On Emily Dickinson

Constructing a De-centered Theology:

Emily Dickinson's Revisions of Nineteenth Century Death Culture



Realizing that an understanding of the culture context in which Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) wrote is a prime necessity for a full critical approach to her work, we shall first explore the cultural background of the nineteenth century before we commence with an analysis of Dickinson's poems. In The Feminization of American Culture (1977), Ann Douglas describes the advent of a new genre of American literature that came to exert enormous force in society called contemporary consolation literature. This genre incorporated a number of different textual forms for representing the grief of the bereaved, including "obituary poems and memoirs, mourners' manuals, prayer guide-books, hymns and books about heaven." The primary purpose of consolation literature was to alleviate the sorrow that accompanied the death of loved ones, inviting its audience to participate in a belief-system where Christianity gave way to fantasy.

Consolation literature soon found widespread acceptance and popularity, as it allows its audience to fantasize that after death, in an unseen world to come, they would be compensated for the losses they experienced in this world. It was a marked feature of this genre that life and death were set against one another as opposing forces. The effect of this opposition was that death and dying took on an excessive importance. In time, the American people developed a death-centered culture where various features associated with death were appropriated by the living in their desire to reconstruct life on the basis of their conception of death. As Douglas tells us, the authors of this genre were predominantly clergymen and women, whose fascination with illness and death represents a sublimated desire to investigate subjects such as sexuality, pregnancy and childbirth. Because these taboo subjects were forbidden from overt expression in the male-dominated society, these authors reverted to a subject reverted to an investigation of a subject that was similar in intensity as a moment of profound experience - death. In fact, their writings became so obsessed with death and dying that Douglas categorizes the memoirs written by women and clergymen in the nineteenth century as "exercises in necrophilia."

Partly from the desire to witness a perfect realization of the ethos of Christianity on earth and partly from their desire to elevate themselves from their subordinate positions, the weakest and most powerless members of society, the ones who were politically at a supreme disadvantage, set out to construct a fantastic cultural consciousness in the hope of instigating social change. As the fulcrum of their societal transformation, these two groups placed great emphasis on the bonds of mutual affinity between mother and child. This attempt to establish a new balance of power, ostensibly in the name of the insignificant, in the name of children, was in reality an attempt to promote their own status, converting their secondary social position into a position of power and transforming their resignation from the physical plane of existence into a position of superiority. In advocating the realignment of power relations, the proponents of the culture of death attempted to make the world into a place where they stood as the unquestioned adjudicators of live and death for their respective groups, families and congregations. In this way, too, Douglas says, the American death culture of the nineteenth century brought about the "domestication of death."

The authors of consolation literature were greatly interested in deceased children, a subject that embodied the feelings of loss and abandonment as these individuals represented the author's desire to make contact with the realm of divine reality. Douglas focuses on authors such as Lydia H. Sigourney who, in poems such as "Twas But a Babe", embodied these feelings:

I asked them why the verdant turf was riven

From its young rooting, and with silent lip

They pointed to a new-made chasm among

The marble-pillared mansions of the dead

Who goeth to his rest in yon damp couch ?

The tearless crowd past on - "twas but a babe."

A babe ! - And poise ye on the rigid scales

Of calculation, the fond bosom's wealth ?

Rating its priceless idols as ye weigh

Such merchandise and moth and ruse corrupt,

Or the rude robber steals ? Ye mete out grief,

Perchance, when youth, maturity or age,

Sink in the thronging tomb, but when the breath

Grows icy on the lip of innocence

Repress your measured sympathies, and say

"Twas but a babe."

