Wild Nights—Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile—the Winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass—
Done with the Chart -
Rowing in Eden—
Ah, the Sea!
Might I but moor—Tonight! -
In Thee!

(Dickinson 114)

A poem on passion written in the conditional mood. It dwells not so much upon fantasies but rather speculates about what might be, should be. The conditions that made Emily Dickinson endorse the conditional were subject to many speculations in turn. Yet even if we refrain from a biographical approach to Dickinson's poetry, the initial question would still remain: why write in conditional terms? Why speculate about passion if poetry, for once, is the realm where fantasy can gain the status of fact?

Of course, passion and ecstasy are problematic issues for a woman writer to approach in nineteenth-century America, as Joan Burbick, among others, has pointed out: “desire, if it existed for the woman, was ‘dangerous’ and, as Dickinson would write, needed to be ‘handled with a Chain.’ Without the legitimation of marriage, the single woman was forced into a controlled abstinence of both her emotional and social self” (76-88, 77, Loeffelholz). Burbick's reading of Dickinson in view of contemporary provisions around the single woman and her sex life comes to a conclusion that resembles other feminist readings of nineteenth-century texts, arguing for an inversion of dominant ideology by way of the individual writer: For Burbick, Dickinson's curious indifference, her reluctance to go all the way and to actualize her speculations if only in writing, becomes a means of challenging the dominant system of values itself. If female passion is such a dangerous state, then the management of desire is the most important skill to achieve for a woman, and Dickinson carries this logic to an extreme: “Dickinson's speakers can define desire as the mere realization of absence. […] The activity of not-having can […] gain such importance that it begins to rival consumption” (82). By dint of this move, desire is not abandoned, but redirected: away from its object to its own essence—turning into “desire for desire” (Hagenbüchle 2) eventually. What seems to be a strategy of containment at first glance becomes an act of totalization, a turn which also characterizes Dickinson's perspective on death, or rather, the act of dying. Seen that way passion is another borderline state in Dickinson which could very well be represented in the same strangely detached tone as another such extreme experience in “The Sun kept setting”: “'Tis Dying—I'm doing” (Dickinson 341).

In this light, passion appears as fascinating, precisely because it is not entirely positive and liberating, as much enslaving as self-empowering: an highly ambivalent force. Like Burbick I read Dickinson's writing as an extremely condensed reflection of contemporary conceptions of sexuality and passion. Yet other than Burbick I do not conceive of the nineteenth century as of an “age that attempted to ‘rob’ the female body of delight,” as Burbick somewhat dramatically concludes (88). To ‘rob’ something it has to be given in the first place, and I argue that the language of passion was construed and widely disseminated during this very period, by way of restrictions just as much as by contestations, so that Dickinson's poetry not so much expresses and asserts a woman's right to passion (as a decontextualized reading of “Wild Nights” might very well suggest), but tries to come to terms with a problematical, if fascinating experience instead—a venture or risk. Not accidentally, Dicksinson's speculations about passion call to mind her speculations about suicide—another boundary crossing that promises liberation but could as well mean only destruction.

It is of course hard, if not impossible, to keep twentieth century conceptions and values out of a reading of nineteenth century texts, and in Dickinson's case this is especially difficult, as her work seems to be strangely unconcerned with the conditions and conventions of her days. For that matter I will not offer another reading of her poetry here, but turn to a series of other texts on female passion, written in the same period, and thus try and disclose another matrix for reading Dickinson. Two other discourses of the day are of course central to a conceptualization of gender along the lines of sexuality: medicine and pornography. Tracing some dominant patterns of thought in these texts, I will then have a look at two literary ‘strong women’—Nathaniel Hawthorne's heroines in The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance—who have been read within the same framework of liberation and repression as Dickinson, if to different effects. This discursive grid, constituted by fiction and non-fiction, might help to approximate Dickinson's writing from another angle.

