LITR 308 Emily Dickinson & Queer Theory

The lives of many literary greats remain a relative mystery; literary critics and historians are often left to piece together details from letters, documentation, and, sometimes controversially, the author’s work read for repeated motifs. They then draw what conclusions they can about the authors’ lives. One of the most prolific female poets in the English literary canon, Emily Dickinson’s life is preserved in letters and artifacts from her life. When examined as a body of work, Dickinson’s poetry reveals a pattern of focus on women’s interior lives and relationships that may be regarded as queer, especially with the added dimension of her close relationship with her sister-in-law. This essay examines a selection of her poems through a queer lens, highlighting the poems’ relationships to female love and Dickinson’s life and arguing against established patterns of erasing Dickinson’s queer identity.

Critical representation of Dickinson paints her an immensely private, reclusive individual. Known in her Massachusetts home of Amherst as “the Myth,” Dickinson “lived a nun-like existence, wearing only white, seeing no one but her sister, writing poems that almost no one saw” (Nicholson). This suggests that the aforementioned canonical portrait of Dickinson is mostly accurate, but though she saw few in person, she had a rich inner existence, expressed in her many poems and letters. Indeed, both her poems and letters were directed to her “most trusted literary audience,” Sue Dickinson (née Gilbert) (Nell Smith 56). Dickinson shared “about 250 poems” with Gilbert, “by far the largest number” compared to Dickinson’s other family members and acquaintances (Franklin 3). While the particulars of their relationship are lost to time, Dickinson and Gilbert unarguably shared an intimate connection; many of Dickinson’s poems are directed, either explicitly or implicitly, to Gilbert. Despite this, “until recently most literary critics have refused to acknowledge her love for other women,” instead continuing to prop up the image of the maidenly recluse (Faderman 43). Twentieth century critics, acknowledging the romantic and erotic contents of Dickinson’s poems, embarked on a “quest for the identity of this ‘reclusive spinster’s’ elusive (male) love,” though evidence shows “no significant heterosexual involvements until [Dickinson] was well into middle age” (Faderman 43). More recent literary criticism examines Dickinson’s poetry through a queer lens, but there is a long history of criticism going to “great lengths to explain away the content of same-sex love in her poems” (Faderman 45).

Suggestions of intimate female relationships are easy to identify within Dickinson’s vast collection of poems. In “Ourselves were wed one summer - dear,” Dickinson laments the end of a close relationship. The cause of separation is left obscure: Dickinson writes that “Our Futures different lay,” indicating that their lives lead them down diverging pathways, but also writes that the speaker’s object’s “little Lifetime failed” (Dickinson 9, 3). This adds a characteristically grim undercurrent to the poem, and may either be a physical or metaphorical death. The intimacy of the relationship is nonetheless underscored as Dickinson writes that she “wearied - too - of mine” after her object’s life ended (Dickinson 4). Dickinson therefore expresses that her life lacks meaning or value without her beloved. In the poem’s final stanza, Dickinson affirms that the poem describes a relationship between two women, writing that “we were Queens” (Dickinson 15) – the speaker and her object are therefore definitively female.

Interestingly, the “death” of the poem’s object seems to have occurred when she is “crowned in June” (Dickinson 16). Gilbert married Dickinson’s brother in July of 1856, the “crown[ing]” possibly referring to the couple’s engagement (Dickinson 16). Similarly, the “Bloom” of the object’s “Garden” may be the birth of Gilbert’s first child in 1861, the blooming of plant-life being a common metaphor for reproduction (Dickinson 13). It was upon this marriage that “the relationship between Sue and Emily became stormy… [and] Emily may have had a nervous breakdown,” a kind of metaphorical “Frost” in Dickinson’s life (Faderman 44; Dickinson 14).