In obituary poems such as this one, Sigourney collaborated with the cult that elevated death to the detriment of the living. Examining this poem, one sees that here Sigourney reproaches those whose daily lives permit their avoidance of death specifically, she scorns those (male) individuals who, because they focus on the external world of human activities, fail to recognize the inner dramas that occur everyday, such as the death of children. In Sigourney's view, it is a mistake for life to be lives without giving death the proper recognition it deserves. Douglas points out the "Twas But a Babe" adds force to the cult of death in its insistence that the locus of one's concerns should be dominated by private matters such as death, rather than public matters if life. Like most consolatory literature, this poem achieves its effectiveness with three important features: a denunciation addressed to those members of society who do not participate in the family-centered aspects of social life; a prediction that, inevitably, everyone must consider the prospect of dying; and finally, a clue suggesting that a reprieve from the terrible onslaught of death may be found in religion and prayer.

Like many other pieces of consolatory literature, "Twas But a Babe" makes its impact by sentimentalizing the time of childhood, romanticizing the transfiguration that accompanies death and mythologizing one's life after death on a plane of divine reality. Along with the cultural adhesion to a death-centered religious spirit, this literary form enabled women and clergymen to exert social change to a greater extent than the had previously enjoyed. This format was used to instill the cultural belief that one's turning to the sphere of the public and the worldly, away from the personal and the domestic, constituted a reprehensible act, equivalent to an act of corroboration with the forces of evil that brought death upon the child.

It is noteworthy that the two groups most responsible for producing this literature, women and clergymen, were both situated on the margins of society. For Douglas, the introduction of consolation literature represents a tactical measure on the part of these two groups who, ostensibly powerless, attempted to wrench power out of the hands of the controlling hierarchy of authority. Setting up a dogmatic belief-system where death could be made to cohere with life, they re-made the image of God as an ideologue to be imported into American society under the unassailable protection of Biblical authority. In this way authors such as Elizabeth Prentiss and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps wrote popular fantasy-books that gave explicit details about the celestial after-life.

Writers of consolation literature carried an aura of authenticity when the spoke about the nature of heaven, a world that represented the perfect embodiment of domestic retreat. Here in heaven, the writers of consolation literature promised, all of one's earthly desires will be satisfied. In this way heaven came to stand for a place where all of one's childhood fantasies were to be realized, too. From the perfect unification of the family, with all members bonded together for eternity, to the realization of childhood wishes, with a supply of cookies endlessly produced by the dozens, heaven was a place where one's every dream came true. Douglas names The Gates Ajar (1868), written by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, as representative of "the apotheosis of consolatory literature." This novel, which was a great commercial success, emphasized the need to follow a code of correct Christian behavior for a civilized and socially hygienic community of Christians. In their depictions of the after-life, writers like Phelps abandoned all spiritual discoveries in favor of scenes of typical domestic life; only this time, the home was a place where the woman was authorized to wield power rather than have power wielded against her.

All of these beliefs led to the glorification of death at the expense of life. With the formation of the cult of death, life could not be lived as life, but could only be lived in the shadow of a future burial. Eventually, a whole death-centered culture came to be produced on the basis of the feelings stirred into action by the literature of consolation, including the establishment of rural cemeteries and the many other practices that fetishized the dead, making burial and interment into commodified affairs. Again, it was women and clergymen, the same two groups who bore the greatest responsibility for producing consolatory literature, who were the impetus behind the widespread growth of the rural cemeteries. The first rural cemetery was to open in America was Mt. Auburn in New York. These cemeteries were meant to bring the living into a closer relationship with the dead, allowing living patrons to visit their departed loved ones in an atmosphere that presented death, not as a monumentalized and monolithic entity, but simply as a feature of the natural landscape gently receding into the background. For the patrons of Mt. Auburn cemetery, the dead were still an important part of the present, at least in the lives of the relatives and loved ones. Immediately following the creation of this death-centered consciousness, the market opened for new commercial enterprises, including new businesses that saw death as a lucrative and highly profitable field. Undertakers and funeral directors came to the fore in the business of death, taking the positions left vacant by the women and ministers who had produced the literature of consolation and remembrance.

