Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination by Linda Freedman (review)

401 Book Reviews now find their task difficult, if not implausible. Heady has made a formidable case for the rhetorical union of the self and the community in the study of conversion. Further, this work offers a rich resource of literary criticism for each novel Heady reviews. In every chapter, she demonstrates her thorough knowledge of the novel’s history of criticism and posits her own unique interpretation based upon insights drawn from the various disciplines mentioned above. Scholars will find Heady’s Victorian Conversions both refreshing and authoritative. Susanne Calhoun Wheaton College Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination. By Linda Freedman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-107-00617-1. Pp. x + 210. $90.00. In the past decade there has been a small resurgence of interest in the part that Christian theology plays in the thinking and writing of the major poets of nineteenth-century America. In Emerson (2003), Lawrence Buell writes: “Like it or not, there’s no getting rid of religion as a force in human affairs. If you think it’s nothing more than the opiate of others, you’re likely to misunderstand yourself as well as them. Especially if you’re trying to come to terms with so religio-centric a culture as the United States was in the early nineteenth-century—and indeed still is” (Buell 159-60). When it comes to Dickinson studies, however, the conversation about religion and theology is fraught with caveats and uncertainties. This is due, in part, to Dickinson’s own attestations of unbelief, none more famous, perhaps, than her wry poem about staying home from church (to the frustration of her father): “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – / I keep it staying home – ” (Dickinson 106). More seriously, as a girl Dickinson refused both baptism and the chance to profess her faith in front of her school. In light of these various attestations, she has been recently praised by Helen Vendler (Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries 2010) for “her defiant critique of Christianity and her uninhibited scrutiny of its concepts [which was] unequalled among the other poets of her day” (17). All this may lead the reader of Dickinson criticism to believe that the primary way in which Christian theology affected the poet was negatively. She can emerge— especially from Vendler’s readings—looking like an anti-Christian poet. How refreshing it is, then, to find Linda Freedman engaging with the biblical and theological elements of Dickinson’s verse and thought, especially those elements that are not explicitly anti-Christian. Freedman begins by taking seriously the Puritan heritage and atmosphere of the Amherst in which Dickinson grew up, steeped as it was with the thought of the orthodox Puritan Jonathan Edwards and Christianity and Literature 402 emerging liberal, Unitarian tradition of William Channing. Whereas critics like Vendler have emphasized those aspects of Dickinson’s thought that fall in line with Channing’s criticisms of Edwardian Puritanism, Freedman argues that Dickinson shares with Edwards a belief in the religious power of language: Though Dickinson repeatedly cast her ironic eye on the Puritan preoccupation with sin, she was fascinated from an extremely early age by the role of language in affective religion. … Like Edwards, Dickinson was aware of the problems of false conversion and insincere emotion. Her strong skepticism may well have been why she was able to remain an enthusiastic observer (rather than an enthusiastic participant) of the Visible Church in the years when she still attended. Like Edwards she turned to the authenticity of embodied experience in order to negotiate the problem of falsity. (24, 26-27) This concern with embodied experience that Dickinson shares with Edwards becomes for Freedman a guide through the oeuvre of the poet. Revealing Dickinson’s deeply biblical imagination, Freedman sees the prime example of embodied experience in Dickinson’s poetry, time and again, in images of Christ. It is Christology—especially Puritan Christology—that provides us with a key to reading Dickinson’s poems that feature Christ: “When Dickinson invoked Christ’s body, she did so in full awareness of its importance to the theological claims that Christ was not only human” (28). A little later she clarifies...