SOURCE: "The Pea That Duty Locks: Lesbian and Feminist-Heterosexual Readings of Emily Dickinson's Poetry," in Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, edited by Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, New York University Press, 1990, pp. 104-25.

[In the following essay, Bennett challenges feminist critics who study Dickinson "as a woman poet" but within the context of Dickinson's "relationship to the male tradition." Bennett asserts that Dickinson's erotic poetry suggests that the poet viewed her relationships with women as safe and protected, and that these relationships allowed Dickinson to explore her sexuality.]

[The clitoris] is endowed with the most intense erotic sensibility, and is probably the prime seat of that peculiar life power, although not the sole one.

—Charles D. Meigs, Woman: Her Diseases and Remedies, 1851

One would have to dig down very deep indeed to discover … some clue to woman's sexuality. That extremely ancient civilization would undoubtedly have a different alphabet, a different language…. Woman's desire would not be expected to speak the same language as man's.

—Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, 1985

In a 1985 essay in Feminist Studies, Margaret Homans brilliantly analyzes Emily Dickinson's use of vaginal imagery ("lips") as a multivalent figure for female sexual and poetic power ("'Syllables'" 583-86, 591). Homans quite rightly identifies Dickinson's concept of the volcanic "lips that never lie" in "A still—Volcano—Life" (The Poems 461)¹ with the genital/lingual lips from which the hummingbird sucks in "All the letters I can write":

All the letters I can write
Are not fair as this—
Syllables of Velvet—
Sentences of Plush,
Depths of Ruby, undrained,
Hid, Lip, for Thee—

Play it were a Humming Bird—
And just sipped—me—
(#334)

Less happily, Homans treats Dickinson's use of genital imagery entirely within the context of the (male) tradition of the romantic love lyric (that is, as a "subversion" of the "scopic" economy, or visual orientation, of masculinist love poetry). Not only does she fail to discuss the poem's homoerotic or lesbian possibilities, she barely notes them—this despite the fact that the poem's only known variant was originally sent—with a flower—to a woman, Dickinson's cousin, Eudocia (Converse) Flynt, of Monson, Massachusetts. For Homans, text—not sex—is the issue.

As in "A still—Volcano—Life," the imagery in "All the letters I can write" is undoubtedly (if not necessarily, consciously) sexual. The reader-lover-bird is told to sip from the well-hidden "depths" of the poet-vagina-flower: "lip" to lips. But the form of sexual congress which the poet fantasizes in this poem is—as Homans fails to specify—oral; and the sex of the beloved-reader-bird is left deliberately (though, for Dickinson, not a typically), vague. He/she/you is referred to as "it." If this poem overturns the scopic conventions of the male-dominated romantic love lyric, it does so not to critique male "gaze," but to celebrate a kind of sexuality the poet refuses, or is unable, to name.

Because of her ambiguity, which makes variant readings such as the above not only possible but inevitable, Dickinson has become a preeminent example of the splitting of feminist criticism along sexual orientation lines. To those critics who read the poet heterosexually, the central narrative of Dickinson's career is her struggle with the male tradition—whether this tradition is seen as embodied in her lover, father, God, muse, or merely her precursor poets. Critics writing from this perspective (which represents, in effect, a feminist retelling of traditional mainstream narratives of the poet's career) include, in chronological order, Gilbert and Gubar, Margaret Homans, Joanne Feit Diehl, Barbara Antonina Clarke Mossberg, Suzanne Juhasz, Vivian Pollak, Jane Donahue Eberwein, Helen McNeil, Alicia Ostriker, and, most recently, Cynthia Griffin Wolff. Although all of these critics are deeply committed to understanding Dickinson as a woman poet, the framework for their discussion is the poet's relationship to the male tradition. Their concern is with "woman's place in man's world," even when, as in Homans's case, they acknowledge the presence of homoerotic strands in the poet's life and work.

In contrast to these critics are those like Rebecca Patterson, Lillian Faderman, Adalaide Morris, Judy Grahn, Martha Nell Smith, Toni McNaron and myself, who believe that Dickinson's relationships with women are of greater significance than her struggles with men or with the male tradition. While lesbian critics do not necessarily deny the prominence of certain male figures in Dickinson's life, they have dug beneath the more mythic aspects of the poet's heterosexuality (in particular, her supposed "love affair" with a "Master") to uncover the ways in which Dickinson used her relationships to the female and to individual women such as her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson to empower herself as a woman and poet. To these critics, the central struggle in Dickinson's career is not, as Joanne Feit Diehl puts it, "to wrest an independent vision" from the male ("Reply" 196),² but to find a way to identify and utilize specifically female power in her work.

