Emily Dickinson’s existential dramas

Very often readers regard Emily Dickinson as a confessional poet, a poet whose
writings reveal her own perception and her own feeling about the world, love, life, death,
etc. But at a closer glance at her as poetic “career”, discloses a more complex artistic
purpose one that reveals in both possibility and impossibility of the language to suggest
the experiences of life and mind. One might say that Dickinson dramatizes the
predicaments or state of mind and constructs scenarios in verse and she declares to
Thomas Wentworth Higginson in an early letter that “ When I state myself, as the
Representative of the Verse it does not mean- me- but a supposed person” (L 268). The
distinction is exceedingly important for she is presenting herself not as a sentimental
“poetess” but as a Woman of Letters with an artistic agenda of profound scope and
vision, reflecting what Matthew Arnold would term “high seriousness”. In that same
letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson she proclaims “ My business is Circumstance”” a
wonderfully compact way to assert that her poetic project embraces concerns that are
relevant to the entire human sphere, not just to herself.
Dickinson’s world-view is existential, which is to say that her personae regarded
the individual self, and not any divine agency, as solely responsible for the events that
shape their lives, which are intrinsically limited, flawed, and separate fro nature. The
existentialist values longing over gratification, the journey over the destination, the
creative process over its finished products. Anguish, doubt, penury, striving are of greater
value than comfort, certainty, wealth, attainment- for the former intensify experience
while the latter tend to numb it. The existentialist will rail against panaceas and anodyne,
whether in word or deed.
For Dickinson, the poet is the supreme existentialist for she “ Distills amazing scenes/
From ordinary meanings”- and the echo from John Newton’s hymn, “Amazing Grace,” is
quite deliberate: The poet also can create grace, however limited or ephemeral, as well as
“scalp your naked soul” ( J 315, Fr 477). Dickinson’s poetry, as Inder Nath Kher states,
displays “ a fundamental concern for existence itself as seen through the power to
creative imagination.” For the existentialist, the power to imagine, to shape experience
out of language, is as close as human beings can get to achieving salvation.
On superficial level, the point is patently obvious; and if that were all there was to
the poem, it would be promptly brushed aside as a mere trifle. However, the exclamatory
tone of the speaker, the startling use of “culprit” to modify “Life” – and finally the intense
emphasis on the word “Life” triggers a different level of reading, together with a more
complex interplay of the dramatistic elements. The speaker is underlying agent, who uses
her innocent childhood demeanor to admonish an overly rational adult society to put less
faith in their surgical techniques and to be more respectful of the unpredictable, wily,
inscrutable nature of life, which tends not to yield its secrets when the knife of reasons is
brought to it.
Dickinson’s poems also are dramatic in the conventional sense of the word – not
just in the way they depict personae engaged in dramatic monologue or dialogue, but in
the way they construct a virtually Aristotelian problem/situation-crisis/climax-
denouement progression.
Dickinson prefers the aesthetically richer indirection of a dramatic rendering, whereby
characters – personae – speak in their own disparate voices, thereby creating a richer and
more complex work of art.
The dramatic rendering can be subtle and multi-leveled. Let us consider this popular
poem of hers as a case in point:

I never hear the word “Escape”

Without a quicker blood,
…
I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars
Only to fail again!

(J 77, Fr 144)

The poem dramatizes an artist’s recognition of one of life’s central paradoxes: the mind,
which contemplates and yearns for boundless freedom, is bound forever in a mortal body.
The speaker, feels that she could simply spread her wings and fly away from her real-
world confinement.
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.
Individual existence is flawed and filled with suffering and limitations, but that defines
life’s authenticity. Kierkegaard criticizes the Romantic poets for using their own making.
Thus, they live “in a totally hypothetical and subjunctive way,”1 which causes them to
lose touch not only with the authentic world but with themselves.
Dickinson’s poems are existential for yet another reason: their speakers seldom feel
secure in the promise of a transcendent reality as do the speakers in so much of
Romantic poetry. Her speakers ironically are most secure with the doubts and
uncertainties of their flawed and finite existence.
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.
The speaker in the following poem progresses from an enthusiastic expectation of
reaching heaven to an enthusiastic acceptance of disbelief in that very expectation.
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 –

