[In the following essay, St. Armand discusses Dickinson's stance toward death in her poetry as a mixture of the influences of her Puritan heritage and her Romantic historical context.]

Looking at Death, is Dying—
Just let go the Breath—
And not the pillow at your Cheek
So Slumbereth—

(281)

“But she's so morbid!” is an often-heard lament from fresh readers of Emily Dickinson's poetry, whether they be sixteen or sixty. Those over sixty, or those who have been exposed to a conservative ethnic background where traditional funeral and mourning customs still prevail and who are familiar with old women dressing completely in black as an outward and visible sign of prolonged inner and immedicable grief, will have less of a problem with Dickinson's stress on the panoply of death and dying. But with modern exequies becoming more and more streamlined, antiseptic, and privatized, as the twentieth century itself begins to put out its last candles, the skull beneath the skin that grins at us in such poems as “Because I could not stop for Death” (712) or “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” (465) is beginning to seem as remote and as alien as the enigmatic “sign you must not touch” in John Donne's baroque poetry of melancholy and malaise (“The Funeral”).

This situation should not surprise us, since Donne and Dickinson are cousins-german in their attitudes toward death, both preaching, as Donne writes in his “Song” (“Sweetest love, I do not go”), that because all must die and all lovers eventually part, it is best to accustom oneself to such inevitabilities and so “by feigned deaths to die.” Dickinson did not go as far as Donne, who had himself painted in his winding sheet, “so tyed with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed, as dead bodies are usually fitted to be shrowded and put into the grave” (Death's Duell 40). Yet her famous white dress, which Dickinson wore exclusively in one form or another later in her life, was a plain-style New England version of Donne's shroud, both wedding gown and winding-sheet in one, a living icon symbolizing that whatever the wearer's ultimate spiritual destiny—celestial marriage or angelic celibacy—she had forcibly put away the world.

Both Dickinson poems cited above are full-stage dress rehearsals for death; moreover, “Because I could not stop for Death” is tinged by an eroticism that had already erupted more boldly and more blatantly in Donne. The Victorian Dickinson is never as explicit as the lusty poet of “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” nor does she ring scatological changes on the seventeenth-century pun that made the verb to die a slang term for sexual orgasm (significantly, to spend did the same duty for her own capitalistic century). But she did fabricate a private love-religion that beatified herself and the object of her passion in much the same manner as Donne's “Canonization.” Dickinson's autobiographical “Novel,” which she claims is true but so condensed that it remains unread and disbelieved (669), is therefore like Donne's “legend,” which is romance, hagiography, and short caption all in one, an intensely abbreviated form that though “unfit for tombs and hearse” is still suitable for poetic devotionals:

And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs;
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love. …

Just as the American Puritan poet Edward Taylor chose homely spinning wheels and freshly baked loaves of bread as his vehicles of metaphor rather than the elegant compasses of Donne's “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” so did the no-nonsense Dickinson prefer Isaac Watts's staunch sing-song hymn meters over the mannered intricacies of the Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnet. Yet to make Dickinson's death poetry and its Donne-like emphasis on spiritual autopsies, shuddering night thoughts, and anticipatory funeral rites (“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” [280]) as understandable as possible to a sometimes fascinated, sometimes horrified, undergraduate audience, I have found it necessary to become myself the kind of collector of the curious, the quizzical, and the eccentric that Donne was. His age excelled in such antiquarian pursuits—one thinks automatically of figures like Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and John Aubrey—though in dealing with Dickinson's supposed morbidity, I have found that it is imperative for the teacher to go beyond the virtuosity of a “show and tell” approach. One must also set her private hymns against our own contemporary public chronicles of grief and bereavement if Dickinson's poetry of death, love, and love in death is to come fully alive and not simply be exhibited, like Donne's “bracelet of bright hair about the bone,” as a grisly memento wrenched from a broken and violated grave (“The Relic”).