I. BODY LANGUAGE 1: SEXUALIZING SPACE¹

The discursive turn that regulated and normalized the talking about sex cannot be separated from the “creation” of sex as a discursive phenomenon in the first place, it is intricately linked up with the “transformation of sex into discourse” (316) as Michel Foucault has pointed out in his History of Sexuality: “Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged a political, economic and technical incitement to talk about sex” (306). In the light of this development, the very distinctions between an experience of sex, the talking about sex and the regulations around both talk and experience turn out to be preliminary at best:

The objection will doubtlessly be raised that if so many stimulations and constraining mechanisms were necessary in order to speak of sex, this was because there reigned over everyone a certain fundamental prohibition […]. Does this not prove that it was an object of secrecy, and more important, that there is still an attempt to keep it that way? But this oft-stated theme, that sex is outside of discourse and that only the removing of an obstacle, the breaking of a secret, can clear the way leading to it, is precisely what needs to be examined. […] Is it not with the aim of inciting people to speak of sex that it is made to mirror, at the outer limit of every actual discourse, something akin to a secret whose discovery is imperative, a thing abusively reduced to silence, and at the same time difficult and necessary, dangerous and precious to divulge? […] What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadowy existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.

(315)

I have quoted this passage at such length because it seems that as present as Foucault's History of Sexuality is in all kinds of new-historicist reflections of the past and sexuality, his insights into this interrelation tend to be neglected. Yet any reflection upon nineteenth century-conceptions of sexuality and gender has to set out from this insight into the indissoluble entanglement of experience and discourse, which renders the very idea of sex as a pre-discursive act of subversion impossible.

Karen Lystra has re-examined Foucault's approach in view of the United States, presenting nineteenth century medical advise literature, which she calls “medical jeremiads,” as a means to take account of a pervasive and most anxiously watched social transformation: “Nineteenth-century jeremiads condemned many sexual sins so vigorously because they recognized them as endemic to ‘modern life’ and thus incurable” (113). Indeed, the discourses of regulation seemed to have abandoned the project of mending the corrupt state of things altogether and concentrated on practices for controlling the situation at hand instead. In the course of these contrivances, differentiating between public (restrictive) and private (liberal) practices of sex became vitally important—and to the present day this differentiation tends to be cast in terms of discursive regulation (public) and pre-discursive practices (private), while of course both phenomena testify to one discursive framework and depend upon each other.

As the private has turned into a sphere for more liberal practices, the logic of the day runs, at least a further narrowing of sexuality to the individual (in masturbation) just like a further extension to the public (in free love or prostitution) should be prevented. The frightful scenario of a purely libidinous and fundamentally perverted order of society becomes a matter of constellations as Thomas Laqueur pointed out: “The problem with masturbation and prostitution was essentially quantitative: doing it alone and doing it with lots of people rather than doing it in pairs” (232-33).

The effort of “at least keeping it private,” of assigning deviancies and aberrations to the private sphere to keep them out of public sight, runs parallel to a general tendency in nineteenth-century culture to cast the private, the domestic space as a “true” space, unblemished by the opacity and falseness of public life. This emphasis on the private can in turn be seen as a reaction to its endangerment—due to modern mechanisms of control and standardization the different spheres became increasingly hard to tell apart. As the public seemed to take over and replace the private sphere, the latter's functions had to be explicitly defined in the first place, in order to maintain its separate existence as a sphere allowing for self-realization, truth, authenticity and protection. If this turn often also implied associating the private sphere with higher morals, as Richard Sennett has shown, the identification of privacy with morality was far from committing: the private space could just as well represent the embarrassing truths to be concealed from the face of the world: sexual passions and practices. In either case the domestic and private space gained immense importance as an enclave of security: safeguarding its inhabitants against a cold and cruel social reality or keeping certain practices within limits (Sennett, Habermas, Stallybrass & White).

The discussions around sex and sexuality in the nineteenth century testify to an “explosion of distinct discursivities” as Michel Foucault argued (314). The shift from a moral-theological to a scientific (medical and sociological) line of argumentation took consequently not so much the guise of a substitution or even competition, but rather presented itself as a discursive proliferation. As a multiplicity of discourses came to negotiate and circulate conceptions of sexuality, sex, and gender, fundamental logical inconsistencies, transdisciplinary contradictions, and radical argumentative shifts remained largely unnoticed and uncommented. Such a paradoxality demarcates the debates around the dispositions of female nature. For once, the medical definition of female nature assumes women to be “naturally lusty and capable of multiple orgasms” (Smith Rosenberg 23)² (and thus claims a seemingly innate female sexuality). On the other hand theological and reform discourses maintain female passionlessness, an innate a-sexuality that makes women more controlled and “moral” than men. Seen that way female nature seems to be much better at managing passions and disciplining drives than male intellect.³ Both lines of argument ran parallel and referred to each other, so that the woman seems to be both essentially weaker (in a pathological sense) and essentially stronger (in a moral sense).

