Emily Dickinson: How Illness Shaped Her Writing Essay -- Biography

Emily Dickinson has a characteristic writing style. Dickinsons use of dashes and randomly placed capital letters throughout her work devote her a unique style that is contradictory to her time. Many believe that it was her genius that caused this while still others believes it was her illness that contributed to her characteristic writing style. Lyndall Gordons biography offers a major(ip) revelation evidence that Dickinson suffered from epilepsy. The author makes her case partly through prescriptions that Dickinson received (the papers still survive) and reinterprets poems such as I felt a Cleaving in my Mind to describe the poets condition. She writes that sickness is a more sensible reason for seclusion than disappointed love. Epilepsy carried a stigma, and Gordon explains that because diagnosis was rarely uttered, still less charge on paper, theres little chance of explicit evidence (Ciuraru). Gordon makes a persuasive case for the link between epilepsys visual and cerebral dis tortions and Dickinsons extraordinary language (Showalter). By examining the imagery, diction, symbolism and tone in the poems I Felt a Funeral in my Brain, I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind and Pain, the commentator can decipher the characteristics of Emilys illness brought out in her writing.Through the use of imagery, diction and symbolism in these three poems, the reader can feel a sense of the painful sensation and distraught that Dickinson may have felt because of her illness. In I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind the speaker talks of how my Brain had split (2). The word Brain (2) is capitalized to add emphasis on the word. To have ones brain split (2) gives the illusion of ones brain actually being rendered in two. To have this actually happen wou... ...is experiencing. Pain is described as an Element of Blank (1). Blank is nothingness. It cannot recollect (2), it cannot look on a time when it was not there. It is difficult and hard to live with. The speaker cannot remember When it begun-Or if there were/ A time when it was not-(3-4). The illness has become such a part of the speakers life, she cannot remember a time when it did not occur. The speaker has no Future (5) with the pain of the illness. The illusion of infinity with the illness and pain is given and reiterated in the next line with Its Infinite contain-(6). The only future the speaker has is New Periods- Of Pain (8). Because all the words are capitalized the reader is given the feeling of finality. That this is all there is, nothing more than pain. The dash causes the reader to pause and digest this information and the finality of it.