While both heterosexual and lesbian/feminist readings of Dickinson exemplify what Elaine Showalter calls "gynocritisicm" (128), that is, both focus on the woman as writer, the difference between these two approaches to the poet—one privileging the male, the other the female—results in remarkably different presentations, of Dickinson's biography and art. In this essay, I will discuss what happens to our reading of Dickinson's poetry when we give priority to her homoeroticism—and what happens when we do not. In particular, I will focus on the ways in which the privileging of homoeroticism affects our interpretation of Dickinson's erotic poetry as this poetry projects Dickinson's sense of self as a woman and as a woman poet (the two issues raised by Homans's essay).

For "straight" readers of Dickinson's texts, the poet's struggle with the tradition is mediated through her relationship with a man whom history has come to call the "Master," since his biographical identity (if any) has yet to be confirmed. Whoever or whatever this man was to the poet—whether lover, father, God, or muse—Dickinson's relationship to him is, according to this view of her texts, fundamental to her poetic development—the means by which she came to define herself. In response to critiques by Lillian Faderman and Louise Bernikow of her theory of a male muse in Dickinson's poetry, Joanne Feit Diehl articulates the underlying assumptions governing the feminist-heterosexual approach to the Master Phenomenon in Dickinson's work:

Bemikow's and Faderman's remarks offer nothing that would cause me to change my assertion that Dickinson found herself by confronting a maledominated tradition. My essay acknowledges that she sought inspiration and courage from women poets engaged in similar struggles toward self-definition; however, hundreds of poems attest that her primary confrontations are with the male self. Furthermore, it is Dickinson who enables later women poets to trace a more exclusively female lineage. Refusing to ignore the tradition Bernikow and Faderman would deny her, Dickinson confronts her masculine precursors to wrest an independent vision. No woman poet need ever feel so alone again. ("Reply" 196)

The key word here is "alone." Like a latter-day feminist confronting a totally male-dominated environment (whether home, office, or academic department), Dickinson struggles in isolation to "wrest" vision from a male figure (or "tradition") infinitely more powerful than herself, a figure whom she wishes both to seduce and to defy. Because her Master is superior to her—and, perhaps, because she does love him—the form her struggle takes is (as Alicia Ostriker puts it), "subversive" not rebellious (39). Dickinson's tools are traditional female weapons, the "weapons" of those who are subordinate and isolated: play, parody, duplicity, evasion, illogic, silence, role-playing, and renunciation. As Ostriker says of the first five, they are strategies "still practiced by women poets today" (43).

For this particular interpretation of the poet and her plight, "The Daisy follows soft the Sun" has, not surprisingly, become the signature poem, mentioned or analyzed in a striking number of feminist-heterosexual readings:³

The Daisy follows soft the Sun—
And when his golden walk is done—
Sits shily at his feet—
He—waking—finds the flower there—
Wherefore—Maurauder—art thou here?
Because, Sir, love is sweet!

We are the Flower—Thou the Sun!
Forgive us, if as days decline—
We nearer steal to Thee!
Enamored of the parting West—
The peace—the flight—the Amethyst—
Night's possibility!
(#106)

In light of the above discussion, the reason for this poem's appeal to feminist-heterosexual readers should be obvious. Duplicity and subversion are the Daisy's essence. Cloaking herself in a veil of modesty (sitting "shily" at her Master's "feet"), the speaker claims to "follow" the Sun all simplicity and adoration, when in fact her real aim is to "steal" from him at night what he will not allow her to have by day: call it love, poetry, or power. The Daisy's reverence for her Master may be sincere, but it is also a cloak for highly disobedient ("Marauder"-like) ambitions, ambitions which only "Night's possibility"—and the Sun's "decline"—can fulfill.

I have no quarrel with this reading of the poem or those like it on which it is based. As Diehl's "hundreds of poems" testify, Dickinson was both attracted to and jealous of male power (from her brother's to God's), and she sought a variety of ways, including duplicity and subversion, seduction and evasion, and maybe even fantasies of madness and necrophilia, to compensate for—or to change the conditions of—her unwanted subordination. Indeed, the poet's need to claim power equal to the male's is the primary theme of most of her heterosexual love poetry. His is the "Shaggier Vest" against which she asserts her smaller "Acorn" size ("One Year ago—jots what?" #296). His is the "crown" or "name" she wants to bear ("The face I carry with me—last," #336), even if she—and he—must die in order for her to have it:

Think of it Lover! I and Thee
Permitted—face to face to be—
After a Life—a Death—We'll say—
For Death was That—
And This—is Thee—

… . .