One way of overcoming the paradoxical character of this argumentation seemed to consist in further translations. Thus the debates around gender difference are correlated with the debates about “sexualized” spheres, not so much to bring about clarification after all, but rather to set clear-cut boundaries and binaries against all odds, in view of the fact that traditional lines of differentiation dissolve.⁴ This is the project of the British physician Alexander Walker who sets out explicitly to reintegrate ideological and scientific patterns of thought, as the latter seem to suggest an arbitrarity of gender difference. He draws heavily on the work of the French historian Jules Michelet, who had categorized women as essentially affectionate beings in his seminal work La femme, and then highlighted the importance of marriage as a protective institution for the “weaker” sex.⁵ By extension, Walker means to clarify once and for all that female “perfection” in certain areas of modern life did not imply their fundamental sameness to men, but to the contrary pointed to an even greater difference between the sexes:

[This work is original in] the showing that woman's perception of what is fitting, her politeness, her vanity, her affections, her sentiments, her dependence on and knowledge of man, her love, her artifice, her caprice, being chiefly instinctive, reach the highest perfection, whereas her friendship, her philanthropy, her patriotism and her politics, requiring the exercise of reason, are so feeble as to be worthless; …

(6)

Hence the commonplace distinction of female instinct and male intellect is used to consolidate the equally commonplace differentiation of female domestic and male public space. A favorable review of Walker's book in the Southern Quarterly Review in 1842 pins these reflections (and their strange logic) down: “A family is an epitome of a nation. If the heads be in opposition, there will be anarchy. It differs in this. A woman may be chief of it, because domestic duties are the very object of her existence. She cannot be chief of a nation, because nature abhors it” (297). By dint of this argument, a strangely circular logic evolves. Gender difference, which has been traditionally established along the binary distinctions public/private, now comes to figure as the last and most important means of demarcating this distinction, while the distinction in turn seems to become the most important means of gender differentiation and thus fundamentally important for the maintenance of stability and order. Given this insight, the efforts of many radical reformers at abandoning the institution of marriage in favor of free love or celibacy⁶ seem not only immoral but also liable to bring about utter chaos in their suspension of established social spheres.

Defining gender differences and demarcating social spaces become interdependent activities, and it is sex talk that ties these matters together. Passion, especially, comes to figure as a dangerous force not to be underestimated in its destructive power: “Curbed in and regulated they [the passions] constitute the source of our most elevated happiness; but when not subdued, they drive the vessel on the rocks and quicksands of life, and ruin us,” writes another renowned British physician of the day, Forbes Winslow, in his Anatomy of Suicide (46).⁷ The topic itself is highly significant, in that suicide is very much a “gender” issue in the nineteenth century, as Winslow epitomizes:

It is admitted, by almost universal consent, that there is no affection of the mind that exerts so tremendous an influence over the human race as that of love. … This sacred sentiment, which some have debased by the term passion, when unrequited and irregulated, produces the most baneful influence upon the system. … From the constitution of woman, from the peculiar position which she of necessity holds in society, we should, à priori, have concluded that in her we should see manifested this sentiment in all its purity and strength. Such is the fact. A woman's life is said to be but the history of her affections. … Separated from the bustle of active life—isolated like a sweet and rare exotic flower from the world, it is natural to expect that the mind should dwell with earnestness upon that which is to constitute almost its very being, and apart from which it has no existence.

(55-57)

Again, the reference to the “peculiar position” of women in society is by no means an indication of this position's changeability or arbitrarity, but an absolutely unquestionable given—demarcating female identity, just like female identity comes to demarcate it in turn. By extension, love and affection disclose themselves as passion's other face, tightly connected states, if belonging to different social spheres, as Winslow's conclusion to the case history of a woman who killed herself for unrequited love and jealousy makes clear: “She died, a melancholy spectacle of the effects of passion” (63).

