Open Interiority: Emily Dickinson, Augustine, and the Spatial Self

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Dena Fehrenbacher, Calista McRae, Peter Sacks, and John Stauffer for their attentive comments on an earlier draft of this article. Thanks also to James Doyle and David Ungvary for lending their expertise on the works of St. Augustine, and to Suzanne Smith for her careful edits on both substance and prose. Especial thanks to Elisa New for her support and guidance, and to Renée Bergland for so generously shepherding this article into print.

Notes

¹ A few critics have offered earnest if brief discussions of Dickinson’s Augustinianism, including Benjamin Lease (by way of the fifteenth-century Augustinian theologian Thomas à Kempis), Sharon Cameron, and Elisa New.

² See Ahlstrom (78, 127, 270–75); Miller (3–35).

³ The Dickinsons tended to purchase books no more than a year after they were published, as suggested by numerous entries in Jay Leyda’s Years and Hours (see for instance Leyda 1: 376, 2: 8, 20, 21), and Emily was a famously avid reader. The editions of the books listed above are as follows: Augustine’s Confessions translated by William Watts, revised by G.T. Shedd, and published in 1860 by W.F. Draper in Andover, MA; The Poetical Works of George Herbert published in 1857 by D. Appleton and Co. in New York; and The Imitation of Christ by à Kempis published in 1857 by John Henry and James Parker in Oxford. On the two copies of Thomas à Kempis’s work, see Capps (62) and Lease (54). All quotes from Augustine’s Confessions in this article are taken from the edition Dickinson read; the Dickinson family copy is held in the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

⁴ It is difficult to trace the particular sermons by Wadsworth that Dickinson may have known, but she likely heard him preach in 1855, after which she was given copies of his sermons by friends and family, and received at least two visits from him, the first in 1860. Throughout her life, he remained on her mind: in 1877 she offered to lend a friend one of his sermons, and after Wadsworth’s death in 1882, a mutual friend sent her a posthumous collection of his sermons (Habegger 330–33, 420, 574; Lease 9; Reynolds 169).

⁵ Habegger dismisses the theory of medical trouble, while giving emotional explanations some consideration; yet he finds no single proposed cause to be sufficiently persuasive. Ultimately he refuses to speculate with precision on the cause of the “terror” (435–41).

⁶ See Douglas (128, 135–36); Lundin (11–14); Welters (139–40).

⁷ On Dickinson’s avoidance of sin as a subject for poetry, see Barnstone (59) and Eberwein (72, 78). Freedman sees Dickinson as taking a tacitly ironic view of the “Puritan preoccupation with sin” (24).

⁸ Throughout, I follow R.W. Franklin’s dating. For Dickinson’s annual poetic output, see Franklin’s Reading Edition, Appendix 1 (637–38).

⁹ Parsons develops the idea of Augustine’s “mystical process”— a way of placing a mystical episode in relation to “the course of a religious life and in the cultivation of various dispositions, capacities, virtues, and levels of consciousness” (8).

¹⁰ Dickinson was no stranger to gothic fiction or the sensationalized pulp crime narratives of the popular press, as David Reynolds and Daneen Wardrop point out.

¹¹ As Scott MacDonald explains, Augustine’s decision to seek God by turning “inward, using the eye of his own rational soul” (22), culminated in an “intellectual vision” that gave him “a glimpse of God’s inmost nature” (3) as “true being” (vere esse) (31), characterized by “incorporeal reality” (25). This Augustinian model of a direct, intuitive vision of God came to underlie expectations for “conscious conversion” (Ahlstrom 60).

¹² I am grateful to James Doyle for pointing out this etymological pun. For an overview of Dickinson’s Latin education and its importance to her poetry, see Habegger (140–2).

¹³ See Fuss (32–33); Young (174).

¹⁴ See the Emily Dickinson Collection at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Packet XXXVIII (Mixed Sets), including 11 poems, ca. 1871–72 (F1234D).

¹⁵ See D. Williams (199). Dickinson also uses metaphors about being “at sea” for trying times: see for instance L294 and L306 (Letters 2: 434, 441) both written while Dickinson was undergoing treatment for her eyes, and was forced to stay in Cambridge away from her home and family.

¹⁶ See the Emily Dickinson Collection at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, Packet XXXVIII (Mixed Sets) including 11 poems, ca. 1871–72 (F1234C).