Queer Appropriations: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Dickinson's Love Poems
Páraic Finnerty, University of Portsmouth
Abstract
While it is expected that nineteenth-century love poetry would engage with Shakespeare's Sonnets, considering their status and pervasive appeal at the time in Anglo-American culture, this paper puts forward the case for Emily Dickinson's specific borrowings from these poems. More specifically, within the context of their afterlife, it argues that the Sonnets provided the American poet with an authoritative and, at the same time, controversial resource for her construction of love. It examines Dickinson's use of a vocabulary of aristocratic and economic tropes, love triangles, imagery of light and darkness, physical beauty and erotic multiplicity, which she would have identified as Shakespearean. His unconventional sonnets, it will be suggested, offered Dickinson a means of validating the traditionally feminine position of powerlessness within the discourse of love, of representing female desire for a male figure, and of constructing poems that connote same-sex love. Like the Sonnets, Dickinson's love poems are queer: They unsettle repressive categories of gender and sexuality and make possible the signification of same-sex passion. This paper continues current discussion of the queer afterlives of both writers as an antidote to the intrusive and spurious biographical readings of their brief, repetitious, and figurative lyrics.
While scholars have long acknowledged the powerful influence of Shakespeare's writings on Emily Dickinson, they have only recently discussed her appropriation of a specifically Shakespearean vocabulary for the depiction of gender, sexuality, and eroticism (Bennett 1990b; Farr 1992; Hart 1990; Finnerty 1998; Comment 2001). This article considers Dickinson's appropriation of the language of Shakespeare's Sonnets, a language that encourages "alternative and competing constructions of gender" and is especially useful to readers, such as Dickinson, who seek to unsettle the normative limits of sexual desire (Bennett 1993, 95). Although Dickinson's edition of the Sonnets, now at the Houghton Library, Harvard suggests much use, this topic has been relatively unexplored by scholars (Finnerty 2006, 118-19; Richwell 1989, 22-31). Judith Farr notes the similarities between the Sonnets and Dickinson's love poems that address both a male figure associated with "courtesy, loyalty, physical appreciation" and an awe-inspiring female who is "false, feline, and distant" (Farr 1990, 132, 182). For Farr, the Sonnets are one of Dickinson's models of the expressive lyric, a genre that offers "a personal encounter, a private moment publicized" (Jackson 2004, 10). Yet it seems more likely that Dickinson would have extended to Shakespeare her own disclaimer about the dangers of reading lyric poetry as personal expression: "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person" (L268).1 From Dickinson's many references to his plays, it seems that Shakespeare's importance to her lay in his powers of multiple identification rather than personal revelation. Like Robert Browning, a writer whose use of dramatic monologue and personae she admired and emulated, Dickinson probably felt that Shakespeare had not "unlocked his heart" in the Sonnets, and that "If [he had done] so, the less Shakespeare he!" (Browning 1996, 1317).
If for Browning and Dickinson the idea that the Sonnets were autobiographical lessened Shakespeare's genius, for other readers it caused the scandal that England's national poet was guilty of sodomy and adultery (De Grazia 1993, 37-49; Stallybrass 1993, 91-103). In Dickinson's edition of Shakespeare, the editor Charles Knight offers an essay on the Sonnets that chronicles the intrusive way these lyrics were being read as privacy made public, and also the concerted assertion by scholars that the Sonnets were highly stylized and conventionalized Renaissance lyrics in which the author's literal presence and personal expressivity were elaborate conceits (Knight 1853, 8:459-60, 479; see also Vendler 1988, 1-12; Rosemarin 1985, 20-37). Knight's essay suggests Dickinson's awareness of a historical alternative to the lyric's position in the post-Romantic period as the genre of "personified identification," and this offered a rationale for what Virginia Jackson regards as Dickinson's interrogation of the "cultural identification of personhood with writing" (Jackson 2004, 197). Other nineteenth-century critics questioned the validity of the sonnet sequence and argued that these so-called revelatory poems, for the most part, obscure the identity, gender, and sexuality of both speaker and addressee (Knight 1853, 8:476; Jameson 1829, 238-41; Hudson 1872, 24-26; Massey 1866, 173-84, 205-24, 228-31; Edmondson and Wells 2004, 30; Dubrow 1996, 291-305). The Sonnets were poems not of exemplary individual disclosure but "multiple eroticism," and, as a result, were probably all the more important for Dickinson's poems in which the gender of the speaker or addressee is treated as an interchangeable alternative (Henneberg 1995, 1-19; see F1396; F1566; F494).2
