[In the following essay, Bergmann explores similarities between Emily Dickinson's poetic persona and the self-conscious heroine of Drabble's The Waterfall. According to Bergmann, both share preoccupations with love and mortality, often expressed in the form of “paradox, imagery, irony, and reversal.”]

The sense of working within a tradition is part of what the woman writer must have to establish that sense of individuality and autonomy that is necessary to create art. If, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar tell us, “the creative ‘I AM’ cannot be uttered if the ‘I’ knows not what it is,” then part of the way the “I” defines itself is through its identification with other, similar “I”s. Understanding women's influence on women, Elaine Showalter tells us, “shows how the female tradition can be a positive source of strength and solidarity as well as a negative source of powerlessness; it can generate its own experiences and symbols which are not simply the obverse of the male tradition.”

The experiences and the symbols of women's literature have been shared by women authors across centuries. Emily Dickinson only listened in on this conversation among the women authors of her century; although she read George Eliot, the Brontés, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, they knew nothing of her. In the twentieth century, however, her importance is thoroughly acknowledged. The narrative strategies embodied in the tiny plots of her poems, her thematic concerns of love, death, renunciation and redemption, and her control of language are examined, shared, and rewritten by Margaret Drabble in The Waterfall, a novel in which Dickinson seems almost as much incarnation as she is influence.

Margaret Drabble's novels often seem to spin around themes clearly announced by their titles: The Needle's Eye is about the divestiture of riches; Realms of Gold is about the discovery of hidden treasure, personal and public. Allusive and literate, each Drabble text has as its donn‚e a previous text, a book of the Bible or a piece of poetry that it rewrites. The Waterfall takes its theme from a poem by Emily Dickinson that appears as its epigraph:

Drowning is not so pitiful
As the attempt to rise.
Three times, 'tis said, a sinking man
Comes up to face the skies,
And then declines forever
To that abhorred abode,
Where hope and he part company—
For he is grasped of God.
The Maker's cordial visage,
However good to see,
Is shunned, we must admit it,
Like an adversity.

The poem speaks of the supposed three times that a drowning man attempts to save himself before going under and comments ironically that although we are supposed to want to go to God by dying, in fact we make every effort not to do so. The twentieth-century novel that follows this nineteenth-century epigraph is structured by water imagery and includes several important images of waterfalls, literal and figurative, but the Dickinson poem provides more than simply a clue to theme and image in the novel. It provides us with a way to understand the novel's heroine-narrator, who bears a striking similarity to the persona of Emily Dickinson's poetry. More important, it tells us much about the novel's mode of narration and about its language.

Jane Gray, the heroine of The Waterfall, is self-consciously the author of her own text, and it is as an author that she refers to those she recognizes as predecessors. Like Charlotte Bronté, she tells us, she has created a lover made of prose, living in “a Brussels of the mind”; like George Eliot, she has created a heroine （who is also her self） who “had a cousin called Lucy, as I have, and like me she fell in love with her cousin's man.” She compares her status-conscious family to families in Jane Austen's novels, although Jane Gray deplores some of Austen's solutions—“What can it have been like,” she demands, “in bed with Mr. Knightly?” At the end of her novel, she contemplates having her lover suffer permanent injury so that she can keep him “as Jane Eyre had her blinded Rochester.” The novelists she mentions have indeed created plots not unlike hers, but Jane, we find out, is a poet, and there is a foremother of whom she appears perfectly unaware, and that is Emily Dickinson.

Told in both the first person and the third person, The Waterfall is the story of Jane Gray's love affair with her cousin Lucy's husband, James. The affair begins a few days after the birth of Jane's daughter and continues until it is discovered by Jane's estranged husband, Malcolm, and reported to Lucy after Jane and James have a car wreck on the way to an illicit vacation. Jane is reclusive, agoraphobic, crazily introspective, and she receives James as the savior of her sanity and as the object of a most intense passion. Despite her conviction that even the smallest task is overwhelming, she is a published poet, and by the end of the book has escaped her neuroses enough to resume writing poetry, to clean her house, and to pick up the ends of her life and go on with it.

Drabble allows her first/third-person narrator an awareness of all her real and fictional literary precursors—Charlotte Bronté, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Maggie Tulliver, Emma Woodhouse—except the one she most resembles: Jane Gray is Emily Dickinson's poetic persona reimagined by Margaret Drabble. It is for this reason that Jane can acknowledge her ties to other literary heroines as well as to other novelists （aware as she is that she is both author of and character in her own novel） but never to the poetic mother whose epigraph poem sets the major image for the novel. Jane's central concerns—love, death, renunciation—are Dickinson's concerns, and her interior life （for certainly not the externals of her life, lived as it is in contemporary Britain） is correspondent with that intense interior life lived by the persona of Dickinson's poetry. These concerns, moreover, are figured forth in the art produced by each speaker by the same techniques of paradox, imagery, irony, and reversal. The two speakers hold point after point in common—their rejection of traditional salvation, their identification of lover with savior, their fascination with death and exaltation of love, their Calvinistic sense of doom, even Dickinson's solitary “white election” and Jane's daughter of solitude, Bianca. Read this way Drabble's novel is a palimpsest whose story, that of a contemporary woman writer imagining herself as character, can only be understood when we see inscribed as its lost text the character of Emily Dickinson as imagined in her poems.

Both the Dickinson persona and Jane Gray practice what I would call Dickinson renunciation, that special sort in which limitless desire is reduced to satiety by the willed spurning of the desideratum before it is ever offered. Value thus is transferred from the object of desire to the act of desiring and finally to lack itself. Probably the most familiar poem in which Emily Dickinson propounds this notion is “Success is counted sweetest,” in which by using the imagery of battle she elaborates the value of failure in teaching the true nature of success. More often, she uses the imagery of food to express the value of extreme desire going unfulfilled. The speaker in 579, “I had been hungry, all the Years—,” imagines looking through windows at a banquet and concludes that

… hunger—was a way
Of Persons outside Windows—
The Entering—takes away. …

Entrance to the feast threatens that her desire might be satisfied, and the narrator discovers that it is better to hunger than to have. Again, in poem 1282, the speaker questions the value of satisfying desire:

Art thou the thing I wanted?
Begone—My Tooth has grown—
Supply the minor Palate
That has not starved so long—
I tell thee while I waited
The mystery of Food
Increased till I abjured it
And dine without Like God—

Her desire is so great that the only satisfaction possible is renunciation of the food; the object of desire loses all intrinsic value, and instead value comes from desiring and renouncing. Renunciation, in turn, paradoxically empowers the speaker; she discovers not loss but gain in lack and is raised to the status of God by embracing absence itself.

Jane Gray learns abstention and renunciation in her parents' home where she gets no psychic nourishment from either her father or her mother, who both practice walking “the delicate line between flattery and self-aggrandizement” at the prep school of which her father is headmaster. She learns self-denial in response to her mother's lived lies, such as the assertion of the importance of “family warmth … she, who flinched from any physical approach,” who “rejected me at my sister's birth and had disliked me ever since.” The hypocrisy she reads in her parents' lives breeds in her a sense of alienation from their world, and as a child she blames herself for living “on the dim outskirts of their world, my life a mockery, a parody of theirs.” The result is alienation from herself: “It seemed in a sense, better to renounce myself than them. …”

In the face of this hypocrisy Jane devises ways to hide her desires and persists in these ways into her adulthood:

… I declined a drink, to my own surprise; I could not resist trying to outwit my mother at her own abstemious game, as though only by such deceitful gestures could I protect and color my true desires. If I declined even the permitted measure, how could they know how much and what I really wanted?

Fearful, like Dickinson, of the enormity of her desire, she makes a virtue of showing none at all. Based on her observations of the hypocritical world around her, she constructs a self to cloak her real self, and waits trembling for her deceit to be discovered, “knowing that if they could see me as I truly was they might never recover from the shock.”

Losing faith in the adults around them, both Jane Gray and Emily Dickinson lose faith in the God in whom those adults say they believe. Both find only terror in the anthropomorphic God proposed by the hypocrites. Jane says:

They believed, or so they said, in the God of the Church of England, and in a whole host of other unlikely irreconcilable propositions. … Sometimes at table I would look down at my plate, afraid that they might see in my eyes the depths of my deceit, afraid that they might see themselves condemned.

In one of her early letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson says of her family, “They are religious—except me—and address an Eclipse, every morning—whom they call their “Father.” The socially sanctioned God addressed by her family is meaningless to Dickinson who, as we know, felt unable to participate in the revivals that swept New England in her youth.