Forgive me, if the Grave come slow—
For Coveting to look at Thee—
Forgive me, if to stroke thy frost
Outvisions Paradise!
(from #577)

When writing heterosexually, Dickinson apparently could not imagine achieving equality in any other way. Men had the power. For her to have power equal to her male lover's, she had to take, steal, or seduce it from him—or they both had to be dead. Given nineteenth-century gender arrangements (including the arrangements within the Dickinson household), it is not surprising that the poet thought of heterosexual relationships in this way. But this is not the only kind of "love" poem that Dickinson wrote, nor is this the only kind of love story (or story about power) her poems tell.

As research by feminist historians Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman suggests, the rigid separation of the sexes produced by nineteenth-century American gender arrangements did not totally disadvantage women (Smith-Rosenberg 53-76, Faderman, Surpassing, 147-230). True, women spoke of themselves typically as "low" or "inferior" in respect to men. These are terms Dickinson herself uses in variants to a poem on Elizabeth Barrett Browning (#593). But nineteenth-century women were not solely reliant on their relationships with men for their sense of personal or sexual power (as heterosexual woman in our society tend to be today). On the contrary, one of the ironies of the doctrine of separate spheres was that it encouraged women to form close affectional bonds with each other. Within these bonds, women were able to affirm themselves and their female power despite their presumably inferior state.

Dickinson's letters and poems indicate that she participated in such relationships with women throughout her life and, as I have discussed elsewhere (My Life a Loaded Gun 27-37, 55-63), she drew an enormous amount of comfort, both emotional and sexual, from them. Indeed, a study of Dickinson's erotic poetry suggests that it was precisely the safety and protection offered by her relationships with women—that is, by relationships in which sameness not difference was the dominant factor (Morris in Juhasz 103 and passim)—that allowed her full access to her sexual feelings. Unlike unambiguously hetero-sexual poets such as Plath, Wakoski, and Olds, Dickinson did not find male difference exciting. She was awed, frightened, and, finally, repelled by it. In her often-quoted "man of noon" letter, sent to Susan Gilbert prior to the latter's engagement to Austin, the poet's brother, Dickinson compares male love to a sun that "scorches" and "scathes" women (The Letters 210). And in her poetry, she exhibits similar anxieties. Thus, for example, in "In Winter in my Room," she depicts male sexuality as a snake "ringed with Power" from whom her speaker flees in terror:

I shrank—"How fair you are"!
Propitiation's claw—
"Afraid he hissed
Of me"?

… . .

That time I flew
Both eyes his way
Lest he pursue
(from #1670)

And this same response of mingled awe and repulsion is repeated more subtly in other poems as well: "I started Early—Took my Dog," (#520) for instance, and "I had been hungry, all the Years" (#579). In each of these poems, the poet's fear of male sexuality—not the arousal of her desire—is the operative emotion. If she cannot find some way to reduce male power, to bring it under control, then she either loses her appetite for it (as in "I had been hungry, all the Years") or else she pulls back before she is engulfed (as in "I started Early—Took my Dog"). As she says in the latter poem, she feared male desire "would eat me up" (#520).

When relating to women, on the other hand, or when describing female sexuality (her own included), Dickinson's poetry could not be more open, eager, and lush. Permeated with images of beauty, nurturance, and protectiveness, and typically oral in emphasis, this poetry bespeaks the poet's overwhelming physical attraction to her own sex, and her faith in the power of her own sexuality even when, as in the following poem, Dickinson is presumably writing from a heterosexual point of view:

I tend my flowers for thee—
Bright Absentee!
My Fuschzia's Coral Seams
Rip—while the Sower—dreams—
Geraniums—tint—and spot—
Low Daisies—dot—
My Cactus—splits her Beard
To show her throat—

Carnations—tip their spice—
And Bees—pick up—
A Hyacinth—I hid—
Puts out a Ruffled head—
And odors fall
From flasks—so small—
You marvel how they held—

Globe Roses—break their satin flake—
Upon my Garden floor—
(from #339)

At the conclusion of this poem, the speaker vows to "dwell in Calyx—Gray," modestly draping herself while "Her Lord" is away, but the damage, so-to-speak, has already been done. The entire emphasis in the poem lies in the speaker's riotous delight in the sensual joys that female sexuality has to offer. Like a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe or Judy Chicago, "I tend my flowers" takes us into the very heart of the flower: its sight, smell, taste, and feel. It is all coral and satin, spice and rose. In its image of the budding hyacinth coming into bloom, it could well be orgasmic.

