Dickinson (2002): "A Womanly Way to Write"

                                                                                                            Billy Schraufnagel

English 281, Otten

February 25, 2002

Mid-Term Paper, Topic # 1

A Womanly Way to Write

            The Female Writer was a blossoming cultural phenomenon in the 19^th Century United States. Or at least, She was enough of a phenomenon to inspire one of her ranks to compose a poem on her behalf. Phoebe Cary wrote the poem “Advice Gratis to Certain Women (By a Woman)” to help guide her sisters in the production of important and effectual literature. Cary warns that if women wish to have more power in their society, they must be willing to transform themselves as thinkers and as writers. She offers specific advice concerning word choice, tone, and humility– practical hints from a writer to other writers. More intriguing, however, is the way in which Cary manipulates gender-adjectives to recast the personality of the new Female Writer: “I would have you be womanly while you are wise; / ‘Tis the weak and the womanish tricks I despise.... But to be a true, womanly woman is great: / And if ever you come to be that, ‘twill be when / You can cease to be babies, nor try to be men!”[1] The crucial adjective in these lines is the word “womanly.” Cary seeks a “womanly” writer who abandons “womanish tricks.” As a personality, this writer must locate her “womanliness” somewhere in the space between “babies” and “men.” It appears, therefore, that the “womanly” voice can be found by understanding what Cary refers to as its enemies: “womanish tricks,” the voice of “babies,” and the voice of “men.”

            Cary mentions “tricks” early on, and points out several examples. She implores her Poetess to not write “too fine.” Don’t thread your subject together with “poetical” clichés such as “golden” and “shimmer.” Don’t try to impress your reader with what a “charming creature” you are. Don’t “pull your curls over men’s eyes while they read.” These criticisms are unified in their appeal against self-dramatization, poetry to be pretty, and manipulative gushing of false emotion. In addition, they suggest that a large part of female poetry is guilty of these very things– else the criticisms would not be necessary. For some evidence, we turn first to the poet Maude and her poem “Lang Syne” from 1861: “But grief and woe are all my part; / I sit and dream those sweet days o’er, / And cry aloud in anguish sore, / ‘O May, give back my heart!” This melodramatic tragedy offers one extreme of what Cary may mean by “womanish tricks.” Another side is the too-frivolous, or too-dreamy. In “The Withered Daises” by Nancy A. W. Priest:

            She flitted like a sunbeam bright

                        Around our cottage door;

            Her footsteps, as a fairy’s light,

                        Made music on the floor.

            On every flower of wood or glade

                        She lavished childish praises,

            She loved all things the Lord has made,

                        But most she loved the Daises.

This sing-song cliché-ridden stanza could be considered farcical if not for its lack of ironic self-awareness. Priest has even mutated the word “Daisies” into “Daises” to fit her rhyme scheme. What tries to come off as a playful, innocent verse instead reveals an awkward strain to fit into a structure that is rigid to the point of impossibility. The poem resembles what we might imagine its author to be– a woman smiling cheerfully while her body is squeezed by corset and girdle barely concealed under her dress.

            One “womanish trick” may be to appear grave and serious like a man– this trick comes off as painful melodrama. Another may be the hopeless imitation of an ideal of Innocence. Both poetic voices are transparent and false. The desire to become babies or men points to insecurity concerning the woman’s own voice, or the “womanly” voice that Cary seeks. Emily Dickinson assaults the woman aspiring to perfect innocence in her poem, “What Soft - Cherubic Creatures” (poem 675)[2] The first line and the poem’s title immediately suggest a desire to combine the youthful with the pure. Yet by encasing “Cherubic Creatures” within dashes to modify the adjective “Soft,” Dickinson slams these “Gentlewomen” even as she identifies their highest ambition. She refers to them as “Plush” and “Brittle Ladies,” accusing them of possessing “A Horror so refined,” and “Dimity[3] Convictions.” Their fear to offend translates into a fear of speaking. Dickinson’s association of poetry with God leads her to conclude that they are “Of Deity - Ashamed” and that “Redemption... Be so - ashamed of [them].” Dickinson’s poem, therefore, serves to criticize the “womanish trick” of pretentious innocence while distancing Dickinson herself from the poetic voice that too closely resembles babies. Recall that Cary asked her Female Writers to “cease to be babies,” implying that most women poets start off as some version of Cherubic Creatures.

