N. Morgan's Emily Dickinson and Hymn Culture. Drawing on feminist theology and French theory, Morgan places Dickinson in the context of women hymn writers and describes Dickinson's positive inheritance from Isaac Watts as well as her rejection of his hierarchical relationship to the divine—accomplishing all these things in order to depict Dickinson as a writer of alternative hymns, deeply immersed in nineteenth-century hymn culture. The book culminates in a long chapter on bee imagery that explains how Dickinson undid the Puritan work ethic and its hierarchical understanding of God to create an "alternative mode of belief" (212). The climax of this chapter arrives in an interesting interpretation of why Dickinson removed the babbling bee of the first version of "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers - " (Fr124). What makes Morgan's analysis comfortable is that she is able to discuss Luce Irigaray and Michel de Certeau in a way comprehensible to undergraduates and, after a single chapter, she keeps theory and theology in the background, employing her key terms only in the concluding statements to her sections and chapters. One finishes her book with gratitude for all that has been argued without feeling numbed by repetition. Readers interested in feminist theology, women hymn writers, Isaac Watts, or bee imagery will complete the book edified and curious to learn more.

Readers might also complete the book skeptical about some of these elements. Because my interests lie in prosody and genre, my skepticism is deepest there. Like many, Morgan makes reflexive comments about Dickinson's meter and stanza. For example, she equates the "relative simplicity of the hymn common metre" with "praise to a clearly defined Christian God" so as to claim that Dickinson "invokes these expectations only to rupture and radically reconfigure them" (45). But meters do not communicate meaning so straightforwardly. They communicate through various means whether these be John Hollander's "metrical contracts," Annie Finch's "metrical codes," or Stephen Cushman's "fictions of form." More importantly, Morgan seems to think that Dickinson's metrical practice is itself disruptive when scholars like Judy Jo Small, in her indispensable Positive as Sound: Emily Dickinson's Rhyme, have established that Dickinson's meter is, more often than not, quite conventional. What makes Dickinson so disruptive of sense lies not in meter but in the elements Cristanne Miller describes in Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar—word choice, syntax, reference, metaphor, and so on. Since Morgan's book went to press, I have examined the rhythmic structures underlying hymnal meters and argued that, often, what looks metrically disruptive appeals only to visual expectations not to rhythmic ones. Thus, Morgan errs in claiming that a stanza that begins with two two-beat lines "dissolves" common meter when all that has changed is the lineation and not the underlying rhythm (137).

A more central problem lies in an undertheorizing of the hymn genre and of what Morgan calls hymn culture. Small, whose work does not appear in Morgan's bibliography, has argued that scholars are too quick to say that, in Morgan's words, Dickinson uses "form in a way that alludes to hymns" (43-44), when, in fact, what are called hymnal meters are metrically indistinguishable from ballad meter and other staples of the lyric tradition since the fifteenth century and were ubiquitous in the nineteenth century from Wordsworth to newspaper verse. What makes a poem a hymn is not its meter but its use of hymnal conventions. And yet Morgan produces no sustained definition of the hymn genre or description of its conventions. She only makes some brief mentions: listing its conventions as being "hierarchical address, teleological narrative, and particular imagery" (23), stating that the hymn "both dramatizes a speaker's relation to the divine and presents a clear narrative in which speaker and God are defined," explaining that hymns articulate "an agreed 'common bond' of a Christian community, and [. . .] their...