The interplay between security and insecurity is never quite resolved in The Portrait of a Lady, a fact that James strives to emphasize by opening up both his heroine and his conclusion to competing visions of failure and success. Such a competition had been a fundamental ingredient of imaginative life in America since John Winthrop's closing evocation of Moses in “A Modell of Christian Charity,” and no writer in the nineteenth century carried out the implications of the competition more thoroughly than Emily Dickinson. The reassuringly familiar hymn meters of her verse are constantly challenged by the complexity of her syntax and by the unstable mixture of separation and conjunction represented in her use of dashes. Our first and deepest impressions of Dickinson's work often derive from the competition between a metrics of security and a grammar of insecurity that combine to make her poems a puzzling blend of the accessible and the inaccessible.

In the absence of some immediately recognizable tradition to which such an expressive mixture might be traced, Dickinson's work can seem almost perversely detached from referential meaning, as David Porter has recently argued, or utterly absorbed in private, psychic anxieties, as Vivian Pollak suggests. Even a reader as sensitive to Dickinson's cultural context as Barton St. Armand can slip into this assumption of the poet's psychological or linguistic enclosure. In her struggle with what he describes as the “aloof cat-god” of Calvinism, Armand contends that “Dickinson constructed a closed imagistic world” in which she inverted the domestic pieties of Edward Taylor, envisioning God as a grim predator and identifying herself with his diminutive, nimble, but finally helpless victims.