The Gothic Mode: ‘’Tis so appalling — it exhilarates —’

Abstract

Emily Dickinson’s gothic poems are perhaps her most startling challenge to the symbolic order. They are transgressive poems of great energy which explore taboo states usually excluded from consideration. In these poems the speakers spare the reader no excess in their relish of the macabre, as a selection of first lines suggests: ‘As by the dead we love to sit’ (88); ‘Do People moulder equally,/They bury, in the Grave?’ (432) or ‘If I may have it, when it’s dead.’ (577) In many poems, the dead simply refuse to lie down; witty, garrulous corpses relentlessly address the reader from deathbed or grave: ‘’Twas just this time, last year, I died’ (445); ‘I heard a Fly buzz — when I died —’ (465); ‘I died for Beauty —’ (449). In others the speaker confronts an unknown self and experiences ‘A doubt if it be Us’ (859).

Don’t put us in narrow graves — we shall certainly rise if you do, and scare you most prodigiously, and carry you off perhaps! (L 35)