Emily Dickinson and the Search for Meaning

Preface

In my mind Emily Dickinson has always been the woman in white: an enigmatic and ghostly figure who wafted through my imagination with no let or hindrance, taking my breath away each time she appeared. I must have been a young lad entering his teens when I came across her poems, and though much of what she wrote was incomprehensible to me in those early days, she fascinated me for no clearly identifiable reason. The power of her words to stun me, to make me start and shiver, to set me off into a reverie, was obvious from the start. As I grew, I learned to seek for her hidden meanings, for her new insights, the unmatched compression and concentration of her lexicon, and the quaint strangeness of the manner of her expression.

Throughout the busy schedule of my decades in the civil service, she used to wander in and out of my life, in the form of a collection of poems someone had left behind, a critical article in a literary publication, and even a play on YouTube starring Julie Harris. When Harold Bloom included her name in the Western canon, it seemed she had finally achieved the supreme honour she was destined for.

As superannuation neared, and the prospect of doing nothing loomed large, Emily called out to me again. It was time to finally get to know this mystery woman better, to understand her through dogged research and study and to finally try to make some sense of who and what she really was. I registered myself as a Ph.D research scholar and proposed a detailed examination of the philosophical and symbolic meaning of 'circumference' in her poems. Over four years I scoured through the libraries at the University at Jaipur, the USIS at New Delhi and the American Studies Research Centre at Hyderabad: there was sufficient material available, including new studies that often popped up on the internet. Doing this along with the onerous official duties was difficult, but Emily often proved to be the escape I longed for, from files and meetings and the daily political machinations that had become a part of my official life. What bliss, what joy as she beckoned me into her world.

A few weeks before my retirement, I was able to submit my thesis for evaluation. My ever-patient guide Professor Sudha Rai, then the head of the English Department at the University of Rajasthan, was more than helpful. My gratitude to her for speeding up the process for the viva call came just a few months later in December 2014 and soon enough I was awarded the Ph.D. And thus I obtained for myself the honour of adding the honorific of 'Doctor' to my name. Friends and colleagues wondered why I was overjoyed in acquiring this new title on a subject which has no practical use in the real world. But then Emily had taught me that the real world was within.

It was the culmination of a life-long fascination with the poetess who, without warning or notice, used to walk though my imagination. My gratitude too to Geeta my wife, who these past few years has been the iron pillar around which my life revolves, though the ups and downs of my niggling health issues and the unexpected twists and turns of our lives. Having herself obtained the Ph.D some two decades earlier, she had used all her means to gently goad me into emulating her.

This book is an edited version of my doctoral thesis. I hope the reader finds it readable and that that it helps in deciphering the complex and layered mind of Emily Dickinson as she struggled to find meaning in the life she was privileged to live.

Dr CK Mathew

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Emily Dickinson presents in her personal life, and in her prodigious work, a curious enigma the likes of which have seldom been encountered in the vast and wondrous world of literature. New England, where she lived for fifty-six years of a piquant and intriguing life, was the cradle of the classical tradition of Puritanism brought over from Europe, when the Mayflower carried freedom-loving dissidents across the North Atlantic in 1620. Two centuries down the line, in 1830, Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. The Puritan landscape and the contours of the moral philosophy she was heir to, had almost reached the end of its utility. Moral and ethical values, the mainstay of the Puritan way of life, were fast declining.