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As a renowned and enigmatic poet, many people have created narratives about Emily Dickinson’s life, and their varying depictions relate to pain. In “Neither Mad Nor Motherless,” the contemporary Dickinson scholar Jerome Charyn engages with John Cody’s book After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (1971). Charyn argues that Cody “presents Dickinson as a mental case whose only manner of survival was writing her cryptic and very private poems” (Charyn, Jerome. “Neither Mad Nor Motherless.” LitHub, 2016). In My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 1985), a collage-like assessment of Dickinson by American poet Susan Howe, Howe criticizes scholars like Cody, who distort Dickinson’s life to fit “the legend of deprivation and emotional disturbance” (Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. New York, New Directions, 1985, p. 24). While Charyn and Howe contest the “legend,” the feminist scholars Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, following Cody, advance it. In Gilbert and Gubar’s canonical text about 19th-century female writers, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), they refer to Dickinson as “truly a madwoman (a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in a room in her father’s house)” (Charyn).
Scholars like Cody, Gilbert, and Gubar argue Dickinson’s pain was psychological.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If I should die
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson