Paula Bennett | Cristanne Miller | Mary Loeffelholz | Claudia Yukman
 

Paula Bennett, 1986

No poem written by a woman poet more perfectly captures the nature, the difficulties, and the risks involved in this task of self-redefinition and self-empowerment than the poem that stands at the center of this book, Emily Dickinson's brilliant and enigmatic "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun":

[. . . .]

Composed during the period when Dickinson had reached the height of her poetic prowess, "My Life had stood" represents the poet's most extreme attempt to characterize the Vesuvian nature of the power or art which she believed was hers. Speaking through the voice of a gun, Dickinson presents herself in this poem as everything "woman" is not: cruel not pleasant, hard not soft, emphatic not weak, one who kills not one who nurtures. just as significant, she is proud of it, so proud that the temptation is to echo Robert Lowell's notorious description of Sylvia Plath, and say that in "My Life had stood," Emily Dickinson is "hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another 'poetess.’"

Like the persona in Plath's Ariel poems, in "My Life had stood," Dickinson's speaker has deliberately shed the self-protective layers of conventional femininity, symbolized in the poem by the doe and the deep pillow of the "masochistic" eider duck. In the process the poet uncovers the true self within, in all its hardness and rage, in its desire for revenge and aggressive, even masculine, sexuality (for this is, after all, one interpretation of the gun in the poem). The picture of Dickinson that emerges, like the picture of Plath that emerges from the "big strip tease" of "Lady Lazarus" (CP245) and other Ariel poems, is not an attractive one. But, again like Plath, Dickinson is prepared to embrace it nevertheless--together with all other aspects of her unacceptable self. Indeed, embracing the true or unacceptable self appears to be the poem's raison d'etre, just as it is the raison d'etre of Plath's last poems.

In writing "My Life had stood," Dickinson clearly transgresses limits no woman, indeed no human being, could lightly afford to break. And to judge by the poem's final riddling stanza, a conundrum that critics have yet to solve satisfactorily, she knew this better than anyone. As Adrienne Rich has observed, Dickinson's underlying ambivalence toward the powers her speaker claims to exercise through her art (the powers to "hunt," "speak, " "smile," "guard," and "kill") appears to be extreme. Of this ambivalence and its effect on women poets, Rich has written most poignantly, perhaps, because of her own position as poet. For Rich there is no easy way to resolve the conflict entangling Dickinson in the poem. "If there is a female consciousness in this poem," she writes,

it is buried deeper than the images: it exists in the ambivalence toward power, which is extreme. Active willing and creation in women are forms of aggression, and aggression is both "the power to kill" and punishable by death. The union of gun with hunter embodies the danger of identifying and taking hold of her forces, not least that in so doing she risks defining herself--and being defined--as aggressive, as unwomanly ("and now We hunt the Doe"), and as potentially lethal.

Yet despite these dangers and despite her recognition of the apparent dehumanization her persona courts, in "My Life had stood" Emily Dickinson does take precisely the risks that Rich describes. In the poem's terms, she is murderous. She is a gun. Her rage is part of her being. Indeed, insofar as it permits her to explode and hence to speak, rage defines her, unwomanly and inhuman though it is. Whatever constraints existed in her daily life (the breathless and excessive femininity so well described by her preceptor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson), inwardly it would seem Emily Dickinson was not to be denied. In her art she was master of herself, whatever that self was, however aggressive, unwomanly, or even inhuman society might judge it to be.

Given Dickinson's time and upbringing, it would, of course, have been unlikely that she, any more than we today, would have been comfortable with the high degree of anger and alienation which she exhibits in this extraordinary poem. But the anger and the alienation are there and, whether we are comfortable or not, like Dickinson we must deal with them. If, as Adrienne Rich asserts, "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun" is a "central poem in understanding Emily Dickinson, and ourselves, and the condition of the woman artist, particularly in the nineteenth century," it is so precisely because Dickinson was prepared to grapple in it with so many unacceptable feelings within herself. Whatever else "My Life had stood" may be about, it is about the woman as artist, the woman who must deny her femininity, even perhaps her humanity, if she is to achieve the fullness of her self and the fullness of her power in her verse.

From My Life a Loaded Gun: Dickinson, Plath, Rich, and Female Creativity. Copyright © 1986 by Paula Bennett. Reprinted with permission of the author.

In "My Life had stood" [. . .] Dickinson compares an action in the present tense to one in the past or present perfect:

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow--
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through--

And when at Night--Our good Day done—
I guard My Master's Head--
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow--to have shared--

In the first instance, the speaker/Gun compares her smile to the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. Her smile is not like the volcano's fire or threat but like its completed act: when she smiles it is as if a volcano had erupted. The past perfect verb is more chilling than the present tense would be because it signals completion, even in the midst of a speculative ("as if') comparison; her smile has the cordiality of ash, of accomplished violence or death, not just of present fire. In the second instance, the speaker prefers guarding the master to having shared his pillow, that is, to having shared intimacy with him--primarily sexual, one would guess from the general structure of the poem. Again, the comparison contrasts action with effect rather than action with action (and when I guard . . . 'tis better than sharing ... ). As a consequence, the speaker seems ironically and almost condescendingly distant from the world of life (here, of potential life-creation or love). Shared intimacy, in her view, would bring nothing better than aggressive self-reliance does. Both uses of the perfect tense in this poem distance the speaker from humanity, perhaps as any skewed analogy would. Yet by allying herself with catastrophic power rather than sexual intimacy, she may also be indicating that the former seems more possible or safer to her; even the power of volcanoes may be known. The change in tense alerts the reader to the peculiarity and the importance of the comparisons.

From Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar. Copyright © 1987 by Harvard University Press.

The Dickinson poem that Rich so presciently invoked in 1965, "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun" (poem 754), has since then attracted diverse interpretations, especially feminist interpretations. It has become the locus of discussion for feminist critics concerned about accounting in some way for the aggression of Dickinson's poetry, beginning with Rich herself. In her 1975 essay "Vesuvius at Home," Rich names "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--" as the "'onlie begetter"' of her vision of Dickinson, the poem Rich had "taken into myself over many years."' The language of Rich's critical essay suggestively echoes the issues of the poems Dickinson had already haunted and would later haunt for Rich. While not explicitly violent in the way of Dickinson's loaded gun, Rich's metaphor of incorporating, eating Dickinson's poem establishes, but only to transgress, the boundary between inside and outside. Invoking the dedication to the "onlie begetter" of Shakespeare's sonnets identifies Dickinson's poem with a male literary tradition (although the overriding aim of Rich's essay is to link Dickinson to other women writers) and identifies Dickinson herself with a phallic power (the loaded gun's power) of inseminating Rich's thoughts. It is hardly necessary to add that Rich's language is intimately, evocatively complicit in these respects with the language of Dickinson's poem itself. What it means to be inside or outside another identity; what it means to "take in" or possess; the very meaning of a boundary--are put into question by "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun--." In this and other poems, Dickinson's often violent transactions with what is "outside" her reflect a situation for women poets of the dominant Anglo-American tradition in which, according to Joanne Feit Diehl, "the 'Other' is particularly dangerous ... because he recognizes no boundaries, extending his presence into and through herself, where the self's physical processes, such as breath and pain, may assume a male identity." The male Other who occasions her speech may also commandeer her very bodily identity, leaving nno refuge of interiority that is her own. Adrienne Rich’s reading of "My Life had stood—" internalizes Dickinson's struggle with the problem of boundary and violence, rendering Dickinson both as the Other male ravisher and as an aspect of Rich's own interior.

From Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory. Copyright © 1991 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

The object status of a subject within a narrative is dramatically played out in Dickinson's frequently discussed poem, "My
Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun -- ." In this poem the subject fears the permanence of the text as much as death, or rather,
fears the overdetermination of her subjectivity by the text more than "the power to die."

[. . . .]

The term "identified" elsewhere in Dickinson's poetry and in her culture at large refers to the conversion experience that
authorizes the Christian to view his or her life as typified by the narrative of Christ's life. To be able to tell this story, like learning
language, permits the individual to be a Christian to another Christian and to herself. Dickinson's poem is told by the object it is
about and thus gives expression to the object positions we all occupy within social-symbolic codes. The Christian narrative form in this poem is enacted as the object/instrument life of the gun. The master gives dramatic form to the prior narrative, or
master story, which confers identity on the gun. The "Sovereign Woods" designate the limits within which both the master and
gun are free, an analogue for the freedom invented by, but limited to, the Christian narrative.

But during the process of the poem the object (the gun) increasingly takes on subject status. Already in the second verse the gun speaks "for" the master, which is to say she perceives her function as an extension of his power: his will and figuratively, his voice. But in the mountain's reply to this speech the gun experiences her own singular effect on the world. In the third verse she no longer acts for the master but describes an exchange between herself and the mountain. There is a greater equality between the gun and the mountain than between the master and the gun because they respond to each other's alterity or otherness. Interestingly, this situation of alterity and reciprocity is represented as the elision of narrative (in the loss of a syntactical antecedent to the pronoun "it") in the line "It is as a Vesuvian face / Had let its pleasure through." In recognizing the alterity symbolized by the "reply" of the mountain, which entails that it recognize its own otherness, the gun experiences an identity distinct from her purpose in the master's life (or the master story). In the fourth verse, though she still serves her master by "guarding his head," the gun expresses preference for the pleasure her autonomy and alterity allow her."'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's / Deep pillow -- to have shared -- " to guard the master's head.

But perhaps more significantly, in the next to the last stanza she speaks of herself as bodily. In effect, the master disappears, his story, the prior narrative, eclipsed by the difference rendered as the gun's increasing embodiment.

To foe of His -- I'm deadly foe --
None stir the second time --
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye --
Or an emphatic Thumb --

Again, as was the case in "I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died," the narrative frame is broken by the bodily frame of experience.
The object of the story becomes a subject at the same time it comes to perceive itself as bodily.

Given this reading of the poem, the ambiguity of the ending, "Though I than He -- may longer live / He longer must -- than I -- / For I have but the power to kill, / Without -- the power to die -- " (like "to see to see") represents the difficulty and relative success Dickinson has in creating a text that will preserve a relationship of equality between herself and her reader, imaged in the exchange between the gun and the mountain within the poem. Dickinson is using a text to free herself from the restrictive and destructive freedom of the Christian narrative frame. We, her readers, come upon her poem as a prior text, which we may read as our master story because it is prior. The danger of inventing a new relationship between writer and reader is suggested in the figures of the gun and the mountain. They are both images of potential violence, and their unchecked pleasure or power, if we take the allusion to the volcano Vesuvias literally, would ultimately be desructive of life. In other words, there is a danger in escaping one form of identity only to become mastered by another. In our desire for identity we bring the words we read, whether those of the Bible or Dickinson's poem, to life. The words that liberate us in turn become the limits of identity. Dickinson's works demonstrate that the only way to prevent oneself from being "framed" by language is to keep writing one's way out.

from "Breaking the Eschatological Frame:  Dickinson's Narrative Acts." Emily Dickinson Journal Vol. 1, No. 1 1992. Online source: http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/articles/I.1.Yukman.html