The hypocrisy they find in the world causes both narrators to invest heavily in truth as an absolute and to invent for themselves a god abstract and perfectly rational, a deity who is all necessity. In poem 576, Dickinson depicts how she would feel if the God promised by religion really existed:

I prayed, at first, a little Girl,
Because they told me to—
But stopped, when qualified to guess
How prayer would feel—to me—
If I believed God looked around,
Each time my Childish eye
Fixed full, and steady on his own
In Childish honesty—

Imagining a god far too abstract to feel an individual human appeal, Dickinson justifies spurning hypocrisy and societal forms. Jane, too, insists on an abstract God: “Perhaps I could take a religion that denied free will, that placed God in his true place, arbitrary, carelessly kind, idly malicious, intermittently attentive, and himself subject, as Zeus was, to necessity. Necessity is my God.” The ironic humor of the portrait is belied by the obvious intensity of her desire and inability to believe. She wishes for virtue but can find only one way to struggle toward it: “So what could I do, but seek in abnegation, in denial, renunciation, that elusive quality.” Rather than deny the existence of a deity, each chooses to deny her self, minimizing the human personality while further exalting the divine.

The God they both insist on is one who will have instant access to what each conceives as her inmost self, the self that has been split, deliberately and consciously, from the self “known” by the world they inhabit. Surely they imagine a most patriarchal and powerful God, and yet one senses that their desire for an absolute deity is a kind of challenge to the patriarchy to produce and abide by a God who will act in accordance with human claims for him. Each heroine has a kind of ironic distance on herself that is the product, paradoxically, of a real but unenforceable will to believe.

When James enters Jane Gray's life, which until now has been all pretense, he sees, according to Jane, her real self: “he redeemed me by knowing me, he corrupted me by sharing my knowledge.” Until James, Jane says, “I thought that if I could deny myself enough I would achieve some kind of innocence,” but his clear knowledge of her renders all her past denial meaningless. He is at once savior and devil, redeemer and corruptor, and she is willing to rewrite her past morality in new terms, to reinvent religion, if it is necessary to accommodate the fact of his loving her. She no longer needs Zeus as a deity; she will worship James: “Salvation, damnation. That is what it amounts to, and I do not know which of these two James represented.”

Dickinson also raises the beloved to the position of a deity. In poem 640, “I cannot live with You—,” she imagines accompanying her lover to heaven, where she says she would not be accepted because her lover's “… Face / Would put out Jesus'.” Her passion for the beloved is so intense that he “saturated Sight—/ And I had no more Eyes / For sordid excellence / As Paradise.” The lover becomes the savior in a new religion of love, and like Jane Gray, the Dickinson persona consciously and willingly risks blasphemy of the accepted religion to declare her own private one.

One form that both Jane's and Dickinson's renunciation takes is literally to renounce the world. They choose to be alone. Jane chooses her isolation for the night of her daughter's birth. She is eventually attended by a midwife, and then by her cousin Lucy and by James, but she goes into the moment of birth alone. “I made that loneliness, I created it alone, it grew out of me and surrounded me; and I chose it, I preferred it to the safety of human company, or a hospital bed.” A soul selecting her own society, she chooses only to admit James.

Jane's solitude is white; as snow falls outside, Jane lies on the “white moist sheets” with “heaps of white towels” standing by, the baby under its “white blanket.” Dickinson's “white election,” her choice to wear only white, is accompanied by her withdrawal from the world. The implications of this choice of solitude and whiteness are many, but for Dickinson and for Jane Gray most of them circle about the question of sexuality.

Both Jane Gray and Emily Dickinson have renounced love. At the same time, both acknowledge within themselves the capability of a passion so intense that it seems to result, like white-hot flame, in purity. In both their cases this is a paradox; Jane's, because she has married and borne children, yet not loved until she falls in love with James, and Dickinson's, because the intense passion of her love poetry seems unrelated to what we know of her experience. Both speakers further the paradox by insisting on it: “Like a nun, ＼Jane］ had held on, in wise alarm, to her virginity; through marriage, through children, she had held on to it, motionless, passive, as pure as a nun, because she had always known it would destroy her, such knowledge.” Told by James that she is beautiful, Jane denies it,

but at the same time she knew he was right, she was beautiful, with a true sexual beauty, she had always been so, with a beauty that was a menace and a guilt and a burden … wild like an animal, that could not be let loose, so she had denied it, had sworn that black was white and white was black …

Dickinson, who never married, and about whom it is probably safe to say that she never had a realized sexual affair, asserts “A Wife—at Daybreak I shall be—.” The wife claims that she is a nun, the virgin that she is a bride. By insisting on the paradox they simultaneously recognize and deny their sexuality and accomplish, as well, a redefinition of the terms in which they have set the challenge to language.