II. BODY LANGUAGE 2: THE FIEND WITHIN

Installing a series of binary distinctions which tautologically confirm and constitute each other, mid-nineteenth-century medical discourses cast women as inherently private beings: intuitive and passionate, they function perfectly in the private home, yet are liable to run out of or lose control once released from this sphere. For that matter, the city, as the epitome of public life and its dangers, presents itself as an almost paradigmatically “male” space; it is the private home where women accomplish their self-fashioning. The writer of the urban apocalypse, George Lippard, has time and again traced the implications of this imagery, which renders the city a dangerous ground for single women to tread, pleading for an utopian counter-space of domestic bliss, harmonious country-life and safeguarding familial institutions, while filling page after page of his novels with descriptions of urban chaos and depravity. This is of course the structural principle of sensational and pornographic writing, exemplarily actualized time and again in Lippard's combinations of political pamphlet and pornographic panorama.⁸

His moralistic argument draws heavily on the popular argument raised so often in the wake of Jules Michelet that women are the first to suffer, once the borderlines between public (urban) and private (domestic) spheres are given up. Depicting the city and its underworld as a licentious cesspool, Lippard relishes in the depiction of women victims. In his porno-political novel The Quaker City, we witness a scene of seduction that enacts the sexual transgression as a transgression of spaces: “private” imagery being used for other means.

The libertin Lorraine sets up a complicated scheme to seduce Mary, who believes him to be in love with her. Once he lured her into “Monk Hall” in the “Quaker City,” the perverse center of the sinful Philadelphia underground, he leaves a book on a table for her to find, and then tells a story “to wake her animal nature into full action” (109). While this is the standard seduction program in a later British pornographic bestseller, the anonymously published My Secret Life, the choice of book in The Quaker City is both significant and amazing. “Walter,” the seducer in My Secret Life, leaves John Cleland's Fanny Hill for his lady friends to find, and always achieves the desired effect of arousal. Lorraine, however, leaves a “romance”—a play by Bulwer—and the story he tells Mary to overpower her is apparently quite harmless, culminating in a scene of domestic bliss involving Mary and himself: “Beside our cheerful fire, Mary, with our hands clasping some book, whose theme is the trials of two hearts that loved on through difficulty and danger or death, we will sit silently, our hearts throbbing with one delight, while the long hours of the winter evening glide quietly on” (112). Even with the later evocation of an embrace and a “fair babe,” the images are far from overtly erotic. Yet they have the intended effect, as Lorraine notices immediately: “She is mine! […] while the story fell from my lips, I aroused her slumbering woman's nature. Talk of force—ha, ha—She rests on my bosom as though she would grow there—” (113).

Again, the fiend is already there, hidden in “woman's nature,” her sensuous body:

She knew not that in her own organization were hidden the sympathies of an animal as well as of an intellectual nature, that the blood in her veins only waited an opportunity to betray her, that in the very atmosphere of the holiest love of woman, crouched a sleeping fiend, who at the first whisperings of her Wronger, would arise with hot breath and blood shot eyes, to wreak eternal ruin on her woman's honor.

(73)

Letting down guard for once, woman is lost. While this association of corporeality with treason and rebellion runs through nineteenth-century thought,⁹ it culminates in the description of the woman who traditionally is more body than the man. Passion, it seems, might be completely foreign to the female spirit and the female mind (“her mind,” we learn consequently, was “vividly sensible of the approaching danger” [113]), yet the female body hosts it only too gladly, harboring and nourishing woman's most dangerous enemy without her knowledge and beyond her control.

As the idea of an innate female sexuality is conceptually closely linked with the notion of a closed private sphere, Lorraine's inversion of the rhetoric and imagery of the private turns out to have disturbing implications. If the private space, the true and safe space, becomes disposable, open to the manipulative uses of the libertin, then all the social values are bound to go. “Save me,” (114) implores Mary dramatically, but the very institutions of privacy which traditionally stood for this safety—family, marriage, the home—have been hollowed out and appropriated by the libertin, functioning as nothing but cover-ups for his corrupt schemes. This development seems to enact Forbes Winslow's worst nightmares—the passions are definitely no longer “curbed in and regulated,” but suffuse the entire social system.