Of course, for Dickinson the significance of the Sonnets was the fact that they marked a break in a tradition of English love poetry in which a male lover speaks and a female beloved is silent. The Sonnets also offered an authoritative endorsement of the traditionally feminine position of powerlessness, passivity, and longing. Consequently, Dickinson's female contemporaries recognized the special relationship that existed between women and the "feminine" Shakespeare of the Sonnets; for example, Mary Cowden Clarke noted that the "tenderness, patience, devotion, and constancy worthy of the gentlest womanhood are conspicuous in combination with a strength of passion and fervor of attachment belonging to manliest manhood" (Clarke 1887, 356). Accordingly, the Sonnets were models for Dickinson's unsettling of the naturalness of the male or female position within the lover's discourse (Barthes 1978, 13-15). Shakespeare's poet-speaker likens himself to a mother (S21),3 a tender nurse (S22), a widow (S97), and Philomela (S102); but he also presents himself as the slave (S57, 58) of a powerful male figure, who is his "Lord" (S26), "sovereign" (S57), and "master" (S106). At other times, the Sonnets feminize the young man, using a language traditionally associated with women (Stapleton 2004, 271-96). The speaker is a "deceived husband" (S93), the male beloved a "master-mistress" (S20) who is compared to Helen of Troy (S53), Eve (S93), and a Queen (S96).
While for conservative readers such features made the Sonnets troubling, for Dickinson they were a means of rethinking conventional categories that organize human desire and present gender disjunction. The male homoeroticism of these poems provided her with a language that authorized and ennobled same-sex passion (Edmondson and Wells 2004, 138-39, 148-53; Sinfield 1994, 20); and her susceptibility to such a language is likely, considering her passionate relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, regardless of whether their homoerotic friendship was self-consciously lesbian or not (Faderman 1978, 197-225; Bennett 1990a, 150-80; Smith 1992, 23-30). In the poems to be discussed, Dickinson appropriates the Sonnets, their mercantile and aristocratic imagery, their gender ambiguity, and their concern with time, waste, aging, and beauty to destabilize and complicate categories of gender and sexuality and to question compulsory heterosexuality and the conventional relationship between identity and desire.
Many critics in Dickinson's day read the Sonnets as a record of an intimate relationship between a rich and handsome nobleman (believed to be the Earl of Southampton or the Earl of Pembroke) and a lowly and reliant poet; their homoeroticism was often explained as a petition to gain and keep the financial support and influence of a wealthy patron (Marotti 1990, 143-73; Kernan 1995). Yet in many of the Sonnets, the gender of the addressee and of the speaker are indeterminate, and what connects the poems is a concern with "metaphorical wealth, profit, worth, value, expense, 'store,' and 'content'" (Greene 1985, 231-32). Using the posture of the impoverished and dependent lover, a posture first employed by Sappho and of great influence on nineteenth-century women writers (see Prins 1999, 227; Bennett 2003, 175), Shakespeare created speakers who are rich while their beloved is present, but in a state of poverty (emotional and actual destitution) when the beloved is absent. The Sonnets begin by addressing a beautiful figure, "rich in youth," who squanders his beauteous treasure (S15) and makes "famine where abundance lies" (S1). In other sonnets, the vulnerability of the poet-speaker is expressed through jewel-image clusters:
"ransom all ill deeds" (S34), and the beloved is "time's best jewel" (S65) and Nature's own store and wealth (S67), in comparison to whom all other "jewels" are mere trifles. Even the beloved's faults are graces: "As on the finger of a throned queen / The basest jewel will be well esteemed" (S96). The speaker's "only care" is that his jewel will be stolen in this "filching age," and he hoards the precious stone like a miser who enjoys his treasure sparingly (S48, 75).Dickinson invokes this vocabulary of eroticized affluence in many poems. For example, in "Your Riches – taught me – Poverty" (F418), a female speaker was a millionaire until she encountered a beloved who teaches her "a different Wealth – / To miss it – beggars so –." This recalls the sonnets in which the beloved is a "sweet thief which sourly robs" (S35) and a "gentle thief" who "steals "all [the poet's] poverty" (S40). Although this poem was sent to the poet's sister-in-law, as in many of Dickinson's love poems and in Shakespeare's Sonnets, the gender of the addressee is ambiguous; gender seems less important than what the figure represents — a wealth beyond mines, gems, diadems, jewels, and monarchy. The beloved is the Pearl "That slipped my simple fingers through – / While just a Girl at school." Like Shakespeare's beloved, Dickinson's Jewel/Pearl alters all value systems and economies of worth and impoverishes the speaker eternally by its loss. Similarly, "I held a Jewel in my fingers" (F261), written a year later in 1861, presents the same situation; although here the genders of the speaker and of the addressee are unclear, the theme remains commemoration ("Amethyst remembrance") of the moment of loss. Whereas in the previous poem, simple fingers drop the jewel, here overly trusting, "honest" fingers allow it to be pilfered by a dishonest thief.
