Dickinson’s Home as a House of the Lyric: A New Domestic Selfhood and Its Time

초록

In Dickinson’s poems, home figures as a privileged spatial imagery for constructing her lyric subjectivity that experimentally rewrites dominant gender ideology. In this essay, I investigate how Dickinson’s lyric home negotiates historical homes invested with the hegemonic power structure of her time, especially her father’s homestead and marital home. While Dickinson constructs her lyric home to project a poetic futurity as liberating enough to free her from the patriarchal structure of her father’s mansion, she is also concerned that the new route she is about to take could turn out to be a beaten track. Dickinson also eagerly anticipates that marital union will fructify her lyric selfhood, while at the same time the poet also has such romantic aspiration come face to face with the historical conditions of the nineteenth-century middle-class wives. Reflecting her struggles within parental and marital home, Dickinson’s house of the lyric therefore produces a double move, an ambivalent gesture towards eager anticipation and critical disavowal. To compose her lyric home as a site of double movement, Dickinson’s poetics envisions a synchronic temporality that undoes the historical time of logo-centric public space. Thus, Dickinson’s lyrics see the historical present as an antecedent to the future, identifying the seeds of what will come, whether liberating or repressive, in a poetic act of anticipatory enunciation. Dickinson’s lyric synchronicity, furthermore, takes the form of gothic temporality in her haunted house poems, where Dickinson’s house of the self is constantly reminded of the psychologically distressing mechanism of personal growth. Her home is therefore a lyric present that does not seem to have sublimated its dark past, and thus her house qua self suffers chronically from disorienting self-divisions.

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