Emily Dickinson’s existential dramas

 Dickinson’s existentialist sensibility has much in common with that of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813–55). For Kierkegaard, life must be accepted for what it is – as a finite (that is, non-universal) existence.

Kierkegaard refutes Hegel’s universal synthesis because it ignores reality at the individual level. Individual existence is f l awed and filled with suffering and limitations (both physical and mental), but that defines life’s authenticity.

Kierkegaard criticizes the Romantic poets for using their powers of creative imagination to escape into inauthentic realms of their own making. Thus, they live “in a totally hypothetical and subjunctive way,”4 which causes them to lose touch not only with the authentic world but with themselves.

Aside from Kierkegaard, whose ideas probably had not yet spread beyond Europe in Dickinson’s day, a kind of proto-existentialist thought can be detected in America via Calvinist and Presbyterian Christianity, which advocated deep learning and self-discovery. The Presbyterian minister Charles Wadsworth, one of Dickinson’s spiritual mentors (aside from the rumored possibility that she was in love with him), asserted from the pulpit that “Man’s business on this sublunary platform is to work out his hidden character in the face of the universe” – this he proclaimed in his sermon “Development and Discipline.” (Note the similarity between this statement and Dickinson’s “My business is Circumference.”) Self-reliance was also behind Mary Lyon’s rigorous curriculum at the Mt. Holyoke Seminary for Women – it placed heavy emphasis on the natural sciences. Studying nature was an important prerequisite to becoming a good Christian; a sure path to God was through intense study of His creations. Henry David Thoreau, whom Dickinson had probably read, for she mentions him in a letter, advocated self-knowledge and self-betterment through deliberate intimate knowledge of the physical world and learning “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.”5

And of course, the plays of Shakespeare, her most beloved author, are filled with existential moments, from Macbeth’s “sound and fury” anguish over the meaninglessness of human destiny to Hamlet’s bitter assessment of human nature (“What a piece of work is a man! how inf i nite in faculty . . . in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”).

And Shakespeare would certainly have agreed with Dickinson’s speaker’s claim that “‘Hamlet’ to Himself were Hamlet – / Had not Shakespeare wrote – ” (J 741, Fr 776). Quite clearly, then, Dickinson had sufficient exposure to existentialist thinking for it to have influenced her at least indirectly.

Dickinson’s poems are existential for yet another reason: their speakers seldom feel secure in the promise of – or refuse to take refuge in – a transcen-dent reality as do the speakers in so much of Romantic poetry. Dickinson’s speakers ironically are most secure with the doubts and uncertainties of their flawed and finite existence – a disposition that John Keats, a proto-existentialist Romantic (whose immortality questing personae eventually confront their mortality), termed “negative capability.” There may exist an infinity of possible realms – Heaven itself among them – that beckon to be explored, but they never can be escaped into. The speaker can never venture beyond “circumference,” the word in this context effectively conveying the paradoxical human predicament of being both free and confined: free to explore while at the same time confined by the inescapable forces of gravity, mortality, and the limitations of individual human perception. Thus in the poem “I saw no Way – the Heavens were stitched – ,” all the speaker needs to do is “touch the Universe – ” . . .

And back it slid – and I alone – 

A Speck upon a Ball – 

Went out upon Circumference – 

Beyond the Dip of Bell – (J 378, Fr 633) 

This little poem – ironic even in its smallness, for its scope is epic – can be read as a drama of the Christian speaker’s discovery of her decidedly un-Christian plight: possessed with the desire to learn the secrets of the heavens, she soon realizes that such a discovery cannot be made. And yet, the very act of exploring – of venturing out “upon Circumference” despite her being a mere Speck upon the earth – is what makes her life purposeful and – paradoxically – more meaningful than before. To examine one’s life unflinchingly and learn to accept it for what it really is – the prime existential directive – is to liberate oneself from such inf l exible directives as church dogma (“the Dip of Bell”) that present themselves as the sole path to salvation. For her, a mortal woman whose paradigm of reality consists of domestic objects like thread and needle, the fabric of heaven can never appear more than “stitched.”

In another poem the speaker proudly proclaims, “The Queen discerns like me – Provincially – ” (J 285, Fr 256). 

The existentialist thus learns to accept her intrinsically restricted reality, just as the speaker in the following poem progresses from an enthusiastic expectation of reaching heaven to an enthusiastic acceptance of disbelief in that very expectation. Notice how skillfully Dickinson dramatizes the lapse of childlike faith as an existential awareness of the consequences of maintaining such faith takes hold:

Going to Heaven!