Jane Gray and the persona of Dickinson's poems go beyond simple abstention and valorize renunciation by their emphasis on choosing to renounce. Choice is essential because they are not passive; renunciation is not victimization. In poem 745, “Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue—” Dickinson first defines renunciation rather traditionally: it is “the letting go / A presence—for an Expectation.” The ability to defer gratification is a sign of maturity. She goes on to redefine renunciation in terms of choice, and in terms, more importantly, of a split in the self:

Renunciation—is the Choosing
Against itself—
Itself to justify
Unto itself—

Renunciation is, in other words, its own justification when it pits the self against its equally strong number, the other part of the self. Choosing to renounce is a declaration of action, an enabling rather than a disabling act.

That sense of alterity, of objective distance from the self, that the “Renunciation” poem defines is of great importance to Dickinson's persona and to Jane Gray because they are both artists. Margaret Homans argues that the ability to grasp their own alterity, to hold it and embody it in their texts, is what enables artists to produce art. Women artists, especially those who inherit the Romantic tradition, are handicapped by the identification of nature as female and are thus deprived of this sense of objectivity about the self. Emily Dickinson's sense of self against self is therefore for Homans “probably the most radical and conceptually challenging answer possible to the dualism of self and other that empowers the masculine tradition and that troubles its female inheritors.” Dickinson's expression of the dualism of the self occurs in some of her most famous poems, as when she imagines “Me from Myself—to banish—.” Dickinson's conscious dualism not only opens up for her the possibilities of language but puts her in control of her text.

The same conscious strategy creates the dual narration of The Waterfall and is probably the most important technique shared by Emily Dickinson and Margaret Drabble, although the generic differences between novel and lyric markedly change what happens to their two personae. The novel alternates between first- and third-person narration, although almost twice as much is told in the first person, and indeed the first-person voice corrects much of what the third-person narrator asserts. This technique allows the text to be, in effect, constantly rewritten by the more authoritative first-person voice. “It won't, of course, do: as an account, I mean, of what took place”; she confesses to the reader at the first switch in narrative voice, thereby reopening for investigation all the assertions made in the first fifty-one pages of the novel. The switch is convenient, of course; it allows a kind of writerly cheating, as when she says of the newborn baby, Bianca, “I would have liked to evoke her” and then proceeds to do so. More than tricks, however, it allows a dialogue between the two parts of the self that emphasizes the psychic balance of self and creativity that Jane at first lacks totally and must gain throughout the course of the narrative. If we see the foremother incarnated in Jane and read in her an embodiment of Dickinson's thematic concerns, we see that the character/author Jane Gray can finally attain the control that empowers Dickinson only by discovering for herself her own relation to language. Renunciation as a theme, then, announces for us the presence of a strategy of control of desire, control of creativity, and finally control of the word itself.

Art is the most obvious connection between Jane Gray and Emily Dickinson's poetic persona: they are both poets. The reader never sees any of Jane's poetry, but we early find out that it is famous enough to have been read on the BBC's Third Programme, and Jane describes it as very regular and rather formal. Jane derives little satisfaction from her art because she views herself as helpless to control it. She offers a reason for the extremely formal verse that she writes: “My verse was flawlessly metrical, and it always rhymed; I think that I tried unnaturally hard to impose order upon it because I was unnaturally aware of my own helpless subjugation to my gift, my total inability to make a poem at will. …” The externally imposed order of rhyme and meter controls her creative chaos. Jane identifies this sense of the chaos of creativity quite specifically with what she sees as the random success of sex: “I resented this helplessness ＼with her poetic gift］ as I resented a woman's helplessness with a man. …” Grief and despair are the occasions for her poetry, and when she finds pleasure with James, it is unutterable: “I did not know how to write about joy, I could find no words for the damp and intimate secrets of love.” Sex and art join to be imaged in wetness. Jane is unable to write about her joy because it is her own sexuality, and it is watery, formless, chaotic, not to be bounded by rhyme and meter. In a kind of classic struggle of ego and id, she simply forces form on the chaos of her poetic gift and her sexual abilities.