Donne and Dickinson can be compared not only because they are part of a long and strong tradition of English metaphysical poetry (a quotation from a poem by George Herbert, copied out in Dickinson's hand, was once published as one of her own productions) but because the intimacy and urgency of their art were the result of a similar displacement of, rather than a mere dissociation of, sensibility. Donne was a Catholic whose family's religious heritage automatically cut him off from office holding and public power; in reaction he turned to a mordant poetry of passion, building a closed world of ritualistic, liturgical, rhetorical excess. This excess was one of mood as well as of language, a love-hate relationship with his place, with his God, and with his own escapist eroticism. The result was manic-depressive swings of emotion, combining ecstatic devotion with nihilistic despair, rough-hewn monosyllabic expletive with Latinate polysyllabic cadence. Donne's premature superannuation is symbolized by the “palsy,” “gout,” and “five gray hairs” that worry stanza 1 of “The Canonization,” but this angry young man was eventually replaced by, or rather evolved into, the sober Anglican apologist preferred to the living of the deanship of Saint Paul's by that most learned of monarchs, James I.

Emily Dickinson was, as befits her American-Puritan heritage, a more independent naysayer, but she was no less an outsider in her culture than was the scorned and scornful Donne. Though never imprisoned in the Tower of London for an unlawful liaison, she was equally “Love's martyr,” in effect becoming her own jailor, locking herself away in her father's house in Amherst while also locking out the busy, public Whiggish world of Scottish common-sense-school philosophy and unflagging Christian endeavor that Squire Dickinson symbolized. Raised on the cold milk of provincial Congregationalism, heated periodically to scalding temperatures by repeated revivals of religion both at home and at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson thirsted after the velvety clarets and rich port wines of romantic love. Whether she found that love in person or in persona still remains a question, but the result of her displacement as an unorthodox member of a believing community and as a genteel single woman shut out from the spheres of public, literary, and maternal power led to the same kind of confessional, self-dramatizing, consciously liminal art produced by Donne. As a nineteenth-century New Englander and the daughter of one of the Connecticut Valley's powerful “River Gods,” Dickinson could at least live her life and choose her fate with more confidence and comfort than her seventeenth-century predecessor; after visiting her in 1870, the much maligned but extremely well read Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote to his wife that “if you had read Mrs. Stoddard's novels you could understand a house where each member runs his or her own selves. Yet I only saw her” (L 2: 473).

The novels of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard (1823-1902), like her Temple House of 1867, are one of the keys to the composite Holinshed's Chronicles that the teacher can use to recontextualize the unique character of Dickinson's strict New England nurture as well as to encourage students to appreciate the rebellious, all-consuming interiority conditioned by that upbringing. As Stoddard observes, “The events of thought and feeling occupy little time and space; they may be so invisible in the ordinary drama of the day that the decree which decides the future is made, and the bystanders only observe that a man is twisting his mustache, or a woman adjusting her ribbons” (Temple House 186). The Dickinson who ties her hat, creases her shawl, and puts “new Blossoms in the Glass” while realizing that “Existence—some way back— / Stopped” (443); who learns to hear her lover's name spoken without experiencing “That Stop-sensation—on my Soul— / And Thunder—in the Room” (293); and who apprehends that it is under the sign of such “little” things as the shortness of a sigh that “by Trades—the size of these / We men and women die!” (189) well knew from personal experience the authenticity of Stoddard's novels, though the aristocratic and condescending Mary Channing Higginson did not.

It was through just such personal experience that Dickinson encountered the reality of death and dying in Victorian America, as expressed in lines as uncompromising as “She died—this was the way she died” (150). While this reality had its innerness, it also had its finite emblems, hieroglyphs, and tokens, all part of a new, elaborate romantic mourning iconography, what Dickinson herself referred to as “the éclat of Death” in her archly ironic “That short—potential stir” (1307). The best way that I have found to establish contact with this iconography and the psychic strategies of consolation that lay behind it is through direct examination of its material remnants, some of which are still embedded in our late twentieth-century culture. It has been well over twenty years since Jessica Mitford derided “the American way of death,” but the practices she condemned in 1963 were themselves the last gasp of a romantic revival in a modernist age. Expensive, padded, earthquake-proof caskets, as heavily carved as one of the American cabinetmaker John Henry Belter's laminated rosewood armchairs, no matter how out of place they might seem in a world increasingly dominated by Scandinavian design, constituted a technological folk survival. What was once a popular and normative cultural mode of burial had remained virtually unchanged since Victorian times. American funeral practices continue to be largely a code without a codification, a sign with signification, since the attitude behind them—sentimentality—has withered away without being replaced by any ritual expressive of the invisibility and oceanic nothingness of today's “death in a minor key” (Ariès, Images 112).