While men like Lorraine are held responsible for bringing about this universal corruption, it is women's cognitive deficit, their failure to tell pretension (the fake-marriage, the seduction story) from truth, which makes this manipulation possible in the first place. In their inclination to totalize the logic of privacy, women threaten to unknowingly play into the hands of politically or morally corrupt men, intent on bringing down the existing order of things: “Women have much more excitability and enthusiasm than men. Hence every passion which springs solely from the heart, burns in them with the brilliancy unknown to the more phlegmatic constitution of men. Love which is, but an episode with man, forms the whole story of a woman's life.” This is not Lippard, but an anonymous reviewer of Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century, chiding her for her ridiculous ideas of female self-governance and independence (167).

Indeed Margaret Fuller's book sets out to attack contemporary medical and social theory at the core, trying over and over again to subvert the idea of gender difference organized along social spheres, due to essential biological principles, by way of imageries of gender sameness: “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (115-16), she writes, echoing and concretizing pre-Romantic reflections on the secondary quality of individuality and gender as opposed to identity: “The man is in a certain sense also a woman, just like the woman is a man,” Novalis wrote (495, my translation).

With Zenobia, Hawthorne's dark heroine in The Blithedale Romance, Margaret Fuller makes a strange and quite ambivalent appearance in another text on (among other things) gender difference: “No doubt Fuller was in Hawthorne's mind as he invented Zenobia,” as Annette Kolodny pinned it down (xvi). Just like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, this other strong lady of Hawthorne, Zenobia has time and again been read as an exceptional woman figure, a forerunner of modern feminism, leaving the tight gender boundaries of the nineteenth century behind and exploring new gender roles, if with tragic consequences.¹⁰ Yet, for once, both heroines do not necessarily represent their novels' moral and humanitarian projects, as Michael Davitt Bell pointed out for The Scarlet Letter when clarifying that Hester is not Hawthorne's “spokesman” (178), a statement that could easily be extended to Zenobia's function in The Blithedale Romance. After all, while Zenobia doubtlessly subscribes to Fuller's theory of gender, the entire novel is much more skeptical about her project of “oversetting all human institutions” (44). Secondly, and more importantly for the context that I have opened up, once seen in view of contemporary gender theory, Hester and Zenobia do not really present themselves as all that exceptional, they reflect a central cultural ideologem rather than giving the lie to dominant ideas of female nature and character.

III. “OVERSETTING ALL HUMAN INSTITUTIONS”: WOMEN, CHANGE, AND THE SYSTEM OF THINGS

“She who has once been woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transfiguration. We shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched, and transfigured” (158). As we all know, the “magic touch” will be administered again to Hester and her womanhood will experience a powerful revival later in the novel, the “mightier touch” once more “awaken[ing] all her sensibilities” (169). Hawthorne's vocabulary calls to mind the terminologies of sensationalism and medical theory, and just like these discourses his texts focus on the function of social spheres to demarcate and transfix gender difference and identity, rendering gender distinctions one means of sustaining an endangered order of social spheres.

Yet Hawthorne does not repeat the contemporary obsession with an unambiguous “spatial” delineation of gender difference linearly, but complicates it considerably. In fact, men seem to be highly ambivalent beings in his novels, difficult to subsume under traditional categories of gender or social space. Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter represents almost prototypically the “feminized” cleric which Ann Douglas made out as a paradigmatic feature of nineteenth-century American culture (1-43). And in the course of The Blithedale Romance, stereotypes of masculine strength and control are revised considerably, both in view of Hollingsworth and Coverdale (Rowe 67-68).¹¹ So Hawthorne seems not altogether in discordance with pre-Romantic and early feminist ideas of gender as individual disposition, or as “fluidity” when it comes to men. Women, however, are another issue. When fair and shy Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance first comes from the city to the countryside, she changes fundamentally, as Coverdale notices. His generic explanation for this transformation is significant: “Girls are incomparably wilder and more effervescent than boys, more untamable, and regardless of rule and limit” (73). The tendency to forget about “rule and limit” and to let the “wildness of … nature” (Scarlet Letter 83) take over characterizes Hester and Zenobia even more. While Hawthorne's men more often than not seem to leave stereotypical (and biological) gender categories behind, his women, it seems, manage at best to stifle what will always be their predicament. Thus, Hester might repress the “woman in her,” yet her passion is “neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like heart” (173). Her daughter, Pearl, who is said to “perpetuate … the warfare of Hester's spirit” (93), exemplifies the extremes of such a passion released. And while there are clear analogies between Hester and Zenobia, it is Pearl that comes to prefigure Zenobia's uncompromising radicality and instinctive/natural rebellion, being “a law onto herself” (132):

[Zenobia] made no scruple of oversetting all human institutions, and scattering them as with a breeze from her fan. A female reformer, in her attacks upon society, has an instinctive sense of where the life lies, and is inclined to aim directly at that spot. Especially, the relation between the sexes is naturally among the earliest to attract her notice.

