Linguistic turns: Emerson's figuralism and Dickinson's biblical contests

Despite her reclusion both in life and in her publication history, Dickinson's poetry embeds her very use of words and their constructions in the language uses around her. Language as publicly shared provides historical context and community for Dickinson's formal and metaphysical enactments. Dickinson's verse vacillates between moments of belief and recurrent doubts and anguish about the divine order and its metaphysical structures that puncture her faith, never reaching final resolution, in a language that is shared and historically charged. In Dickinson this context and contest of language have two closely interrelated genealogies. The first is the tradition of figuralism, strong in America from its Puritan founding, which comes to intense and self-conscious new power and transformation in her contemporary world, most dramatically in the writings of Emerson as explored in this essay. The second is the not-coincidentally concomitant reexamination of biblical language. Biblical language in the United States traditionally claimed immense authority. This authority, however, precisely in Dickinson's period, was being eroded by new methods of biblical Higher Criticism and ways of thinking about historicity. In the arena of American politics and culture, the very power granted the Bible in the antebellum period came to be claimed and hence also undermined by opposing political sides-notably for and against slavery-with increasing shrillness and violence, finally bursting into Civil War. These public contexts penetrate Dickinson's verse and make her writing at once deeply interior and deeply cultural.