Emily Dickinson participated fully in the romanticizing of death, though her tough neo-Puritan upbringing, which enjoined her to examine the dying self as rigorously as the living Word, also taught her to interrogate steadily and constantly sentimentality's wishful presuppositions (“I measure every Grief I meet” [561]). As often as she found in this cultural mode intimations of immortality and what Walt Whitman called “whispers of heavenly death” in a late poem by the same name, Dickinson also discovered small-minded hypocrisy (“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” [216]), blasphemous philosophical lacunae (“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died”), and cosmic chilliness (“Because I could not stop for Death”). I explore her techniques of domestication, exaggeration, and inversion in my chapter on Dickinson and Victorian death rituals in The Soul's Society: Emily Dickinson and Her Culture, but they can only be italicized by concrete object lessons drawn from the paraphernalia of American mourning practices. I can still recall a student telling me of her initial repulsion after I had brought in a part of my own small collection of jewelry made from human hair, photographs of the dead, and silver coffin plates—all mementos of mourning designed to be hung on the self or on the wall—and then how she realized that these were not repugnant relics but rather legitimate tokens of a whole lost consciousness and sensibility. Moreover, this sensibility was in rebellion against a dry, mechanistic theology that did not look toward consolation of the living but that used the fact of death as an excuse for a public dissection of the deceased's immortal soul and eternal destiny. Such was the hair-splitting rigor of the “New England Theology” that conditioned the ups and downs of Dickinson's youthful manic-depressiveness, embedded not only in the seesaw emotionalism of her early poetry (“If I'm lost—now” [256]) but in the polemical New England novels of her close contemporary Harriet Beecher Stowe, like The Minister's Wooing of 1859 and Oldtown Folks of 1869. The death of an appealing but unconverted loved one is central to the sentimental vision mythologized by Stowe and by a host of mortuary poets, who preached sanctification through suffering and the panacea of a progressive, cottage-style heaven as welcome antidotes to the “slow poison” of Calvinist doctrine (Minister's Wooing 339).

The result was both the spread of a popular literature of consolation, epitomized by the elegies of Lydia Sigourney, Alice and Phoebe Cary, and the Davidson sisters, and a remarkable material constellation of symbols and icons into a full-blown mythology of mourning, that “Dark Parade— / Of Tassels—and of Coaches” Dickinson describes in her crystallized local-color masterpiece, “There's been a Death, in the Opposite House” (389), with its offhand, deliberately gossipy tone. I suggest three approaches, then, that the teacher can take in stimulating students to think about Dickinson's fascination with death not simply as a freakish idiosyncrasy but as a cultural revelation that has resonances and relevancies to our contemporary interest in the tabooing of death, the dynamics of grief, and the treatment of the dying. The first approach, on which I have already touched, is an investigation of the material culture of death. Students are encouraged to write personal narratives and reminiscences of family death customs (photographing the dead is still practiced among some ethnic groups in American society, for example). Individual student involvement can be further deepened by research about and exposure to mourning artifacts often housed in local historical societies and museums. These items include needlework mourning pictures and samplers, mourning jewelry, coffin plates, plaques, shadow boxes featuring designs made of woven human hair, black-bordered mourning stationery (“The letter edged in black”), mourning costumes, funeral elegies, poems, cards, and broadsides—even fancy hearses with carved panels and etched-glass windows to emphasize the baronial character of the antique funeral procession itself (“Because I could not stop for Death” [712]).

