"One Unbroken Company": Religion and Emily Dickinson

Abstract

shaped the content and form of Emily Dickinson's writings. Her hymn-poems are often interpreted against the background of either Puritanism or Transcendentalism. These critical strategies tend finally to evaluate her poetry as the isolated outpourings of a highly individualistic religious thinker. There is, however, a more immediate religious background behind Dickinson. If we focus instead on the feminized nineteenth-century religious persuasion of the evangelicals and their emphasis on group continuity and familial love, a different Dickinson appears, one whose questioning is more relational than individualistic, and whose poetry loses its pristine casing. By examining her letters in the light of the persuasive strategies of evangelical religion, this essay will set her religious struggle within a social context and should point toward the need to rethink the metaphysical interpretations of her poetry. The question of religious influence becomes clear in the judgment about Dickinson's formative year at Mount Holyoke. Albert Gelpi and Robert Weisbuch who see this moment as negative-Gelpi even calls it a nightmare-tend to describe her rebellion against the authoritarianism of religion in terms of the more positive myth of the romantic or transcendental poet, ultimately the myth of the hero.1 Against the negativity of religion, Dickinson erects a citadel of art and cultivates the ego or consciousness. The most negative judgment of her year at Mount Holyoke, however, comes from the clinical analysis by John Cody. He describes Dickinson as the victim of relentless and merciless pressure, subject to humiliation, threats, indignation, seduc-