The poem by Lydia Sigourney is just one example of the kind of poetry whose legitimacy Dickinson criticized within the space of her own work. Unlike much of the poetry written in the nineteenth century, Dickinson's poetry presented an image of death that countered the one produced in the chiliastic consolatory literature of the nineteenth century. She wrote a great deal of poetry that criticized its central project, the removal of the distinction between life and death, thereby making death into a domesticated presence. One such poem is #445, which related the experience of death from the perspective of a child; her employment of this perspective was a particularly effective way of criticizing those adherents of the culture of death:

'Twas just this time, last year, I died.
I know I heard the Corn,
When I was carried by the Farms --
It had the Tassels on --

I thought how yellow it would look --
When Richard went to mill --
And then, I wanted to get out,
But something held my will.

I wondered which would miss me, least,
And when Thanksgiving, came,
If Father'd multiply the plates --
To make an even Sum --

And would it blur the Christmas glee
My Stocking hang too high
For any Santa Claus to reach
The Altitude of me --

But this sort, grieved myself,
And so, I thought the other way,
How just this time, some perfect year --
Themself, should come to me --

In this poem Dickinson speaks in the voice of a child who has died through undisclosed circumstances. The speaker begins the poem by remembering how she was taken into the fields at about the same time last year. She knows this by the observations of the natural world around her, for at that time the corn was high and ready for harvesting. She hears the resulting corn as the cart of which she is riding, perhaps one of the tasseled funeral coaches popular at the time, passes through the fields of the farm. Her thoughts, however, are not concerned with her immediate situation, the burial and internment the would be her final destination; instead, she finds herself thinking about the future, about the glittering colors of the season that lay ahead, the sowing of the fields and the way the farm would look come harvest time. She yearns to participate in these events yet, although she desires to return to life, climbing out of the cart and into her father's arms, she finds that she is powerless to do so. The child in Dickinson's poem does not realize that death constitutes the end of life, the final pronouncement on one's physical existence. In her refusal to accept the finality of death, she is like the consolatory literature of the time. So innocent is she, so unaware of the full implications of death that she continues to expect a future of bountiful harvests and red apples. Without any consciousness of death, she likens her own burial to the time of year when the cart was sent out to bring in the fall pumpkins.

It is then that her thoughts turn to the effect her death will have on her family; however, although she acknowledges that her presence will be missing from the family, this does not mean that her thoughts are rational. Instead, like a selfish child, she wants to have both life and death simultaneously. She wants her passing to be a source of constant remembrance for each member of the family; she says that she is curious to discover who will miss her the 'least', suggesting, perhaps, that she will be disappointed with the person who fails to keep her in their daily thoughts. She even thinks that it would be fitting for the family to continue to set a place for her at the table for each meal; she thinks that the family would be better off if, at the next Thanksgiving dinner, a place devoted to her would maintain 'an even sum', preserving an order that would allow the family to function properly. In a moment of realization, Dickinson's child-narrator reconsiders her effect on the family and decides that it will perhaps be too sorrowful to set aside a place for her on Christmas morning. After all, there will be no-one to open her gifts, now will there be any stocking to be filled. The child realizes that she now resides in heaven, a place far too 'high' for anyone to reach, even for Santa Claus himself. Deciding that hoping for a continuance of life after death is too depressing both for her and her family, the speaker resolves that she will concentrate on death, whose inevitable intrusion will reunite the members of the family once again. While the dead may not return to life, it is the living who will follow the dead into the grave. On this final thought, the speaker concludes, contented by this pronouncement on the inevitability of death.

In writing this poem from the perspective of a child, Dickinson portrays a consciousness too immature to accept the inevitable transformation that accompanies death, clinging persistently to the materiality of physical existence. That this poem relates the experience of death from the perspective of a child makes it that much more effective for, essentially, this was the perspective that dominated consolatory literature and the practices of nineteenth-century death-culture: the fantasies of childhood, the juvenile desire to see order imposed upon a universe that makes no such promises, the desire for the full preservation of being after death, the self restored and collected for eternity in an alternative existence--all of these things indicate a mind that is rooted in childhood. In addition, the speaker betrays her childish conception of death by naming as her greatest wish the desire to re-experience her life with her family in the world after death. Indeed, all of these wishes express a basic desire to maintain a life that is stable and unchanging, a life that preserves an essential sameness to one's activities. It is evident that she believes that nothing less than the full presence of being is necessary in order to enjoy life properly; her wish for the reunification of the happy family--mommy, daddy and child--is a wish to see the full circuit brought to completeness at once, an idea that Dickinson will critique in the next poem to be discussed.

