Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [70]
Make me bearded like a Man!
Modest blushes are swept aside by the speaker’s pride in a ‘constant’ love that ‘never leapt its socket’ and by acceptance of a gender shift ‘when they dislocate my Brain!’ Here is another secret: ‘Big my Secret but it’s bandaged’ for the rest of her life. Dramatically, a ‘Wife’ - a socially unacknowledged wife - blurts what she stifles. Conjoining issues of sickness and gender, this poem was not published until 1945.
The more daring her imagined confessions, the more the poet had to guard the facts of her life. She cannot name ‘Master’. Nor can she name her sickness. The sacred or falling sickness was always unnameable when it struck a female. With males, secrecy was less strict, and fame in a few - Caesar, Mahomet, Dostoyevsky - over-rode the stigma, but a woman had to bury herself in a lifelong silence. It’s therefore remarkable that Dickinson developed a voice from within that silence, one with a volcanic power to bide its time.
Publication, under the circumstances, had to be postponed indefinitely. When Higginson suggested that she delay to publish, she assured him that publication was as foreign to her intentions ‘as Firmament to Fin’. She owed it to her father’s name not to expose her oddities: ‘A modesty befits the soul / That bears another’s—name—’. A deeper reticence held up this shield of modest womanhood, and it was not an act; she could defer to others while protecting her gift. In this she was not all that unusual amongst women writers. But she stood alone in her avoidance of print. Conceivably, this was not so much a matter of modesty, nor even a matter of poetic irregularities, but the intractable block of a taboo.
Amid the thousands of details amassed about the poet’s family and local environment, one link has been overlooked. It’s the curious fact that living within yards of one another were three semi-invalids who belonged to the same family, each with a member of family attached as carer. If we look at a well-known British case of the period, the poet Edward Lear, there’s the same closed-off family solution: Lear’s sister became his lifelong carer. Since these were middle-class families who could afford outside help, the issue was not economy but secrecy. A diagnosis, if made, would not have passed a family’s lips. And yet, if this guess is correct, the poet talks about ‘it’ all the time in her poetry, the pronoun pointing to its namelessness. ‘’Tis so appalling—it exhilarates—’. All the same, ‘it’ is no more than virtual death, unlike men dying ‘externally’ in the Civil War. The actuality of their deaths is a fact ‘of Blood’, whilst ‘it’ is playing ‘kill’ and the dreamer is playing ‘shriek’. A dreamer has the option of opening her eyes - safe after all, and mocking her safety: this is ‘Dying in drama—/ And Drama—is never dead—’.
Dickinson tells it ‘slant’, but to tell it at all is an act of disclosure, justified only by refraining from publication and certainly not under her own name. As disclosure ‘it’ becomes exemplary of any extreme ordeal of those who live in sight of death, but more significantly for a poet, ‘it’ is formative for the jolts or leaps across space to open new pathways.
Emily Dickinson was an avid reader of Shakespeare and took similar liberties with English grammar, as when she coins ‘perfectness’ to convey a uniqueness too intractable for standard ‘perfection’. In that poem on the impossibility of objective perception (‘Perception of an Object costs’) she transforms the passive voice of the verb ‘is situated’ into an ungrammatical active form, ‘situates’. Each transformation has its rationale. ‘Situates’, like ‘perfectness’, conveys a wilful distance from definition - a disruptive energy crucial to her art. It turns the noun into a verb. Research on Shakespeare’s grammar, in particular his use of a noun as a verb (say, ‘foots it’ for dance), has demonstrated a measurable surge in the brain of his reader or audience. This research is still at an early stage, but one idea is that nouns and verbs may be processed in different regions of our