Supplemental Essay: "Gender Personas" in
Chapter 24 of Sexual Personae

 

​I have been using the device of Dionysian-leaning androgynes versus Apollonian-leaning androgynes to illustrate the dynamics of the last few chapters. Viewed through the lens of that dichotomy, Paglia appears to be describing Emily Dickinson as a Dionysian-leaning androgyne.

 

To recap the difference between Dionysian- and Apollonian-leaning androgynes:

• Chapters 19 and 22-23 of Sexual Personae described Dionysian-leaning Decadent androgynes: Dionysian-leaning androgynes indulge their Dionysian side by seeking out commanding mother figures and becoming devoted to them. They normally repress their Apollonian side; but if they become overly obsessed in their devotion to mother figures, their repressed Apollonian side may return in daemonic form as asceticism and hierarchism; it may turn their attraction to mother figures into a masochistic worship of cruel, punishing mother figures in the form of female vampires. Pain and subservience to such vampires provide Apollonian hierarchy and structure. Eventually such androgynes may rebel and destroy the object of their devotion in the hope of breaking free and restoring their detachment from the world.

• Chapters 20 and 21 of Sexual Personae described Apollonian-leaning Decadent androgynes: Apollonian-leaning androgynes indulge their Apollonian side by practicing aggressive aestheticism and hierarchism. They normally repress their Dionysian side; but if they become overly obsessive in their aesthetic pursuits, their repressed Dionysian side may return in daemonic form as hedonism and loss of self-control; it may turn their aestheticism into cruelty, chaos, and self-destruction. Again, eventually such androgynes may rebel and destroy the object of their devotion in the hope of breaking free and restoring their detachment from the world.

 

Dickinson appears to be Dionysian-leaning insofar as there is a strongly dramatic aspect to her poetry; she doesn't display the scrupulous aestheticism of the Apollonian-leaning Decadent.

 

But as Paglia points out, the typical model for a Dionysian-leaning androgyne is that of a male going against type by assuming the role of passive "male heroine" orbiting a punishing mother figure. As a woman, Dickinson starts from a position where she is expected to assume a more passive role in society; therefore, if she is to engage in Romantic rebellion and experiment with the freedom offered by modern western culture, then she has to flip all the gender roles on their head. As a result, she obsesses about a paternal, punishing God in place of a punishing maternal figure; and she covets male action, rebellion, and opposition in place of feminine passivity.

 

Thus, gender becomes a mask that Dickinson plays with in her poetry. For example, one of her poetic conceits is that she was a boy in her childhood, is a woman in her adulthood, and will one day become a man again--perhaps transvestized by death. (pp. 640-641)

 

Similarly, she creates two very different styles of poems. Paglia divides Dickinson's poetry into two "representational modes": Light, fluffy, sentimental "Wordsworthian" poems versus dark, dramatic, sadomasochistic "Sadean" poems. (p. 624) Paglia suggests that Dickinson is playing with creative personae: The Wordsworthian poems reflect an assumed persona of feminine gentility as defined by conventional society, while the darker Sadean poems tend to reflect her true masculine personality as evidenced by her private correspondence and personal interests.

 

I will talk about all these aspects in more detail below.

 

The Dionysian aspect of Dickinson's poetry

Paglia repeatedly refers to the Dionysian influence implicit in ED's poetry. For example: "Dickinson’s poetry, as an art of sexual personae, comes from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. She thinks in theatrical or masquelike terms. She writes capsule screenplays of agony and ecstasy where someone is tortured, dying, transfigured. The poems are sexual scripts, like Sade’s." (p. 648) Elsewhere Paglia says, "Her antecedents are not in Puritan probity but in Baroque sensationalism." (p. 667)

 

Paglia quotes Dickinson herself on her need for Dionysian drama in poetry: "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way." Paglia comments on Dickinson's statement: "Poetry is assault and battery on the body. Shamanistic vision demands physical trauma." (pp. 636-637)

 

Dickinson's friendships and affections are similarly stormy and dramatic: "She bitterly complains of others’ inability to sustain her level of intensity: 'Bind me … Banish … Slay' (1005). [...] Relationships are wrestling matches of domination and submission [...] She has a pagan view of love as a hazardous sphere of primitive power. She applies antagonistic formulas to everything..." (pp. 667-668)

