The Value of Emily Dickinson by Mary Loeffelholz

Author:Mary Loeffelholz [Loeffelholz, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Scaffold and the Carpenter –

Just such a Retrospect

Hath the perfected Life –

A Past of Plank – and Nail –

And slowness – then the Stagings drop

Affirming* it a Soul –

(Fr 729A)

The governing metaphor of the poem is homely or democratic enough, evoking a typically American wood-framed house made without distinguishing ornament or luxury materials, a house “adequate” without pretension, as the equivalent of the “perfected Life.” It was during Dickinson’s childhood that light-framed, nailed-lumber construction – “balloon framing,” as it was called by the time Dickinson wrote this poem – became the most common building method for meeting America’s ravenous demand for cheap, quickly constructed housing. In American national myth, and to some degree in national fact, anyone could aspire to build – or to become – this self-supporting house.

And yet Dickinson’s metaphor in this poem is also, in Crumbley’s terms, “nonpopulist” or even anti-populist. Having lived through her father’s extensive renovations of the Homestead when the Dickinsons moved back into the family home in 1855, and his erection in 1856 of the elaborate Italianate, towered, and balconied Evergreens next door for Austin and Susan Dickinson, Emily Dickinson was well aware that simple American planks and nails could support complicated and by no means egalitarian social aspirations. Fulfilling the great American dream of individual self-sufficiency, her poem’s House, once erected, forgets the common human community of labor that brought it into being. Is the same forgetfulness of its dependent origins to be expected of the perfected individual Soul?

By breaking off at the moment when the “Stagings” fall away from the accomplished Soul, Dickinson seems to suspend this question beyond her poem’s ending. Hearing echoes of Christ and Calvary in the poem’s Carpenter, planks, and nails, Helen Vendler believes that the “slow, repetitive work” of its painful spiritual education “is remembered by the perfected Soul in every detail, in every plank, in every nailing.”9 It’s not clear to me, however, that Dickinson’s poem provides this assurance, whether on a religious or a secular reading. Its emphasis on self-sufficiency stands apart from the central experience of American spiritual autobiography in the Protestant tradition, that of acknowledging the soul’s utter dependence on God. The central concern of the poem is with the falling away of the perfected Soul’s scaffolding rather than the pangs of its construction. Its mood and focus seem closer to Emerson’s assertion, in “Experience” (1844), that “Souls never touch their objects”: even in the death of his young son, Emerson writes, “Something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous.”10 That Dickinson sent a copy of this poem to Susan Dickinson, signed “Emily,” only deepens the uncertainty of its tone: would Susan have received this as a message complimenting her own “perfected Life,” rebuking her for withdrawing from their intimacy, asserting the poet’s growing autonomy with respect to Susan’s

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