As in "The Daisy follows soft the Sun," Dickinson employs a heterosexual context in "I tend my flowers" in order to assert female sexuality subversively, but her focus is obviously on female sexuality itself. It is this (not the charms of her absent male lover) that evokes the poet's intensely colored verse, her sensual reveries. When writing outside a specifically heterosexual context, as in the following poems, Dickinson is able to revel in female sexuality's Edenic pleasures without apology or restraint:

Come slowly—Eden!
Lips unused to Thee—
Bashful—sip thy Jessamines—
As the fainting Bee—

Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums—

Counts his nectars—
Enters—and is lost in Balms.
(#211)

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

… . .

Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight—
In Thee!
(from #249)

Within that little Hive
Such Hints of Honey lay
As made Reality a Dream
And Dreams, Reality—
(#1607)

As Lillian Faderman first observed of "Wild Nights" ("Homoerotic Poetry" 20), these poems are all written from what we would normally think of as a male perspective. That is, they are written from the perspective of one who enters, not one who is entered. Because of this ambiguity, they effectively exclude the male. ("He" is at most a male bee, and hence, being small and round, equivocally, as we shall see, a female symbol.) The poems focus on female sexuality instead. "At sea" with this sexuality, Dickinson's speaker bathes in bliss and moors herself in wonder, eats hidden honey, adds up her nectars and is "lost in balms." The undisguised lushness of the imagery, especially when compared to Dickinson's poems on male sexuality, speaks for itself. For Dickinson, the dangerous aspects of sexual power lay with the male—the power to devour, scorch, and awe. The sweetness and balm (the healing) of sexuality, as well as its abundant pleasures, lay in women. And it was within this basically homoerotic context (a context created and sustained by nineteenth-century female bonding) that Dickinson defines her own desire.

As I discuss in Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet, in the poetry in which Dickinson privileges the clitoris even more than in the poetry in which she extols the delights of vaginal entry, she puts into words her subjective awareness of this desire and its paradoxical "little-big" nature. In this poetry, a poetry characterized by images drawn from the "neighboring life"—dews, crumbs, berries, and peas—Dickinson (in Irigaray's words) digs beneath the layers of male civilization to recover the ancient language of female sexuality itself (25). As Dickinson says in a poem sent to Susan Gilbert Dickinson in 1858, it is a language that sings a "different tune":

She did not sing as we did—
It was a different tune—
Herself to her a music
As Bumble bee of June

… . .

I split the dew—
But took the morn—
I chose this single star
From out the wide night's numbers—
Sue—forevermore!
(from #14)

In Literary Women Ellen Moers observes that women writers—including Dickinson—have a predilection for metaphors of smallness which Moers relates to their small physical size. "Littleness," she writes, "is inescapably associated with the female body, and as long as writers describe women they will all make use of the diminutive in language and the miniature in imagery" (244). Even though Moers summarizes these metaphors suggestively as "the little hard nut, the living stone, something precious … to be fondled with the hand or cast away in wrath" (244), she does not identify such images as clitoral. However, I believe that we should. Indeed, I believe that we must if we are to understand how a great many women—not just Dickinson—have traditionally (if, perhaps, unconsciously) chosen to represent their difference to themselves.

As nineteenth-century gynecologists such as Charles D. Meigs recognized over a hundred and forty years ago (a recognition "lost" later in the century), the clitoris is the "prime seat" of erotic sensibility in woman just as its homologue, the penis, is the prime seat in man (130).⁴ It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that the clitoris's size, shape, and function contribute as much to a woman's sense of self—her inner perception of her power—as does her vagina or womb—the sexual organs on which psychoanalytic critics since Freud have chosen to concentrate.⁵ Images of smallness in women's writing unquestionably relate to woman's body size and to her social position. But like phallic images (which also serve these other purposes), such images have a sexual base, and so does the power women so paradoxically attribute to them. In identifying their "little hard nut[s]" with "something precious," women are expressing through their symbolism their body's subjective consciousness of itself. That is, they are expressing their conscious or unconscious awareness of the organic foundation of their (oxymoronic) sexual power.

