Emily Dickinson and the Search for Meaning

The long-simmering Civil War exploded into violence and tore the country apart in an internecine conflagration. Colonial plantation life of tobacco and cotton, sustained by the aid of black slaves, was no longer tenable. Industrialisation, commerce and business were slowly making irrelevant the old way of life. The first stirrings of basic human rights had established that colour could no longer be a barrier to freedom, though it took another century to finally establish that truth.

Westward Ho! was the clarion call of the day as young men and women swept across the wide open lands stretching out between the Atlantic and the Pacific. There was a nation to be built and it was waiting for willing hands to mould its future. But it would be at the cost of the old foundations of moral behaviour that had set and stabilised American life ever since the Mayflower's perilous voyage to the brave New World. The Puritan way of life, with its piety and its industriousness, its sense of service and its frugality, had helped nurture the fledgling colonies into the young nation that was now finding its feet. Across the ocean, in what was once the mother country, Charles Darwin, after the path-breaking voyage on the Beagle, was shattering religious canons with his Origin of the Species. The Christian World was set on its head: idols, saints and dogma fell by the wayside as an impatient nation strained to run on.

The beginnings of the literature of this brave new world were seen as early as the first half of the 17th century in the form of descriptive pieces and travelogues of life on the East Coast. For the next century and a half, it grew in size and shape, quickened by the Puritan code of New England literature. The new nation was largely excluded from the ferment of the post Renaissance world of English and European art and literature because of the insular way in which they looked at life; and more so, because of the vastness of the ocean separating mainland from colony.

The Declaration of Independence of 1776 split the master-colony relationship forever. It was only after the Civil War in the mid-19th century, imbued with new thoughts and ideas, that the American spirit slowly found expression and voice. Writers, including women, were evolving in a pattern that is now recognisable. The predominant theme, to start with, was what is now referred to as the early national period, where writers like Lydia Sigourney (1791-1865) addressed political and social issues of a wide variety. This phase was followed by the Romantic writers and poets who based their objections to injustice on philosophical grounds. Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) and Frances Osgood (1811-1850) are examples. The third phase was that of the Realists who tried to truthfully depict the conditions under which people were living, presenting an accurate imitation of life as it is. And in the fourth and final period of evolution of 19th century writing, we come to the Pre-Modernists, who moved away from archaic language and societal values and towards a personal, idiosyncratic viewpoint, with a more ambiguous and complex appreciation of life than that of the sentimental poets. It is from this group, if at all, that Emily Dickinson rises.

But who can slot Emily Dickinson into any one category? Preferring to ignore the world around her, this Queen Recluse was almost completely divorced from the political and social life around her in America. With the passage of time, and in the eccentric mannerisms that soon came to define her, and certainly with a predisposition to explore her own self rather than the society around her, she withdrew into her room on the second floor of her Homestead mansion, from where she hardly ever ventured out. The view of the world from her window, from the window of her heart, presents today a marvellous, intriguing and radically new perspective, enticing readers to seek to know more about her and her life. It cannot be denied that the poetry and letters of Emily Dickinson seem to stand alone, by their own definition.

The contextual relevance of Emily Dickinson must be seen in this light. In a true sense, Emily Dickinson was one of the first poets of her time, willing to question its moral foundations and to enquire into issues that would profoundly disturb accepted social mores and religious beliefs. The God she discerned was not restricted to pulpit and seminary, but to the wider world of nature and the limitless skies. She looked beyond the boundaries of convention and society and saw intimations of immortality, the liberating force of a life that lay beyond the power of death.