Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 213Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see –
For love of Her – Sweet – countrymen –
Judge tenderly – of MeA letter sent without the possibility of response or reply, a message committed to
invisible hands: as this poem intimates, Dickinson’s condition and subject was
isolation. As she put it once, in one of her letters, “My Business is Circumference”;
and the circumference she was talking about was surely that of her lonely self.
For her, the self was not the circumscribed Eden it was for Poe. Still less was it a
matter of process, a dynamic node or source of energy capable of contact and even
confluence with the other, as it was for Whitman. It was, rather, a prisonhouse, from
which it was evidently impossible to escape. Her poetic mission, as she saw or
sensed it, was to explore the dimensions of her cell; to find out what could be felt or
known, what surmised or guessed at, and what could be said and communicated
within the constraints of experience and expression that, for her, were the conditions
of living. The result is a poetry that manages to be at once passionate and sly,
visionary and ironic, as Dickinson tries to push perception and language to the
limits while suspecting just how radical, how stringent those limits are. And it is
also a voice that not only echoes the doubts of many of her contemporaries, about
the possibility of belief and the viability of democracy, truly social living, but also
anticipates the skepticism and subversiveness of later, twentieth- and twenty-first-
century writers: those for whom any version of reality is just that, a version, a
picture or figurative pattern drawn by the prisoner of what he or she sees through
the bars of the prison cell.
“I have a brother and sister,” Dickinson wrote in 1862, in response to an inquiry
about herself, her family and her work. “Mother does not care for thought – and
father – too busy with his briefs to notice what we do.” “They are religious – except
me –” she added, “and address an Eclipse, every morning – whom they call their
‘Father.’ ” The earthly father Dickinson refers to here was Edward Dickinson, an
eminent lawyer, politician, and judge; he was described by one contemporary as
“a man of the old type, la vieille roche of Puritanism.” “We do not have much poetry,
father having made up his mind that it’s pretty much all real life,” Dickinson
observed of him in a letter to her brother Austin, away from home at law school.
“Father’s real life and mine sometimes come into collision, but as yet escape unhurt!”
“He buys me many Books –” she admitted of Edward Dickinson, in another letter
written around ten years later, “but begs me not to read them – because he fears
they joggle the Mind.” Her mind was joggled perhaps a little by attendance at
Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847 and then at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary
from 1847 to 1848. Her early years were also certainly filled with the normal social
activities of a daughter of a prominent citizen. But gradually she began to withdraw
from the world and, by the age of 30, she had become an almost total recluse, rarely
leaving her father’s house and garden in Amherst, Massachusetts, dressing
completely in white, and conducting most of her many friendships by letter. SheGGray_c02.indd 213ray_c 02 .indd 213 8 8/1/2011 7:54:44 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 44 AM