The existence of a pattern of imagery involving small, round objects in Dickinson's writing cannot be disputed. Whether identified as male or female, bees alone appear 125 times in her poetry. Dews, crumbs, pearls, and berries occur 111 times, and with peas, pebbles, pellets, beads, and nuts, the total number of such images comes to 261. In the context of the poems in which they appear, many of these images are neutral, that is, they seem to have no sexual significance. But their repetitiveness is another matter. So is the way in which they are given primacy in many poems. Analysis of the latter suggests that on the deepest psychological level, these images represented to the poet her subjective awareness of her female sexual self, both its "littleness" (when compared to male sex) and the tremendous force nevertheless contained within it. In privileging this imagery, consciously or unconsciously, Dickinson was replacing the hierarchies of male-dominated heterosexual discourse—hierarchies that disempowered her as woman and poet—with a (paradoxical) clitorocentrism of her own, affirming her specifically female power.

Over and over clitoral images appear in Dickinson's poetry as symbols of an indeterminate good in which she delights, yet which she views as contradictory in one way or another. It is small yet great, modest yet vain, not enough yet all she needs. The following poem brings together many of these motifs:

God gave a Loaf to every Bird—
But just a Crumb—to Me—
I dare not eat it—tho' I starve—
My poignant luxury—

To own it—touch it—
Prove the feat—that made the Pellet mine—
Too happy—for my Sparrow's chance—
For Ampler Coveting—
It might be Famine—all around—
I could not miss an Ear—
Such Plenty smiles upon my Board—
My Garner shows so fair—

I wonder how the Rich—may feel—
An Indiaman—An Earl—
I deem that I—with but a Crumb—
Am Sovreign of them all—
(#791)

There are a number of things to note here. First, the poet is undecided whether the crumb in her possession satisfies her physical or her material appetite. In the first three stanzas it takes care of her hunger (albeit, by touching). In the fourth stanza it makes her wealthy, an "Indiaman" or "Earl." She also cannot decide whether she is starving or not. For while she can touch and feel the crumb, she cannot eat it. Owning it is, therefore, a paradoxical business. It is a "poignant luxury," that is, a deeply affecting, possibly hurtful, sumptuousness that has archaic overtones of lust. Finally, poor though she is, the crumb makes this sparrow a "Sovreign," that is, it gives her power. She prefers it to "an Ear," presumably an ear of corn, and hence, given the poem's erotic suggestiveness, a phallus.

From one point of view, this poem is, obviously, a stunning example of Dickinson's ambiguity. Despite the many terms whose status as erotic signifiers can be established by reference to passages elsewhere in her work (loaf, bird, eat, luxury, sparrow, famine, plenty, Indiaman, earl, sovereign), there is no way to "know" what the poem is about. Not only do masturbation and cunnilingus fit but so do having a male or female lover, having some other unnamed good instead, sharing communion with God, and being content with her small/great lot as poet.

But whatever reading one adopts, what matters is that Dickinson has used imagery based upon her body as the primary vehicle through which to make her point. Whether or not she intended this poem to be about the clitoris, the clitoris is the one physical item in a woman's possession that pulls together the poem's disparate and conflicting parts. What other single crumb satisfies a woman's appetite even though she cannot eat it, and gives her the power of a "Sovreign" (potent male) whoever she is? In trying to represent her sense of self and the paradoxes of her female situation, consciously or unconsciously, Dickinson was drawn to what she loved most: the body she inhabited, the body she shared with other women. And it is the specific and extraordinary power of this body, its sovereign littleness, that she celebrates in this poem. As she says in another poem, this was the "crumb" for which she sang. As figure and fact, it was the source, motivation, and substance of her song:

The Robin for the Crumb
Returns no syllable
But long records the Lady's name
In Silver Chronicle.
(#864)

By giving primacy to a clitoral image in this poem, Dickinson is asserting a form of female textuality and female sexuality that falls explicitly outside the male tradition. The song this "Robin" sings is "Silver," not golden like the sun/son. It is a "chronicle" that records "the Lady's," not her Master's, "name." And because it is female, it is written in different "syllables" from those of male verse, syllables drawn from the backyard life to which Dickinson's "lot" as a woman had consigned her—the life of robins, bees, and, above all, crumbs. From this life comes the "alphabet" in which female desire is reco(r)ded, an alphabet suited to the very different "Pleasure" loving women (as opposed to loving men) gives rise:

There is an arid Pleasure—
As different from Joy—
As Frost is different from Dew—
Like element—are they—

