| As a mysterious figure haunting the literary world nowadays, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) has experienced fairly dramatic ups and downs in critical reception with her legendary life and unique writing:an intense obscurity in lifetime and then an enormous popularity currently with an ever-increasing reputation. Conrad Aiken is fully justified when he, in 1924, acclaimed Dickinson's works to be "the finest poetry by a woman in the English Language."Dickinson's intense reclusion partly accounts for her enigmatic life story and baffling poetic expression, and also underlies the increasingly intensified academic interest from scholars throughout the world. Being highly introspective, Dickinson lives in an insular world, but the world she builds in her poetic imagination is enriched and her perceptions are universal. Though living a lonely life confined in her bedroom upstairs in the Dickinson Homestead, Dickinson, from a panoramic perspective, dwells on such grand subjects in poetry as religion, nature, love, death and immortality. Dickinson's poetry doesn't leave the impression of being narrow-minded or monotonous either in expression or connotation. However, in her poetic world, Dickinson also displays a strong sense of loneliness and the concomitant pain and suffering. It's true that her loneliness apparently originates from her solitary life over the mundane sphere for lack of normal interpersonal relationship and social involvement, but, when more closely examined, Dickinson's loneliness goes beyond the general state of being alone and gets enlarged into an experience more profound, which is essentially caused by her rebellion against the deeply established religion in the 19th-century New England and the patriarchally defined Victorian society. Dickinson insists that loneliness is an inherent fact of human existence and man's life is doomed to be a lonely journey. In addition, the poet's consciousness of loneliness is reinforced by Dickinson's sober detachment on the relationship between man and nature. The poet holds that, with the unity between self and nature impossible to achieve, human beings harbor a sense of collective loneliness in confrontation with nature and the cosmos.Dickinson experiments with her attitudes towards religion, nature, life, death and immortality in her poetry, but her paradoxical attitudes and variable tones pose great difficulty in readers'interpretation and appreciation of her poetry, while her disregard for meters and rhymes, her unconventional and irregular grammar and diction, her weird imagery and unusually compressed connotation, all add to the complexity and difficulty in the criticism of her poetry. Although she anticipates the modern idea that poetry is ususally equipped with a fictious speaker when she tells of the speaker in her poems as a "supposed person" instead of herself, a careful examination of her poems, letters and biographical texts provides the eloquent testimony that "I" in her poetry speaks for the poet. Given the fact that quick judgements, simplification and even distortion frequent the Dickinson scholarship, this dissertation is based on an intensive reading of Dickinson's texts and, by setting Dickinson in the proper historical and cultural contexts, it seeks to make more reliable the interpretation and analysis. Existentialist views are employed in this dissertation to formulate Dickinson's bleak view of life and death, and her philosophical contemplation on religion and nature, while feminist criticism is adopted to illustrate Dickinson's living status and anxiety of authorship in the patriarchal society and patriarchal poetics of the 19th-century New England. Besides, the psychoanalytical approach is used to conduct the analysis of Dickinson's psyche and inner world.The dissertation consists of six parts.The introduction firstly defines loneliness, its connotation, and dictions. Following that, the significance and purpose of this study, and the analytical approaches this study employs are clarified. This part also conducts a literature review sorting out the past and current research studies, both abroad and in China, on Dickinson, which is the foundation of the ensuing argumentation.Chapter One formulates Dickinson's loneliness resulting from her rebellion against the institutional religion in the 19th-century New England. It's a demanding task to perceive Dickinson's view of religion, given the poet's hesitant and paradoxical attitudes. Living in the intensely Puritan context, Dickinson longs for God's identification and shelter in order to acquire a sense of belonging in terms of faith, but over such crucial religious questions as whether God saves and whether soul survives after death, Dickinson transfers into a skeptic from her early belief and aspiration, for she recognizes God's indifference, impotence, hypocrisy and cruelty. With the popularization and enlightenment of secular knowledge mainly brought by scientific and geological development, Dickinson gets disenchanted in her worship for God and in her hope for future salvation. With the Civil War shattering her hope for God's mercy and blessing, Dickinson, under the influence of Emersonian Transcendentalism, turns to nature for spiritual attachment and comfort. She quits church-going and claims herself a confessed rebel. In the process of her rejecting the institutional religion, Dickinson is cut off from the religious community and feels further estranged from her family members and friends who successively convert. Along with it comes her loneliness of social dimension. Regardless of the ardent persuasion from her family and friends and the constant efforts on her part, Dickinson fails to claim her membership, for she couldn't escape her questioning obsession and disenchantment. However, she never ceases struggling between aspiration and rejection with vehemece in her whole life, while the hesitation and oscillation are, to a great extent, responsible for her stronger sense of estrangement and loneliness.In her despair of the established religion, Dickinson is devoted to developing a personal religion. In her pursuit of truth and beauty, she practices with her keen observation and profound meditation what Emerson advocates-to turn to nature for the discovery of truth and beauty with man's intuitional perception and cognition. Dickinson bears a cult of the child both physically and spiritually, which helps to preserve the untainted childlike perspective in her observation of the world and the articulation of her epiphany in a straight way. The child's faith in Dickinson produces novel lines in her poetry, but renders the poet, as a retarded adult, isolated in the actual world.Chapter Two focuses on Dickinson's loneliness in her reflection on human existence, which mainly consists in three aspects:loneliness in nature, loneliness in life and loneliness in confrontation with death. During this process, Dickinson experiences a strong existential loneliness, or cosmic loneliness. Following Romanticist tradition and especially Emersonian doctrines, Dickinson believes that nature is the emobodiment of beauty, and man derives pleasure both from his direct observation of natural scenery and his further meditation on nature. Nature in Dickinson's poetry is a highly personalized and internalized existence, projecting the poet's inner landscape. However, in her keen observation and intuitive perception, Dickinson identifies the other side of nature:cold, indifferent, and even destructive. Inheriting more of Emerson's skepticism, Dickinson develops a detached view of nature, which emphasizes its impermanance, unpredictability and inscrutability. To Dickinson, nature is an unattainable mystery following its inherent order, which, despite man's constant efforts and wishful thinking, is beyond man's perception and cognition. With the ultimate integration between man and nature impossible to realize, man's alienation from nature makes an obsessing proposition in Dickinson's ideology.Although there are poems celebrating the ecstasy of living in her works, Dickinson, generally speaking, holds a pessimistic view of man's existence. Regarding man as a lonely pilgrim, Dickinson defines man's existence as a lonely journey, which is invariably accompanied by separations both in life and on death. Life being short and fleeting, Dickinson relies on friends to achieve a necessary emotional fulfillment in her seclusion, while their departure, for various reasons, renders the poet in a more isolated state. Meanwhile, Dickinson suffers from her remote relationship with her parents as a severely starving-thirsting child in the family. With a stern and remote father, and a subservient and unobtrusive mother, Dickinson is deprived of a healthy role model and an assisting force in her formative period of character and later maturation, which is responsible for the development of the poet's introverted nature and suppressed character. The sense of estrangement and loss resulting from her unfulfilled emotional aspiration gets deepened by her frustrations in love affairs. Though some critics hold that Dickinson's choice of celibacy, to a larger extent, results from her determination not to conform to the standard set for women by the Victorian society, which articulates her protest against the patriarchal culture, it's a stark reality that Dickinons spends her single life in her father's homestead, haunted by loneliness and pain.In her poetry, Dickinson presents us with a death-haunted persona. She focuses on death as man's doom, while the survial of man's soul after death is evaluated as a precarious proposition. The confrontation with imminent death causes an essential loneliness in man's life, which is characterized by Dickinson's presentation of separation, loss and pain in her poetry. Man's life on earth is threatened and made bleak by the shadow of death, but when she resorts to a future life where reunion can be ensured and happiness resumed, Dickinson displays strong doubt and uncertainty. However, the borderline between her doubt of afterlife and her longing for immortality is impossible to be clarified. She wavers between belief and disbelief in her conjecture of an afterlife, unable to settle for a single conclusion.Chapter Three analyzes Dicksinon's loneliness in gender by placing the poet in the historical context of the 19th-century New England characterized by the patriarchal culture in the Victorian era. Dickinson's loneliness stems from her inferior stance as a woman in the patriarchal society, and her anxiety of authorship as a woman writer in the patriarchal poetics. Being an alien to the 19th-century patriarchal context in New England, Dickinson is subjected to a loneliness of cultural dimension. Though she's entitled to a relatively systematic primary education due to the family's fortune and her father's asserted support of women's education, Dickisnon is denied higher education and active public involvement largely because of her father's, characteristic of the society's, conviction that women are educated in order to be more marketable in marriage. Besides the familial chores, Dickinson undertakes a poetic writing with no family members paying attention to her poetic impulses or talents. Both at home and in the social context, Dickinson is ignored and lives in reticence.The 19th-century America witnesses the rising of a group of female writers, but on the whole, female writing is encumbered and restrained in the patriarchally defined poetics. Suffering from the strictly gendered society, Dickinson is castigated by the Victorian aesthetic standard for her wayward writing. She professes a longing for public acknowledgement, but refuses to modify herself so as to cater to the conventional standard which has been established and guarded by men. She disregards regular meters and rhymes of traditional poetry, and even challenges the grammatical appropriacy, employing poetry as the natural catharsis of her psychological strains and crises. Well aware that her violation of convention sets the barrier on her way to reputation and fame, Dickinson nevertheless stays her course by refusing to make substantial changes. While being prepared to renounce social acknowledgement, Dickinson seeks to utter her voice with another textual strategy and a hidden face. By employing a "supposed" speaker and a masculine persona, Dickinson approximates what the feminists term as "androgyny," but, meanwhile, experiences a disintegration of her self, which brings about a loneliness of psychological dimension. Where she stands alone in religion, she now poses herself as a stubborn rebel in the