 

Of course, Dickinson's sadomasochistic "Sadean" poems represent a mode of Dionysianism as well. Paglia says, "Dickinson does wage guerrilla warfare with society. Her fractures, cripplings, impalements, and amputations are Dionysian disorderings of the stable structures of the Apollonian lawgivers." (p. 652)

 

Paglia says, "Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist. [...] The brutality of this belle of Amherst would stop a truck. She is a virtuoso of sadomasochistic surrealism..." (p. 624) Paglia then provides an initial list of Dickinson's various metaphors for pain and torture on pages 624-637 and concludes, "Thus far we have established Dickinson’s unrecognized appetite for murder and mayhem, her sweet tooth for sadomasochistic horror." (p. 637)

 

However, Paglia says that this Dionysian-Sadean-sadomasochistic aspect of Dickinson's poetry is generally missed or ignored by modern criticism: "Psychoanalytic readings are slowly making their way, but the academic view of her remains too genteel. The horrifying and ruthless in her are tempered or suppressed." (p. 624)

 

The violent Sadean poems are somewhat hidden from sight by virtue of being mixed in with her more flowery, conventional, and sentimental Wordsworthian poems. Also, Dickinson's style of poetry can be somewhat opaque and difficult to fathom; the poems are short, choppy, and truncated. Paglia says, "The primary qualities of Dickinson’s style are high condensation and riddling ellipsis." (p. 624) The meanings of poems are often hidden by wordplay in the vein of Lewis Carroll: "Dickinson shares many images and moods with Lewis Carroll, another celibate fantasist whose principal creative years, the 1860s, were the same." (p. 634)

 

But Paglia insists that a close reading of the Sadean poems justifies a sadomasochistic interpretation: "When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent." (p. 624)

 

Paglia says of Dickinson, "Much of Dickinson’s sadism comes from her sardonic speech, a rustic bluntness about birth and death. Victorian euphemism was a bourgeois phenomenon, and Dickinson as much as Baudelaire is anti-bourgeois." (p. 633) "Dickinson is a pioneer among women writers in renouncing genteel good manners. She cultivates knavish insolence." (p. 634) "Dickinson has a zeal for indelicacy." (p. 635) "Her letters too display Dickinson’s witty flouting of decorum. [...] The tone is pure Vincent Price, a self-satirizing ghoulishness." (p. 636)

 

Dickinson's obsession with God

Paglia also says that much of the energy of the Sadean poems is driven by Late Romantic obsession with--and rebellion against--God. Paglia says, "Without her struggle with God and father, there would have been no poetry." (p. 653)

 

As I said above, this represents a reversal of gender roles:

• The typical male Dionysian-leaning androgyne assumes the role of a passive "male heroine" obsessed with a punishing mother figure.

• As a woman, Dickinson obsesses about a paternal, punishing God, and she herself covets male action, rebellion, and opposition in place of feminine passivity.

 

Dickinson herself is an atheist. She says of her family, “They are religious—except me—and address an Eclipse, every morning—whom they call their ‘Father.'" (p. 632) But that leaves Dickinson staring into nothingness--a frigid, godless universe. (p. 656) 

 

One result was that Dickinson came to have a "notorious preoccupation with death." (p. 648) Paglia says, "Dickinson thinks of death as enforced passivity, agonizing impediment of movement. She dwells on the moment a person becomes a thing, as in 'The last Night that She lived,' where the pronoun disappears in the last stanza: 'And We—We placed the Hair— / And drew the Head erect' (1100). A human has passed into the object-world [...] It, it, it, she says of the dying one (519). Mind, body, and gender have gelatinized." (p. 647)

 

In this worldview, God becomes a poetic foil, a device upon which Dickinson can pour out her fear and frustration. Paglia says, "God, or the idea of God, is the 'One,' without whom the 'Many' of nature fly apart. Hence God’s death condemns the world to Decadent disintegration." (p. 652) Heaven disappears, God's promises of an afterlife turn out to be empty, and the dead remain trapped in their coffins and sarcophagi for all eternity. Paglia says, "As in Sade and Swinburne, God condemns man to fascist oppression and sexual subordination. Unable to advance or retreat, the dead rest in an infinity of checkmate (615). Dickinson declares, 'I saw no Way—The Heavens were stitched.' There is no entrance to the tent of the inhospitable Bedouin god (378, 243)." (p. 648)

