The Implications of Calvinism

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Recommended: “they shut me up” in prose Emily Dickinson analysis

With apologies to Winston Churchill; Emily Dickinson is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Dickinson scholar Linda Freedman attempts to decipher the mysteries of the poet’s language in her book Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination by considering her religious imagery as an allegory for Dickinson’s poetic journey; a quest that shaped the narrative in Emily Dickinson’s work. Freedman posits a theory that “the sense of a life to be lived in the difficult knowledge of a goal beyond unites the poetic and religious quest” (98). On the other hand, author Judit Konyi argues in her essay “The Pseudo-Silence of Emily Dickinson” that Dickinson’s religious language referenced her calling as a poet and Dickinson considered herself a messenger of God (96). Could these ideas be the key to unlock the inscrutability of Dickinson’s poetry? Although I agree with both of these authors in their assessment of the importance of Dickinson’s religious phraseology each of them seem to have overlooked the overarching cogency of the harsh reality of classical five-point Calvinism and the connection between this dogma on her thinking and use of language. I celebrate the fact that these authors have identified the value in Dickinson’s religious language but a point that needs emphasizing I will examine in this essay is the influence of Calvinism on Dickinson’s poetry and the interpretation of language in her poetry through a Calvinist lens. Specifically, I will focus on the poems that reference “grace” and “election.”
History
Emily Dickinson was raised in a time in which religion and religious thought was a reality that shaped the everyday interactions of her time. The family and Dickinson attended a Congregationalist church with root...

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...ine by the Right of the White Election!” is brimming with Calvinist references.

Works Cited

Barlow, Jonathan. "The Five Points of Calvinism." Center for Reformed Theology and Apologetics. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2013.
Dickinson, Emily, and R. W. Franklin. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999. Print.
Dickinson, Emily and Thomas Johnson. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. London [u.a.: Little, Brown, 1998. Print
Freedman, Linda. Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print.
Konyi, Judit. "Emily Dickinson's Pseudo Silence." Reverberations of Silence: Silenced Texts, Sub-texts and Authors in Literature, Language and Translation. Ed. Márta Pellérdi and Gabriella Reuss. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013. 78-97. Print.
Noah Webster’s 1828 Dictionary of the English Language. 2013.

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