The most provocative version of this scenario occurs in "That Malay – took the Pearl," which presents the loss of a Pearl/Jewel from the perspective of a male aristocratic speaker; this poem also brings together many of the motifs present in the Sonnets: the erotic triangle, the Earl figure (Southampton or Pembroke), and the imagery of light and darkness:
| That Malay – took the Pearl – Not – I – the Earl – I – feared the Sea – too much Unsanctified – to touch – |
| Praying that I might be Worthy – the Destiny – The Swarthy fellow swam – And bore my Jewel -– Home – |
| Home to the Hut! What lot Had I – the Jewel – got – Borne on a Dusky Breast – I had not deemed a Vest Of Amber – fit – |
| The Negro never knew I – wooed it – too – To gain, or be undone – Alike to Him – One – (F451) |
In addition, same-sex passion in Shakespeare's Sonnets is presented as the merging of the identities of the poet-speaker and the young man in and through the body of the woman. For example, the poet speaker is not jealous of the relationship between the young man and the Dark Lady because "here's the joy, my friend and I are one: / Sweet flattery! Then she loves but me alone" (S42). This level of identification within the Sonnets is mirrored in the final lines of Dickinson's poem: "To gain, or be undone – / Alike to Him – One –." Evoking the Sonnets, the final lines connect the Earl with the sexual and sexualized Malay, affirming, and also complicating, the cultural correlation between hypersexuality and darker or "Southern peoples" (Bennett 2003, 165). As in the Sonnets, a desire for the same object unites the rivals beyond notions of difference, whether of class, gender, sexuality, or race.
This poem has been read as one in which Dickinson uses a male persona, the Earl, to express the anguish of watching a less worthy rival steal one's idol (Patterson 1979, 1-29; Pollak 1984, 156). What is visible here, as in other Dickinson poems, is the invisibility of lesbian love and the need for a refraction of same-sex desire through identification that crosses boundaries of sex (Sedgwick 1994, 175; Patterson 1979, 16, 88-89). The Malay represents the male rival who can with natural ease take, rather than merely covet and idealize, the Pearl: heterosexuality and male physical superiority are victorious over a feminized aristocratic masculinity, associated in the nineteenth century with deviant sexuality (Sedgwick 1985, 216-17). Here, Dickinson makes her poet-lover of higher rank than Shakespeare's is, perhaps to reflect emerging stereotypes of male homosexuality, and uses these to figure female same-sex passion. Yet Dickinson's inactive and weak Earl might also be read as representing a female figure, suggesting that Dickinson is not using a male persona or identifying with — or performing — masculinity, but rather playing with gender itself (Finnerty 1998). What is most interesting about Dickinson's use of gendered titles or names is that it does not represent a gendered or sexual identity, but is "the site of a certain crossing, a transfer of gender," staging possible "exchange[s] of gender identifications that the substantiating of gender and sexuality conceal" (Butler 1993, 144-45). The fear, failure, and introspection of the Earl might suggest passivity, reticence, and a socially-constructed reserve associated with Victorian ideals of femininity; thus, the Earl might connote gender and sex rather than sexuality. The suggestion that Dickinson's Earl is a woman is supported by another poem, "No Matter – now – Sweet – but when I am Earl" (F734); here the speaker imagines a future time when she, a powerless girl, will transform into a magnificent Earl with belts, buckles, crests, and ermine robes. Reading these two poems together, Dickinson's Earl complicates the discourse of love and the traditional erotic triangle by making impossible the identification of the sex/gender and sexuality of their protagonists.