 

Paglia says, "Dickinson’s cynical surrealism is unparalleled among great women writers. Dickinson says, 'God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him.'" (p. 651) In her various poems Dickinson calls God "a 'Burglar' or 'Mighty Merchant' and accuses him of fraud: '"Heavenly Father" … / We apologize to thee / For thine own Duplicity' (49, 621, 1461)." (p. 634)

 

Paglia says, "Like Swinburne in Anactoria, Dickinson shows sadomasochism suffusing the world. [...] Disaster is nature's norm. [...] Like Swinburne’s Sappho, Dickinson thinks God jealous and vindictive, an attitude she got from Blake. God lures mankind into the grave with promises of a fair future, only to default on his contract. His credit history is a spree of embezzlements. He condemns man to death and loss: 'Earth is short / And Anguish absolute' (301)." (pp. 650-651)

 

Wordsworthian versus Sadean poems

Paglia suggests that modern feminism would probably interpret Dickinson's sadomasochism and rebellion against God and polite society as a critique of patriarchal society in the mid-1800s. But Paglia disagrees with that interpretation and says that Dickinson instead suffers from the same problem as all Romantic authors: Too much freedom. Paglia says, "A conventional feminist critique of Emily Dickinson’s life would see her hemmed in on all sides by respectability and paternalism, impediments to her genius. But a study of Romanticism shows that post-Enlightenment poets are struggling with the absence of limits, with the gross inflation of solipsistic imagination." (p. 652)

 

To spell it out: As I described in previous chapters, modern Dionysian freedoms eventually turn into a free fall of chaos, resulting in anxiety due to the loss of order, stability, and predictability. Repressed Apollonianism returns in daemonic form as a fear/temptation/craving for closure, boundaries, and hierarchy. Sadomasochism becomes a means of setting limits on oneself: An encounter with overwhelming force and pain results in passivity, closure, and withdrawal into the androgyne's self-complete bubble.

• Male Late Romantics project punishing vampirism onto femininity to satisfy their need for limits; 

• As a woman, Dickinson satisfies her need for limits with a Decadent obsession for--and rage against--a punishing masculine God in her Sadean poems.

 

Furthermore, Dickinson's authorship of both "Wordsworthian" and "Sadean" poems suggests that Dickinson is neither an enemy of masculinity/patriarchy nor a defender of femininity. Instead, as I said above, gender becomes a mask that she plays with freely in her poetry. She represents neither side in the modern feminist gender wars because she claims ownership of both sides as the mood strikes her. 

 

To spell it out a bit more:

 

The Sadean poems are dark, dramatic, and sadomasochistic; they reflect a masculine persona that craves action, competition, and conflict. Paglia provides a number of examples of poetry where Dickinson plays at sexual self-transformations. For example, Paglia says, "She calls herself boy, man, bachelor, brother, uncle." (p. 640) Elsewhere Paglia says, "The most blatant of Dickinson’s masculine self-portraits is “My Life had stood a Loaded Gun,” where she is a totem of phallic force (754)." (p. 642)

 

The Wordsworthian poems are light, fluffy, sentimental; they reflect an assumed persona of passive feminine gentility as defined by conventional society. Paglia calls them "pert, peppy trifles." Paglia suggests that Dickinson uses them to cleanse her palate after the Sadean poems: "Sentimentality restores her poetic equilibrium. It adds representational weight to the light end of the sexual seesaw. Her feminine personae are mental calisthenics by which she dissuades herself from sadism." (p. 658) Paglia says that other poets do the same thing at times. Paglia says, "These are Dickinson’s versions of Blake’s chimney-sweep poems, where the poet incarnates himself without satire in a simpler consciousness." (p. 639)

 

Paglia suggests that Dickinson played out a similar Wordsworthian-versus-Sadean dichotomy in real life as well. In the Wordsworthian vein: With guests and even family she often played out a light-hearted, somewhat infantilized version of femininity; she herself would sometimes refer comically in her writings to the childish conceits she practiced with those around her. Paglia says, "She loves to appear frail and pitiable—but only to make more delicious her vamping between hierarchic levels." (p. 660) Concerning Dickinson's interactions with Higginson, Paglia says, "Dickinson’s most cherished maneuver is to appear smaller, a camouflage in society. This compression of persona is a hallucination projected upon the unwary by a gamesman of tough will. The poet has duped and beguiled not Higginson alone but generations of her readers and critics." (pp. 661-662)

