Emily Dickinson and Class

Abstract Nowhere is the controversy over the relative merits and limits and possible interdependence of class and gender as categories of historical and cultural analysis more evident than in recent work on Emily Dickinson.1 From Rebecca Patterson’s early emphasis on Dickinson’s erotic relationships with women in The Riddle of Emily Dickinson (1951), to Adrienne Rich’s important essay “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson” (1975), to more recent work by Sandra Gilbert, Joanne Feit Diehl, Barbara Mossberg, Vivian Pollak, and Wendy Martin, among others, feminist critics have overturned traditional representations of Dickinson as sentimental recluse, “Belle of Amherst,” unrequited lover, or sublimated neurotic. But through an almost exclusive focus on gender, psychosexuality, and patriarchy as the only oppression, feminist critics have also tended paradoxically to take Dickinson out of history, (re)privatizing her in the space of the home and the psyche, and subsuming the particularity and difference of Dickinson’s life and work into a repeat across time of the same familial romance: the story of the daughter’s revolt against a perpetually demonized and transhistorical patriarch and her desire to return to a preoedipal and prehistorical mother.2 In this essay, I would like to problematize the historical grounds of these polarizations by (re)situating Dickinson as fully and complexly as possible in relation to the social, political, and cultural struggles of her times. While it is certainly true to say that Dickinson was not an overtly political poet in the same sense that Whitman was, it is simply not true to say that she had no politics and no ideological investment in a particular order of power.