Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief

Commonweal, Oct 9, 1998 by David Yezzi

Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief by Roger Lundin William B. Eerdmans, $24, $16 paper, 305 pp.

What were Emily Dickinson's religious beliefs? The matter resists illumination as thoroughly as any aspect of her famously tenebrous career. Yet, given the housebound poet's hymnal meters, her biblical references, clipped Calvinist idiom, and enduring preoccupation with God, Jesus, suffering, death, and (her "Flood subject") immortality, the question persists: To what extent did Dickinson espouse the Congregationalist faith of her family and of her community in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the middle nineteenth century? With Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief, Roger Lundin seeks to locate the spiritual concerns underlying a life and art seldom marked by biographical or critical consensus.

In fact, it seems that where Emily Dickinson (1830-86) is concerned, no two critics can agree on much. So, too, with regard to her spirituality. There are those writers, for example, who doubt that Dickinson's religious beliefs bear greatly on her poetry; others assert that she rejected religion outright, while still others feel poetry itself "became her religion." The critic Dennis Donoghue has aptly observed that "of her religious faith virtually anything may be said, with some show of evidence. She may be represented as an agnostic, a heretic, a sceptic, a Christian." Donoghue himself perhaps oversteps, however, when he argues that "Dickinson's Christianity was never a firm conviction." Her own words at the age of fifteen would seem to refute this. "I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness," she wrote to a friend, "as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior.... I feel I shall never be happy without I love Christ."

Such happiness proved elusive. The joy that Dickinson took in faith at that early age gave way in young adulthood to doubt, which her poems later absorbed as ambiguity and contradiction. As Lundin's efforts attest, little in the life provides conclusive answers (and, in this regard, Lundin is justly cautious, dispelling earlier misconceptions rather than fostering them or perpetrating additional ones). Of some things, we may be certain. In 1847-48, Dickinson underwent a year of religious instruction at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, but returned to Amherst after suffering an illness that gave the family cause to wish her home. (Home was, in fact, where Dickinson preferred to be her whole life; she regularly avoided travel and, in the end, almost never left her father's grounds.) Raised during the period of New England revivalism, Dickinson declined to make the public confession of faith that would admit her to the church (her father made his twice), and by the age of thirty she left off attending services altogether. Still, it is the critic J. V. Cunningham's contention that losing the call to salvation was the great disappointment of the poet's life.

Despite her failure to convert, Dickinson often returned in her writing to ideas of divinity. Both her more than one thousand surviving letters and her 1,775 poems contain wildly disparate views of deity; hers was "that religion/that doubts as fervently as it believes." In her years of greatest productivity--roughly the period of the Civil War, during which she wrote some thousand poems--God was portrayed as alternately salvific and distant. In one poem, dated circa 1864, Dickinson imagines herself as a bride of Christ:

Given in Marriage unto Thee

Oh thou Celestial Host--

Bride of the Father and the Son

Bride of the Holy Ghost.

Other Betrothal shall dissolve--

Wedlock of Will, decay--

Only the Keeper of this Ring

Conquer Mortality-

(If, in the end, she was not Christ's bride, she was no man's either: the death in 1884 of Otis Phillips Lord cruelly removed her one prospect for human marriage.) More often the poems suggest a God passively listening ("Of course--I prayed--/And did God Care?) or altogether absent ("They went to God's Right Hand--/That Hand is amputated now/And God cannot be found--"). Her conflicting views of the divine existed simultaneously and unresolved in her long struggle with faith (a "Pugilist and Poet," she termed herself). Yet doubt can be a form of belief, as the poets and ministers John Donne and George Herbert knew. If her relationship to God defies easy characterization, it is nonetheless everywhere in evidence.

Working back from the letters and poems, Lundin's biography attempts to place Dickinson in the context of the religion of her time and place, of which there are four standard views: staunch moral Puritanism, Whiggish cultural Protestantism (with a side of Transcendentalism), Darwinian naturalism, and Nietzschean post-Christianity. It is true that Dickinson's life spanned this drastic shift from a religious to a secular society, but a Nietzschean she was not. As Lundin points out, "Unlike Nietzsche, she was not gleeful about the possible loss of God but profoundly sad about it, because `The abdication of Belief/Makes the Behavior small--.'" Also to her credit, there was perhaps something of Dickinson's Puritan inheritance that led her to perceive the limits of Romantic optimism found in the work of her contemporaries Emerson and Whitman, yet, like them, she refused to accept the notion of Original Sin. As Lundin puts it, "God may know why we need to be forgiven, but `The Crime, from us, is hidden--.'"