 

In contrast, Dickinson's personal interests tended to reflect more Sadean interests. Paglia notes that Dickinson derived enjoyment from attending to the dying and the newly-dead. Paglia says, "Of the century’s major American writers, Dickinson is the most Decadent in religious and sexual psychology. Her fondness for corpses far exceeds the Victorian cult of bereavement. [...] Dickinson sheds no tears. As she fondles the corpse, she flashes a dazzling smile. Stroking corpses of both sexes is Dickinson’s literary hobby (187). [...] Dickinson is a Decadent voyeur, and her corpse poems are specimens of sexual objectification, the primary principle of Decadent eroticism." (pp. 662-664)

 

Still in the Sadean vein, one of Dickinson's favorite topics of correspondence was to inquire about injuries and deaths among family and acquaintances: "Her Decadent voyeurism is abundantly clear in her letters, which increasingly become a chain of condolences. Death and calamity are the only subjects on which the poet speaks. [...] There is maniacal glee in her sepulchral letters. She makes strange hard jests at tender moments. [...] There is not a grain of Christian compassion in these letters. They are a Late Romantic prose-poem, a stunning chronicle of necrophilia and voyeurism. [...] The letters of condolence are erotic, self-conscious, ritualized, and therefore Decadent. Like the governess of Turn of the Screw, Dickinson is a Romantic terrorist, presiding over eruptions of horror." (pp. 664-666)

 

Ultimately Paglia concludes that Dickinson's masculine-Sadean persona is the truest reflection of Dickinson's personality. Paglia points at a number of features in Dickinson's poetry and life that indicate a masculine cast of mind. For example, Paglia notes that Dickinson excludes the maternal influence from all of her poetry, both Wordsworthian and Sadean combined; Paglia says that she can only find one oblique reference to pregnancy or birth in all of Dickinson's poetry. (p. 639) And of her own mother, Dickinson says, “I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” (p. 639)

 

In other words, Dickinson indulges Wordsworthian femininity as a creative persona but has no affinity for the deeper meaning behind it. As Paglia says, "She accepts femininity but denies femaleness, sweeping it out of her cosmos." (p. 639)

 

Paglia even suggests that Dickinson wrote her Wordsworthian poems in order to isolate her "femaleness," refine it, and eradicate it. Comparing Dickinson to the poet Blake, Paglia says, "Her sentimental feminine personae are paradoxically a tool of her poetic self-masculinization. For Blake, imagination must liberate itself from female nature. For Dickinson, a rare woman Romantic, that femaleness is in herself, which she must jettison to be free. By polarizing nature’s powers into masculine and feminine, a duality that ensures the destruction of undefended femininity, she expels chthonian femaleness from her world." (p. 672)

 

Similarly, the Romantics generally had a notion that illness and disease were associated with femaleness, the effluence of feminine miasma. In her disdain for femaleness, Dickinson avoids mention of disease in her sadomasochistic poems. Paglia says, "Significantly, Dickinson shows little concern with disease. Her sadomasochistic horrors are confined to piercings, slashings, hackings, scorchings, and dislocations. Why? Poe’s Red Death, Baudelaire’s “Voyage to Cythera,” and Huysmans’ flower episode make disease a major Late Romantic metaphor. It is the depraved touch of female nature. Dickinson’s substitution of accidents for disease is part of her extraordinary effort to wipe chthonian femaleness out of nature." (pp. 654-655)

 

By way of contrast, maleness and phallic imagery suffuse her poetry and even her dreams. For example, Dickinson describes a fantasy of being a loaded gun and enjoying its destructive powers: "the power to kill, / Without the power to die." (p. 643) 

 

In another poem, Dickinson describes a nightmare where she is pursued by a worm that swells into a hissing snake. Living in a pre-Freudian time, Dickinson herself misses the obvious phallic reference in the dream. But Paglia suggests that Dickinson was in an unguarded Wordsworthian frame of mind when her repressed Sadean side appeared to her in the chthonian or daemonic form of a dream symbolizing rape. Paglia says, "The snake is a fantasy of power escaping Dickinson’s control. [...] The snake is a materialization of her own phallic potency, her Jungian animus or repressed masculine half." (p. 646)

