RESISTANCE TO DEMOCRACY AND ISOLATION

Dickinson retains her position of separateness as a way of resisting equation. Dickinson begins poem #398 with the solution closed. A tension arises in the poem over the sense that Dickinson both wills the separation between herself and the divine, and feels unsatisfied or short-changed that she can't cross a wall that is "a single hair --/ a filament -- a law." She positions herself as simultaneously attracted to the "silver call" which pulled her away from her initial stance of having "not minded -- Walls --," and wary of the power such an Other might wield over her. The He in this poem contains the possibility of usurping her own voice, her own authority, and she both establishes the boundaries which separates and protects her from `Him', and continues to be drawn to `Him'.

Perhaps most remarkable about Dickinson's work is the achievement of her seclusionary or hermetic "I". While Whitman addresses a readerly "you" to draw the reader into the poem, Dickinson addresses a "you" or a "he" who is clearly not the reader. Her incorporation of the "I" in the text is rigidly idiolectic. While the "I" has authority in the text, it does not extend to a larger social group to reaffirm the possibility of human agency. The "I" on her work rejects the confidence with which Whitman and Emerson claim human access to the sublime. Dickinson creates a singularly non-democratic "I" whose only sociolect is drawn from biblical text. She succeeds in plying the text to her individual thoughts without elevating herself into the text as a social or political figure. Unlike Whitman, who extends his "I" to encompass many forms, and surrounds himself with "you"s, Dickinson writes, thinks, and is alienated from the sublime in isolation.

Dickinson's insistence of the law-like limit between herself and the sublime can be seen as an act of rejection or resistance that lends her authority and strength. In Flirting with Patriarchy: Feminist Dialogics, Melanie Kiersthardt argues that, for a sub-altern figure, resistance may take the form of asserting the self through silence or death. Dickinson responds to the essentially male intellectual experience of the sublime and transcendence by positioning herself outside the sublime in a private, isolated and alienating experience. Her act of self-isolation is both an effort to reaffirm the mystical and unknowable nature of the divine, and a way to resist the dominating force of the consuming sublime.

Her "I" forms an idiolectic posture because she presents no social references with which to contrast. In the same gesture of locating herself outside the sublime experience, separated from it by an impenetrable, but hair-thin wall, she situates the reader outside the poem. Unlike Whitman's open, sociolectic verse which both addresses the reader and invites the reader into the text, each dash, each fragmented verse, highlights the extent to which Dickinson's words have been pared down, honed, and withheld from the reader. The "I" in Dickinson's poetry keeps her power. The "I" is the only agent in the work. The agency of the "He" is mediated by Dickinson's phrasing, "My face take her recompense." Rather than the active "looks", he is made distant and more impenetrable by the construction, "the looking." By pushing the "He" out of the poem, she leaves herself alone, a voice that isolates itself from both the reader and the Other or the sublime, affecting a silencing of herself.

In contrast, Whitman actively seeks to merge with the sublime by erasing to barriers both between self and nature, but also between the "I" and "you" of the text.. By privileging physical experience, he emphasizes the imminent characteristics of the sublime. In the third line he notes, "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you," by way of creating a fluid crossing of the boundaries which Emerson erected between the self and "all other men," and the self and its body. Whitman positions the transformative and mystical properties of the sublime within himself, and simultaneously erases the Soul/ Nature distinction, and raises it to a level of greater authority. Sublime experience is "that in me -- I do not know what it is -- But I know it is in me." (50) While the sublime exists within him, it is still mystical and unknown.

Whitman attempts to democratize the sublime by locating it in the body. He describes himself as "the poet of the woman the same as the man" (21), and claims:

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of dogs,

Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the

marksmen,

I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn'd with the

ooze of my skin,...

...Agonies are one of my changes of garments,

I don not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person. (Song of Myself)

His tendency to equate "I" with "you", his body with anybody else, self with sublime, individual with social, is threatening to women. It contains the possibility of usurping the voice, body, and power of the object with which it equates itself. Whitman's ability to level all the constituencies in the poem through the physical, creates a democratic unity.