While this interpretation alone does not prove a lesbian relationship between Dickinson and Gilbert - only a close one - it upholds the existence of female relationships in Dickinson’s life and body of work. Other poems are far more explicit in their dedication to Gilbert, such as “You love me - you are sure,” which speaks to a “Dollie” (“You love me - you are sure” 6). An affectionate pet name, Dickinson referred to Gilbert as Dollie in her letters (Nell Smith 61). In the poem, Dickinson craves affirmation of Gilbert’s love, worrying that she will “wake - / Some grinning morn” to find the “Sunrise” (i.e. Gilbert) gone from her life (“You love me - you are sure” 3-5). In another poem, “To own a Susan of my own,” Dickinson writes that her love for Susan “is of itself a Bliss” and that she would “forfeit” anything to “Continue me in this,” that is, her relationship (“To own a Susan of my own” 3-4). Modern critics also point to distinct and repeated imagery in Dickson’s poetry, such as “jewels, gems, pearls, peas, berries, nuts, buds, crumbs, and beads,” which gloss as “clitoral… [and] demonstrate an awareness of lesbian sexuality” (Faderman 45). It is neither difficult nor reaching to read the “Pink and Pulpy multitude” and “Modesties enlarged” of “Our little Kinsmen - after Rain” as such given these patterns and autobiographical considerations (“Our little Kinsmen - after Rain” 3, 11).

Whether or not this intimate bond between Dickinson and Gilbert materialized as physical is impossible to know (and immaterial to the thesis), especially considering that the letters “written by Sue [to Emily] were destroyed at Emily’s death” by Dickinson’s brother Austin (and Gilbert’s husband), presumably in an effort to conceal the parameters of their relationship and avoid public knowledge of his wife’s queerness (Faderman 44). Dicksinon writes in her letters to Gilbert of a desire to “nestle close to your warm heart” and to “carry me to you, and to bring you back to me, long enough to snatch one kiss” (Faderman 49). While these professions read as distinctively lesbian through a modern lens, they may simply be characteristic of the “sensual avowals of love” found in female relationships of the period (Smith-Rosenberg 168). These friendships existed along a “continuum or spectrum of affect gradations strongly affected by cultural norms and arrangements,” and they therefore defy modern classification (Smith-Rosenberg 180). It is similarly anachronistic and limiting for critics to “subdivide Dickinson’s love poetry into ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ poems,” as it imposes a binary sexuality that did not exist during Dickinson’s time and which is opposed by modern queer theory (Henneberg 2). It is then perhaps most appropriate to label to sexuality, content, and eroticism in Dickinson’s body of work as queer (rather than ‘homosexual’ or ’lesbian’) in that it shifts the, at the time, historically androcentric narrative of poetry to focus instead on the relationships between women. This queerness manifests in Dickinson’s syntactical style as well, with her liberal use of hyphens and capitalization. She “break[s] traditional linguistic and poetic forms” to reclaim them from patriarchal domination, creating something subversive in its distinct focus upon the interior lives of women and paving the way for future queer and lesbian poets like Adrienne Rich (Jeffs).

It is critical that the queer identities of canonical writers like Dickinson be discussed. Doing so affirms the long history of queer people, who existed before terms like “homosexual,” “bisexual,” or “lesbian.” It also adds dimension to the examination and interpretation of their work, elevating natural imagery and symbols in Dickinson’s work to indicative of her interior life, love, and relations. These considerations must be preserved in the same way that we preserve other artifacts from author’s lives; they offer readers a glimpse into their lives, values, and identities and help readers understand who they were and what they wrote about. These queer readings may, at times, seem to fly in the face of current literary discourse, but it is critical that we not allow these facts of author’s identifies to be erased; to do so would be a disservice to the author and to queer history.

Works Cited

Dickinson, Emily. “Our little Kinsmen - after Rain.” 1865.

—. “Ourselves were wed one summer - dear.” 1863.

—. “To own a Susan of my own.” 1877.

—. “You love me - you are sure.” 1861.

Faderman, Lillian. “Emily Dickinson.” Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the Seventeenth Century to the Present. New York: Penguin Group, 1994. 43-60. Print.

Franklin, R.W. “Introduction.” The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Harvard University Press, 2005. 1-11. Print.

Henneberg, Sylvia. “Neither Lesbian nor Straight: Multiple Eroticisms in Emily Dickinson’s Love Poetry.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 4.2 (1995): 1-19.

Jeffs, William Patrick. “Adrienne Rich: The Union of Feminist, Gay, and Lesbian Theories.” Feminism, Manhood & Homosexuality: Intersections in Psychoanalysis & American Poetry. Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2003. 96-149.

Nell Smith, Martha. “Susan and Emily Dickinson: their lives, in letters.” Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Ed. Wendy Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 51-73.

Nicholson, William. A Quiet Passion won’t solve the mystery of Emily Dickinson – but does the truth matter? 1 April 2017. Web. 8 December 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/01/a-quiet-passion-wont-solve-the-mystery-of-emily-dickinson-but-does-the-truth-matter-.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” n.d. 168-183.