(44)

Concentrating “instinctively” on gender relations, Zenobia thus sets out to question the very boundary so eagerly defended in her days—the boundary between private and public space. Indeed, Zenobia's entire project could be described in terms of a totalization of the private space, a “tyranny of intimacy,” as Gordon Hutner pointed out with reference to Richard Sennett's terminology (109, 117, 127, 232). Totalizing the private realm, however, is as dangerous as its radical opposition, the totalization of the public sphere, as we have already seen in Lippard's writing.

If Zenobia's critique of the “relation among the sexes” indicates a political project, in the following it becomes clear that she is not really concerned with politics, nor with society, but draws upon the rhetoric of reform to pursue very personal, “private” issues. Underneath her vigorous reform efforts lies an emotional incitement: love or rather love sickness, as Coverdale recognizes:

What amused and puzzled me, was the fact, that women, however intellectually superior, so seldom disquiet themselves about the rights or wrongs of their sex, unless their own individual affections chance to lie in idleness, or to be ill at ease. They are not natural reformers, but become such by the pressure of exceptional misfortune.

(121)

Coverdale is clearly not a reliable narrator, yet his characterization of Zenobia as essentially affectionate complies with her entire development up to her tragic fate.¹² While Hollingsworth is seen to expertly enact all sides of human nature (emotionality just like lack of empathy, passion just like rationality) to realize his reform project, for Zenobia her reform project is obviously secondary to her actual motivation: to gratify her emotional and sensual desires. The fact that she abandons her feminist project as soon as it no longer complies with her love for Hollingsworth thus indicates a lack of consequence only at first glance;¹³ a closer look reveals that all of Zenobia's seemingly flimsy actions testify to a systematic underlying behavioral pattern—her female disposition.

Zenobia, just like Pearl, comes to be identified with some kind of paradigmatic precondition, “female” (Zenobia) or “natural” (Pearl), which is far from positive in its implications. If in The Scarlet Letter the problematic implications of this determination are associated with Pearl, the child, it is Hester, the woman, who epitomizes the tragic dimensions of the dichotomy between body and mind, nature and culture:

Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down and built up anew. Then, the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change; in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish.

(160)

The protofeminist rhetoric of this passage calls to mind Zenobia's radical project of “oversetting all human institutions,” the “tyranny of intimacy” she means to establish. Here, however, tearing down “the whole system of society” is seen as problematic from the very beginning, not only because it destroys the very basis for human interaction and communication, but moreover because it threatens to destroy the possibility of a positive female self-conception. As the “ethereal essence,” woman's “truest life” “evaporates,” we can only guess at what will take its place. Given the persistent allusions to the “passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned” (173), chances are that it is this inner force which will gain control eventually.

Of course, Hester opts neither for radical reform nor for suicide. Zenobia's fate, by contrast, will later bring forth the tragic consequences of the decision to go all the way.¹⁴ Given the idea of an irreversible process of destruction setting in once certain emotional forces are released, Coverdale's commiseration of Zenobia after her death comes across as ambivalent at best. He demarcates the problems inherent in a male system, yet never seriously considers a change to the “female” paradigm:

It was a woful thought, that a woman of Zenobia's diversified capacity should have fancied herself irretrievably defeated on the broad battle-field of life, and with no refuge, save to fall on her own sword, merely because Love had gone against her. It is nonsense, and a miserable wrong—the result, like so many others, of masculine egotism—that the success or failure of woman's existence should be made to depend wholly on the affections, and on one species of affection; while man has such a multitude of other chances, that this seems but an incident. For its own sake, if it will do no more, the world should throw open all its avenues to the passport of a woman's bleeding heart.