1
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), in Howard V. Hong
and Edna H. Hong (eds.), The Essential Kierkegaard (Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 20-36.
 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. 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. Act Three: The speaker’s tone changed from sarcasm to a
triumphant, almost Nietzschean bravado in not only expressing disbelief in the heaven
myth, but in equating in with annihilation of self – for if the myth were true, it would
mean losing the world – the “mighty Autumn afternoon” – forever.
T. Z. Lavine in From Socrates to Sartre, identifies six themes in existentialism:
(1) Existence precedes, and is superior to, essence; (2) Awareness of the nothingness at
the heart of our existence produces anguish; (3) Existence is inexplicable and absurd; (4)
Sciences, philosophies, or religions that argue for universal systems are invalid; (5)
Death, like the sword of Damocles, hangs over our heads every moment of our lives, and
for that reason must be acknowledged and confronted; (6) The individual is alienated
from society, from the natural world, from the cosmos.2
2
Lavine, From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), pp.330-4.
Dickinson gives dramatic poignancy to each of these existentialist themes in her poems,
as I shall now attempt to show.

Existence precedes and is superior to essence

This is a foundation of existentialist thought. Whereas essential being is timeless

and selfless and linked inseparably to all creation, existence is bound by temporality,
individual limitation, and isolation. The best we can do is define the timeless, the
heavenly, in terms of the temporal and earthly – but to do that is to champion the
existential over the transcendent!
Dickinson dramatizes this principal existential condition in at least three different ways.
One way is to show speakers meditating upon their limited, isolated, time-bound
natures, as in “I tie my Hat”:

Life’s little duties do – precisely –

As the very least
Were infinite – to me –

I put new Blossoms in the Glass –

And throw the old – away –
I push a petal from my Gown
That anchored there – I weigh
The time ’twill be till six o’clock
…
And yet – existence – some way back
Stopped – struck – my ticking – through –
We can not put Ourself away
As a completed Man
Or Woman – When the Errand’s done
We came to Flesh – [u]pon –
There may be – Miles on Miles of Nought –
Of Action – sicker far –
To simulate – is stinging work –
To cover what we are
From Science – and from Surgery –
Too Telescopic eyes
To bear on us unshaded –
For their – sake – not for Ours –

Therefore – we do life’s labor –

Though life’s Reward – be done –
With scrupulous exactness –
To hold our Senses – on –

(J 443, Fr 522)
The speaker begins by reflecting upon the details comprising a typical day in her life. The
ultimate irony of the poem is that they are of infinite importance because, existentially
speaking, human experience is all there is.
Another way to dramatize the superiority of existence over essence is to compare
the ironic richness of impoverished, finite life with the poverty of riches in the
conventional sense.
A third way that Dickinson’s speakers dramatize the superiority of existence over
essence is by capturing the intensity of living from moment to moment.

Existence is inexplicable and absurd

The problem with attempting to “explain” existence is that the explainer

inevitably resorts to divine revelation or some idealistic metaphysical system that cannot
be empirically authenticated. In the following poem, the speaker compares two views of a
sinking boat: a human one, represented by a sailor’s perspective, and an angelic one:

Adrift! A little boat adrift!

…
Will no one guide a little boat
Unto the nearest town?

So Sailors say – on yesterday –

Just as the dusk was brown
One little boat gave up its strife
And gurgled down and down.

So angels say – on yesterday –

Just as the down was red
One little boat – o’erspent with gales –
Retrimmed its masts – redecked its sails –
And shot – exultant on!

(J 30, Fr 6)

Compared with the sailor’s view the angelic view reads like a gross euphemistic
platitude.
Human existence, lacking the comfort of God’s palpable presence, is indeed miserable,
the speaker seems to imply; but the only alternative is non-existence.
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 – give us a better sense of the scope and
complexity of her project.