Dickinson continues to use the posthumous voice in poem #465. In this poem, the speaker narrates her own death-bed experience, depicting how the ending of life is, not a moment of transcendental entry into a realm of pure being, but merely a tamping out of the last sparks of life, the final extinguishment of consciousness.

I heard a fly buzz -- when I died --
The stillness in the room
Was like the stillness in the air --
Between the Heavens of Storm --

The Eyes around -- had wrung them dry --
And Breaths were gathering firm
In the last Onset -- when the King --
Be witnessed -- in the Room --

I willed my Keepsakes -- signed away
What portion of me be
Assignable -- and then it was
There interposed a Fly --

With Blue -- uncertain stumbling Buzz --
Between the light -- and me --
And then the Windows failed -- and then
I could not see to see --

This is a poem which, as Sharon Cameron has noted, the Victorian conception of death is shown to be contrary to the reality of the experience. While most critics are in agreement with this judgment, critics such as Barton St. Armand speculate whether the buzzing of the fly blocks the transcendent light of a divine reality or if it is merely the light that expresses the everyday "fallacy of hope." Either way, St. Armand declares, this depiction of a death-bed experience stands out in contrast to other death-bed poetry of the time. Dickinson takes the nineteenth century desire to make death into a moment of vast significance and subverts these cliches by constructing a death that ends, not with the trumpets of a resounding redemption, but with the most quotidian of sounds, the buzzing of a common housefly. By having this unimpressive sound mark the end to life indicated Dickinson's belief that the end of life is not accompanies by a momentous climax indicating the singularity of one's existence. Instead, the end of life is accompanies by complete silence, dry eyes, firm beliefs, nervous anticipation and flies. Dickinson takes on the traditional cliches of the Victorian manner of dying as, in her last moments, the speaks renounces before the world all of her personal possessions, giving away "what portion of me be assignable". In the throes of dying, she awaits Christs' coming to claims her for the kingdom of heaven. Yet she finds her faith to be undermined by a familiar domestic presence, the buzzing of a common housefly. The distracting presence of the fly, with its "uncertain stumbling buzz," prevents the speaker from concentrating in the last important moments: she is unable to make a final testimony of her faith, keeping her from the light she imagines to be her destination. St. Armand sees this poem as representating of Dickinson's work in that it is a poem of an essentially ambiguous nature: Dickinson's desire to be intentionally indecisive on the ultimate meaning of individual existence can be compared with the uncertainty that the believer has to reconcile with if she is going to have faith in a divine reality beneath the world of appearance. He suggests that the presence of the fly distubs the certainty that had braced the speaker's faith throughout her life and, as a result, the ending of the speaker's life, like the ending of the poem, is obscured in ambiguity.

Throwing a skeptical light on the notion of death as understood in nineteenth century consolatory literature, Dickinson represents heaven not as a place of peaceful quietude but as a place of 'storm'. This indicates the for Dickinson the arrival of death is hardly a religious experience; all that can be said about it, in terms of the pragmatic considerations of this life, is that it is the final stage of material existence. For Dickinson, the idea that one could be distracted from Christ, the eternal source of reconciliation and redemption, by the simple buzzing of a fly, blocking the soul in its path on the way to heaven, clearly indicates the problems with a literal interpretation of the scriptures as preached by the evangelists. In succumbing to death, the speaker's faculties begin shutting down and, as blindness sets in, she comes to see the self in relation to death, until finally, she says, "I could not see."

