The Soul Thinking Itself: Toward a Poetics of Subjectivity in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson

This thesis argues for a phenomenological reading of Dickinson’s poetics of subjectivity, ranging from perception to self-consciousness. Dickinson’s poetics is phenomenological in the sense that her poetry explores and enacts the subtle and complex experience of a subject that can never grasp itself fully. In this exploration, the Hegelian dialectical movement from sense-certainty to self-consciousness and spirit is a useful auxiliary lens for understanding Dickinson, but this lens has to include, among other things, the Christian and pagan (Neoplatonic) ethical, philosophical and mystical traditions (as in Emerson’s Essays) for a more well-rounded picture of Dickinson’s poetry. Chapter 2 examines the dialectical doubleness of perception, pervaded by pain, lack of closure and liable to distortion, an experience constitutive of subjectivity. Chapter 3 explores the ineradicable experiences of absence, desire, blank and negation that not only frame Dickinson’s poetry but constitute, even threaten to eclipse, the perceiving subject. Chapter 4 focuses on the movement from consciousness to self-consciousness, never that of a pure subjective rationality, but integrally inclusive of feeling to the point of unhappiness—a self-consciousness or developing subjectivity caught between the opposed and apparently irreconcilable poles of its experience of self and otherness. Chapter 5 analyses Dickinson’s characteristic “slants,” flashes of light, and oblique angles, all of which profoundly disorient, and cross the dialectical interval of, subjectivity, reasserting the existence of two poles bound together in both identity and difference. It then goes on to probe not only how the interval emerges but what this space is for emergent subjectivity occurring within and traversing it. Finally, Chapter 6 takes up the broader task of situating the notion of a soul within the mediating perspectives of consciousness, perception, mind, and self-replicating spirit first, to determine what soul and its functions might be and, second, to analyze the qualities of its self-limitation. In removing its own preferences and limiting or adjusting its field of interactions, the subject appears both to recapitulate, yet complete what were at earlier stages simply painful, seemingly passive moments of absence, blankness, and blindness. Each chapter identifies an important layer of Dickinson’s poetics from perception to the fuller range of subjectivity and emphasizes both the negative and the positive sides of her poetics. The thesis suggests that in Dickinson we encounter a new poetics of subjectivity, one in which many earlier features of consciousness such as body, soul, mind, spirit, the “I”, the “me,” the “we,” and even consciousness itself, are subsumed and transformed in what is effectively a very Dickinsonian phenomenology of subjectivity.

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