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Reviewed by:
  • Religion Around Emily Dickinson by W. Clark Gilpin
  • Karin E. Gedge
W. Clark Gilpin. Religion Around Emily Dickinson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). Pp. 201. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $34.95; Paper, $29.64.

This is the second volume in an ambitious series from Pennsylvania State University Press entitled “Religion Around.” The series applies the New Historicism to literary and cultural figures of various times, places, and genres. The first effort by series editor Peter Iver Kaufman explored religious ideas, writers, and debates revolving around Shakespeare. Future proposed additions to the series may focus on various cultural figures such as Dante, Edward Gibbon, and Walter Scott, or Langston Hughes, Billie Holliday, Allen Ginsberg, and Sting. The series aspires to shed light on the religious ideas that shaped the selected iconic life and creative work while also considering ways that individual subjects contributed to and resisted, perhaps in previously unrecognized ways, the religious movements and debates swirling around them. The works carve out a new genre, resisting the forms of more traditional biographies, religious histories, literary histories, and literary criticisms at the same time they mine those secondary sources to analyze “religion around.”

Gilpin’s long and productive career has been firmly situated in the religious history of Christianity in the United States, with special focus on religious literature. His contribution to this series tackles three subjects that most Americans today, even the literate and the scholarly, often find dense and difficult to access—theology, poetry, and, specifically, the life and work of the poet Emily Dickinson. Gilpin traces the relationship between these [End Page 126] subjects by inviting the reader into his personal intellectual exploration of the religious milieu in which Dickinson lived and worked and her use of religious themes and metaphors in her poems as well as in her letters. Dickinson’s life and works span the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a period of social, economic, political, religious, and cultural transformation in her native New England and beyond. Her most prolific years of writing poetry coincided with the traumatic years of the Civil War. According to Gilpin, Dickinson was by no means a mere product of her time and place, however. She resisted the ambient Protestant culture as often as she mirrored it; she was an incisive cultural critic.

Gilpin situates Dickinson’s religious motifs and criticisms within this broader context of religious, intellectual, and cultural history. His primary sources reach back to the Puritan Jonathan Edwards in colonial New England but focus on nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicals such as the Beechers, Horace Bushnell, and Phoebe Palmer, the Romantic writers Emerson and Thoreau, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the novelists Susan Warner and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and many others. Dickinson and her family subscribed to many periodicals of the time, listened to the preachers and lecturers who came through her hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, sang the hymns, read the King James Bible, and engaged in political debate. Gilpin cannot identify exact connections between Dickinson and other writers beyond her correspondence with mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the noted Unitarian clergyman, author, abolitionist, and women’s rights advocate. Instead, within that broader context, Gilpin identifies a long-standing imaginary conversation among American religious and intellectual thinkers about the relationships between the interior self and soul, the exterior world of nature and society, and the transcendent realm of God, immortality, and eternity.

Religion around the poet Emily Dickinson, then, is not just doctrines or beliefs, practices or affiliation. Indeed, Dickinson never joined her family’s church and rarely attended in adulthood. Religion around her is, however, metaphors and tropes, ideas and ideals, ways of thinking, debates or dialogues, correspondence, literary and other artful expression and experience. In a chapter entitled “Society and Solitude,” Gilpin situates Dickinson’s legendary reclusiveness into a long religious tradition of retreat and self-examination, whether in the closet or the woods, in prayer or in writing. This tradition helps explain Dickinson’s choice for solitude, though her place of withdrawal was the domestic and gendered space of house and garden and her writing a [End Page 127] very distinctive style of poetry. The chapter, “Domesticity and the Divine,” explores ways that...

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