Travels with George, in Search of Ben Hur and Other Meanderings

Was Emily Mad or Merely Angry?

Was Emily Mad or Merely Angry? Over the years I have taught a number of courses in which I used the poetry of Emily Dickinson, one of my all-time favorite poets. One reason is, I think, that she wrote many of her poems in the hymn beat, which has always been quite familiar to me. My initial appreciation of poetry came from memorizing the lyrics of all the songs in the Broadman Hymnal, that tome that we used in the Assembly of God Church in which I grew up. After a while, I could rattle off a hymn-beat poem in a heartbeat, a talent that later made me a professional poet at twelve. See, when my friends in school were assigned to write a poem, they would come to me, knowing how fast I was on the draw, and pay me a dime or quarter—depending on complexity and length—to write their poems for them. But all this is beside the present point. . . . Miss Emily, she strikes students different ways. Some view her as odd but pleasant, and most seem interested more in Emily the person than Emily the poet, this in spite of the fact that, as several students have pointed out, her poems are short and many can be sung to the tune of “Amazing Grace.” Why this latter characteristic should loom large would be beyond me, but for my acceptance of the fact that most of my students come from Protestant households , as I did, and know and love the hymn beat the way they do the rhythm of their own hearts. It is a fact that many of our poets practice eccentricity; such behavior hints at genius, whether it is there or not. Usually it isn’t. Miss Emily did not practice: she was eccentric. A graduate student said to me one time, after we had finished analyzing a Dickinson poem titled “I felt a funeral, in my brain” (the first line of the poem—Dickinson provided no titles): “This is one of the strangest poets I’ve ever been exposed to. Was she simply nuts?” I do not recall my answer. Interest in Emily Dickinson the woman and Emily Dickinson the poet has surged and waned over the past hundred years, but at no point since the Was Emily Mad or Merely Angry? 29 1920s has she or her poetry been in any danger of disappearing from the literature texts. Indeed, given the fact that she is universally embraced by almost every school of criticism, the prospects of her continued prominence as one of the few representative modern poets of the nineteenth century seem virtually assured. Like the Bible, her work can be interpreted almost any way that you wish to fit your particular agenda, whether you are Freudian, feminist , Marxist, or of a more conventional tribe. One of the most controversial pieces published recently on Dickinson is psychiatrist John F. McDermott’s “Emily Dickinson Revisited: A Study of Periodicity in Her Work,” which appeared in the May 2001 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. After conducting a meticulous study of her letters and poetry, McDermott concludes that Dickinson suffered from a broad range of mental problems, including agoraphobia (fear of open or public places), “seasonal depression,” and bipolar disorder. He bases these diagnoses on her patterns of creativity and social behavior at different times in her life. What is unusual here is not that a psychiatrist has attempted to diagnose mental disorders in a writer long since dead—this has been done a number of times—but that McDermott rendered his analysis after applying the codes of what is referred to as the modern psychiatrist’s diagnostic bible, the DSMIV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition), a complex publication listing both alphabetically and numerically all known mental disorders, complete with symptoms and diagnostic criteria. This is presumably the first time that a posthumous diagnosis has been made through the application of the codes of the DSM. McDermott’s conclusions have of course been discounted by feminists who prefer to believe the focus should remain on Dickinson’s talent and perseverance and hard work. Why are the women always being picked on, when madness must surely have been at work in the creative production of many male artists? Why must men be portrayed as superior enough to rise above their mental problems to produce their art while the creative genius of women is the result of their madness...