If Dickinson's Earl connotes a desiring woman whose object of desire is proscribed, it is easy to read the poem as a coded articulation of same-sex passion; however, in order to read the female Earl as heterosexual we would need to view the Pearl as male, a conceptual move corroborated by the Sonnets. But if the Pearl is male and the Earl female, the poem is about the speaker watching two men together: The Malay takes the Pearl from the "unsanctified" sea, which the Earl fears, and brings it to his hut. The sea imagery and the activity of swimming/driving in the poem have homoerotic connotations and are used in other nineteenth-century poetry (Bennett 2003, 170-73). For example, the twenty-ninth bather in Whitman's "Song of Myself" becomes aroused as she spies on nude male bathers; similarly, Dickinson's female voyeur watches an equivalent homoerotic scene between the Malay and (male) Pearl. In this poem, Dickinson appropriates the central scene and imagery of Shakespeare's Sonnets, maintaining their fluid and protean eroticism, their validation of gender-blurring figures such as a female Earl and male Pearl, and the permission they grant her to represent (male and female) same-sex passion. Using Shakespeare, Dickinson expands the possibilities of identification, creating triangles of desire that are not, despite the use of gender pronouns and titles, anchored to sex.
Another theme from the Sonnets that Dickinson uses is that of a dependent and inferior lover who must flatter, praise, and love a powerful, aristocratic beloved (Scott 2004, 316; Bennett 2003, 177). Such a submissive and masochistic identification runs throughout her writing, in which speakers frequently address with love, fidelity, and meekness various distant, aloof, and often careless "Master" figures (Griffith 1964, 166-69; St. Armand, 1984, 39-41, 137-51). Yet as in the poems already discussed, Dickinson may have added "masculine pronouns, or 'bearded' pronouns," "an occasional 'sir,' 'signor,' or 'master'" to her declarations of love, thus disguising "affirmations of love for a woman" (Patterson 1951, 8). This would mean that some of Dickinson's heterosexual love poems use the homoerotic sonnets to queer normative sexuality. Dickinson evokes the sonnet speaker and the idea that a lover's unquestioning compliance to and devotion for an aristocratic beloved confers titled status. In Sonnet 91, the speaker declares that
"crowned with" the beloved and "drink[s] up the monarch's plague, this flattery" (S114); love allows the speaker to be "engrafted to [the beloved's] store," to transcend physical and social stigma, to share in the beloved's "abundance," and "by a part of all thy glory live" (S37). In yet another Shakespeare sonnet, the speaker notes: F280, 353, 347, 575) or aristocratic figures (F194) on whom love confers nobility (Crumbley 1997, 125-38). Yet Dickinson's poems alter the central fear of Shakespeare's poet-speaker, that this status is dependent on his beloved's favors: "Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take / All this away and me most wretched make" (S91); "To leave poor me, thou hast the strength of laws, / Since why to love, I can allege no cause" (S49). In Shakespeare, the beloved's absence and distance cause the speaker to experience destitution and a range of negative emotions, including frustration, neglect, resentment, fear, and anger (S33-35, 40-42, 57-58, 67, 69); in Dickinson, by contrast, although such emotions are expressed, the loss of love does not imply a loss of rank.In "The Sun – just touched the Morning" (F246), written in 1862, for instance, a male sun touches a female "Morning" with the hope of a life of spring:
| The Sun – just touched the Morning – The Morning – Happy thing – Supposed that He had come to dwell – And Life would all be Spring! |
| The Morning – fluttered – staggered – Felt feebly – for Her Crown – Her unanointed forehead – Henceforth – Her only One! |
In a poem from the same year, Dickinson presents another speaker, who like the sonnet speaker, is ever faithful to an absent lover; however, this is not acknowledged or appreciated by her lover (F267). Again, a crown becomes the symbol of the lover's absence rather then his presence: Having been covertly raised in status by love, the speaker wears a crown of "Thorns" by day and only puts on after sunset her "Diadem." The poem begins by suggesting that what this speaker has endured is equivalent to a violent sex change:
| Rearrange a "Wife's" Affection! When they dislocate my Brain! Amputate my freckled Bosom! Make me bearded like a man! |
| Blush, my spirit, in thy Fastness – Blush, my unacknowledged clay – Seven years of troth have taught thee More than Wifehood ever may! |
| Big my Secret but it's bandaged – It will never get away Till the Day its Weary Keeper Leads it through the Grave to thee. |
To make Me Fairest of the Earth
Perhaps one of the most interesting of these "Master" poems is "Fitter to see Him, I may be" (F834), which is generally interpreted as describing how God's grace transforms the ugliness and decay of human sin into beauty and the speaker's fear that her lover (Christ) will not recognize her after this transformation (Mudge 1979, 153-56; Eberwein 1985, 182). The poem stands out in Dickinson's canon because its form deviates from her usual hymnal meter, presenting what might be viewed as two sonnets, with iambic tetrameter instead of pentameter, back to back. The vocabulary recalls that of the Sonnets: their obsession with beauty and youth and the popular name given to the male beloved of these poems, "the Fair Youth" (MacInnes 2000, 1-26):
| Fitter to see Him, I may be For the long Hindrance – Grace – to Me – With Summers, and with Winters, grow, Some passing Year – A trait bestow |
| He left behind One Day – So less He seek Conviction, That – be This – I only must not grow so new That He'll mistake – and ask for me Of me – when first unto the Door I go – to Elsewhere go no more– |
| How sweet I shall not lack in Vain – But gain – thro' loss – Through Grief – obtain – The Beauty that reward Him best – The Beauty of Demand – at Rest – |
Whereas association with and distance from the beloved lead to disgrace in the Sonnets, Dickinson's speaker gains grace (Heale 2003, 165-67), and the fear of physical change (decay and waste) in the Sonnets becomes here anxiety about beauty. The fairness makes Dickinson's speaker unidentifiable and unchosen. Upon his return, the Master treats her face as an object to be scrutinized, itemized, and described, in the way that the Dark Lady's features are in Shakespeare's Sonnets (e.g., S130). While the Fair Youth "masters" and perfects older ideas of beauty (S106), the Dark Lady is desired despite her lack of conventional beauty: "For well thou knowest, to my dear doting heart / Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel" (S131). Like Shakespeare's speaker, Dickinson's male figure ultimately prefers the "Excellenter Youth," Dickinson's version of Shakespeare's "lovely boy." Although the term "Youth" might suggest a person of either sex, the Shakespearean resonance suggests we read the figure as male. If so, following Shakespeare, Dickinson's text unsettles the blazon tradition in which the body of the beautiful female is admired and sought, for as in Shakespeare it is the youth who is "Excellenter," has "sweet beauty's best / Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow," and is chosen (S106). Dickinson's youth, like Shakespeare's, may be a favorite of Nature, who though she "goest onwards, still will pluck thee back, / She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill / May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill" (S126). Perhaps Dickinson's evokes the Sonnets to remind her Master that although this youth has stifled time's destruction of beauty, he is bound to Nature's "audit," which "though delay'd, answer'd must be, / And her quietus is to render thee" (S126). However, it is her Master's choice of the Youth, over and above the newly beautified speaker, that is Shakespearean and homoerotic. Read in light of the other poems discussed, this choice might suggest that the Master is in fact female; if so, perhaps the speaker's beloved chooses the youth to conform to traditional heterosexual roles.
The concluding lines take the "Master's" hypothetical rejection to its logical conclusion in grief; however, this allows the speaker to transcend the cult of beauty and her lover's implicit demand for change and (physical and/or spiritual) perfection. The beauty that will reward this figure best (which might be read as sarcastic, considering the Master's choice of the "Excellenter Youth") is the end of his control over her, "The Beauty of Demand at Rest." This ending, which might signify silence, passivity, and death, could also hint at alternative and un-represented (sexual) possibilities beyond the failed and rejected heterosexuality described in the poem.