            When Dickinson cuts herself off from the Cherubic Creatures, Cary warns that she must not “try to be a man.” How does Dickinson treat the masculine poetic voice? Where does she place herself in relation to that voice, and why? One hint can be gathered from her poem, “It’s easy to invent a Life” (747). The title and first line show that she is here concerned with authorial authority. God and the poet are one. Her last stanza suggests a first step in her understanding of the Man from God’s point of view: “But His Perturbless Plan / Proceed - inserting Here - a Sun - / There - leaving out a Man -”. Her final image in this poem on authorship is the association between “Man” and “Sun.”

            This poem, alone, does not help much in understanding Dickinson’s own voice in relation to the masculine, but it can help us read another poem. Mentally associating “Man” with “Sun” gives new shading to “Of Bronze - and Blaze -” (319):

            Of Bronze - and Blaze -

            The North - tonight -

            So adequate - it forms -

            So preconcerted with itself -

            So distant - to alarms -

            An Unconcern so sovereign

            To Universe, or me -

            Infects my simple spirit

            With Taints of Majesty -

            Till I take vaster attitudes -

            And strut opon my stem -

            Disdaining Men, and Oxygen,

            For Arrogance of them -

            My Splendors, are Menagerie -

            But their Competeless Show

            Will entertain the Centuries

            When I, am long ago,

            As Island in dishonored Grass -

            Whom none but Daisies, know -

Begin with “Bronze” and “Blaze” as associates of “Sun.” Together with “North,” the North’s connotations of roughness and grandeur, and our reading of “It’s easy to Invent a Life,” the first two lines convincingly establish a Male authorial presence. This Male voice is “adequate,” “preconcerted with itself,” and “distant to alarms.” Its very existence produces its inverse, an “Unconcern” that Dickinson immediately seizes upon (or “opon”). This Unconcern is greater than the Male voice that spawned it, it is sovereign to the Universe and Dickinson herself. For the rest of the poem, Dickinson describes how the Unconcern works within her to create a poetic voice that is anti-male and opposed to every male ambition we might assume. The Unconcern “infects” her with “Taints of Majesty,” the inverse of that Bronze Blazing North. The Unconcern breeds a “vaster attitude” that allows her to disdain “Men and Oxygen,” those things that she supposedly “needs,” as a woman, to survive. She desires no competition (“Competeless”) nor honor (“An Island in dishonored Grass -”). She rests confident that her poetry will “entertain the Centuries” and her body will be remembered by “none but Daisies”– Daisies spelled correctly, that is, tucked coyly in the middle of the poetic line.

            Thus, Dickinson defines her own expression of the “womanly” voice that Cary seeks to cultivate. It is a voice that denies the cliché of its own origin, but defines itself in opposition to the ambition and haughtiness of an established cultural elite. In that way, Dickinson’s womanly voice can be both original and subversive. This allows Dickinson tremendous freedom and power both as a person and as an artist. Equipped with our awareness of her voice, we can read the following poem (557) with a deeper appreciation of her cunning:

            I send Two Sunsets -

            Day and I - in competition ran -

            I finished Two - and several Stars -

            While He - was making One -

            His own was ampler - but as I

            Was saying to a friend -

            Mine - is the more convenient

To Carry in the Hand –

Dickinson rarely published her poems. She kept them in her room or sent them to friends. Her poem was a personal artifact, one that provided her own personal freedom and her own “womanly” voice. Perhaps it was not the womanly voice that Cary is looking for. But perhaps Cary is not looking for the womanly voice. Recall that she addresses her poem to individuals, not to a “people.” Perhaps an idea of the womanly voice is contradictory. Any one womanly voice would necessarily depend on public perception, a perception that, at least in this country, is distinctly non-female. Through locating and breeding with “Unconcerns” of the public consciousness, Dickinson and Cary offer the hope of finding the true “womanly” voice.

[1]In American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, p. 526

[2]In The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin

[3]Dimity is a strong but thin cloth. Dickinson accuses the Cherubic Creatures of having firmly established but transparent and ineffective convictions.