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written permission from the JHU Press. In the flyleaf of a tiny brown (crumbling) leather volume, the 1819 Benjamin Warner edition of Paradise Lost, is a penciled "E Dickinson." At least forty-eight of its pages, pages crowded with tiny unnumbered lines, show signs of reading: penciled marks jutting horizontally into the text on the left margin, long vertical lines stretching on the right margin, small x marks, references to other pages, and creases of a corner turned as a marker. Obviously, we cannot know who made those marks in the little book that lives now in Harvard's Houghton Library. This paper does not attempt to establish the unprovable. Whether or not this is the volume that caused Rebecca Patterson to remark that Emily Dickinson studied Paradise Lost "as a poetic textbook" (186), the markings form an intriguing map to Dickinson's journey through the text of the man whom George F. Sensabaugh tells us "ranged more variously over the moral, spiritual, and intellectual life of [America] than any one man" (305) and whom Dickinson (in L1038 to Mrs. Holland) dryly labeled "the great florist."
Emily Dickinson Journal readers need no reminder of how deeply steeped Dickinson's culture was in Milton, of how she might have absorbed him through Emerson, Melville, the Brontės, the Brownings, George Eliot -- to name a few. Just so, they know how deeply steeped she was in Milton's own biblical text. Recently, R. McClure Smith has pointed out that "the would-be graduate of Mount Holyoke apparently was expected to leave with as thorough a knowledge of Paradise Lost as she had of the King James Bible." In fact, says Smith, all graduates of the 1845 class (Dickinson was there two years later) were required to explicate and note biblical parallels in what Smith calls "the quintessential narrative of seduction" (34). Although this 1819 edition is listed by Carlton Lowenberg as one of the textbooks at Mt. Holyoke Seminary [End Page 55] and although it was in the family library, we do not know with certainty whether or not this was the one used by the young poet as she studied Milton under Miss Mann (re-imagined so vividly in Judith Farr's novel). 1
Without necessarily making that claim and also without necessarily claiming that Milton was more important to Dickinson than, say, Shakespeare or Tennyson or Keats or Barrett Browning, I am called by that little Milton volume to take a fresh -- indeed, almost a first -- look at Milton's influence on Dickinson's imagery 2 and at the ways she used that influence for her versions of the biblical text's interpretation of the woman she called, however ironically, "our timid Mother" (P1335) -- her twist on Milton's "our credulous Mother"(9:644). 3 Disclaimers aside, the marks alert us to listen to echoes as we imagine Dickinson's way through Milton's wandering Ways 4 to "Paradise fictitious" (P1260).
She knew those ways well. At least seven letters spanning forty years (at sixteen to Abiah -- "I am Eve, alias Mrs. Adam" [L9]; at twenty to her "Dearest of all dear Uncles" [L29]; and just before her death to Mrs. Holland [L1038], among them) 5 and scores of poems paraphrase or quote him, proving Christopher Benfey's suspicion "that Dickinson knew all her own poetry by heart, as well as huge passages from Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning" (14).
As she was toward God, Dickinson may have been ambivalent about Milton. Perhaps he was just another of the Autumn poets toward whom, as Sandra Gilbert says, Dickinson spoke with "an elliptical expression of literary scorn" (132); perhaps, as Paula Bennett puts it, he was "too 'Vermillion'" for Dickinson (69). On the other hand, perhaps he was one of "The Martyr Poets -" who "wrought their Pang in syllable - / That when their mortal name be numb - / Their mortal fate - encourage Some -" (P544).
In her family library there was plenty of ammunition for the latter reading. Robert Chambers' Cyclopedia of English Literature, for example, told its readers not only that Milton adapted the biblical story for his own purposes, implying something along the lines of Christopher Hill's view of Milton as "a radical Protestant heretic . . . living in a state of permanent dialogue with radical views" (39 and 113). Evoking the image of the martyr poet, Chambers also emphasized Milton's losses: of sight, of partner, of position.
