Clark E Moustakas : The Solitude of Emily Dickinson

Extracts from :

Clark E Moustakas

Loneliness

EMILY DICKINSON

"Emily Dickinson lived alone, in almost complete isolation, for a quarter of a century, the last years of her life. Privately, she loved a man for almost twenty years whom she had seen face to face no more than three or four times and who was unaware of the depth and intensity of her devotion. Much of her poetry was inspired by this intimate, monastic attachment. Its force continued to give direction to her productive capabilities for the rest of her life. She was a rare, unusual, gifted person who could not find a place for herself in society, and whose only salvation was a lonely, solitary existence. She often stood out as the lone dissenter in her youth when she made efforts to meet others on an honest basis. She stated her convictions even when they removed her from the appropriate and acceptable modes of behavior and from the proper groups.

While attending Mount Holyoke Female Seminary she searched to find the existence of God but she emerged with less than absolute devotion. Her non-Christian ways created much consternation among her family, teachers, and classmates. She could not readily accept the standards of Christian living imposed by the college, nor the precepts and prayers for redemption. She lived a life of hardship as a non-believer in an institution founded and dedicated to Puritan rigor and religious worship. She was one of the few who did not rise when Miss Lyon, the Principal, wished to see the faces of all who had been saved. Rollo Brown wrote of her individuality, as follows.

The most heroic display of courage in New England was not at Concord Bridge or Bunker Hill, but in Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Principal Mary Lyon had just made her announcement to the young ladies assembled in chapel that Christmas was to be celebrated as a fast. After she had awed — or bullied — the hesitant into acceptance, she

asked — that is, dared — any dissenter to rise. And Emily Dickinson stood up. Merely to be the solitary dissenter required courage enough. Unsympathetic eyes on every side, supported by stout authority, have driven many a college girl to surrender convictions that she had believed were laws of nature — and possibly were. Unsympathetic eyes on every side, without the official support, have caused many another to turn away from college broken-hearted. Emily Dickinson did not choose to surrender. Nor did she decide to go home — except for a rebellious celebration of Christmas. Instead, in a little world where it was proper to think as the majority thought, and where the majority had much of its thinking done by somebody else, she dared to express the sense of fitness cherished by the minority.

Emily Dickinson remained spiritually intransigent to the end of her seminary experience. Even when she felt grave danger that one of her very few ties would be severed if she did not declare a Christian faith, she could not revise her ways.

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Emily Dickinson did not give up the world but neither could she find I herself in the world, so she retired from it. Only by violating a purity of self, only by denying her inspirations, and values and purposes, only by distorting her private perceptions and experiences could she achieve an acceptable place and be approved by others. Only by compromising, by distorting, by abstracting from her total experience what could be confirmed, by using a common language, by employing recognizable standards and forms could she have lived in society. She had to resist being warped into something resentful and ugly by a practical society, by the values of a middle-class education and culture, and by the evangelical demands of her community. She resisted by choosing a life of seclusion as the only way of life by which she could consolidate her resources and express her talents in unique, poetic forms.

The loneliness and simplicity of her life enabled her to live in accordance with her private experiences and convictions and to realize her talents. Her indifference to professional or artistic goals and to social recognition, she expresses in the following poem.

How happy is the little Stone

That rambles in the Road alone,

And doesn’t care about Careers

And Exigencies never fears-

Whose Coat of elemental Brown

A passing Universe put on,

And independent as the Sun

Associates or glows alone,

Fulfilling absolute Decree

In casual simplicity

Through a reclusive life she maintained her health and her sanity. She enjoyed a gentle peacefulness and serenity. Through loneliness, she preserved her integrity, her individuality. In this, she remained private, immovable, proud. She achieved a victory, living creatively in isolation, never being forced to bitterness, retaliation, hatred, but always maintaining a pure identity of love, gentleness, and understanding combined with wisdom, determination, and a powerful authenticity.

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Her poetry was her way of maintaining an inner life and growing in isolation and loneliness. In these poetic forms Emily Dickinson lives forever, bringing gladness and joy, depth of feeling and understanding, to thousands of human hearts. Her poems were conceived in lonely hours. They depict the incongruity of man and the universe, the loneliness man feels in separating himself from the universe, the tragedy of man’s selfestrangement and alienation from nature. Her poems empowered her to endure life and attain a fortitude and intuitive vision into the unknowable, into nature, beauty, the ordinary experiences of life, and into death and immortality.

(...)

Richard Chase describes Miss Dickinson’s victory, as follows.

Her antagonist was nothing less than society itself, and the public opinion through which the values of society were forced upon the individual. She was entirely content to be what the world called a “nobody” so long as her position as “nobody” could be used as a vantage point....And in her way she defeated the world, finally overwhelming its most stubbornly held redoubts. Her strategy was elaborate and extreme; it involved her own death. Emily Dickinson’s seclusion — sad as it was and unpropitious for our culture — was yet one of the notable acts of our history.

In one way or another, most of Emily Dickinson’s poems bear irrevocably the depth of her isolation and loneliness. But it was a way of life she chose because she felt she must. She gave to her seclusion a range of significance beyond herself. She gave it a liveliness and beauty, an experiential quality that enabled her to commune with many frightened lonely souls, unaware of their own separation from life."

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