As Dickinson shows us, it only takes one tiny fly, or a mote in one's eye, to destroy one's picture of the world, causing the self to dwindle from view. The fly focuses her attention onto the present moment and prevents her fromn creating the circumstances that would make her death a happy death, the King coming to receive her into God's heavenly family. Perhaps the speaker is a member of the cult of death for who religion is an ideological construct used to make life safe from death, to ward off as if it were a common pest. However, the fatalistic death-centered eschatology of the nineteenth century is undermined by Dickinson's poem in that by giving into death, the speaker makes the discovery that there is no King; there is only the discomforting presence of a fly. This would be a most unsettling prospect to the writers of concolatory literature who, in defiance of death, sought to construct a belief-system that promised the eternal preservation of the physical body and the continual repression of death.

St. Armand lists a host of new developments in the technology of death, such as new embalming techniques to preserve corpses, waterproof tombs and air-tight burial cases, all of which were invented in the nineteenth century. These developments were to have great significance for the institutionalization of American death-culture as corpses in the nineteenth century were prepared to look as if they were still alive. However, Ann Douglas reports that invariably, these corpses looked like lifeless dolls. At this stage in American history death had become a fetishized commodity, as funeral directors catered to a public who wanted to seperate life from the 'indecent' presence of death, creating a patently false image of the dead by making them into keepsakes to be held onto, treasured and venerated by those still living. Clearly, the members of the cult of death believed that if you could prevent the deterioration that accompanies the decaying of the body and the material aspects of the human form can be preserved, then the preservation of the soul will surely follow, as one's presence will permanently fixed, forever unchangeable before God -- a guarantee of salvation. Deceased loved ones were carefully prepared for their eternal repose, now assigned a fixed and permanent identity to carry with them over into the next world. Dickinson, too, comments on the cultural desire to preserve the physical body in defiance of this natural process in writing a poem that, once again, concerns the death of a child:

But little Carmine hath her face --

Of Emerald scant -- her Gown --

Her Beauty -- is the love she doth --

Itself -- exhibit -- Mine

In this poem Dickinson points to the fallacies inherent in the attempt to insure the body's resistence to death, and demonostrates an understanding of the psychology that would make someone participate in these practices. The dead child, little Carmine, is prepared for the grave and, like many a bereaved mother in the nineteenth century, the speaker in this poem sees her child as a precious treasure that has been taken away from her. In dressing her child for burial, the mother makes an attempt to ward off death, adorning her in an elaborate and elegant manner. In fact, her costume is so beautiful that it both seems to reflect and preserve the innate, natural innocence of childhood. However, this poem is merely a sentimentalized portrait of grief, as in Sigourney's poem: the final two lines of this poem indicate that this final gift to one's child has taken the form of a dangerous reaction where, in an act of projective identification, the parent sees the child as the container for her unconscious and sublimated emotions.

Dickinson's four-line poem represents a brief scene of profound social and cultural importance. Here we have a mother who, having lost her daughter, dresses her child in a delicate and lovely way. The exquisite beauty that the child displays is itself a product of the mother's attention to the child's appearance. As a result of this connection, the mother sees the child as a substitute for herself, and so comes to feel as if she herself has been recreated into a thing of beautyand put on display; she sees the child's body as indicating the physical manifestation of the love she has given her. The projective mother assumes that the child not only represents her, but embodies her. For projective parents, both mother and father, the child is not an individual, nor even a little person; children are something similar to a possession, a trophy, a form of oblation made in sacrifice to a God who demands the death of the young. In this way the dead body of the child is fetishized as a keepsake, a container to be filled up by the mother's overwhelming feelings of grief and frustration. These feelings are then transferred over to the child, who serves merely as an instrument in the equation. In this poem, the mother's projective reaction has significant effects, for in the last two lines the mother thinks that the child she has laid to rest is not only an extension of herself, but is herself come again. The beauty that the child exhibits in death is apporpriated by the mother and, as it is the parent, not the child, who is the source of this enormous grief, perhaps someone might consider the somewhat Wordsworthian idea that here the child has become the parent. Dickinson shows how, in the fetishized death-culture of the nineteenth century, children were often seen not as seperate individuals, but as repositories for the fantasies of their projective parents, in that the bodies of the children were often used to validate the parent's existence. Traces of this notion are to be found within many of the philosophical ideas of the nineteenth century, a time when the origin-centered philosophy of the consciousness prompted a belief in the eternal recurrence of the eternal presence.