In her article, Whitman, Syntax, and Political Theory, Wai Chee Dimock argues persuasively that Whitman's catalogs of images and people, and the sense that the "you" in the text is democratically imminent -- that is, any "you" is equally possible and good, in the end leave the text barren of any sense of preference or focused love.

Good, good, good, good. That chant of equivalence brings to head the hope as well as the frailty of democratic poetics, as of a democratic polity. The equivalence is secured, of course, by the regularity of the syntax, which neutralizes luck by making all eventualities equally indifferent, both in the sense that none is distinguishable from the others, and in the sense that none is preferred to the others.(78)

This sense of democratic union is created syntactically, in the physical presentation of the poem and in Whitman's emphasis on physical sensation as a way of incorporating the sublime. Whitman's construction of the "you" in Song of Myself is instructive for understanding Dickinson's resistance to and resolute establishment of the line dividing self from the democratic sublime.

Ultimately, the relationship between the sublime and the democratic "I" is irreconcilable for Dickinson. For Whitman, the democratic "I" and the sublime appear as a complementary pair. In Song of Myself, he synthesizes a relationship between reader and poet in which the reader is asked to join the poet physically in a space within the text, in much the same way that the poet seeks to draw the sublime into himself. He engages the reader on three fronts. First, as Scarry argues, his emphasis on the "I" allows for a sociolectic reading of the individual that maps the authority of the "I" onto every individual in the readership. Second, he addresses the reader directly as "you" and invites the reader to enter the text (rest the chuff of your hand on my hip), to depart from him (I kiss you with a good-bye kiss, and open the gate for your egress hence), and to accept him as a lover (stop this day and night with me). Third, he creates figures within the text who fulfill the reader's role as a voyeur and, by describing scenes of pain(33) and sexual arousal(28), casts the reader as the voyeur. Whitman sexualizes the union of self and sublime as well as the textual union between the "I" of the poem and the readerly "you".

Dickinson's understanding of, and resistance to the sexually figured invasive sublime protects her from being absorbed into a democratic state and supplies the sublime, outside of her self, with a sense of great, but distant, authority. In The Rape of Narrative and the Narrative of Rape: Speech Acts and Body language in Judges, Mieke Bal claims that "rape is the body speech act par excellence ... It is... an act of cutting, of dividing flesh, destroying its wholeness, hence the subject. It alienates the victim from herself and is meant to do so." (20) This definition provides helpful tools for understanding the implications of Whitman's initiation of a sexual union between the reader and the text, as well the sublime. Furthermore, it begins to develop an answer for why Dickinson establishes and preserves the hard boundaries between the "I" in her poetry and the divine "he", as well as between the text and the reader. While Whitman's "I" appears to initiate the union between reader and text, which would suggest as "rape" of the reader, Dickinson's work seems to resist the reader's voyeuristic eye, as if in fear of a reader's "rape" of the text.

While Dickinson resists the anonymity of the democratic by embracing the anonymity of alienation, she presents herself, and her poetry , as hermetically separate from the reader. She speaks to a "you" who is evidently not the reader, and establishes a clear line of privacy in her work. Because, as Joanne Diehl argues, Dickinson cannot "take for granted a relation to what lies beyond the self,"(44) she defines her position by resisting the democratic and in opposition to the sublime. The sublime, like the democratic, is frightening. Both advance upon the subject to consume or overwhelm. Both imply a loss of self or a form of submission. While Whitman claims that "to touch (his) person to some one else's is about as much as (he)/ Can stand," Dickinson resists the contact itself. She deliminates the boundary between self and other with an adamantine line.

TO READ MORE ABOUT FORM, CLICK HERE

TO READ MORE ABOUT THE SUBLIME AS A SEXUAL UNION, CLICK HERE

TO READ MORE ABOUT THE BODY FIGURED IN TEXT AND THE TEXT AS A BODY, CLICK HERE

TO RETURN TO MY INTRODUCTION, CLICK HERE