Most important, however, is the possibility that Dickinson, whose radicalism may have evolved from rage 6 at such injustices as that God did to Old Moses (P597), recognized that Milton's apostasy, as some see it, 7 was close to her own. As Lynn Shakinovsky's discussion in this Journal put it, Dickinson's voice was "aware of both a sense of emptiness and loss and of the powerful [End Page 56] possibilities contained in rage" (32). The markings in that little Milton edition are one means of seeing how Dickinson might have been influenced by Milton's poetics, Milton's God, and Milton's struggling, disappointed humans. Just so, they hint that perhaps most of all, she was influenced by Milton's Satan tumbling through space, testing bridges to Paradise, observing the human love he would never share, railing at his stupid cohorts, and attempting with bravado and silver words to outwit the God who denied him Heaven, Eden, and Earth. For it is in fact Satan, followed closely by Eve, who seems most to have interested Milton -- and, judging from her marks and from her poems, Dickinson.
Benjamin Lease reminds us that the last paragraph of Higginson's "Letter to a Young Contributor" ends with a call to "the mute inglorious Miltons of this sphere" to "sing their Paradise as Found" (76). 8 Dickinson answered in another key as did, according to Joseph Wittreich and Barbara Lewalski, other nineteenth-century women. Wittreich and Lewalski call us to revise the proposition of Gilbert and Gubar, Christine Froula, and others that "Milton's Bogey" haunted and required exorcism by women writers who saw Milton himself as a "patriarchal specter," Adam as God's favorite, and Eve as Satanically inspired (Gilbert and Gubar 188). As Wittreich says, "women writers learned from Milton and gathered from his poetry strategies for obfuscating without altogether obscuring their subversive impulses -- strategies for privatizing their often risky and sometimes dangerous vision" (43).
Dickinson's "risky and sometimes dangerous vision" is most apparent, perhaps, in her sideways reflections of Milton's most tragic character. Satan's name appears in only one of her poems, one that begins as a slyly funny one: "The Bible is an antique Volume - / Written by faded Men / At the suggestion of Holy Spectres -" (P1545). "Satan - the Brigadier -" is third in a list of cautionary subjects that Dickinson contrasts to "Orpheus' Sermon." In contrast to the "antique Volume," the "faded Men," and the "Holy Spectres - ," she says, "Orpheus' Sermon captivated - / It did not condemn." This may be the only overt reference to the character about whom Milton seems sympathetic ("pain is perfet miserie, the worst/ Of evils, and excessive, overturns/ All patience" [6:461-464], for example), but Satan's banishment from a stolid, stern God may have seemed paradigmatic to Dickinson, who also created an exile who "Years had been from Home" but who fears "a Face," a face, perhaps, not unlike the stern and banishing God of Satan's experience, that might "Stare stolid into mine / And ask my Business there -" (P609).
Just so, Satan's terrible loneliness, a loneliness borne of his recognition of loss, must have resonated with the poet who writes of flinging speech "in [End Page 57] God's Ear - / If then He hear -" with the emphasis on the "if" ("Prayer is the little implement" [P437]). Milton's Satan might have resonated, too, with the poet who wrote of God's "care" about our prayers in "Of Course - I prayed -" (P376): "He cared as much as on the Air / A Bird - had stamped her foot." Behind these lines hover Adam's words to Michael, who has brought the news of the first couple's banishment: "But prayer against his absolute Decree / No more avails then breath against the wind, / Blown stifling back on him that breaths it forth" (11:310-312).
From the beginning of both the epic and of Dickinson's surviving letters to the world, one might note the comparable championing of Milton's introductory invocation to Moses and Dickinson's defense of him against God in "Could we stand with that Old 'Moses' -" (P168), but there are no marks at this passage in the little brown book. The lines are clearly pencil marked that follow the introduction to Satan, who, cast out from heaven, is tormented with "the thought / Both of lost happiness and lasting pain . . . Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate" (l:54-58). The marked passage, reflected in Dickinson's dialogues with God, iterates the darkness, wildness, and hopelessness of Satan's hell: in the brown book tiny horizontal pencil lines are wedged between each line:
At once as far as angels kenn, he views
The dismal Situation waste and wild
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible . . .
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all. . . .
For those rebellious, here thir Prison ordain'd
In utter darkness. . .
O how unlike the place from whence they fell!
(1:59-75).
On the last line there is a change from the horizontal slice: an arrow marks the exclamation of woe, and several lines later an "X" begins and ends this stubborn declaration from Satan: "Yet not for those / Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage / Can else inflict, do I repent or change" (1:93-95). [End Page 58]
You hear the Dickinson image clusters in Milton's Satan. As did Milton's character, Dickinson's persona prefers the dark, the condition that "felt beautiful" for the poetic enterprise ("I think I was enchanted" [P593]), the darkness to which the speaker grew accustomed and to which she fit her vision ("We grow accustomed to the Dark -" P419). As did Milton's Satan, Dickinson's "I" dwells in and probes polar distances from God, the "solitude of sea . . . That polar privacy / A soul admitted to itself - / Finite Infinity" ("There is a solitude of space" [P1695]). Both poets explore imprisonment in spiritual stubbornness in which
A Prison gets to be a friend -
. . .
We learn to know the Planks -
that answer to Our feet -
So miserable a sound - at first -
Nor even now - so sweet"
(P652)
Further, the marked passages suggest, as do Dickinson's poems, that such spiritual stubbornness substitutes both for despair and hope. In "A Prison gets to be a friend -" the imprisoned speaker regrets
The slow exchange of Hope -
For something passiver - Content
Too steep for looking up -
The Liberty we knew
Avoided - like a Dream -
(P652)
Perhaps the strongest echo is that of the Miltonic Satan's "Situation waste and wild." For both Milton and Dickinson "wild" and "wilderness" are loaded words. In at least eight poems Dickinson links "My Wilderness" (P1233) to renunciation, deprivation, and death.9
Later in the passage that I have just quoted, in addition to the horizontal lines, someone has placed small "x" signs on either side of these words "yet not for those [fallen Angels], / Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage can else inflict, do I repent or change." As Milton seems here to endow his thwarted, stubborn Satan with tragedy, one thinks of what Dickinson's narrator calls [End Page 59] "this smart Misery" of disappointed prayer ("Of course - I prayed -" [P376]) and the "Beggary" of losing faith ("To lose one's faith," [P377]). This tonal similarity reifies Joseph Wittreich's comment that nineteenth-century women readers recognized the link with Satan: "Satan is a Prometheus," says Wittreich, and "the plight of women requires of them a Promethean patience and endurance" (2).
The person behind the pencil-wielding hand seemed to respect that complexity. That person marked with double vertical lines the effect of Satan's speech to the fallen hosts (1:330) that begins "Awake, arise; or be for ever fall'n." Under line 331 are double horizontal lines: "They heard, and were abasht, and up they sprung" (1:331). An "x" marks a simile involving Moses and another "x" marks the catalogue of ancient Egyptian deities and the opening of Satan's speech (1:622) that includes this most overt challenge to God: "that he no less / At length from us may find, who overcomes / By force, hath overcome but half his foe" (1:647-649). In this passage Milton's story conveys --and this differs radically from the Genesis story -- the notion of a bullying deity who in Dickinson's poems becomes a teasing God, one who withdraws the longed for prize almost for sport, as, for example in "The nearest Dream recedes - unrealized-," where the June Bee is metonymic for a force in the world that "Dips - evades - teases - deploys -" (P319).
Cynthia Griffin Wolff, one of the few to note Dickinson's Miltonic resonances, remarks on lines not marked in the brown book but obviously important to Dickinson:
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell a Hell of Heav'n . . .