The teacher who lives in New England, the attic of America, is fortunate in having easy access to such objects and can often use a wealth of museum resources to trace funeral customs back to the actual rings, gloves, and poems that were regularly distributed at funerals in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. Happily, fine illustrated books and articles about mourning art exist to supplement or even replace a hands-on experience with the material evidences of the growing romantic cult of death (Morley; Pike and Armstrong; Schorsch). But while every place in America might not have preserved the ephemeral keepsakes of this sentimental danse macabre, every place in America has its cemeteries, and these places of interment can be readily used to gauge the changes in tomb sculpture (Barker and Gay; Gillon; Kull; Marion). Styles range from the Puritan boneyard with its uniform ranks of slate tablets incised with grinning winged skulls (social control and natural depravity) to the neoclassic marble balance of urn and willow (pious commemoration and sensibility) to the wild and effusive eclecticism of Victorian times (monumentality and sentimentality), end-stopping with the modified art deco cubism of the early twentieth century (“less is more”). What are we to make of the even more abstract stelae of our own day, where an opulent three-dimensional symbolism has given way to a new plain-style emblematic mode suited to the flat utilitarianism of the easily mowed suburban lawn (Hijiya)?

All these changes in taste record countervalent changes in attitude, culture, and consciousness, most of them secularizing and many of them quite subtle; as Ariès notes, “For unbelievers and believers alike, the cross has become a part of the common language of our communications code, in which it signifies death. A cross displayed after a name states, quite independent from any (at least conscious) idea of salvation, that the subject has recently died” (Images 227). The Victorian idea of the cemetery as a dormitory for the dead (“What Inn is this” [115]), as well as a resort for the living (“After a hundred years” [1147]) and a place for recreation, meditation, and moral, patriotic, and aesthetic uplift, was a romantic innovation that united the love of nature with the self-indulgent pleasures of melancholy celebrated in Thomas Gray's “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Garden cemeteries in England and America were soon filled with marbles as polished as Gray's verses, eventually becoming a study in Victorian clutter as their early picturesque ambiance gave way to the colonizing demands of the imperial self, though the original purposes of the movement have been curiously resurrected in California's various Forest Lawn memorial parks (Pictorial Forest Lawn). Dickinson's poems set in country burying grounds—“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (216), “Where bells no more affright the morn” (112), “Who occupies this House?” (892), “She laid her docile Crescent down” (1396)—can be fruitfully transplanted to this context, while her many elegies and tributes (see 1701, 1702, and 1703 for some undated examples) can be compared and contrasted with the traditions of the epitaph, seen in its folk, popular, and elite forms (Enright; Meltzer). Although this tradition has shrunk to an abbreviated minimalism on modern tomb sculpture, contrasting both to the poignant, wry, comic or orphic tenseness of the Greek Anthology and to the long-winded eulogia to be found on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stones, it still survives in the commemorative verse that can be seen on the obituary page of almost every local newspaper, especially around holidays like Memorial Day, Christmas, Mother's Day, and Father's Day. Funeral directors sometimes distribute books and pamphlets containing consolatory passages from prose and poetry as part of their services, and these can be used to trace the modern history of bereavement; the eclecticism of the selections reflects Americans' penchant for a multichannel, melting-pot approach to the vexing problem of death.

For death today is a problem rather than the visitation, act of God, or sublime mystery that it once was. Like the breakdown of the family car, it disrupts our lives, overloads our schedules, and embarrasses us into awkward disclosures about complicated affairs and interpersonal relations better left unuttered and unrevealed. This fact leads naturally to a second sounding of Dickinson's mortuary preoccupations, which involves tracing the history of dying itself (Ariès, Western Attitudes; Farrell; Stannard, Death in America) and the concern of such contemporary “thanatologists” as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Ernest Becker with the troubling psychological repercussions stemming from the wholesale twentieth-century “denial of death” (Dumont and Foss). The only difficulty with this methodology, fascinating and involving as it may be, is that it tends to develop into a separate sociological study that can reduce Dickinson's poetry into only another artifact, document, object, or relic of culture. If kept within bounds, however, it can be a valuable adjunct in opening up discussion about the searching questions posed in her art, questions of accommodation, compassion, and dignity that mirror the recent tendency to counter the technological alienation of death by both highlighting and ameliorating the visibility of the process (Carr; Russell; S. Stoddard). The success of this approach depends largely on the teacher's ability to digest much of the weighty literature on the subject, some of it highly specialized, and to present it with economy, tact, and a keen eye for selections that students themselves can report on and discuss without sinking under the sheer abundance of professional jargon or historical fact. (Ariès's Hour of Our Death, the summa theologica of the history of death and dying, is 650 pages long!)