In poem #408, Dickinson criticized the establishment of rural cemeteries such as Mt. Auburn, an aesthetic retreat for death that was built like a park:

Unit, like Death, for Whom ?

True, like the Tomb,

Who tells no secret

Told to Him --

The Grave is strict --

Tickets admit

Just two -- the Bearer --

And the Borne --

And seat -- just One --

The Living -- tell --

The Dying -- but a Syllable --

The Coy Dead -- None --

No Chatter -- here -- no tea --

So Babbler, and Bohea -- stay here --

But Gravity - and Expectation -- and Fear --

A tremor just, that All's not sure

Here, too, Dickinson rails against a death-obsessed culture that, in her opinion, places too much significance on the material aspects of death. She saw no merit in the idea of a cemetery was that also to be seen as a park to be enjoyed on a Saturday afternoon, either for a date or a family picnic. This misguided attempt to level the distinction between life and death was detrimental to both the living and the dead. Voicing her concern that death had become overly materialized, Dickinson compared the entry into the cemetery to the fee one pays before entering the theater. To Dickinson, in the attempt to preserve the fiction that the dead are part of the natural landscape, the American people had made death into a piece of theater, something she found to be reprehensible. The theatrics of death can be spotted most clearly in the relationship between the gravedigger and the corpse who, by functioning together as one unit, ignore the vast difference between the living and the dead.

In Dickinson's view, this dishonest portrayal of these differences contributed to the oppositional split between life and death where, as a result of being centered in the tensions between (living) speech and (deathly) silence, one draws from both sources in an attempt to display one's commitment to the equalization of these two camps. Speaking with the voice of authroity, Dickinson explains that after death there will be no glib conversations one can engage in while politely drinking an afternoon cup of tea. She exhorts all lover of babble and bohemianism to remain on the side of life if they wish to engage in threse pursuits. Making a final pronouncement, she inscribes the maxim that, as the weight of seriousness to one's consideration of death increases, one's desire to participate in the fantasies of the consolatory literature, a fiction that stressed the social materiality of the after-life, is bound to decrease; spending time seriously considering the immanence of death, one becomes aware of one's one uncertainty. The manner in which death was socilaized and domesticated in rural cemeteries such as Mt. Auburn was yet another sign of the untenable belief that kept America from a true appreciation of religion.

The complexities in Dickinson's revisions of the relationship between the living and the dead are made even cleared in poem $976; however, this time the relationship is represented not through the figures of the bearer and the borne but through the anthropomorphized figures of Death and Spirit.

Death is a Dialogue between

The Spirit and the Dust.

"Dissolve" says Death -- The Spirit "Sir

I have no other Trust" --

Death doubts it -- Argues from the Ground --

The Spirit turns away

Just laying off for evidence

An Overcoat of Clay.

In this poem, the entities of death and Spirit are personified as two speakers, Death being named as the mediatory through which Spirit and Dust articulate their differences. An argument ensues, as Death commands Spirit to submit to the same process of disintegration that the material body succumbs to. However, the Spirit successfully resists Death's demands, for the Spirit has not installed its "Trust" solely in the material plane of existence, where death inevitably provides closure to every life. When the Spirit claims to have avoided the contingency of Death by investing itself in an alternative plane of existence, Death becomes skeptical and sinks into the earth, in this way suggesting that the visible evidence of the end of life, the corpse that is buried in the grave, constituted the finality of existence. At this point the Spirit declines to participate in the argument any further, taking it as a self-evidence proof the the temporality of the body does not indicate that death marks the end-point of life, only the end of one's physical life. As in the earlier poem about the death of Little Carmine, which criticized the mother who painted a sentimental mask over her child's features, this poem too attempt to locate proof of the eternal spirit, but in a way that immediately strikes one as a more mature response.