 

As for attraction to the opposite sex, Paglia notes that Dickinson worshiped the men in her life in the sense that she put them on a hierarchical pedestal as an expression of repressed Apollonianism; but at the same time she had little or no emotional attraction to them. Paglia says, "[H]er erotics of Sadean hierarchy require most of her males to be male—but without any necessary heterosexual desire on her part. At her most rigorous, Dickinson is a Wildean Apollonian aroused by rank alone, irrespective of gender. She is one of the last scholastics of the great chain of being." (p. 671)

 

Instead, Dickinson's emotional attractions were reserved for women. Paglia especially notes Dickinson's intense (but presumably unconsummated) adoration for her step-sister Susan Gilbert. (p. 670) Paglia says of Dickinson: "Her homoerotic flirtations were integral to her masculine poetic identity. To love like a man is a first step away from social and biologic destiny." (p. 672)

 

Finally, Paglia suggests that Dickinson's greatness as a poet is, in and of itself, a proof of her male cast of mind. Elsewhere in Sexual Personae Paglia theorizes that men historically tend toward both great achievement and great criminality due to testosterone and a male drive to differentiate themselves and achieve; women, on the other hand, are more comfortable immersing themselves in the collective and playing a nurturing role there. In her book Provocations, Paglia says "Women track in the sensible middle, while men veer to radical extremes." (p. 622) Hence Paglia's famous quotes like "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts" and "There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."

 

In Chapter 24 Paglia makes this same argument with respect to Dickinson, and it goes back to the point I raised earlier: Dickinson's sadomasochism isn't a form of mere feminist critique of the patriarchy. Instead, her genius arises from the combination of her male cast of mind, the conflicts it created given her station in life as a woman, and her embrace of the masculine "radical extremes" rather than the feminine "sensible middle." Paglia says, "[W]omen do not rise to supreme achievement unless they are under powerful internal compulsion. Dickinson was a woman of abnormal will. Her poetry profits from the enormous disparity between that will and the feminine social persona to which she fell heir at birth." (p. 653)

 

Decadent androgyny and closure

In her poetry and her life Dickinson is "hermaphrodized" by virtue of the opposition between her masculine cast of mind, which impels her toward activity, violence, and exploration, and her sex and social position, which demand a passive feminine role. Paglia says, "Dickinson’s major poems are bursting hermaphrodite lozenges, a small feminine body charged with a mighty masculine mind. The rhetoric itself is powerfully bisexed." (p. 656)

 

But the freedom to play with gender in this manner is also anxiety-producing. As I said above, modern Dionysian freedoms eventually turn into a free fall of chaos, resulting in anxiety due to the loss of order, stability, and predictability. Dickinson addresses this in part via sadomasochism as a limit-setting exercise.

 

Dickinson also exhibits all the signs of a Decadent androgyne: The typical Decadent androgyne calms anxiety by making himself as free of attachments as possible. This too is a limit-setting exercise: He accomplishes this by receding from the Dionysian chaos of the world and locking himself away in a bubble of passivity, self-containment, and self-sufficiency. The Decadent androgyne backs off and observes the world passively and without empathy or connection, awaiting something to come along and stir him, be it great beauty or great ugliness.

 

This becomes Decadent closure: Life in a self-contained bubble turns into confinement. In other words, the androgyne frees himself from anxiety, but that freedom comes at the price of passivity, solipsism, and self-imprisonment.

 

Dickinson's poems and life demonstrated the closure of the androgyne:

• As a sexual hermaphrodite she demonstrated the self-sufficiency of the androgyne: She didn't need a partner to complete her; swapping between genders at will made her a closed circle, sexually in balance and complete.

• She lived a highly cloistered life at home, refusing to receive most callers, or carrying on conversations with visitors from behind a screen or from the next room. (p. 666)

• Dickinson wrote some 1,800 poems, but only 10 were published during her lifetime; most of the people in her circle were unaware of her poetry.

 

Hiding from society in this manner gave her the freedom to indulge her poetry and gender experiments, but it also represented the closure and withdrawal of a Romantic androgyne--surveying life from a perch of indifference, detachment, and non-participation.