The chaos that Jane so fears contains knowledge of the world and of herself, and she fears knowledge—at least knowledge as expressed in language. Musing on the smell that emanates from the race track where James is testing a car, she thinks about learning the name for that smell, and about what such knowledge would imply:

Perhaps it would be a word she would never again be able to dispense with, an important word, a necessary word, that she now still at that instant lacked. Learning was so dangerous: for how could one tell in advance, while still ignorant, whether a thing could ever be unlearned or forgotten or if, once known and named, it would invalidate by its significance the whole of one's former life, all of those years wiped out, convicted at one blow, retrospectively darkened by one sudden light? It seemed at times too dangerous to find out those most important things, in case, having found them, one should also find that nothing else would do, no other word, no other act.

At this point in the narrative language is so perfectly literal to her that a word, once known, could be fatal; Emily Dickinson tells us in poem 1261, “Infection in the sentence breeds” and in poem 952, warns, “Let us discourse—with care—.” Incapable, it seems, of metaphor, Jane sees no way to control language, which threatens her with oblivion should she choose the wrong word. Incapable, as well, of irony, she cannot see language but as absolute.

It could easily be argued that the word Jane needs does not exist for her, because it can only be spoken in the patriarchal language and cannot be a true utterance for a woman. Certainly the patriarchy speaks its language in this novel; when Malcolm strikes Jane several times, accusing her of unfaithfulness, she is proud of the language of her bruises, “glad that my flesh had made some response to so desperate a statement.” But Jane's deep sexual response to James comes so clearly from her own femaleness, and so clearly restores to her a part of herself she had renounced, that it feels like her own language, like a true female utterance. The water imagery in which she reports on her feelings reinforces the sense of femaleness.

Emily Dickinson's most passionate poem is probably “Wild nights—wild nights,” in which the sexual intensity is figured specifically in water imagery. Jane's recognition of her intense sexuality, so central to the book and to her salvation, is also figured in water imagery. James's first declaration of love is a “blind, suicidal dive into such deep waters”; marrying into a family like Malcolm's shows her that “only by sinking could ＼she］ avoid the deadly, human, incriminating impulse to rise.” It is that impulse toward earthly human life and selfhood that Dickinson records in the epigraph poem, which imagines a man struggling against drowning. The first time Jane and James make love she admits that “one of the things she had always most feared in love had been the wetness,” but after this experience “she lay there, drowned in a willing sea.” At the center of the book Jane experiences a powerful orgasm, during which she fears that “she will never get back to the dry integrity she once inhabited” but allows herself to be led “to fall, painfully, anguished, but falling at last” until she ends “down there at last in the water, not high in her lonely place.” In this water/fall she accepts water as her element.

Finding the intensity of her passion matched by that of James, she can only think that he has been responsible for a kind of second life of hers, that she has been reborn by his efforts: “A woman delivered. She was his offspring, as he, lying there between her legs, had been hers.” In poem 470 Emily Dickinson tests and affirms the fact that she is alive, and also ascribes her rebirth to a beloved:

How good—to be alive!
How infinite—to be
Alive—two-fold—The Birth I had—
And this—besides, in—Thee!

Dickinson claims rebirth in the beloved, Jane Gray with him.

Two-thirds of the way through the novel Jane and James are in a car crash, just the sort of catastrophe that would be predicted by a nature like Jane's. Driving toward Newcastle with both of Jane's children in the car and the radio playing a popular song called “Chimborazo” （an Ecuadoran mountain, named by Dickinson in poem 453 as a height the speaker and her lover might scale）, the car hits a truck. Jane faces death with Dickinsonian resignation, trying “to avoid the impact of eternity by pretending I had always foreseen it.” She says, “The accident, when reconstructed for me, was so horrific in its ghastly disproportion between cause and effect that it would have shattered any delicate faith; and yet how dreadfully it reinforced my views of providence, of Divine Providence, of the futility of human effort against the power that holds us.”

She is certain James is dead, but in fact he is not, and a paradox attends his life: “The price of his restoration was his loss.” Lucy discovers their affair, but there is no apocalypse, because the accident forces Jane to assume some control of her life. Loss of James （an incomplete loss, at that, since they continue to see each other） is paradoxically accompanied by rediscovery of her self. Jane returns home, cleans her house, sorts the mail, writes poems, and thinks about what happened.