We have seen how Dickinson used her poetry to revise the cult of death's understanding of the relationship between the diving and earthly reeality. In her later poetry, Dickinson employed this revised relationship to elucidate the nature of her religious beliefs. A poem such as #1620 provides us with a good example:

Circumfrence thou Bride of Awe

Posessing thou shalt be

Possessed by every hallowed Knight

That dares to cover thee

In order to provide an adequate reading of this poem, one must first understand the poet's use of the term 'circumference'. Charles Anderson analyzed Dickinson's concept of circumference and suggests that she uses the term to namew the relationship between the Being who possesses an "infinite fullness of expansion and infinite simplicity of perfection," and the poet, a being whose imperfections render her "by implication inadequate." With this insgith, one sees that Dickinson is also alluding to the famous pronouncement of St. Augustine, who described God as a being whose center is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere. Dr. Elizabeth Petrino has quoted Dickinson as saying, "The Bible only dealth with the center, not with the circumference." She has also said that, for Dickinson, the circumference includes all that you know, as well as all that you do not know.

Extending her strategy to affect American culture through her poetic revisions of religious principles, Dickinson casts our endeavor to illuminate the center as a grevious mistake. It is not that she disputes naming the center as the core of human existence, but that she sees this attempt at a rational understanding of that which is essentially incomprehensible as an error in judgment. The center being unknowable, it is the center the circumference that needs to be invoked in order to obtain a full comprehension of the significance of one's life. It is through our attention to the circumference that God keeps us fundamental and rational, preserving us by ensuring the continual replenishment of our ability to experience the joyous ecstacies of creative fertility. Unlike the selfish members of the cult of death, who compete with one another for possessions, greedily desiring to see life continue on ad infinitum, the embrace of circumference advocated by Dickinson allows one to envisage death as a realm where the act of possession is an act where the one comes to be possessed by the many, as there is no significant differentiation between the status of the possessor and the status of the possessed. Her revision is far from a simple reversal of the Biblical equation, popular in consolatory literature, which predicts that the last shall be first. Instead, she reconfigures the set os positions between the worshipper and the worshipped, using the notion of circumference to develop an original theological perspective that refuses to see God as a wrathful figure who distinguishes between the sacred and the profane, accepting some individuals while discarding others to hell/ Nor is it true that, for Dickinson, God represents a higher being whose supreme powerprfoundly exceed that of the individual. For Dickinson, God is the God of infinite love, the One who does not refuse to love us simply because we fail at being who we are. By embracing the Dickinsonian theology of circumference, the individual's relationship with God becomes an empathic extension that allows for the expression of a reciprocal loving intercommunication between souls.

In switching the emphasis from the center to the circumference, Dickinson develops a nontheological space for a decentered God; the replacement of center with circumference attests to her belief that religion is theological only insofar as it possesses a center. In the final poem we will be looking at, #915, Dickinson writes a prayer of invocation for this willfully uncodified religion without a center,a religion that encompasses both life and death at once.