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
(I: 254-263)
This declaration of independence, notes Wolff, shows up in Dickinson's "litany of loss." The speaker of "A loss of something ever felt I -" (P959) compares her or himself to "one bemoaning a Dominion / Itself the only Prince cast out - . . . still softly searching / For my Delinquent Palaces -" (Wolff 420).10
Such passages lead us to apply to Dickinson what William Empson says about Milton: that "the poem [Paradise Lost] is not good in spite of but because of its moral confusions." Empson continues, "I regard it as like Aztec or Benin sculpture . . . or the novels of Kafka" (13). So might one read many of Dickinson's dramas. [End Page 60]
Books 2 and 3 are so full of marks that one can scarcely maintain a cool objectivity about who made them. For example, on both the right and left sides of the description of Satan in Book 2, the hand has left an asterisk:
and from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high insatiate to pursue
Vain Warr with Heav'n, and by success untaught
His proud imaginations thus displaid
(2:6-10) italics mine
Along with the asterisks are penciled directions--one to "p.167," the other to "p.168." No marks appear on either of those pages, but they, too -- portions in Book 6 referring to the confrontation with Michael, his amazement "That thou shouldst hope" to overthrow Heaven, to turn it into Hell -- have to do with Satan's loss of hope. Other marked portions focus on "hope," as well. No Dickinson reader needs to hear the list of Dickinson's definitions of "hope," not all of which are as famous or Hallmark-y as "the thing with feathers -" (P254). As for Satan, his disdain, his substitute for hope and for fear, is born of despair.
That triad of causally connected emotions -- fearlessness, hopelessness, and disdain -- with which Milton has endowed Satan (we could look at Book 4:83-96 :"Disdain forbids me. . ." and Book 4:106-110 : "So farwell Hope, and with Hope farwell Fear,/ Farwell Remorse) seems to anticipate many of Dickinson's meditations on Hope. While the definition poems are in the present (Hope is a subtle Glutton [P1547], is a strange invention [P1392], has a fictitious charter [P1283] -- italics mine), her experience with it -- or the experience of her narrative voices -- like that of Satan, is largely one of the past: "When I hoped I feared -" (P1181) and "When I hoped, I recollect" (P768), for example.
Book 4 holds a passage not marked with a pencil but spotted with something (candle wax? food?) by an early reader: Satan's soliloquy that begins "What could be less than to afford him praise" and ends "Me miserable! which way shall I flie / Infinite wrauth and infinite despair? / Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell" (4:73-75) seems to prefigure Dickinson's version of Satan:
Me from Myself - to banish -
Had I Art - [End Page 61]
Invincible my Fortress
Unto All Heart -
But since Myself - assault Me -
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?
And since We're mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication -
Me - of Me?
(P642)
More than the rhetorical balance bespeaks an assumption of a Miltonic Satan here. The royal and military vocabulary reflects the warrior outcast prince, darkly clinging to his fallen selfhood. Other gridworks link Milton and Dickinson through that little book. Dickinson's "Remorse - is Memory - awake / . . . /. . . The Adequate of Hell" (P744) echoes Milton's Satan, his memory continually alive, plunging into hell.
That hell provides a geography of loss and separation from God. "The hollow Abyss" of the "Stygian Counsel" is deep and far from Heaven, and it is marked in the little 1819 edition. It is also echoed in such poems as "I saw no Way - the Heavens were stitched - /I felt the Columns close -" (P378), in which the speaker, like Satan cast out, is "alone - / A Speck upon a Ball -" (P378). Vivid terrors of the Miltonic landscape of fallen Satan ("all unawares / Fluttering his pennons vain plumb down he drops / In thousand thousand fadom deep . . . . Instinct with Fire and Nitre hurried him" [2:933-937]) and his Host who "Fled not in silence through the frighted deep/ With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, / Confusion worse confounded" (2:993-995) seem to have shaped the imagination of the reader who relished the Gothic. Consider the way Dickinson's compression intensifies this horror in, for example, the Poe-like horror of "'Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch, / That nearer every Day, / Kept narrowing it's boiling Wheel / Until the Agony / Toyed coolly with the final inch of your delirious Hem - And you dropt, lost" (P414).11 And consider this for a revision of the world of Satan: [End Page 62]
And 'twas like Midnight, some -
When everything that ticked - has stopped -
And Space stares all around -
. . .