(241)

What could imply a critique of the system which opens up a “multitude of other chances” to men, reveals itself on second glance as not really questioning the idea of women's precarious position, but stops short at deploring its inevitability. Moreover, woman as the more “natural” gender seems to embody exemplarily and essentially the general human propensity to let go emotionally, so that the “sentimentalization” of modern culture seems indeed nothing but a “feminization.” Thus the determining force of female basic instincts prefigures the fate of mankind in its entirety: the frightful scenario due to establish itself, once drives, instincts, desires and emotions—the forces of the private sphere—gain the upper hand of the “settled system of things” (141).

While in The Blithedale Romance “the conservatives, the writers of the North American Review, the merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those respectable old blockheads” (141) prove to be the lesser evil eventually, the same dichotomy between natural passions and social institutions suffuses The Scarlet Letter, where the established system, as problematic as it is made out to be, presents itself as indispensable confinement, always both restrictive and protective. Nature might be prior to culture, but Hawthorne is no radical Romantic: “Nature in Hawthorne is … mostly moral wilderness, this state prior to the unavoidable entering of history and society, characterized not only by the absence of every social force, but also by the absence of every moral or social sense of responsibility,” Winfried Fluck pointed out (208, my translation).

If time and again Hawthorne associated the “settled system of things” with a masquerade, the social institutions with stage props and an artificial scenery, these devices seem nevertheless indispensable to regulate what all too easily collapses into utter chaos, the “critical vortex” (140) of the Blithedale experiment. Hawthorne shares Lippard's concerns with the downfall of social boundaries, like Lippard he casts human instincts and impulses as far from innocuous or unproblematic. And as much as their aesthetic and political projects differ, both writers stylize women as—unknowingly or not—epitomizing these dangerous tendencies: victims that come to be blamed for their situation. Not accidentally, Lippard's Mary just like Hawthorne's Zenobia commit suicide in the end, incapable of facing up to the “fiend within” they inadvertently released.

IV. CODA

Passion, suicide and female nature are closely linked in nineteenth-century thought, and reflections on both passion and suicide display women as double victims—subject to conditioning—from the outside (the seducer, the public sphere) and the inside (their own body, the female disposition). Both passion and suicide suspend individual will and release energies that are threatening not only at a personal scale but corrosive for society at large. It is this latter aspect that figures prominently in Emily Dickinson's work, although she is much more ambivalent in her reflections on disempowerment and victimization than other authors of her day. Presenting the experience of passion in terms of utter disorientation—a state beyond “compass”—and “chart” and in conditional clauses, Dickinson brackets a highly disruptive state and thus stages a paradoxically contained totalization of feeling. The conditional mood disassociates the speaker from the experience in the very act of envisioning it.

This oscillation characterizes many of Dickinson's poems, and by way of a conclusion I would like to present a brief reading of another such qualified transgression, another poem lingering on the border between containment and totality. In “What if I say I shall not wait,” Dickinson envisions a sphere beyond laws and regulations, beyond time and space, liberating and open:

What if I say I shall not wait!
What if I burst the fleshly Gate—
And pass escaped—to thee!
What if I file this Mortal—off—
See where it hurt me—That's enough—
And wade in Liberty!
They cannot take me—any more!
Dungeons can call—and Guns implore
Unmeaning—now—to me -
As laughter—was—an hour ago—
Or Laces—or a Traveling Show—
Or who died—yesterday!

(Dickinson 127)

Here suicide is presented in a strangely detached reflection, by sharp contrast to the impulsive acts of self-abandoning described in Lippard and Hawthorne. If here too the decision to transgress the borderline between life and death is associated with (female) loneliness and unfulfilled love, the poem focuses on the alternatives to these states of deprivation, another order of things, captured mostly in the negative, as everything social reality is not: “They cannot take me—any more.”

This poem too takes the guise of a speculation—“what if”—and as “Wild Nights” it runs counter to dominant evaluations and conceptions. The frightening and disempowering aspects of the state/act described, the moral outrageousness and destructive radicality of both female passion and female suicide, need not be made explicit, as they form the conceptual framework of the poems, and thus determine the very acts of transgression thematized. Just like many other writings on these issues, “What if I say” casts this transition in terms of the dismissal of an established order—the “traveling show” of everyday life, the “dungeons” and “guns” of institutionalized reality—and in terms of entering an alternative, uncorporeal, indeterminate sphere neither private nor public.