I don’t know when – Pray do not ask me how!

Indeed I’m too astonished To think of answering you!

Going to Heaven!

How dim it sounds!

. . .

Perhaps you’re going too!

Who knows?

If you should get there first 

Save just a little space for me 

Close to the two I lost – 

The smallest “Robe” will fit me 

And just a bit of “Crown” – 

For you know we do not mind our dress 

When we are going home – 

I’m glad I don’t believe it 

For it would stop my breath – 

And I’d like to look a little more 

At such a curious Earth!

I’m glad they did believe it 

Whom I have never found 

Since the mighty Autumn afternoon 

I left them in the ground.

(J 79, Fr 128) 

Like a three-act stage play, this three-stanza dramatic monologue captures the speaker’s dawning skepticism toward the Christian promise of an afterlife, a skepticism that leads her to a triumphant existential rejection of that afterlife. Act One: The speaker is highly agitated; she keeps exclaiming, “Going to Heaven!” too astonished by the concept either to believe or disbelieve that it’s true. It’s as if she has, for the first time in her life, dared to question the promise of heaven. As we soon realize, she is attending a funeral where everyone apparently is reassuring her that her recently deceased friends are most assuredly on their way to heaven. Act Two: The speaker’s tone shifts from astonishment to sarcasm: Well, if heaven is such a great place, you must be getting ready to go there yourself! If so, be sure to save a space for me – which shouldn’t be a problem because I’m so small.

 Like the speaker in “I saw no way the Heavens were stitched,” this speaker ironically equates space in heaven with ordinary domestic space: why should it be otherwise? Also, why should I dress any differently than I would for home? The comparison pokes fun at the uncritical acceptance of heaven as “up there,” taking up actual space, inhabited by departed souls wearing white robes. Act Three: The speaker’s tone changes from sarcasm to a triumphant, almost Nietzschean bravado in not only expressing disbelief in the heaven myth, but in equating it with annihilation of self – for if the myth were true, it would mean losing the world – the “mighty Autumn afternoon” – forever.

Faced with the resulting isolation and finitude, the individual must direct his or her own life with great deliberateness, despite the fact that there is no certainty of behavior, no divinely sanctioned moral code. As Kierkegaard asserts, “Fulfillment is always in the wish,” and “Doubt is a cunning passion.”6 Now lest the individual be overwhelmed by hopelessness and despair, Kierkegaard posits a way out, and that is to abandon reason and make a pure leap of faith across the unbridgeable gulf to God. As we shall see, Dickinson’s speakers do not make such a leap. They may be poised to do so, just as Dickinson herself had been poised to receive Christ during her student days, but they are unable to take that final step toward becoming a Christian.

In Dickinson’s case, her love of earthy things was a major deterrent: “It is hard for me to give up the world” (L 23) she states flatly to her close friend Abiah Root in 1848. More seriously, like the speaker in “Going to Heaven!” it was her inability to conceive of the existence of an afterlife that kept her from embracing Christianity. In 1846, when she was a mere fifteen years old, she wrote to Abiah, “I am continually putting off becoming a Christian . . . Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you. I often get thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity . . . I cannot imagine with the farthest stretch of my imagination my own death scene” (L 10). That last statement helps us to understand what is going on in poems like “I died for Beauty” (J 449, Fr 448), in which the speaker converses from inside her tomb with one “who died for Truth,” buried in the tomb beside her – or in her most famous poem, “Because I could not stop for Death” (J 712, Fr 479), in which the presumably dead speaker is merely being driven to heaven without ever arriving there – or in “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” (J 465, Fr 591) in which the moment of death is occupied by a buzzing fly instead of the king who would escort her into heaven. One literally cannot transcend one’s own life, these poems argue dramatically; so long as there is consciousness, earthly existence must continue.

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Reading Dickinson’s poems as existential dramas, both in the sense of staged scenarios and as dramatistic “language events,” – poems in which philosophical and religious ideas are delineated, not just expressed – gives us a better sense of the scope and complexity of her project. Dickinson’s poetry exemplif i es what Kenneth Burke calls sensuous apprehension of form. For all her metaphoric brilliance, her thematic and stylistic complexity, she is most of all a poet of the deliberately lived moment, of physical presence, of life’s unstoppable movement.

Fred D. White fromEmily Dickinson’s existential dramas