But, most, like Chaos - Stopless - cool -
Without a Chance, or Spar -
Or even a Report of Land-
To justify - Despair.
("It was not Death," P510)
Milton's (and Dickinson's) geography of Hell is spacious and chaotic, but the anguish of reeling through its vast reaches is intensified by the strangely oxymoronic proximity of the unattainable heaven above and earth somewhere adjacent. For Milton, by the end of Book 2 Satan moves toward earth, tenderly describing it as being "fast by hanging in a golden Chain. / This pendant world, in bigness a Starr / Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon" (2:1050-1051). Book 3 begins as Satan "surveyed Hell and the Gulf between," and seeing it, "wings his way . . . Directly toward the new created World" (3:73, 87-88). Such proximity is eerier in Dickinson's imagining of
A Pit - but Heaven over it -
. . .
The depth is all my thought -
I dare not ask my feet -
"Twould start us where we sit
So straight you'd scarce suspect
It was a Pit - with fathoms under it -
. . .
(P1712)
This nightmare geography seems almost inevitable from someone who read (and possibly marked) these lines in Milton's Book 2: "the void profound / of inessential Night . . . wide gaping . . . [which] threatens [Satan], plungd in that abortive gulf" (2:438-440). Passages marked and close to those marked, anticipate the geography of Dickinson's nightmare world: amorphous, huge, the "vast vacuitie" in which Satan despairs. [End Page 63]
Lacing this geography--in both Milton and Dickinson are bridges, piers, planks. Milton describes the "Bridge / of length prodigious joyning to the passage Wall /. . . Broad, / Smooth easie" (10:301-4), which "portentous Bridge[s] the dark Abyss" (10:371). Milton puns with "the wondrous Art / Pontifical . . . with Pinns of Adamant / And Chains they made all fast" (10:312-319), slyly suggesting a connection between the architecture of Satan and Catholic hierarchy. If Milton's notion of Satan as Architect is subversive, consider Dickinson's bridge-building God: "How brittle are the Piers / On which our Faith doth tread," she says. Dickinson's bridge of faith "is as old as God - / Indeed - 'twas built by him" (P1433). Punning with "pierless," as Milton does with "pontifical," she also says, "Faith - is the Pierless Bridge" (P915). Over some such pierless bridge Dickinson's narrator steps warily, almost desperately: "I stepped from Plank to Plank," she says, speaking of her "precarious Gait / Some call Experience" (P875).
Over such bridges Satan and the Dickinson of many poems maneuver by way of angled roads. Dickinson's slant ways to truth suggest the poet's visualization of Milton's "oblique" route of Satan down to Eden where the first couple tend their garden in separate fields, the site of the momentous temptation. Perhaps she noted Raphael's counsel to Adam to take the plain path, to which Dickinson responds with what Barton St. Armand calls a "deliberately childlike refutation of Calvinism's double-entry bookkeeping" (90):
You're right - "the way is narrow" -
And "difficult the Gate" -
And "few there be" - Correct again-
That "enter in - thereat" -
(P234)
Dickinson's quotation marks around verses that have become devalued to cliché seem subversive, seem evidence of what Suzanne Juhasz, likening the process to that of the Edenic couple, calls "lock-picking" (141).
The Edenic couple -- and Dickinson's scornful speaker -- are lock picking, as it were, at the door of God. Milton's stolid God preaches alarmingly (in portions in that brown volume's Book 3 close to lines marked by that pencil) that [End Page 64]
'Disloyal' [humankind] with his whole posteritie must die,
Die hee or Justice must; unless for him
Som other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death"
(3:209-212)
Such a "just" and rigid God makes his way into Dickinson's work. Far from her playful Garden church's bird, "the noted clergyman" who makes the garden sing in "Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church" (P324), her God is usually more Miltonic. The Dickinson narrator, for example, snaps at God in "I never lost as much but twice" (P49):
Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!