Two Dickinson poems attempt to represent such possibilities in the form of female same-sex relationships: "Like Eyes that looked on Wastes" (F693) and "Ourselves were wed one summer dear" (F596). These poems appropriate from the Sonnets their economic and aristocratic terms, and their discourse of sameness and identity (and marriage). At first, the Sonnets associate a same-sex relationship with (literary) creativity and regeneration. The poet-speaker asserts his ability to immortalize the youth: "His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, / And they shall live, and he in them still green" (S63). However, such Sonnets are undercut by others in which only marriage and procreation can prevent shame and waste:
| But Beauty's waste hath in the world an end, And kept unused, the user so destroys it; No love towards others in that bosom sits That on himself such murd'rous shame commits. (S9) |
| Like Eyes that looked on Wastes – Incredulous of Ought But Blank – and steady Wilderness – Diversified by Night – |
| Just Infinites of Nought – As far as it could see – So looked the face I looked upon – So looked itself – on Me – |
| I offered it no Help – Because the Cause was Mine – The Misery a Compact As hopeless – as divine – |
| Neither – would be absolved – Neither would be a Queen Without the Other – Therefore – We perish – tho' We reign – (F693) |
As if following on from this poem, "Ourselves were wed one summer – dear" begins with a state of mutuality and identity: a same-sex marriage, equivalent to its provocative representation in Shakespeare's "Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediment" (S116):
| Ourselves were wed one summer – dear – Your Vision – was in June – And when Your little Lifetime failed, I wearied – too – of mine – |
| And overtaken in the Dark – Where You had put me down – By Some one carrying a Light – I – too – received the Sign. |
| 'Tis true – Our Futures different lay – Your Cottage – faced the sun – While Oceans – and the North must be – On every side of mine – |
| 'Tis true, Your Garden led the Bloom, For mine in Frosts – was sown – And yet, one Summer, we were Queens – But You – were crowned in June – (F596) |
| Who lets so fair a house fall to decay, Which husbandry in honour might uphold Against the stormy gust of winter's day And barren rage of death's eternal cold. (S13) |
Queer theory offers us new ways of viewing identity, gender, and desire in the works of Shakespeare and Dickinson. Judith Butler's idea that the oppressive binaries of sex might be confounded and denaturalized by alternative configurations of bodies and desires is evidenced in Shakespeare's Sonnets, which complicate a twenty-first century reader's taken-for-granted notions of sex and gender (Butler 1990, 149). For readers such as Dickinson, Shakespeare's radical and deviant representation of human love, deriving from Early Modern conceptions of human Eros, unsettle poetic and social conventions as they were understood in the nineteenth-century, allowing her access to a dissonant and oppositional "order of things." Dickinson found in the Sonnets breaks and fissures in the story that her culture told itself about male and female roles within transactions of passion and desire (Sinfield 1994, 9-10). For Dickinson, the Sonnets made visible and expressible that which dared not be seen or spoken about, as is shown by her use of a Shakespearean vocabulary to represent the possibility of same-sex passion. She opportunistically uses these poems to fashion her own vision in which categories such as male and female multiply into feminized male bodies, masculinized female bodies, or sexless indeterminate bodies; and the assumed sexed bodies of the speaker and the addressee have not the kind of fixed or determined meanings we might expect. With the Sonnets as her guide, Dickinson avoids such simplistic binaries and makes sex — and, by implication, sexuality — a variable (or variant) within the scope of human desire.
Notes
| 1. | References to Dickinson's letters are to The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward (1986). All subsequent references are to this edition, will be included in the body of the text, and will be indicated by the abbreviation L, followed by the letter number. |
| 2. | References to Dickinson's poems are to The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum Edition, edited by R. W. Franklin (1998). All further references are to this edition, will be included in the body of the text, and will be indicated by the abbreviation F, followed by the poem number. |
| 3. | References to Shakespeare's Sonnets are to the The Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Poems of William Shakspere, edited by Charles Knight (1853). All subsequent references are to this edition, will be included in the body of the text, and will be indicated by the abbreviation S, followed by the sonnet number. |
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