Yet one—rejoices Flowers—
And one—the Flowers abhor—
The finest Honey—curdled—
Is worthless—to the Bee—
(#782)⁶

For Dickinson, devoting oneself to this homoerotic pleasure inevitably meant writing a different kind of verse:

As the Starved Maelstrom laps the Navies
As' the Vulture teazed
Forces the Broods in lonely Valleys
As the Tiger eased

By but a Crumb of Blood, fasts Scarlet
Till he meet a Man
Dainty adorned with Veins and Tissues
And partakes—his Tongue

Cooled by the Morsel for a moment
Grows a fiercer thing
Till he esteem his Dates and Cocoa
A Nutrition mean

I, of a finer Famine
Deem my Supper dry
For but a Berry of Domingo
And a Torrid Eye.
(#872)

In the first three stanzas of this poem, Dickinson compares the "malestorm"⁷ created by male appetite sequentially—and hyperbolically—to a whirlpool, a vulture, and a man-eating tiger. In the final stanza, she celebrates her own "finer Famine," satisfied with "a Berry of Domingo/And a Torrid Eye." The theater of blood and lust which Dickinson depicts in the first three stanzas of this poem is so blatantly exaggerated it seems meant to be humorous. Male appetite is so voracious, the speaker claims, it will consume anything, including, finally, itself. (I read both "Crumb of Blood" and "Dates and Cocoa" as references to women.) In the final stanza, the speaker proudly asserts her own "limited" appetite by way of comparison. It is this appetite which defines her, making her the woman and poet she is: "I, of a finer Famine."

For Dickinson this "finer Famine" was a "sumptuous Destitution" (#/1382), a paradoxical source of power and poetry, that nourished her throughout her life. In 1864, the same year in which she wrote "As the Starved Maelstrom laps the Navies," she sent Susan the following poem.

The luxury to apprehend
The luxury 'twould be
To look at Thee a single time
An Epicure of Me
In whatsoever Presence makes
Till for a further food
I scarcely recollect to starve
So first am I supplied—
The luxury to meditate
The luxury it was
To banquet on the Countenance
A Sumptuousness bestows
On plainer Days,
Whose Table, far
As Certainty—can see—
Is laden with a single Crumb—
The Consciousness of Thee.
(#815 Version to Sue)

And in a letter written to Susan in 1883, she declared: "To be Susan is Imagination,/To have been Susan, a Dream—/What depths of Domingo in that torrid Spirit!" (The Letters 791). Over the twenty years that intervened between these poems and this letter, Dickinson's patterns of female sexual imagery and the homoerotic values these patterns encoded did not substantially change. Taken together, they were the "berries," "crumbs," and "dews" that—in imagination and in reality—nourished and sustained her as male love (and the male literary tradition) never could.

The importance of Dickinson's commitment to a womancentered sexuality and textuality seems hard to dispute. But why then have so many feminist critics found it difficult to acknowledge the centrality of Dickinson's homoeroticism to her writing? Put another way, why have so many of them insisted on depicting her, in Diehl's terms, as "alone," even when (given her bonds to other women), she was not? What follows is not meant as a personal attack on these critics, but rather as an exploration of what I believe to be one of the most difficult issues confronting feminist-heterosexual women today—an issue whose political and sexual nature Dickinson was not only aware of but which she addressed in her poetry.

In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray makes the following comments on the (heterosexual) woman's place in the "dominant phallic economy," that is, in male-dominated culture:

Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man's fantasies. That she may find pleasure there in that role, by proxy, is possible, even certain. But such pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of dependency upon man. Not knowing what she wants, ready for anything, even asking for more, so long as he will "take" her as his "object" when he seeks his own pleasure. (25).

Women, Irigaray argues, have been "enveloped in the needs/desires/fantasies of … men" (134). As such, they have been cut off from their own sexuality. In Irigaray's terms, they have learned to "masquerade" (133-34), assuming the sexual roles men have imposed upon them, while devaluing their own capacity for autonomous sexual response. As "conceptualized" within the phallic economy, Irigaray writes, "woman's erogenous zones never amount to anything but a clitoris-sex that is not comparable to the noble phallic organ, or a hole-envelope that serves to sheathe and massage the penis in intercourse: a non-sex …" (23). That women can be sexually equal to men (agents, as it were, of their own desire) is an idea both men and (many) women resist.

