A Clean Dissection

Biographers have played Halloween with the ghost of Emily Dickinson. They Trick or Treat her remnants and if the treat proves not sweet enough, the trick is to corner her ghost and shake the memory of her until it faints into their already rattling paper bags. The truth is coated in coconut, and chocolate, and pistachio to satisfy the historical sweet tooth. (Her unidentified lover has been said to be Judge Lord, T.W. Higginson, her brother Austin, and her father, Edward Dickinson.) The ghost is unable even to say Boo. Emily Dickinson's grave has been a raucous place compared to the privacy of her Amherst room.

But John Cody is a tender and meticulous exhumer. Dr. Cody, a practising psychiatrist, has written Emily Dickinson's psychobiography; (a psychobiography is a psychoanalysis of a deceased person). He uses her letters and poems and previously unpublished family letters in lieu of what, if she were alive, would be her dreams and free associations. Dr. Cody is circumspect in his postulations; he comes to no conclusions without the corroboration of repetitive allusion in the poet's work, which he cites constantly. Frequency of allusion, symbol and metaphor is the key he uses to understand the dimensions of the problems in her psyche.

It seems that Emily Dickinson suffered an irreparable lack of affection from her mother and that she feared her father terribly. Her mother, from the wisps of evidence that remain, seems to have been a nonentity and herself, emotionally stunted. She brought her children up by a Victorian Dr. Spock that would have been enough to curdle any child's blood, let alone the extraordinarily sensitive, intelligent children that were hers. Edward Dickinson, Emily's father, was a severe and joyless Puritan, more interested in politics than his family, a conflict which he could never resolve.

Emily's parental configuration drove her to a mild homosexuality, hence her passionate school girl's correspondence, which Dr. Cody suggests could have been resolved by her implication in her brother Austin's courtship of her girlfriend, Sue Gilbert. Emily sought Sue and Austin homosexually and heterosexually respectively; this impossible sexual projection could have been worked out to Emily's benefit if Sue could have answered Emily's maternal needs and Austin her paternal needs. But the couple, frightened and confused by their role, withdrew from her. Unable to bear the consummation of their marriage in 1856, Emily had her first breakdown.

Her breakdown was the beginning of her retirement from the world. Her increasing reclusiveness brought increasing productivity, and in the early 1860's her talents crested. In 1862 she wrote three hundred sixty-six poems. The deaths of her nephew Gilbert at nine years old, her father, and then her mother dragged Emily into profound depressions, but never the psychotic depths she experienced between 1857 and 1864. It is known that she had a lover in 1883 when she was fifty-three; it seems that he made sexual overtures to her, and she, being unable to respond, lost all possibility of a heterosexual relationship, a possibility which, Cody points out, she lost at the time of Sue and Austin's marriage. Her love poetry is shallow and reflects an inexperience in adult love. Her heart was a child's heart, expressing only oral love.

In concluding, Dr. Cody proposes that had Emily Dickinson had a more loving mother, she most probably would have been a housewife who scribbled poetry in her spare time. He puts us in the uneasy position of being thankful for her pain. He seems to be relegating the notion of vocation to the busywork of sick souls. He seems also to be saying that housewifery is the luxury of the resolved and art the rack of the demented. Beyond anything that Dr. Cody could touch in Emily Dickinson is the fact that she was an artist.

Whatever power analysts may have, they cannot change a patient's past. And so it seems silly and a terror tactic to wonder, what if they could?

Dr. Cody takes Emily Dickinson's biographers, and there is a profusion of them, to task for their inexactness, their apologies, their kitchen table psychology, and mainly for reading into her life what they wanted from her, and not what was there. Biography stands firm when it simply chronicles a person's life. But, the urge for non-professionals to interpret behavior is irresistible.

The seeming violation of psychobiography, of delving into an historical soul, pales beside the violation of misapplied psychology of a biographer. The growing number of superb psychobiographies should prod the biographer to redefine his role. Dr. Cody has gotten hold of what small sureness can be secured from Emily's life.