Faith -- is the Pierless Bridge

Supporting what We see

Unto the Scene that We do not --

Too slend for the eye

It bears the Soul as bold

As it were rocked in Steel

With Arms of Steel at either side --

It joins -- behind the Veil

To what, could We presume

The Bridge would cease to be

To Our far, vacillating Feet

A first Necessity

In the opening line of the poem, a person's faith is defined as a bridge that exists in defiance of the laws of logic, as there is no grounding pier to give it the support it needs. This, then, is the bridge we make unto God, a bridge that spans the distance between the earthly self and the eternal being, supporting all of our subjective interpretations of divine reality, including both that which we know and that which lies covered by our ignorance, as it is too hidden from our sight to be perceived. A second reading one could make of the first line is to interpret 'pierless' as 'peerless', that is, understanduing the poem as saying that faith is a bridge without equal, the sine qua non of all structural relationships, for this bridge is the force that carries the soul with steadfast conviction and with an appreciation of the mystery of life. In the final stanza the poet tries to determine what allows our bridge to be. She discovers that the answer is to be found, literally, in herself, for it is our will to truth, our will to believe, that allows the bridge to be. As Dickinson puts it, 'Faith' is the primary requirement for building a bridge to God, a bridge that cannot be supported directly on the physical plane. As ever, she leaves her ultimate conclusion shrouded in a veil of ambiguity, making it difficult to determine which comes first, the bridge or the faith, the self who wills it or the God who receives it. Indeed, perhaps this is also the reason why the messengers of truth have such 'vacillating Feet' in that the occupy a position of protean and alternating indeterminacy, never deviating from the fluid and variable state of perpetual uncertainty.

As noted in the introduction, The Feminization of American Culture describes the advent of consolatory literature, a body of work that, together with a number of cultural practices, helped establish an oppositional relationship between life and death, with life on one side and death on another. The emergent culture of death that came to dominance in this period served as additional sediment for the disparity between these two catgories. As a result of having an unbalanced significance on death this relationship had significantly debilitating affects on the living. Dickinson's appreciation of the relationship between life and death differs from the one advocated by the writers of consolatory literature in that, unlike a writer such as Phelps, Dickinson does nopt view life and death as being in perpetual opposition to one another. For her, the awareness of death's existence does not mean that life has to abjure the privilege of living.

As Christopher Benfey says, "Dickinson's skepticism is central to both her temperment and her achievement." As we have seen, it was her radical skeptivcism towards the status quo which allowed her to develop these revisionary strategies in an effort to restructure the dual frameworks of fanatical poetic sensibility and fatalistic aesthetic ideology, both build by the high priests of an extremist literary death-culture. The rise of the cult of death in the nineteenth century realized a dangerous possibility for the American culture which, deriving its foundational basis from the axiomatic sacred knowledge of Christianity, subverted itself by giving into the pressure of women and clergymen. In time, this led to the establishment of a number of ritualistic and life-denying cultural practices. Exhibitng a desire to rework the death culture of the nineteenth century, Dickinson's poems about death may be understood as a revision of the consolatory tenor of the other poems written during this period, such as "Twas But a Babe". Whereas poets such as Lydis Sigourney wrote poems that adhered to a belief-system prpounded by the culture of death, promisingh the life would be better in the next world, Dickinson used her poetry to illuminate the discrepancies in this belief system that advocated the deferral of life to the glorification of death.

Dickinson's poetry on the status of death constitutes a series of revisions in the philosophy that gave a legitimate basis to the death-obsessed culture of the nineteenth century. Dickinson conceptualizes death, not as the site of a great revelatory experience, but simply as a transition point on the pathway of life. In her poems she revises and re-qualifies that idea of what death can be said to be, extending the border that had delimited the province of death and countering the indubitable propositions that were assumed to be true in the popular culture of her age. Most importantly, perhaps, her poetry reconstructs the image of God through the radical ambiguity of its theological underpinnings. Her artistic use of radical theological skepticism deconstructs the presumptions that formed the basis of Christian deontology in an attempt to provide an alternative to the death-culture of the nineteenth century. Her axiological revision of death works to displace and de-legitimize the culture of death and all of its theatrical and ritualistic exercises, its theological fixation on subject-centered rationality and its tendency promote constricting projective reactions. She them attempts to implement her skeptical revisions of the religious spirit of her time, using her essentially ambiguous theses to excise the cultural biases that gave creedence to a centralized appreciation of the world. Through the use of skepticism, Dickinson is able to promote a type of consciousness that feels more comfortable with the non-theological space of circumference, rather than the positivistic proclamaticions of a theology that sacrilized the idea of a life spent in supplication to death.