. . . .
Burglar! Banker - Father!
I am poor once more!
In these lines we think of a later more direct reference to Milton and to God's parsimony in "Bliss is frugal of her Leases /Adam taught her Thrift / Bankrupt once through his excesses -" ("Paradise is that old mansion" P1119).
What interests Milton (and us) more than this harsh God, more even than the couple he created to love and obey him, is the imagery of loss and grief as Satan beholds them. His first reaction is anger at his Creator. Karl Keller's remark that "God was Emily Dickinson's only real male test case," that "she had the potency to drive him out, to displace him," that "she sought and found him but her own dark shadow was always larger than his white face" (70), parallels that of many readers (including Dickinson), who find Satan's challenge to the white face of his God as brave as it is startling.
Looking toward Eden in Book 4, Satan blames God for creating his fatal ambition: "O had his powerful Destiny ordaind / Me some inferior Angel, I had stood / Then happie; no unbounded hope had raised" (4:58-60). Beholding Eden and its happy couple, he reacts with heartbreakingly understated pain: "The Fiend / Saw undelighted all delight" (4:285-6). And in the soliloquy that breaks his uncharacteristic silence, Satan pulls us to sympathy: [End Page 65]
. . . Yet no purpos'd foe
To you whom I could pittie thus forlorn
Though I unpittied. League with you I seek,
And mutual amitie
(4:373-376)
Satan spies on the prelapsarian love scene "abasht," reminding the Dickinson reader of "The Porter of my Father's Lodge / [who] abasheth me" (P608).12 Feeling "how awful goodness is" (4:846-849), he "pin'd/ His loss"; the passage anticipates the emotional weight of Dickinson's
This is the place they hoped before,
Where I am hoping now.
The seed of disappointment grew
Within a capsule gay,
Too distant to arrest the feet
That walk this plank of balm -
Before them lies escapeless sea -
The way is closed they came.
(P1264)
The conjunction of Satan and the first couple in Book 4 is well marked in the little brown volume. On the page on which the serpent first sees the innocent lovers and is made speechless the bottom corner of the page is turned; in the next book the page has been turned down in the upper right corner on the dinner scene (5:436-491), and in Book 8's account of uxorious Adam's memory of his wife's creation the pencil has skimmed the entire selection on both sides of the margins (460-490), as in Book 9's passage on Adam's reactions to Eve's fall (9:899-966) and Adam's pleading, bargaining, blaming session with God in Book 10 (136-156). These lines and those of Eve -- reflecting joyous love and horror at the possibility of separation, a willingness to die together rather than be separated -- bear out Wittreich's claim that "it was not just Satan who analogized their [women's] condition -- there was also Eve . . . For women to know their history was for them to know their Milton" (4).
Neither Wittreich nor Barbara Lewalski, whose 1990 return to her earlier studies on Milton's women posits the fierce, sweet strength of Eve13, mentions [End Page 66] Dickinson, but both shed light on the obviously powerful response of Dickinson to her "timid Mother." Even the playful letters ("I have lately come to the conclusion that I am Eve, alias Mrs. Adam" [L9] and her earliest known poems show that she knew her Milton and absorbed his Eve. Consider the open and joyous sexuality of such poems as "Wild Nights -" (P249); consider her willingness to consort with the "Worm" and be "fathomed" by him ("in Winter in my Room" [P1670]). When Dickinson writes "Forever at His side to walk - /. . . Brain of His Brain - / Blood of His Blood -" (P246), she becomes Eve remembering Adam's first words to her: "Bone of my Bone, Flesh of my Flesh, my self / Before me" (8:495-496). And when she writes,
I cannot live with You -
It would be Life -
. . .