A third and final means of setting Dickinson's poetry in the context of her time and our time is a comparative one; Poe immediately comes to mind as an American contemporary whose obsession with death and its Gothic-revival trappings parallels her own Calvinistically grounded interest in the subject, although the funerary preoccupations of Charles Dickens in such works as Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Dombey and Son offer an equally nice, transatlantic perspective. In his poetry, Poe dramatizes the public mythology of the beautiful death (“Annabel Lee,” “The Sleeper,” “To One in Paradise”) as well as exploiting in his more famous tales the horrors of corruption, supernatural trauma, and premature burial (cf. Dickinson's “I died for Beauty” [449], “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” and “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died”). The taste for Gothic romance and for a gothicizing of experience is a remarkable constant in Western culture, and if, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar claim, the Gothic is primarily a woman's genre (Madwoman 594), lines of relation can be drawn from this central web to many other writers and concerns. As I myself have argued, Dickinson often thought of herself as a heroine of Gothic romance, incarcerated in dungeons (“They put Us far apart” [414]), menaced by monsters (“'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch,” [414]), and pursued through tortuous mental labyrinths (“One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted” [670]). Her sisters in terror range from the Emily of Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) to the Clara of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), though the specter in her path remained metaphysical rather than ectoplasmic. Sometimes it was God, sometimes it was death (see “Bereaved of all, I went abroad” [784], for a singularly Poe-esque obsession with the image of the grave similar to that of Poe's “Oblong Box”), but she managed to stare both down (“'Tis so appalling—it exhilarates” [281]) through the steadiness and steadfastness of her art. I have had gratifying success in making parallels between Dickinson's Gothicism and that of the Brontës, drawing out a generic thread that stretches to the Harlequin romances of today's airports and drugstores. Since there is a growing and probing secondary literature on this phenomenon, much of it stimulated by the rise of feminist and popular culture criticism, I have not felt alone or eccentric in exploring these filiations between the ancients and the moderns. Certainly one of the best sessions in my undergraduate seminar on Dickinson was a report on Sylvia Plath's poetry, with special emphasis on the biographical parallels with and contrasts to Emily Dickinson's life. By coming freshly to Sylvia Plath as a representative of the 1950s and to that period's conformist stereotypes, these students could use Plath's slow suffocation within the bell jar of convention to understand and appreciate Dickinson's more distant but just as intense Victorian struggle for survival and sanity.

Dickinson's Romantic strategies of subversion gain added power if we consider that in regard to death and bereavement, our contemporary funerary practices have returned almost full circle to the toned-down restraint of a determinedly anti-liturgical Puritanism. Funeral rites are more and more anonymous, watching by the dead is increasingly omitted (as are flowers), and mourners are advised not to dwell on the past but to “return to normal” as soon as possible. Like the early Puritans, we simply deposit the body in the grave with no attendant service, or we reduce it to sanitary cinders, since unlike them we expect no day of reckoning or resurrection (Stannard, Puritan Way.) Harriet Beecher Stowe charged that the Puritans “swept away from the solemn crises of life every symbolic expression” (Oldtown Folks 83); her own Romantic generation reversed this trend by replacing a religion of severity with a religion of sentiment.

It appears that we are once again at a crossroads in sensibility, for the enigmatic, almost mute role of mourning and commemoration in our culture perfectly reflects the postmodern emphasis on fissures, gaps, margins, traces, and erasures of all kinds. The Emily Dickinson who boldly used metonymy, ambiguity, fade-outs, and dashes to confront the excesses of her times may remain, for students and teachers alike, the best practical guide to the attenuated brevities of our own.