The historical appropriation and devaluation of female sexuality by men is hardly news; women in the nineteenth century were also aware of it. But in "The Malay—took the Pearl," Dickinson gives this perception a twist by addressing it from a homoerotic perspective, that is, from a perspective shaped by the poet's (homoerotic) awareness of the role the clitoris plays in autonomous woman-centered sex:

The Malay—took the Pearl—
Not—I—the Earl—
I—feared the Sea—too much
Unsanctified—to touch—

Praying that I might be
Worthy—the Destiny—
The Swarthy fellow swam—
And bore my Jewel—Home—

Home to the Hut! What lot
Had I—the Jewel—got—
Borne on a Dusky Breast—
I had not a deemed Vest
Of Amber—fit—

The Negro never knew
I—wooed it—too
To gain, or be undone—
Alike to Him—One—
(#452)

Whether the "Pearl" in this poem stands synecdochically for the woman Dickinson loved or metonymically for the sexual and poetic powers which the poet believed were hers,⁸ or, as is probable, for both, the poem's main point is clear. The "Jewel" that the Malay takes and then devalues (brings "Home" to his "hut") is an object of desire not just for the man but the speaker also. Indeed, the speaker (presumably a woman even though she cross-dresses as an "Earl") has far more title to the pearl than the Malay since she appreciates its true worth whereas he does not. (He wears it on a "Dusky," sun-darkened, "Breast" where she would not deem a "Vest/Of Amber—fit" to bear it.) Nevertheless, she feels she has no right to this prize. She "fears" to touch the sea.

In cross-dressing her speaker in this poem, Dickinson may be expressing some of the awkwardness or perhaps even "unnaturalness" she felt in attributing (active) sexual desire to herself as a woman. As a young woman, Dickinson's problem—as she states in "The Malay—took the Pearl" —had been to gather the courage to appropriate female power for herself, to see herself as equally "sanctified"—and sanctioned—to "dive" (or "climb") into forbidden territories, whether erotic or poetic. In maturity, she lashes out again and again at the damage done women psychologically by such self-serving (masculine) prohibitions, prohibitions that not only prevent women from maturing fully, but turn them into the passive objects of male desire (and male art). Not permitted to act on their own needs or in their own stead, women inevitably become the victims of the men who "envelop" them (or eat them up):

Over the fence—
Strawberries—grow—
Over the fence—
I could climb—if I tried, I know—
Berries are nice!

But—if I stained my Apron
God would certainly scold!
Oh, dear,—I guess if He were a Boy—
He'd—climb—if He could!
(#251)

The little girl voice Dickinson adopts in this poem is deliberate and calculated. Boys have a right to "forbidden" fruits, but women (those whose sexual maturation is tied to—and "tied down" by—apron strings) do not. Yet, as this poem's symbolism makes clear, it is precisely women who are the "Berries" that boys so eagerly pick. Hence men's desire to guard their access to this fruit by divine interdiction. The God men worship (or create) protects male right.

What Dickinson is alluding to in this poem is—and has historically been—the paradox (and tragedy) of female sexuality: that its power is something women themselves have been forbidden to enjoy. It is a paradox Dickinson gives brilliant expression to in one of her most teasing yet trenchant epigrams:

Forbidden Fruit a flavor has
That lawful Orchards mocks—
How luscious lies within the Pod
The Pea that Duty locks—
(#1377)

Whether this poem is about cunnilingus, masturbation, or something else altogether, the sexual implications of its final line are hard to evade. "Duty," that is, women's sense of obligation to a male-dominated culture's self-serving prohibitions, has made women's sexuality inaccessible to them. Women's loss of their sexuality occurred literally during the nineteenth century as they were propagandized to believe that they did not have orgasms. As we now know, in the space of less than fifty years, the physiological importance of the clitoris was expunged from the record and apparently from many women's conscious awareness as well (Laqueur 1-41).

Symbolically, this silencing of female sexual power continues to occur today in the writing of those critics, including those feminist critics, who ignore the significance of the homoerotic (and autoerotic) elements in poetry like Dickinson's. Indeed, feminist-heterosexual interpretations of Dickinson's poetry testify all too vividly to the degree to which, as Irigaray says, female sexuality remains "enveloped" in the needs and desires of men, despite the womancenteredness of feminist vision. Committed to a heterosexual perspective (a perspective that makes women sexually as well as emotionally and intellectually dependent on men, no matter how much they may compete with them for power), these critics cannot see the centrality of Dickinson's homoeroticism even when—as in her clitoral poetry—it is obviously there. They cannot decode the "alphabet" in which these poems are written. Dickinson's relationship to the Master (a paradigm, perhaps, for these critics' own relationship to what Diehl calls "the male self) overwhelms ("envelopes") their eyes.