patriarchal society, feeling utterly isolated and forsaken by the world.Chapter Four conducts a strenuous analysis on the nature of Dickinson's loneliness, and clarifies its duality:great pain in loneliness, and romantic appreciation of solitude. In her rebellion against the established religion and the patriarchal society, Dickinson is cut off from the society and loses her sense of belonging, while her detachment in the reflection on man's relationship with nature initiates her in a metaphysical loneliness. Meanwhile, judging from an existentialist perspective, Dickinson derives a strong sense of estrangement and alienation in her contemplation of life and death, while the illusory nature of heaven or afterlife makes life on earth more bleak and pressed. Dickinson's loneliness, whatever dimension it is, gives rise to the negative emotions she reiterates in her works:anxiety, pain and even terror. Her pain in loneliness progresses from an early sentimentality and melancholy to later crushing depression, which even renders enticing the idea of suicide. In her death poems, Dickinson has her speaker speaking the apparently unspeakable experience of dying from beyond death. In addition, she stages the detailed process of suicide in her poetry, holding the self-choiced ending of one's life to be necessary to escape the pains and sufferings in life.While her poetry is permeated with the depressing pain of loneliness, there's another note which can't be ignored:the celebration of solitude. Dickinson derives an aesthetic satisfaction from solitude and appreciates her meditation in solitary moments. She practises Henry David Thoreau's conviction that solitude is one's best companion, which ensures Dickinson's authenticity in a room of her own. By retreating from the tumultuous world to a wider world of her poetic imagination, Dickinson pursues her personal religion in an unvarnished way, rejects the framework of patriarchal poetics, and succeeds in preserving her self and individuality, leaving the world a legacy of nearly 2,000 poems, which are original, novel, thought-laden and fresh with rain, dew and earth. Solitude becomes the source of her poetic inspiration and stimulus of her poetic potentials. Dickinson hasn't perished in her reticence; instead she turns this reticence into a "dialogic" one by conducting a profound contemplation and getting involved in the world with another textual strategy in a slant way. Solitude helps to fulfill the poet's self-examination and self-perfection, contributing substantially to the interpretation of American individualism. Confined in her bedroom, Dickinson nevertheless achieves a universal perspective and horizon in detachment, which accounts for the impression that Dickinson's poetry is highly personal yet doesn't suffer the least hint of monotonousness or restrictions.The concluding part summarizes the explorations and main findings of this study, and presents the conclusion. With loneliness as an obsession, Dickinson's life has been spent in withdrawal and obscurity. Owing to her persistent adherence to authentic mentality and fundamental truth, Dickinson rejects the institutional belief. Recognizing God's hypocrisy and the illusiveness of heaven, Dickinson turns inwards for the development of a personal religion, sticking to her own way to seeking truth and beauty via clinging to a child's faith. In the religious divergence, Dickinson gets distanced from her family members and friends, standing alone in rebellion. Viewed from an existentialist perspective, Dickinson, from her keen observation and contemplation, acquires a detached perception of the relationship between man and nature, while man's alienation from nature constitutes an important source of the poet's loneliness. In her existential loneliness, Dickinsons believes that life is a lonely journey frequented by separation and loss caused by death while the prospect of an afterlife is only a fantasy. Dickinson's sense of loneliness is reinforced by her gender in the 19th-century New England, where women suffer from their inferior status quo while women writers are severely biased in the patriarchally defined context. Dickinson is frustrated and shaded by the authority of patriarchal poetics in her pursuit of literary acknowledgement. Based on a scrutiny of Dickinson's texts, this dissertation aims to justify the perception that Dickinson's loneliness shows a duality in both its connotation and aftermath. In addition to the pain, anxiety and even terror it imposes, loneliness, in Dickinson's case, is partly transformed into a soothing peace of solitude, which provides a fertile land for her existence and poetic imagination. Living in solitude brings Dickinson the desired serenity of life and space for meditation, and, furthermore, ensures the preservation of the individuality and originality in her works. Dickinson achieves a grander perspective in examining life, death and nature, and acquires piercing insights and informed epiphanies. Dickinson, in solitude, observes nature and the world in a direct confrontation and is engaged in a profound introspective contemplation with a certain detachment from trifling mundane affairs, which brings herself closer to the Taoist practice of "conducting a solitary interaction with the spirit of the universe." While withdrawing from the world, Dickinson conducts an active involvement in social activities, and, by using her reticence as an articulation and protest, Dickinson realizes a hidden discourse in a slant way.Dickinson's poetry is her egoistic self-projection. This dissertation aims to gain an insight into Dickinson's awareness of loneliness by a close examination of the landscape she paints in her poetry, hoping to do justice to Dickinson's contribution to American individualism and the world literature. Meanwhile, an effort has been made in the dissertation to demonstrate a convincing "version" of Dickinson who is characterized by loneliness overflowing in her life and works, which, besides the eroding effect, has been elevated to the height of an existential philosophy. To Dickinson, loneliness is a state of existence displaying one's will and fiber, and also a wisdom, which makes her poetry a unique landscape in American literature and also the world literature. |
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