I could not die - with You -
For One must wait
To shut the Other's Gaze down -
You - could not -
(P640)
she becomes part of the anguished couple facing separation because one could "rise"; the other "had no more Eyes / For sordid excellence / As Paradise." She merges with Eve who says, "for bliss, as thou hast past, to me is bliss / Tedious unshared with thee, and odious soon . . . I then too late renounce Deitie for thee" (9:879-885). She reflects Eve who begs, Forsake me not thus, Adam witness Heaven / What love sincere and reverence in my heart I bear thee, and unweeting have offended, / Unhappily deceav'd" (10:914-916). And how can we read the following poem and not think of Milton's Eve's fears and grief:
Because that you are going
And never coming back
. . . .
Because that Death is final,
However first it be
This instant be suspended
Above Mortality -
. . . . [End Page 67]
The "Life that is" will then have been
A thing I never knew -
As Paradise fictitious
Until the Realm of you -
(P1260)
Dickinson turns "our credulous Mother" (9:644) into "our timid Mother" as she extends Eve's story into her own drama:
Not when we know, the Power accosts -
The Garment of Surprise
Was all our timid Mother wore
At Home - in Paradise
(P1335)
"Credulous"? "Timid"? The Eves of Milton and Dickinson nevertheless challenge the male patriarchy. Barbara Lewalski reminds us that it is Eve--not simply as a victim of Satan or of her husband's patronizing sermonizing--who has the last spoken words in Paradise Lost. The words, in sonnet form, celebrate the power of woman: "By mee the Promis'd Seed shall all restore" (12:623). In giving Eve this last lovely word, as Wittreich points out, Milton allows "his / story to modulate into her / story and her celebration" (105).
Suggesting typology with Mary, portrayed through Christian iconography as crowned, Milton's Eve anticipates the Dickinson who tells us that in "ceding," in ceasing to be "Their's," she has positioned herself as "Adequate - Erect, / With Will to choose, or to reject, / And I choose, just a Crown -" (P508). Those who rail at Milton's misogyny for creating a woman who appears, early on, to be "Nobody," who, in fact, needs to see her own reflection in order to identify herself, might take the advice of Wittreich, Lewalski, and also Alicia Ostriker, who reminds us of "Blake's Milton, a poet who is of the devil's party without knowing it" and "is the most duplicitous poet in the language" (Stealing 41). Such "duplicity," a term Ostriker substitutes for "irony," is exactly what creates Dickinson's power. Poets like Milton and Dickinson, says Ostriker, "reject what they commend, commend what they reject. Their delight, their strength derives from their doubleness." Explaining that passage in a later interview, contained in her Feminist Revision and the Bible Ostriker says,
Again, while trying to understand the strategy of duplicity in Emily Dickinson, I suddenly realized that the [End Page 68] most duplicitous of poets was not a woman but John Milton. Duplicity is by no means confined to females but occurs whenever a great artist urgently needs to express something forbidden by the internal censor. In Dickinson's case the lust for power and fame were forbidden, because she was a nineteenth-century maiden lady; in Milton's case the joy of rebelling against a tyrannical God was forbidden because he was a seventeenth-century Puritan (106-107).
No wonder we hear traces of that early Puritan rebel in that later one. With her "Vast Prairies of Air // Unbroken by a Settler-" (P564), in which dwells "God . . . this Curious Friend -" on the one hand and her ugly Toad that "can die of Light -" (P583), reminding us of Satan sitting "Squat like a Toad close at the ear of Eve" on the other, Dickinson reflects the complicated, contrary, powerfully human epic of a very great "florist" indeed.
Reading such poems -- and how many more there are like them -- how can we doubt that Emily Dickinson is a prime candidate for the marker of the passages in the little brown volume that now rests in the Houghton? As she read, she must have thought,
As old as Woe -
How old is that?