 

Paglia says that even Dickinson's poetic style represented Decadent closure. As I mentioned above, her poems are short, choppy, and truncated. Paglia says, "The structure cramps and pinches the words like a vise. The poems shudder with a huge tremor of contraction. Dickinson’s poetry is like the shrinking room of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum, a torture chamber and arena of extremity. We are in the womb-tomb of Decadent closure." (p. 624)

 

Paglia suggests that Dickinson is self-limiting in order to impose order on an excess of freedom: "Dickinson’s small lyrics are a sexual closure, the cage of a self-sequestered sibyl. [...] [T]he self must be sealed up and its integrity defended. [...] Dickinson has a halt meter, like a hobbled horse or a Chinese woman who has bound her own feet. Her harsh pressures on language are another ritual limitation, by which the Romantic self returns to governable dimensions from its monstrous immensity." (pp. 656-657)

 

Closure, limitation, and androgyne passivity are a constant theme in her poetry, even in those poems where Dickinson takes on male roles. For example, in the aforementioned "gun poem"--in which she fantasizes about life as a loaded gun--Paglia notes that the the gun is nonetheless portrayed in a passive role; the gun can't act without the owner present to fire it. "The gun is potent yet dependent." (p. 646)

 

Dickinson's Wordsworthian poems demonstrate this same sense of self-limitation. Paglia talks about this in reference to Dickinson's "bride poems" which describe a sentimental devotion to Christianity, such as poems 279, 615, and 199: "It is easy to misread the many lyrics affecting complacent Christian faith. [...] The mood may be cheerful and upbeat, as in “Tie the Strings to my Life, My Lord, / Then, I am ready to go!” (279). But the bride happily surrendering herself to celestial marriage is usually in for an unpleasant surprise. Death, not a Redeemer, waits at the top of the stairway to heaven. [...] The bride poems are clever hoaxes that turn princesses into pumpkins, mere chunks of debris. Corpses drop into the grave with a thud. A frequent finale is a slow fade, the voice fumbling for words, as consciousness gutters out." (p. 638)

 

Dickinson projects her own closure and passivity out into the world around her. One of her central themes is the passivity of death, which can be represented either negatively or positively:

• In a negative sense: As I mentioned above, the passivity of death is one of Dickinson's reproaches against God, reflecting her own fear of the grave. Paglia says, "Dickinson thinks of death as enforced passivity, agonizing impediment of movement. [...] Dickinson’s death is a great neuter state. A dead female is a frozen phallic shaft; a dead male is a felled tree of humiliating inertness. Death is a maker of sterile androgynes." (p. 647)

• In a positive sense: At the same time, Dickinson's fascination with caring for the dying and dead also represents a projection of Dickinson's obsession with closure and passivity, albeit framed as an expression of allure. Paglia says, "Dickinson’s corpse fantasies are beyond the norm. They are perverse because her intimacy requires inertness. Her consciousness exults in the unconsciousness of its objects. Twin to Whitman of The Sleepers, she is a phantom lover in the world of the dead. She values corpses as artifacts: personality has passed from Dionysian mutability into Apollonian perfection." (p. 663)

 

Aggressive western eye

Concerning Dickinson's attraction to death and dying, Paglia says, "Her passionate kisses are for faces that can make no return. [...] Death, as a collision between time and eternity, has a transfiguring glamour..." (p. 663) Paglia suggests that Dickinson's various obsessions with death--both negative and positive--are due to her aggressive western eye.

 

To recap the aggressive western eye: As I said in my notes on previous chapters, Decadent Late Romantics embrace Dionysian freedom and reject and repress their Apollonian side; but Dionysian chaos brings anxiety with it and the Romantics withdraw from society into an androgyne bubble of self-sufficiency. Their repressed Apollonian side subsequently reappears as a daemonic "western eye" which they use to survey society and tame its Dionysian chaos through analysis and objectification, awaiting something to come along and stir them, be it great beauty or great ugliness.

 

In this manner Dickinson's aggressive western eye draws her into an obsession with passivity and death. She projects her own androgyne passivity out into the world around her, and she encounters and fixates on death as its most perfect manifestation; she obsesses over dying and death as an anchor of solidity and predictability amid the chaos of life.

