The Emily Dickinson Journal

Dickinson scholars have often been intrigued by the poet’s acute sensitivity to relations of domination and submission. ¹ But while Gary Lee Stonum has rightly observed that the poet “tends to measure all conceivably bipolar phenomena for their resemblance to the structure of mastery” (18), Camille Paglia’s provocative thesis that Dickinson was a “sadomasochistic imaginist” (629) and even a “female Sade” (624) has — although perhaps not surprisingly, given Paglia’s tendency to excess and prediliction for sentialism — found few critical supporters. Dare one ask then, contrarily, if Dickinson’s poetic explorations of the structure of mastery align her, in any way, with masochism? Or is the very positing of the question in a scholarly context itself a curious masochistic gesture of sorts? Perhaps not, when we consider that in recent years the rethinking of masochistic subjectivity through the psychoanalytic model of fantasy has become an important project for contemporary literary criticism precisely because this model demonstrates how the perversion may assume an oppositional relation to an experience of oppression. ² Laplanche and Pontalis argue that fantasy is a space or setting in which gendered identity breaks down, in which the subject is elided into the syntax of the scenario, in which no subject position is ever stable or essential. They define the fantasmic as a “mise-en-scène of desire” and “a script . . . capable of dramatization” (318). Fantasy scenarios are specifically constructed in order to permit multiple and shifting identifications. ³ One may extrapolate from this that the fantasy scenario that is the literary text offers a convenient setting from within which gendered identity might be restructured. Thus, a literary text apparently invested in masochism may conceivably subvert the masochistic positioning of the female subject by refusing hermeneutic possession and exploiting masochistic pleasure; that is, pleasure in the loss of a stable identity. Further, by employing techniques of reversal to expose and dramatize power relations, and by enacting those reversals within particular locations, at [End Page 1] textual sites where domination and submission are produced and inscribed, a writer may effectively manipulate and subvert a conventional power paradigm. Moreover, by appealing to masochism, to pleasure in loss, such a writer would not only problematize the strict gendering of the sadomasochistic dynamic but also reveal the subversive potential within masochism itself. With the emphasis shifted from sadistic possession to masochistic loss, the reading process itself would become a means of decentering rather than of stabilizing identity. In short, re-presenting female masochism potentially disturbs the gendered polarities of dominance and submission on a number of different levels of textual representation. It is my contention that Dickinson, who viewed masochistic fantasy’s identification of the role of power in pleasure as not so much the manifestation of female “false consciousness” but as a stark realism, and who was, as a writer, intensely aware of the crucial role of power in sex, gender, and sexual representations, does just that: she develops a subversive masochistic aesthetic that, by staging the thematics of domination and submission within a text, works against and undoes power hierarchies, showing how they, like sexual identity itself, are fragile and fluid entities. In creating these tableaux vivants, Dickinson succinctly demonstrates how masochistic fantasy, by eluding the usual constraints on power and pleasure, can create a representative space, a mise-en-scène of desire, from within which poet and readers alike are able to explore and demystify the brutal conjunction of power and pleasure in intersubjective relations.

Indisputably, Dickinson’s readers frequently confront a female speaker whose narrative emphasizes her own passivity, weakness and insignificance. That speaker is locationally dwarfed by her proximity to the powerful presence of a superior masculine force. When that force is personified and addressed as God, Lover, Father, King, Emperor, Lord or Master, the speaker’s relative powerlessness defines the relationship. Within such a system of established hierarchy, the speaker often characterizes herself as the tiny Daisy juxtaposed to the “Immortal Alps” (#124) and the “Himmaleh” (#481) or unflatteringly paired with the “Great Caesar!” (#102) who is “Her Lord” (#339). ⁴ Clark Griffith observes that the lover-figure of the poems frequently “arrives...