2 - Trends in Dickinson Biography and Biographical/Psychoanalytic Criticism

Summary

Biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied —

— E. D. to T. W. Higginson, February 1885 (L972)

Of all the scientific disciplines psychoanalysis has more in common with art. Both seek understanding of the human spirit.

— Louis Fraiberg, Psychoanalysis & American Literary Criticism (1960)

Her life, like the major vehicle of her poetry, was metaphoric.

— Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974)

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE in nineteenth-century Calvinist, patriarchal New England, students of Emily Dickinson inevitably wonder, that a young woman from a distinguished family rejects her family's and her culture's faith (or at least the protocols of that faith), chooses not to marry and raise a family, and — most astonishingly — “shuts the door” on society and throws away the key to pursue the vocation of poetry in her own utterly uncompromising manner? Formalists, of course, do not consider the question relevant to their critical agendas (although that does not preclude their being fascinated with the poet's life), but biographers and critics for whom the life informs the work consider the question essential. Was it emotional turmoil triggered by unrequited love? Was it agoraphobia or some other kind of phobia? Did her eye problems or other physiological afflictions stoke the engines of poetic production? Perhaps it had something to do with Dickinson's experience of what she mysteriously referred to in an 1862 letter to Higginson as her “terror — since September — I could tell to none,” which led her, as she wrote in her second letter to Higginson, to “sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid” (L261).