Religion Around Emily Dickinson by W. Clark Gilpin (review)

Through the various waves of twentieth-century criticism of Dickinson, religion has been mainly lacking. New Critical explication studied her work in its formal iconicity, independent of social history. The assumption was that Dickinson’s poems, like other literary works, were about the powers and forms of the imagination as they illuminated themselves: artifacts about art, language constructing language. Gender criticism opened the door to social history, but only as wide as women’s literary performances. In an odd way this increased Dickinson’s isolation, together with women contemporary to her. As madwomen in the attic — with Dickinson an exemplar in her reclusion – women writers continued to be seen as cut off from public events. Their restricted, constrained domesticity became the very subject of their work, expressed as an anxious tension between their double roles of women and poet. Cultural Studies linked this gendered positioning to other cultural subjections, making a trinity of race, class, and gender. On one level this broadened discussion into wider social fields. On another, it narrowed analysis to questions of power, of domination and oppression as the ultimate measure or mode of analysis. The literary text became a record of oppression and resistance, which it is the critic’s role to track.

Religion was a cultural arena that these approaches generally ignored. Most critics displayed a kind of metalepsis: the secularism they assumed for themselves, they extended backwards into the nineteenth century. But religion has erupted in the twenty-first century, a return of the repressed with a vengeance, horrifyingly destructive but also as an insistent aspect of human experience and efforts to make sense of it. To omit attention to religion in a century like the nineteenth is to occlude fundamental aspects of the formation of self, the constitution of society, and many aesthetic practices of literature derived from, reflecting, or transforming religious practices.

Emily Dickinson’s world was religious. Amherst, and the entire Connecticut River valley, was Jonathan Edwards’s country. The Second Great Awakening stretched from the start of the nineteenth century to the Civil War, and it was experienced by Dickinson directly through conversion waves, including those that swept up her father and the missionary-inclined Mount Holyoke Seminary Dickinson attended. The period leading up to the Civil War and the War itself, the historical maelstrom during which Dickinson composed half her poems, was represented in theological terms that profoundly shaped the conflict. That Dickinson herself resisted formal religion, while also composing poems almost ecstatic in ways structured according to religious modes, only ties her work more firmly to the religious contexts in which she lived and wrote.

This religious world of Dickinson’s engagement (and disengagement) is the subject of Religion Around Emily Dickinson. To some extent the material Gilpin assembles is familiar. The basic touchstones of American literary history and Dickinson studies, such as Jonathan Edwards and Emerson, are duly treated. Gilpin extends beyond these to topics of recent interest, as well as contemporary methods: domesticity and the market, sentimentality, and the profession of authorship. He addresses a broad range of social practices through a variety of fields, for example examining domestic architecture and its representations as newly spatialized genderings of middle-class life. William Ellery Channing’s call to “self-culture,” reading practices and dissemination, bereavement practices, landscaped cemeteries, keepsakes and public memorials, spiritualism, letter-writing, consolation literature, and gendered boundaries as they were elaborated and enforced in the nineteenth century weave a cultural-social fabric in which Gilpin frames Dickinson’s own texts.

Religion is the thread basting together the varieties of social topics the book reviews. Nineteenth-century domesticity, as a religious site, takes on new and specific forms, such as the “parlor piety” of Phoebe Palmer. Examined as a domestic space gendered female and crossing private with public activity, the parlor offered a social locus where religious attitudes conjoined with emergent American ideologies such as “self-improvement.” The outpouring of religious publications points inward to religious experience while also penetrating public...