[書摘]My Life A Loaded Gun

BENNETT “My Life A Loaded Gun” 書摘

Ah, but what is “herself”? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. –Virginia Woolf

As the voice of her (Woolf) poem, the lyric poet must be willing to put herself in the line and stand at the center of her verse. These are her feelings, her thoughts. As Woolf observes, however, there are many feelings and thoughts that women in out culture, whether or not they are poets, simply are not supposed to have. And conspicuous among them are the very self-empowering ones (pride, anger, self-centeredness, daring, the need to assert oneself not just emotionally but intellectually) that are not only fundamental to the creative proves but are absolutely indispensable to the creation of a convincing poetic persona or lyric self.

For, as Woolf puts it, “who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?”

Lacking of male port’s long-established tradition of self-exploration and self-validation, women ports in out culture have been torn between restrictive definition of what a woman is and their own fears of being or seeming unwomanly. As a result, they have been unable to allow the full truth of their experience to empower their speaking voice. Without predecessors to whom they might appeal or upon whom they might model themselves, they have either fit into the existing masculinist tradition of their own—the literature of the “poetess.” In either case, they have inevitably been led to dissociate the concept of creative power from their woman selves. Thought often possessed, as in Bishop’s case, of extraordinary figts, they have rarely felt these gifts as inherently theirs.

Emily Dickinson – “My Life has stood—a loaded Gun”.
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—

And now We roam in Sovreign Woods—
And now We hunt the Doe—
And every time I speak for Him—
The Mountains straight reply—

And do I smile such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow—
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let it’s 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—

To foe of His—I’m deadly foe—
None stir the second time—
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye—
Or and emphatic Thumb—

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—
(no. 754; P574)

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 gun, Dickinson presents herself in this poem as everything “women” 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.’”

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 understanding Emily Dickinson, and ourselves, and the condition of the woman artist, particularly in the nineteenth century.” (OL, 174), 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 the fullness of her power in her verse.

For all three poets (Dickson, Plath, and Rich), this act of redefinition involved both pain and a price. For Dickinson, imprisoned in what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has aptly called the nineteenth century’s “female world of love and ritual,” the price came in the form of acute sexual and social deprivation. Unwilling either to marry of to devote her days to “useful” service, she lived out her life in virtual isolation, expending her tremendous energies almost entirely on her art. If, as Allen Tate has written, “her life was one of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent,” this richness and depth were achieved only after years of severe depression in which she struggled to arrived at a concept of womanhood that would allow her both to mature and to create; that is, to be both a woman and an artist at once.