Some eighteen thousand years -
As old as Bliss
How old is that
They are of equal years
Together chiefest they are found
But seldom side by side
From neither of them tho' he try
Can human nature hide
(P1168)
Eleanor Heginbotham is Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University St. Paul, where she teaches American literature, journalism, writing, and methods of teaching English. A member of the board of the Emily Dickinson International Society, she has published on the influence of Shakespeare on Dickinson and is working on a book-length study of selected fascicles.
1. For one thing, this copy is not the only candidate. Jack Capps lists the1801 Baker and Scribner edition as one of the textbooks in use at Mount Holyoke in 1847-48 (190), and Lowenberg lists another besides this Benjamin Warner edition: the Phillips and Sampson edition of 1847.
2. Early studies in fact, lead us away from such source sleuthing. Jack L.Capps, for example, says, "although she probably enjoyed Milton thoroughly,she found no place for the involved apparatus of classical and Christian mythology characteristic of his grand style" (72), and George Whicher maintains that there is no positive indication that Emily knew Chaucer or Spenser or Milton." Admitting that "she could hardly have grown up in Amherst a century ago without being inducted into Paradise Lost, Whicher [in 1938] knew of only "one quotation from Milton . . . [and that] had become such a common saying that she was probably not conscious of its origin" (210). This is in keeping with what Paula Bennett reports the infamous Charles Meigs to have said of women, that "the strength of Milton's poetic vision was far beyond her fine and delicate perceptions" (150-151). Bennett is one of those readers who have noted Dickinson's reading and also her re-direction of Miltonic images. George Monteiro, for example, calls Dickinson's poems "an astringent evaluation" of Milton's views. See, too, Cynthia Griffin Wolff (especially 156, 330, 370, 420); Joanna Yin (74); and Wolfgang E.H. Rudat's study of PLIX and P1558. Particularly interesting is Martha Nell Smith's comment that a reference in L85 to "the John-Milton Browns" is, perhaps, "a dim view of those who would dogmatically either reduce the epic Paradise Lost to a religious treatise or regard it as heresy" (169).
3. Because the little book in the Houghton has no numbered lines and is available in the library only, I cite references to Paradise Lost from a more convenient edition, that of T. John Shawcross. Other epithets for Eve that might have registered with Dickinson include "mother of the human Race" (4:475), "accomplisht Eve"(4:660), "much deceav'd, much failing, hapless Eve" (9:404), and, from Adam, "ingrateful Eve" (9:1164).
4. Again, not claiming such coincidences as proof of influence, one hears echoes in Dickinson's many wanderers, particularly the metonymic Arctic flower that "wandered in" to "Eden" (P180) and "the wandering Bird" (P846), of the iterative "wanderings" in Milton (7:302, 7:330, and 8:186, for instance), which culminate in the famous "wandering steps and slow" of the epic's ending.
5. Some years ago Martha Nell Smith encouraged this discussion by pointing out to me that an 1852 letter to Sue (L85) contains one of Dickinson's most direct borrowings of Milton: "'Herein is love.' But that was Heaven-- this is but Earth, Earth so like to heaven, that I would hesitate, should the true one call away," an echo Thomas Johnson missed of "Though what if Earth / Be but the shadow of Heav'n, and things therein / Each and the other like, more than is thought?" (5:574-76). Other references to Milton's themes and images appear in Letters 693, 802, 890, and 892.
6. Not all see Dickinson in this way. Among those who discuss Dickinson as genuinely devotional are Dorothy Oberhaus, Rowena Jones, John S. Wheatcroft, Joan D'Arcy Phelan. On the other hand, see Margaret Homans, for one sample among many of those who see Dickinson's rage toward "the Bible's calumnies" (29).
7. Along with Christopher Hill, see Barbara Lewalski.
8. Lease does not mention it, but Higginson had used Milton to challenge women in an earlier edition of the Atlantic Monthly, a journal which was part of the Dickinson family since its first issue. In the February 1859 issue's "Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?" Higginson somewhat playfully posits a new Eve: "It is true that Eve ruined us all,