The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson by Wendy Martin

Author:Wendy Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2002-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

Perhaps most striking in this poem is that the speaker foregrounds the descent, not the rising, of a balloon, and that the descending balloon is feminine. This surprising focus is underlined by the speaker’s opening reference to plural “Balloons” and then abrupt switch to the singular “Gilded Creature” at the precise moment of the narration in which the balloon both initiates its fall and is gendered: while ungendered balloons ascend “spurn[ing] the Air, as ’twere too mean / For Creatures so renowned –,” the lonely “Gilded Creature . . . Tears open her . . . Veins – / And tumbles in the Sea –” Also striking is that the speaker seems as interested in the audience as in the event – as in the poem “The Show is not the Show / But they that go” (Fr 1270). Between the lines describing ungendered plural ascent and singular female fall, the speaker describes the crowd’s response, and the conjunctions, “And yet,” introducing the crowd’s applause, demonstrate the disjunction between her or his expectation and the clerks’: apparently, unlike the speaker, they cheer, then “retire with an Oath,” dismissively observing “’Twas only a Balloon.”

The poem presents the reader with many obvious puzzles. Among them is not the question of the speaker’s gender. Perhaps, then, the reader must work backwards, through the performance of other aspects of this poem to the question of gender. For example, one reading might begin with the speaker’s sympathy for the death of the “Gilded” feminine being – apparently a painted woman, suggesting the extremes of prostitute or actress, but perhaps also any woman whose livelihood depends on reputation or public respect, and who would hence feel obliged to hide her flaws or weaknesses through gilding. In the era of middle-class womanhood as “the angel in the house,” this could be understood as the position of most women Dickinson knew. The poem may describe the progress of a woman’s life as an undifferentiated communal childhood of swanlike ascent abruptly terminated by an adulthood of isolated vulnerability and disaster. This plot line is well known in popular mid-nineteenth-century fiction: good girl grows up, succumbs to temptation, and falls. In such a reading, the speaker’s empathy might mark her as female, aghast at the unfeeling response of the applauding and indifferent clerks who, apparently, see only spectacle, just another balloon. Similarly, the speaker’s implied difference from the masculine “Clerks” may mark her position as female.

In another reading, however, the speaker’s tone could imply comic distance from both the clerks and the balloon. The exaggerated stateliness and nobility attributed to the balloon’s initial ascent suggests a masculine idealization of feminine beauty and purity: in this well-known discourse, women were indeed “creatures” fabled to live in an atmosphere of such refined delicacy that even “Air” would be “too mean” for them. As feminist criticism has long shown, it is only logical that manipulators of this dehumanizing discourse would also condemn those who “struggle – some – for Breath” at this imagined, idealized elevation.

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