WHEN EMILY DICKINSON first read the novel Jane Eyre, she didn’t know the name of its author. At the time, Charlotte Brontë wrote under the pseudonym Currer Bell, and her work was the subject of controversy. The British Quarterly Review referred to Bell as “a person who ... combines a total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion” and said, “the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine ... is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.”
When Dickinson returned Jane Eyre to the friend who lent it to her, she sent it with a bouquet of box leaves and a note that makes it clear she’d heard the gossip on Bell. She wrote, “If all these leaves were altars, and on every one a prayer that Currer Bell might be saved — and you were God — would you answer it?” Years later, when Brontë died, Dickinson wrote the following elegy: “Oh, what an afternoon for heaven, / When ‘Brontë’ entered there!”
As Dickinson’s biographer Alfred Habegger notes, this elegy not only grants Brontë salvation but also “made heaven the beneficiary.” Even in these brief notes on Brontë, we can see some of the common themes of Dickinson’s poetry. There is the impulse to engage with (and even affirm) the ideas of God and heaven but also the impulse to subvert rigid and exclusive notions of theology.
Dickinson, who attended Amherst’s First Congregational Church with her family, grew up in a Calvinist household with daily religious observances. When she was a teenager, a wave of religious revivals swept through New England, prompting many of her family members and friends to make public professions of faith. Dickinson never did, nor did she join the church. She said, “I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel I could give it up for Christ.”
These revivals were not the only instance of Dickinson’s obstinance in the face of religious pressure and frenzy. She studied for one year at the boarding school Mount Holyoke, where the teachers labeled Dickinson a student with “no hope,” and recorded her as such in their institutional journal. Unlike the students they placed in the two other categories — “professors” (of Christian faith) and “with hope” (students who showed some readiness to profess) — Dickinson was considered “impenitent.”
She eventually found teachers who spoke about faith in a way that resonated with her, including Benjamin Franklin Newton, the Unitarian who became Dickinson’s tutor after she left Mount Holyoke. Of him, Dickinson wrote, “Mr. Newton became to me a gentle, yet grave Preceptor, teaching me ... what was most grand or beautiful in nature, and that sublimer lesson, a faith in things unseen, and in a life again, nobler, and much more blessed.” As Habegger puts it, Newton “stimulated her to reinterpret her rich Puritan endowment.”
This interpretive work seems to have held Dickinson’s interest for all her writing life, and the result is poetry that often uses imagery and language specific to Christianity, but points to the tenets of perennial wisdom — wisdom pertinent for seekers in any tradition. Like all the great spiritual teachers, Dickinson writes about the supremacy of love. According to one of her poems, love is where we come from and where we are going: “Love is anterior to Life / Posterior to Death / Initial of Creation / The Exponent of Earth.”
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When Dickinson makes statements about heaven, she often speaks of it not as one obsessed with the afterlife, but in the way that Jesus spoke about the kingdom of God. In Dickinson’s poetry, heaven is both a present and future reality. “Who has not found the heaven below / will fail of it above.”
I believe that one aspect of perennial spirituality would have come naturally to Dickinson: the wisdom of paradox. Throughout her poetry, Dickinson chases irony obsessively, like a hound on a scent. Often, she uses paradox to underscore the idea that we most fully know one thing through the experience of its opposite: “’Tis Beggars Banquets / can define.”
Dickinson’s backward and upside-down philosophy is most reminiscent to me of a book she may never have read — the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese text attributed to Lao Tzu (a name that translates simply as “old man.”) “The Way’s brightness looks like darkness; advancing on the Way feels like retreating ... Be broken to be whole.”
Like Lao Tzu, Dickinson constantly contrasts the human impulse to accumulate victories with another, humbler way of being in the world. “Perhaps you think Me stooping / I’m not ashamed of that / Christ — stooped until He touched the Grave.”
One of the most poignant ways Dickinson leans into paradox is in her poetry on thwarted desire and failure. These poems seem to affirm the spiritual value of human longing and striving while also suggesting that ultimately who we are is far beyond what we achieve in this lifetime. “Exists in every human nature / A goal, / Admitted scarcely to itself, it may be ... Adored with caution, as a brittle heaven ... Ungained, it may be, by a life’s low venture, / But then, / Eternity enables the endeavoring / Again.”
I believe the prevailing myth that Dickinson wasn’t interested in publication and fame is a mistaken story, or at least incomplete. She did say in an 1862 letter to The Atlantic contributor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “I smile when you suggest that I delay ‘to publish’ — that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.” This, however, may have been because she was embarrassed. She was in her 30s, and the writer to whom she’d entrusted her work had just suggested she wasn’t ready for publication. (Higginson was eventually influential in helping publish Dickinson’s work, but it seems that he originally undervalued it because he couldn’t neatly categorize it.)
Writers generally want readers, and Dickinson was no exception. She regularly enclosed her poetry in letters to family members and friends, but most of her writing remained unread during her lifetime. I think she wrote some of her poetry to grapple with this disappointment, to make meaning out of work that didn’t have an audience, and out of a rich inner life that didn’t always have a mirror. “If nature will not tell the tale / Jehovah told to her, / Can human nature not survive / Without a listener?” It seems that for Dickinson, introspection and self-worth were spiritual practices that buoyed her through the puzzles and sorrows of life.
No wonder Dickinson loved the novel Jane Eyre, which says, “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld ...” It is the sort of line that made the Quarterly Review critics disparage protagonist Jane as an “unregenerate and undisciplined spirit” with “a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself.” It is a line in which Dickinson might have recognized a spirit like her own. “No rack can torture me,” Dickinson wrote. “My soul’s at liberty.”
Caroline McTeer is a San Diego-based writer and has been published in Sojourners, The Bitter Southerner, Litro, and elsewhere.
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