國
立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
1.2 Literary Review
Most scholars who studied Emily Dickinson’s reclusion probe into her mentality, and argue that the reclusion is a helpless situation due to several reasons, such as
“avoidant personality disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive episode, schizotypal personality disorder, social phobia, . . . and severe agoraphobic syndrome”
(Fuss 24).2
Jean Mudge, in Emily Dickinson and the Image of Home (1975), took a thorough examination on the relation between Emily Dickinson and her home with a
psychoanalytic approach. Providing handful introductions about the poet’s home, Mudge explored Dickinson’s home with two directions. She studied the substantial structure of the house, within which the function of every piece of furniture in the house was carefully examined. Moreover, she displayed the arrangement of each room with photos from the Homestead, and approached with psychoanalysis,
explicating how Emily Dickinson’s mentality was shaped and influenced by the house.
There were two homes in the poet’s life, one was where she spent her adolescent years, which was named by most scholars as “the house on Pleasant Street,” and another was where she lived for nearly thirty years, being known as “the Homestead.” The
significance of separating two homes with different examinations lied in the
And among the studies of Dickinson’s reclusion, several scholars focus on Dickinson’s home and the poet’s bond to it. They explored the influence of home on Dickinson, approaching from psychoanalytic and architectural methodology.
2 There are several studies concerning Dickinson’s illness. Maryanne M. Garbowsky in The House Without the Door: A Study of Emily Dickinson and the Illness of Agoraphobia (1989) suggested that
Dickinson was a victim of agoraphobia: “the flight from fears, the need for protection within her father’s house, the atmosphere of family conflict, and the desire for release from tormenting inner pressures” had led the poet unwilling to step out of the house (79). Another scholar Lyndall Gordon in Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds (2010) looked into Dickinson’s medical records and argued that the secret behind Dickinson’s reclusion was not a broken love, but was an infliction of epilepsy.
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diversified meanings and memories that the homes had to the poet.
Mudge explored Dickinson’s estrangement from the Homestead with a Freudian study. In the years between 1855 and 1858, after returning to the Homestead,
Dickinson struggled with the acclimation to the new home, which was also a striving adjustment to “the new self.”3 With a strict paternal expectation, the Homestead was both a literal and figurative confinement to Emily Dickinson. In a sense, the house itself was rather a prison than a home. Mudge then proposed that Dickinson’s unstable identity was influenced by the instability of her home.4
3 Approaching from feminist and Freudian study of women’s development of socialization, Mudge explicates that home orients women toward a complete identity. In “Womanhood and the Inner Space,”
Erik Erikson “supports Freud’s supposition that the womb, place of creation, . . . , becomes symbolized quite naturally by a house or by home. In structure and function, uterus and house parallel each other”
(Mudge 94-5). Like a “womb,” home with its “nurturing and pacific nature” (95) provides protection to a girl who receives a sense of security that later enables her to develop identity. Basing on the study, Mudge argues that Dickinson’s belated attainment of feminine maturity is probably resulted from the acclimation to this new home.
The pleasant memory of living in the house on Pleasant Street contrasted to the turmoil incidents in the
Homestead. Thus, Mudge argued that Dickinson’s “need to discover a locus or center”
and her “search for position or status” (76) was a result of the failing of a warm home.
The way to reconstruct the lost center was established by composing poetry. As Mudge indicated, the process of Dickinson’s poetry-making was to build the lost self, center, and her identity as a woman. The sense of fragmentation and the smallness of the self were restored by her own poems. “Her creative inner space becomes the place
4 Alfred Habegger in My wars are Laid Away in Books : the Llife of Emily Dickinson (2002) provided detailed informations about the Dickinson family. After the family returned to the Homestead, they experienced various troubles from inside and outside. The mother’s “perplexing illness” caused her
“invalid” with the sickness, and the father’s failure in lawsuit caused tension in the house. Then, it was
“Emily’s panic” coming after such turmoil in the family (Habegger 341, 345). The silence and the breakdown of the mother caused emotional detachment to her children. She was absent when the daughter needed her comfort.