As she reevaluates her life, the narrative moves more quickly from first to third person, and back to first. At every instance the dual narrative rewrites itself, able by this technique to maintain all fictionality and all truth at once, telling all the truth, yet telling it slant: “In presenting myself, in this narrative, as a woman on the verge of collapse, on the verge of schizophrenia or agoraphobia, I had been lying. … And yet, that can't be the whole truth.” In the battle of self against self that Jane fights, the first person begins to win.

As Jane's control of her text and her life strengthen, she is able to abandon her dependence on the paradox of renunciation and admit change to her life, as the water imagery culminates in a new definition of self: “In a sense, perhaps, I have always believed that a passion adequately strong could wrench a whole nature from its course. …” This would read simply as acquiescence and passivity were it not rewritten by her next statement: “had I not expected such events, they would not have occurred: the force of the current admits them, and a shifting landscape effects them.” She empowers herself to use language as she wants by admitting love and allowing the changes wrought by passion. Dickinson's poem 556 is a gloss on this:

The Brain, within its Groove
Runs evenly—and true—
But let a Splinter swerve—
'Twere easier for You—
To put a Current back—
When Floods have slit the Hills—
And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves—
And trodden out the Mills—

For both of them, an outside force （the passion or the splinter） moves the current that in turn occasions the change in the landscape, and the emotional landscape alters accordingly. For Jane the inward change signals a new understanding of language as metaphoric rather than literal.

Ellen Cronan Rose points out that the ending “successfully resists its own impulse to make a final formulation.” Jane has a new control of language even as she recognizes her lack of control over events: the poems she writes while James is in the hospital are “none the worse for the fact that they were written founded on an unfulfilled terror.” James wants the poems to be symbolic and therefore truly expressive of the events that occasioned them: “He claimed that it was sacrilege to speak of such matters.” She convinces him that her poetry is an act of affirmation, and “he accepted the analogy, although I daresay it would not bear inspection.” Language for Jane Gray, as for the poet （not the persona） Emily Dickinson, is now proximate and not absolute. The transaction between language and reality no longer singular bespeaks potential bondage; a word will no longer have the power to “invalidate by its significance the whole of one's former life.”

“There isn't any conclusion. A death would have been the answer, but nobody died.” Jane and James at the end of the novel visit a waterfall called the Goredale Scar. Jane has made this final water image literal: it is, she assures us, “real, unlike James and me, it exists” and indeed it does. Of it, Drabble has written in her travel book A Writer's Britain that “any post-Freudian would of necessity see this landscape in terms of sexual imagery—the hollow cavern, the gushing water, the secrecy of the approach, the tufted trees—.” Post-Freudian she may be, yet Jane Gray seems as unaware as Emily Dickinson might have been of the somatic comparison and as innocent of the language for describing it. She finds instead in the waterfall a contained chaos that perfectly represents to her the closing of the split of self that now can be expressed in a single voice, the first person: “water leaped down through the side of the cleft, pouring itself noisily downward across brown rocks that are twisted and worn like wood, like the roots of trees. It is impressive not through size, as I had perhaps expected, but through form: a lovely organic balance of shapes and curves, a wildness contained within a bodily limit.” Her own wildness, her creativity, her jouissance is contained within a bodily limit whose bounds she finally understands. Her desire is no longer limitless and self-threatening but, like the torrent, channeled. Form, previously absent from her life and artificially imposed on her poetry, now can be seen as “organic” and “lovely” and her text chooses the single voice, the “I am,” in which to speak.

Dickinson's split selves, her “Me” and “Myself,” appear, unreconciled, in many ways in the poetry, but not as an indication of the poet's indecisiveness or inability. Homans tells us that they open for us and for Dickinson an “understanding of the fictiveness of language” that enables control. It is just this fictiveness that Jane Gray learns and then successfully demonstrates. “There isn't any ending” she tells us, and then ends the novel twice—once with the trip to the waterfall, and then again （“No, I can't leave it without a postscript …”） to tell us that she had imagined killing James （but “I loved him too much”） making him impotent （that “little, twentieth-century death”） but must settle （“the truth is quite otherwise”） for her own escape from death by the accident of stopping birth control pills. “I am glad I cannot swallow pills with immunity. I prefer to suffer, I think.” In full control of her story Jane proffers and then rejects a choice of endings. Identifying in externalized nature a useful trope for her twentieth-century condition of life, Jane chooses to suffer within the bodily limits she has discovered, accepting her humanity and shunning, as Dickinson admits human beings do, “The Maker's cordial visage.”