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“A Loaded Gun”: Dickinson and the Dialectic of Rage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Sharon Cameron
Sharon Cameron*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Abstract

A comparison of narrative and lyric conceptions of temporality in Dickinson's poetry sheds light on that group of her poems in which a story is begun only to be violently broken into and disrupted. Defining life as a series of alternatives, the poems establish a dialectic, but seemingly for the sake of dismissing it as inadequate. The dismissal is frequently one of rage at all that is temporal, all that has a history whose requirement is sacrifice and choice. Such Dickinson poems can end in disorder, and they are examined here in the context of other lyrics that equally seem to pin their hopes on the belief that a verbal sabotage of sequence will trigger a temporal one, that, grown sufficiently desperate, the maneuvers of speech can stop time dead.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 3 , May 1978 , pp. 423 - 437
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 S⊘ren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1941), p. 33.

2 Dickinson's poems are quoted from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1955) and are identified in the text by the numbers assigned to them in this edition.

3 Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 1-31.

4 In “Dickinson's ‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun’ Stanza 5,” Explicator, 21 (Nov. 1962), item 21, Laurence Perrine discusses this fusion between gun and body.

5 See Robert Weisbuch's fascinating discussion of the power relations in “My Life had stood a Loaded Gun,” in Emily Dickinson's Poetry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 25-39. Weisbuch identifies the poem's subject as that of the relationship between power and freedom, nothingness and “self-realization through subservience” (p. 27), but because he considers the analogies it employs as almost infinitely extendable, the discussion seems close to suggesting that the poem is about everything or nothing, as Weisbuch himself acknowledges. Such hospitality to diverse interpretations is carried to its furthest extremity when Weisbuch offers one of Dickinson's letters that employs similar imagery as a new gloss on the poem, suggesting (as I think the poem does not) that this may be a poem about the power of writing poetry. Despite the improbability of the latter speculation, Weisbuch's willingness to look below the surface of the poem's images, as few critics before him have, allows him to see its problematic posing of the dilemma of power and identity, of “Transcendence at the cost of freedom or freedom at the cost of meaning” (p. 32).

6 For a discussion of the relationship between storytelling and death, see Walter Benjamin's “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1973).

7 Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), p. 348.

8 Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise (New York: Holt, 1960), p. 282.

9 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1973), p. 166.

10 For a discussion of the relationship between psychoanalysis and storytelling, see Stephen Marcus, “Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History,” Partisan Review, 41, No. 1 (1974), 12-23, 89-108.