Emily Dickinson’s Legacy Is Incomplete Without Discussing Trauma
To those who think, ‘Who cares?’ I say Emily’s truth matters.
I picture her writing by oil lamp in the dead of night, dressed in white, seated at a tiny desk. A wisp of red hair falls across her face, but she is lost in a world of words while the rest of the household, in fact all of Amherst, sleeps. Over 150 years later I am burning my own midnight oil with these words — her words — and the secret messages I think they encode won’t let me sleep.
“The Myth,” she was called; a “partially cracked poetess;” “Queen Recluse.” Even today, the adjectives “reclusive” and “eccentric” are frequently found near her name, along with admissions of bafflement. “No one knows why Emily Dickinson…lived reclusively at her family’s Homestead,” states the website for the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst. “No one knows just when or why Dickinson began to wear white,” Jane Wald, the museum’s executive director, writes on the New York Botanical Garden blog. “Emily’s refusal to publish work under her own name is a decision that has never been fully explained,” writes Helen Tope for Artsculture.
Agoraphobia, social phobia, lupus, epilepsy, and a vaguely defined eye ailment are several of the explanations offered today for Emily’s withdrawal from society. Many point to…
