Reperiodization: The Example of Emily Dickinson

Abstract

One of the most obdurate institutional restraints in literary criticism is the periodization of literature for purposes of teaching, of analysis, and of specialization. These periods, created by a male-dominated literary establishment for a predominantly male literary tradition and sanctioned by a chronological inevitability, may be fictions, but they have the tenacity of convenience and convention. Even after feminist critics have worked successfully to recover neglected women writers and to place established women writers in the canon, the old periodization of literary studies holds firm. For example, when Modernism is stretched to include women and blacks, the new term High Modernists arises to relegate the additions to what presumably would be the status of Low Modernists. In reconsidering the question of periodization from a feminist perspective, the best place to start is with a major woman writer. For this purpose, Emily Dickinson is ideal because her writing life spanned literary periods and her poetry dominates the century in which she wrote. Generally credited as the greatest woman poet and a major influence on all subsequent women writers, Dickinson is nonetheless set in the literary period of American Transcendentalism, not as the jewel in its crown, but rather as a writer in the Emersonian and Romantic male tradition (see Homans and Diehl). Yet the genre in which she exclusively writes distinguishes her from the American Transcendentalists, and the attitudes she takes toward the lyric I, her art, and her audience are all quite different from theirs. In this statement, I draw no revolutionary conclusions: Dickinson is generally considered so far outside the main currents of the period that she is not always included in major studies of the time (see Matthiessen and Irwin). She does not fit in, I want to argue, because she belongs to a later period, and the reason she belongs to a later period is that she did not fit into her own. In this situation, she may be typical of many women writers who look forward to the next literary period-the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, for example, who has a certain Romantic strain in her poetry, or the Modernist Gertrude Stein, who exemplifies the experiments of Post-Modernism. My reasoning about Dickinson is not so circular as it might at first appear, and it is pertinent to the problems that women writers pose to periodization.