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where poetry is conceived, a complement to, if not a surrogate for, a procreative biological center” (111). By creating poetry, Dickinson discovered the center and the goal. “Poetic consciousness was thus at once her goal, center, and ultimate home”
(Mudge 111). However, Mudge’s study of Dickinson’s home relied heavily on psychoanalytic examination, which limited the study on the house’s strong influence on the poet’s mentality and femininity. Moreover, the poetic home that the poet constructed and dwelled in was taken too certainly by Mudge.5
A more recent study of Emily Dickinson’s house was dedicated by Diana Fuss, who focused on the housing structure and its positive influence on the poet. In her book The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them (2004), Fuss justified that Dickinson was more than an odd recluse who was pathetically isolated. It was the reclusion that prompted Dickinson to take up her vocation as a poet. Examining Dickinson’s preference of solitude, Fuss pointed out that Dickinson
“freely chose her seclusion, opting to sequester herself in her father’s house in order to assume the life of a professional poet” (24). When examining Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life, critics “seemed to agree that interiority, modeled on the architectural space of tomb or prison, was the necessary prerequisite for her poetry” (Fuss 24).
Emphasizing the architectural study on the Homestead, Fuss argued that the house certainly “idealized the family residence as a refuge from the outside world, [and was]
a private domain dedicated to nurturing the interior life of its newly leisured citizens”
(Fuss 30). As the family improved the facility of the house with a better light and installed heating stove in every room, the renovation provided “individual member
5 “Finding her center in creating poetry, she writes for future readers and thus, while still alive, inhabits another world which only succeeding generations will know” (112). Mudge’s statement revealed to be contradictor, because I don’t agree that Emily Dickinson intended to publish her poems and proclaim her vocation as a poet.
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
within the family to seek privacy from the family” (Fuss 54). Emily Dickinson was
benefited by the renovation of such convenience in the house.
In studying Dickinson’s preference of solitude, Fuss’ aspect was different from that of Mudge’s. Though agreeing with Mudge that the house was in a sense a certain confinement and suffocation from which Dickinson wanted to escape, Fuss proposed that the Homestead was not as a terrifying prison which failed to help Dickinson construct a “healthy identity” (Mudge 99). Rather, Dickinson made use of the
enclosed structure of the house and took it as a fountain for composition. In the end of her study, Fuss re-examined Dickinson’s bedroom and argued that it was “actually the room with the best light, the best ventilation, and the best views” (56) in the house rather than a suffocating coffin.6
Fuss’ study focused on the tight bond between the house and the poet. With handful of poems analyzed to explicate Dickinson’s connection to her home, Fuss examined each domestic place, such as kitchen, door, drawing- room, and the poet’s room which separately reflected Dickinson’s use of body function in her poems, such as sight and sound. The enclosed interior of the domestic space was thus became an inward connection to Dickinson’s private interior. In Dickinson’s “upside-down, inside-out world, direction is radically dislocated and space itself unhinged. The inside subsumes the outside, transforming the exterior into a mirror image of the domestic interior” (Fuss, 65). Thus, the enclosed interiority, in this sense, became “an infinitely expanding interiority” (26) that broke the rigidity between the interior and
Dickinson, as Fuss suggested, was not “a helpless agoraphobic, [who was] trapped in a room in her father’s house” (55) but a poet who chose to withdraw from the outside world and carried out her profession.
6 Most critics imagined Emily Dickinson’s most private space—the bedroom—was a “melancholy, even terrifying, sanctuary” place where she felt “herself prematurely fitted to a coffin [that] imprisoned [her] on the inside” (Fuss 55).
‧ 國
立 政 治 大 學
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N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
the exterior.
Both Mudge and Fuss emphasized on the poet’s inseparable link with her home and house. The scholars found it necessary to separate the house from the home, highlighting the significance of the structure of the house, and they respectively studied the house from different approaches. It is true that the poet shows her mature knowledge of domestic space in the works concerning the theme of home, and the mental link between her inner realm and the home seems unavoidable. If Dickinson would never be separated with the home, regardless of how much she desired to escape from it, the study of Dickinsonian home would not be likely to overlook the examination on the structure. Though Fuss mentioned her insight of “infinitely expanding interiority” (26) that freed Dickinson from the enclosed space of the room, she closed her discussion with an examination on death as a resolution which is seen as the “last home” (L 10) by the poet herself.
Apart from the examination on the architectural effect of home, I want to focus on the figurative effect of home that Dickinson receives and transforms it to a source of her own making of home. Not omitting the strong link between the poet and her home, I focus on the act of reclusion that enables the inner realm power. That is, focusing on what is inside and what forms the inside can provide the poet with that inner power to construct a home of her own. With the power and the force within, it is possible for the poet to dwell in the midst of that most private interior—a home within.
She probed into her inner realm and discovered its containing quality and
expandability. The figurative home that the poet constructs is not separating the house from the home; instead, it is a home that contains, shelters, and provides possibility.
By exploring the intense inner power within her, the poet makes use of the confining interiority, and extends out to draw a figurative picture of home.