Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) never received recognition for her literary brilliance during her lifetime, mainly because she wrote in secret, sharing only a handful of poems with a small circle of trusted friends and family. Her sister Lavinia was astonished to find over a thousand poems, carefully stitched into tiny booklets, upon unlocking a trunk in the attic after Emily’s death. Dickinson’s lyrical poetry marks an important turning point in American literature, as she moved away from the heavy, plodding philosophical poetry that preceded her and led the way toward a more spontaneous, creative style. Her work was unique, passionate, and child-like, just as she was, and her contribution to American literature is undeniable. Emily Dickinson was an original genius who showed many traits of Asperger’s Syndrome (AS)—I believe her place on the spectrum influenced her poetry in several important ways.
Like many people on the spectrum, she was challenged with sensory issues:
Exotropia (mis-aligned eyes)
Sensitive hearing (she covered her ears for loud noises such as thunder)
Dyspraxia (her handwriting was so bad she had to clip labels off packages and tape them on letters rather than write addresses herself)
An acute sense of smell that caused migraines
No taste for food—dangerously close to anorexia
Confining clothes bothered her
Her social quirkiness is well-documented—she had problems establishing proper boundaries between herself and other people. As a girl she was crushingly intense in her friendships; as an adult, she withdrew from the world and rarely ventured away from her own home. There seems to have been a thread of eccentricity running through other family members as well: “the brother and sisters all, to varying degrees, ended up somewhat queer, lonely, at odds with the environment, and apart from the community, toward which they developed a defensive hauteur” (John Cody). After having a head-scratching conversation with Emily, editor Thomas Higginson commented on Dickinson’s conversation skills: “the impression undoubtedly made on me was that of an excess of tension, and of something abnormal” (Robert Linscott). That “abnormality” was Asperger’s Syndrome.
Like others on the spectrum, she had few interests but pursued them avidly (plants, playing piano, and above all writing). One of her obsessions was written correspondence: she wrote over 1000 letters in her lifetime, a staggering output for someone who died in her fifties.
Many of her letters showed the influence of an autistic mind at work. Her letters were filled with philosophical observations, linguistic acrobatics, and riddles. Many people with AS write in an idiosyncratic fashion that privileges the author rather than the reader, and Emily was no exception. Her letters had “a problem of organization and coherence. They abounded in energy and zest for living, but they showed her groping for direction and meaning…she [either] pummeled and borrow beat her correspondents or bathed them in tender emotions” (Richard Sewall).
Here is one example, a letter to her sister-in-law Susan:
We wouldn’t mind the sun, dear, if it didn’t set—How much you cost—how much Mat costs—I will never sell you for a piece of silver. I’ll buy you back with red drops, when you go away. I’ll keep you in a casket—I’ll bury you in the garden—and keep a bird to watch the spot—perhaps my pillow’s safer—Try my bosom last—That’s the nearest of them all, and I should hear a foot the quickest, should I hear a foot—the thought of the little brown plumes makes my eye awry. The pictures in the air have few visitors. (Ellen Hart)
The letter suggests a desperation that Emily has for keeping Susan close—either as a corpse in the garden or perhaps in her own bed. One can only wonder what Susan’s response to this was.
Dickinson’s poems, even more than her letters, show a disregard for the reader. Rather than tools for communication, her poems were objects of self-expression and artistic self-fulfillment. As Michael Fitzgerald observes: “[Autistic] writing is often tailored more to the writer than to the reader: they don’t always help the reader with information so that he or she can follow the topic.” Many of her poems make obscure references or have gaps in meaning. They leapfrog from one idea to another with a transition that might be clear in Dickinson’s mind but does not make it to the page. Consider this small poem (poem 242):
It is easy to work when the soul is at play—
But when the soul is in pain—
The hearing him put his playthings up
Makes work difficult then—It is simple, to ache in the Bone, or the Rind—
But Gimblets—among the nerve—
Mangle dantier—terribler—
Like a Panther in the Glove—
Modern readers are more accustomed to these kinds of dissonant leaps and gaps in meaning. We are familiar with the fragment in artwork. We can be comfortable with ambiguity. But when we consider that this poem was written in 1861, Dickenson’s peculiar poetics is astounding. Comparison with other, conventional women poets from that time, such as Julia Ward Howe, shows this difference in associative logic between Emily and her peers.
Much has been written about Dickinson’s unconventional writing style. Feminist critic Lissa Holloway-Attaway and others suggest that she “uses a disjunctive method of communication, that the poet’s revision of the rules of grammar thwart the reader’s expectations of normal, ordered language,” and goes on to explain that this disjunction is her deliberate attempt to “revise fundamental cultural inequalities.” She goes on to explain that this disjunction is Emily’s deliberate attempt to “revise fundamental cultural inequities.” Holloway-Attaway suggests that, by dismantling the language, Dickinson is also dismantling patriarchal power. Although I like this explanation, I really don’t think she put that much thought into this kind of political action. Rather, I think that her unconventional style was a manifestation of the language/communication differences she experienced as a result of her place on the autistic spectrum. She resisted society’s efforts to “put [her] in a closet” or “shut [her] up in prose” (poem 445). She stubbornly resisted cultural expectations—or failed to understand them—and felt compelled to do things her own way.
Like many of the other authors I have studied, especially Sherwood Anderson and Yeats, Dickinson created metaphors to represent the neurological condition that set her apart from other people. She didn’t have the phrase “Asperger’s Syndrome” in her lexicon, but she knew she was different, and quite often she felt isolated and alienated from other people. One of the metaphors she used most often to depict these feelings was the image of the little boat (or swimmer) lost a sea. We see this trope in several of her poems: the chaos of the vast, mysterious cosmos is too much for her, just as the outside physical world is something “too much” for a person with autism. She cannot help but drown.
In one poem, for example, the swimmer finds a watery grave: “The stray ships passings spied a face/ Upon the waters borne/ With eyes in death still begging raised/ And hands beseeching thrown” (poem 227). I am reminder here of Lewis Carroll’s Alice swimming in a pool of her own tears, or Melville’s Captain Ahab drowning in the cold sea, or Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid dissolving into the ocean’s frothy foam. Like these characters, Dickinson struggled against a foe that she could neither understand nor conquer—resulting in her isolation and alienation.
Metaphor allowed Emily Dickinson to speak her truth but also to veil it from others: “she had found a way, through the language of figure and metaphor, to protect herself and to work around and ultimately transcend all that was frustrating her emerging view of life, not only her sense of reality and truth but all her minor irritations” (Sewall). Similar to Yeats, her writing was a means of understanding her neurological position as well as coping with it.
It is very important to recognize Dickinson’s place on the autistic spectrum, to appreciate her differences as a person, and to celebrate her special talents as a poet. Emily reminds us of autism’s many gifts. Her perseverative, single-minded focus on writing enabled her to create an enormous oeuvre of over 1700 poems; her unconventional thinking patterns inspired her to invent an original writing style that created new rules for punctuation, rhythm, and rhyme; her self-oriented perspective encouraged her to explore the inner workings of the human mind and the secret workings of her own psyche, subject matter that seems thoroughly modern to us now, but was bold and daring back in the 1800s. She is an important part of autistic history and culture, and her poetry has much to teach us about the “complex corridors of the mind.”