No one understood the magnitude of the task involved in women's reappropriation of their sexual power better than Dickinson and there were times when she questioned whether her "Pebble" was adequate to the task. It was a struggle of epic proportion in which she was David (indeed, less than David) to her culture's Goliath:

I took my Power in my Hand—
And went against the World—
'Twas not so much as David—had—
But I—was twice as bold—

I aimed my Pebble—but Myself
Was all the one that fell—
Was it Goliath—was too large—
Or was myself—too small?
(from #540)

But there were other times when she was able to assert without reservation her absolute right to the "Crown" she knew was hers:

I'm ceded—I've stopped being Their's—
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now …

My second Rank—too small the first—
Crowned—Crowing—on my Father's breast—
A half unconscious Queen—
But this time—Adequate—Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown
(from #508)

The full impact of these lines can only be appreciated when they are read against those poems in which the speaker yearns pathetically for her Master's "Crown." In this poem, she stands masculinely "Erect" and crowns herself. Doing so, she takes back the symbol of her womanhood that men have usurped. In baptizing their daughters (as in wedding their wives), men give their names to women, making them "half unconscious Queens"—Queens who are not in full possession of their power (their "Crown"). In "I'm ceded," these rights (and rites) of male possession come to an end. The woman's vagina-ring-crown is hers. So presumably is the personal (creative) power—the "crumb"—that goes with it.

As I have asserted in Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet, Dickinson's ability to pose female sexuality and textuality as valid, autonomous alternatives to male sexuality and textuality derives from her romantic commitment to women and from her willingness to see in women sources of love, power, and pleasure independent of what Mary Lyon calls "the other sex" (Quoted by Hitchcock, 301). Her use of female sexual imagery suggests, therefore, not the "subversion" of an existing male tradition—but rather the assertion of a concept of female sexuality and female textuality that renders male sexuality and the poetic discourse around male sexuality irrelevant. In privileging the clitoris over the vagina, Dickinson privileged the female sexual organ whose pleasure was clearly independent of the male. She also privileged the sole organ in either sex whose only function is pleasure. For Dickinson, her "crumb" was "small" but it was also "plenty." It was "enough."

Notes

This essay deals with issues which troubled me during the writing of Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet. In the book, I argue the case for Dickinson's homoeroticism (and autoeroticism) much more fully. Here I wish to look at what feminist-heterosexual critics have—or, rather, have not—made of this material—and why.

¹ All subsequent citations to Dickinson's poems will appear parenthetically in the text as the # symbol, followed by the Johnson number of the poem. In quoting from Dickinson's poetry and letters, I have retained her idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation.

² Diehl's original essay has been republished in her Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination (13-33).

³ Analyses of "The Daisy follows soft the Sun" may be found in Gilbert and Gubar (600-601), Homans (203-4), and the essays by Gilbert, Keller, Mossberg, Morris, Homans, and Miller published in Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, edited by Suzanne Juhasz.

⁴ The knowledge which Meigs states so definitively was "lost" in the course of the nineteenth century as part of a general (politically motivated) redefining of female sexuality. See Laqueur (1-41).

⁵ Naomi Schor is the only critic with whom I am familiar who has treated the subject of clitoral imagery and she discusses it only in relation to the use of synecdoche (detail) in male writing ("Female Paranoia" 204-19). In her full-length study of detail in male writing (Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine), she drops the idea altogether.

The locus classicus for a discussion of uterine imagery in women's "art" is Erik Erikson's influential essay "Womanhood and the Inner Space" (Erikson 261-94). In Through the Flower, Judy Chicago discusses her development of vaginal imagery and the empowering effect working with this imagery had on her (especially 51-58).

⁶ Dickinson identifies two kinds of sexual pleasure in this poem: one that gives the flowers joy and one that dries up or freezes them ("arid," "Frost"). If my reading is correct, this latter "pleasure" is the product of male sexuality which Dickinson depicts in some poems as a "sun," and in others as "frost." See for example, "A Visitor in Marl" (#391), and "The Frost of Death was on the Pane" (#1136). In either case, of course, male sexuality's ultimate effect on the women-flowers is the same: death.

⁷ I am indebted to Ms. Deborah Pfeiffer for calling my attention to this anagram.

⁸ I have discussed the biographical elements of this poem in My Life a Loaded Gun (52-53).

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