 

Paglia says that Dickinson's aggressive western eye results in voyeurism: "Dickinson is a Decadent voyeur, and her corpse poems are specimens of sexual objectification, the primary principle of Decadent eroticism. [...] The corpse poems formalize that eye-object relation which oppresses Romantic poets in their stultifying freedom. Seeing across space and time, Dickinson ritually fixes the distance between self and world, freezing it with her Medusan eye. [...] She is a connoisseur of death, a Decadent collector. [...] The lingering Puritan taboo on visual gratification, I noted, inflamed the eye in American Romanticism. Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson suffer fluctuations between voyeurism and paranoia. Dickinson flattens her chosen ones by her ocular force. She drops on them like a hawk, her eye sadistically glittering. Her Decadent voyeurism is abundantly clear in her letters, which increasingly become a chain of condolences. Death and calamity are the only subjects on which the poet speaks. Life is a string of black pearls." (p. 664)

 

Dickinson also uses her aggressive western eye to sort out the living. As a self-complete androgyne, she has no particular need for friendships and affections; so her aggressive western eye views others through the lens of repressed Apollonianism and  applies hierarchies and structure to her social relations.  Paglia says, "Because her eroticism is visual rather than sensual, Dickinson’s love affairs take the form of adoration and apotheosis. [...] Dickinson is a fan, a hero-worshipper, a creator of hierarchic preeminence [...S]he falls in love with charismatic personality. Like Swinburne in Dolores and Faustine, she is a sexual cultist, electing gods and saints to whom she lights votive candles." (pp. 668-669)

 

But androgyne withdrawal and Apollonian hierarchism require distance between the worshiper and the thing worshiped. Hence Dickinson's lifetime of retreat, solitude, and Decadent closure. Paglia says, "Affect is dependent on hierarchic distance, so married intimacy with either sex is impossible. [...] For the Romantic, reality is always vulgar. The idea of the beloved is superior to actual fact. Dickinson has a curatorial relation to her gods: for them to retain their glamour, she must refuse to see them. She perpetuates the divinity of her chosen ones by imprisoning them in the cell of her mental eye, from which they cannot break free into concrete presence. Seclusion is her perceptual weapon against disillusion." (p. 669)

 

Paglia says that Dickinson's aggressive western eye is so fierce and so sharpened by habit and long use that Dickinson projects it out into the world at large and imagines that the world is staring back at her in similar manner and examining her critically. This becomes another source of modern chaos and anxiety, necessitating androgyne withdrawal and seclusion. 

 

Paglia says, "[S]he constructs a Decadent world of voyeuristic sightlines. Her eroticized lust to see all is combined with intense fear of the visual. Like Gautier’s Queen Nyssia, Dickinson feels contaminated by others’ eyes. She defends her perceptual purity by walling herself up in her Danae’s tower or snowbound “Pearl Jail.” She dreads being seen precisely because her eye is so powerful and intrusive. Letters and poems allow her to be heard at a distance while remaining invisible, as if on a public-address system. Nothing is more terrible in her poetry than when her barriers are breached and the visual pours in on her uncontrollably: 'Creation seemed a mighty Crack / To make me visible'; 'Space stares all around' (891, 510). These mirrorlike returns upon her of her own ocular aggression explain many of Dickinson's eccentricities." (p. 666)

 

Summing up

Dickinson was careful to keep the world at bay, both in her social relations while she was alive and in her poetry after her death. So she has remained something of a mystery across the years. But Paglia says that the earmarks of Decadent Late Romanticism are all there for the observant reader to see: Dickinson had a typical Romantic's Dionysian perception of the world, and her masculine cast of mind led her to pursue a fantasy life where gender could be switched and indulged at a whim. But in the mid-1800s such freedoms gave rise to anxiety, leading to androgyne withdrawal and projection of androgyne passivity out into the world: An obsession with a punishing God enforcing the passivity of death on a long-suffering humanity, and an aggressive western eye that she indulged to pursue that obsession.

 

Paglia considers Dickinson "the greatest of women poets" (p. 624), and Chapter 24 is the final chapter in Sexual Personae. So Paglia ends her book with the following tribute to Dickinson: "Voyeurism, vampirism, necrophilia, lesbianism, sadomasochism, sexual surrealism: Amherst's Madame de Sade still waits for her readers to know her." (p. 673)

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Link: Return to Notes on Sexual Personae

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~Posted September 9, 2026