Of course, this ideal space beyond corporeal confinement and social control is only to be accessed in typically Dickinsonian fashion—by way of allusions, indications, speculations—her vocabulary of the “what if.” And yet this stalled self-realization, this provisional rebellion, is by no means identical to Hester Prynne's controlled passionateness. Whereas like Hawthorne Dickinson envisions the unobstructed release of the passions as dangerous, time and again she turns poetry into a space where this release can be acted out speculatively, where the unsatisfactory conditions of everyday life are contested and replaced with markedly fantastic scenarios of empowerment, self-realization, liberation.

In the face of this move, Dickinson's reluctance to go all the way, her remarkable characteristics of “speaking/not speaking” about passion, desire and ecstasy might turn out to be indeed a reaction to public provisions of the day, yet not so much along the lines of resistance to or compliance with the dominant order, but rather by way of a thought experiment, pulling into focus an alternative, if clearly unreal order of things. If this alternative is too vague to serve as a point of reference for social reform, it does disclose the glaring deficits of the intersecting dominant discourses on gender difference, sexuality and social spheres, pointing to the inadequacy of a network of binary distinctions male/female, rational/passionate, private/public which otherwise tend to present themselves as inescapable even when criticized.

Notes

1. The following reflection on conceptions of the body and identity in nineteenth century America is outlined at greater detail in my Selbsterkenntnis, Körperfühlen.

2. For the origins of this sexualization of women see Azouvi and Jordanova.

3. Nancy Cott has argued for the trope of “passionlessness” as the most decisive image in describing female sexuality in the nineteenth century. However, as a series of feminist literary critics and historians of medicine has shown, the predominance of the paradigm is hardly as self-evident as she makes it out, as in medical discourses at least the paradigm of female innate sexuality prevailed. “On the contrary, virtually the only medical writers who emphasized women's innate asexuality during the first half of the nineteenth century were medical reformers such as Sylvester Graham, C. B. Woodward, Samuel Gregory, and William Alcott. More prestigious physicians maintained the eighteenth century's far more ‘modern’ view of woman's innate sexuality” (Smith Rosenberg 301-2, n. 23). See also: Laqueur 149; Poovey 29. And for an excellent delineation of the feminist debates around the issues of sexuality and gender see Kuppler.

4. On this development and its highly ambivalent consequences see Douglas, Tompkins, and Brown.

5. The text was translated into English in 1840 and became very popular in the United States.

6. About utopian radical reform projects which purport the suspension of the division between public and private see D'Emilio and Freedman 116.

7. See also: Gates 125.

8. On the logic and narrative patterns of pornographic and sensational writing see: Ziff; and Reynolds 211-24.

9. See my “Pierre. Die Rebellion des Körpers” in Selbsterkenntnis, Körperfühlen, for a more detailed analysis of this pattern of thought.

10. To name only a few recent readings of Hawthorne's novels along these lines: Pfister, Bronfen 241; Hernd 75.

11. For a further elaboration of this point and a critique of Rowe see: Selbsterkenntnis, Körperfühlen 229-30.

12. While I see Coverdale's narrative position as unreliable, I do not agree to readings of The Blithedale Romance which read the narrator in overall contradiction to the auctorial position, as exemplified in Justus. Many feminist readings of the novel have drawn upon this pattern and insisted on the unreliability of Coverdale's representation especially in view of Zenobia: See for instance: Morgan; Schriber; Pfister; Brown 96. Evan Carton has reviewed many of these approaches and presented a very differentiated analysis of Coverdale's narrative function and characterization, reading Coverdale's strategy of “self-parody” as an indication of Hawthorne's awareness of a fundamental ambivalence in narration rather than his subversion of every kind of reliable narrator information: Carton 228.

13. As T. Walter Herbert has shown when reading The Blithedale Romance against Hawthorne's correspondence to his wife, the feminist project is highly problematical in this novel, reflecting Hawthorne's more general skepticism in view of radical reform projects. Reading the novel in terms of a radical dichotomy of “womanliness” and “passion,” however, as Herbert does, is to ignore Zenobia's personification as “womanliness incarnated.” For that matter, I do not read “womanliness” and “passion” as oppositions, but rather as analogies, the congruence of which suspends the feminist project.

14. For a detailed reading of Zenobia's suicide see: “Die Tyrannei der Intimität: Zenobias Sterben” in Selbsterkenntnis, Körperfühlen 234-248.

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