Volume 10 67
struggled scarce— / Consented, and was dead— /
And We—We placed the Hair— / And drew the
head erect— / And then an awful leisure was / Be-
lief to regulate—.” In other poems like “The Sun
Kept Setting—Setting—Still” and “I Heard a Fly
Buzz When I Died” Dickinson describes death even
more daringly and intimately from the point of view
of the dying person, both during and after the mo-
ment of death. The latter, one of her most famous
poems, is striking because it interposes a buzzing
fly upon the dying speaker’s grand spiritual pas-
sage to the afterlife. At the moment of “that last
Onset—when the King / Be witnessed—in the
Room—” it is this common household pest whose
presence the dying person feels, rather than that of
God. Dickinson juxtaposes the great theological
concepts of mortality and eternity with a mundane
detail from daily life. “While what is expected [at
the moment of death] is the storm of dissolution,
the sublime moment of passage,” wrote Judith Farr
in The Passion of Emily Dickinson,instead is an
awareness of a fly, “its stupid aimlessness a sug-
gestion of the puzzlement that is life as well as its
homely sweetness.”
The scene of dying at home is important to
Dickinson’s representations of death throughout
her body of work. Indeed, it can be argued that
Dickinson’s “image of house or home, touching the
tangible and imaginative worlds at once, is perhaps
the most penetrating and comprehensive figure she
employs,” as Jean McClure does in Emily Dickin-
son and the Image Home.McClure elaborates that
Dickinson uses images of the house and home to
“treat all of her most pressing concerns, concerns
which relate to her place in the universe. Homethus
reflects her inner landscape ... a sensitivity to space
dependent on both personal and social factors.”
McClure refers to women’s role in nineteenth
American culture as inextricably tied to domestic-
ity, as well as to Dickinson’s personal history—she
lived as a recluse, seldom venturing from her fam-
ily home, from her early twenties until her death at
age fifty-five.
Death poses difficult philosophical questions
for all who contemplate it. Most people rely on
some culturally prevalent form of explanation, such
as science or religion, for death’s mysteries. How-
ever, Dickinson was in critical dialogue with the
dominant ideas of death circulating in her day. Her
poetry is steeped in Protestant theology and the
rhythm of Protestant hymns. But Dickinson sets her
poetic vision of death against the religious doctrine
representing God in authoritative, impersonal, and
patriarchal (male authority) terms that she would
have heard preached at church on Sundays. An-
other culturally dominant understanding of death to
which Dickinson responded in her poetry was de-
rived from sentimental literature—a form of fiction
and poetry that was wildly popular in the nineteenth
century. Popular sentimental literature was pre-
dominantly written by women from whom Dickin-
son was eager to distinguish herself. As Maria
Magdalena Farland described it in her article, “That
Tritest/Brightest Truth,” sentimental literature ren-
ders death less threatening by using “human emo-
tions to symbolize divine love [and] using homey
scenes of life on earth to represent the less-famil-
iar prospect of life-after-death.” Just as Dickinson’s
poetry uses ideas and aesthetics from the strict
Protestant religious culture in which she was
steeped, it also uses ideas and aesthetics from the
dominant popular culture of sentimental literature.
But, “while sentimental fiction and poetry over-
whelmingly tended to affirm the value of such com-
parisons” between home and the afterlife, Farland
argues, “Dickinson’s poems contest and often
negate them.”
“The Bustle in a House,” as in “I Heard a Fly
Buzz,” poses large spiritual questions pertaining to
mortality using modest, homely imagery—a delib-
erate and provocative juxtaposition. The first verb
in the poem, “bustle,” has none of the grand solem-
nity associated with death and formal, ritualized
mourning. Bustle is the somewhat trivial action that
is associated with the many small necessities of
everyday life, necessities that do not cease for the
living even when a death has just taken place.
While men—notably, religious leaders—were tra-
ditionally in charge of the spiritual preparations for
the soul’s passing, it was women’s work to deal
with the practical and logistical preparations. Thus,
Dickinson refers to the morning-after bustle as the
“solemnest of industries,” characterizing it as part
of women’s realm of home industry or housework.
As in “I Heard a Fly Buzz,” this poem situates death
in the home, dramatizing a confrontation between
the seemingly meaningless activities of life and the
specter of a final Meaning endowed by death. TheThe Bustle in a HouseFor Dickinson ...
home is, foremost, a
metaphor for the self.”