Working Annotated Biblio of Criticism onEmily Dickinson's "My Life Had Stood, A Loaded Gun"
Working Annotated Biblio of Criticism on
(-)Early, romanticized biography. Represents a pre-New Critical Approach. Impressionistic and rather irresponsibly biographical. Romantic in the extreme. Assumes Emily is like all her women friends. Focuses on "natural desire" for a man and "hatred of renunciation." Without fully explaining, she links this poem to other "Master" poems where ED addressing a man. Buys into the idea that ED had a happy and satisfying relationship with this man: she was "fully and physically in love." (i.e. ED is healthy hetero). Says poem is "innocently erotic"; so Ed didn't really understand what she was saying. This analysis tells us more about the position and expectations of women in the 1930's than about ED. A good example of trying to save her reputation and of how you can't trust everything you read in the library.
1955 Johnson, Thomas H. Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography. Harvard UP. 138-40.
Johnson is editor of definitive edition of Ed's poems; this critical biography widely trusted and accepted. Can be counted on to know what he is talking about, especially textual details. Knows all poems and letters intimately and has made definitive decisions on chronology of all.
Notice that he -- with access to all letters etc. -- does not connect this poem to Master poems. Instead sees theme as enactment of inner drama, within psyche of Ed, and about creation of poetry. This interpret written during height of New Crit and shows its influence in focus on poetry -- this is a poem about poetry -- and in tendency to see poem in terms of dichotomies: in this case between body (gun = body) and soul or mind or psyche (owner=soul, animating spirit, inspiration). This leads to interp of last stanza: body is only function; like gun can only kill. It is spirit/soul which has power to choose destiny: to die.
Supports this interp of poem with reference to a letter in which loaded gun is associated with inspiration controlled by inner identity: has no monarch in her life, when tries to organize herself her little gun explodes. (I have trouble with this; letter sounds to me like letter is saying that inner force is so great and so uncontrolled it explodes on its own).
1960 Anderson, Charles R. ED's Poetry: Stairway of Surprise. NY: Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston. 172-5.
*Classic New Crit: secular vs sacred love/ pioneer hunter and his bride! Shows fully developed New Critical interpretation of poem. Sees poem as organic unity produced out of fusion of tension btw irreconcilable opposites. Tries to interpret poem as though it were 17th century metaphysical poem: comparison of life and gun in first line seen as "conceit." Life vs. gun set up as dominant antithesis of poem.
Second major element of interp is connection of poem to "ballad" tradition of folktale about frontier bride and hunter husband. Reminds me of Taggard in imposition of sex role expectations: wife stays hone and "celebrates the softer arts" (!almost willful misinterp here: "emphatic thumb" doesn't seem very soft to me). Does find it "curious" that love "is never fulfilled in physical union."
Does recognize how power shifts in poem so that gun is firing r.t. Master, but doesn't seem to be able to explain it. Admits that cannot explain end of poem, but thinks it's the poem's fault.
Ends by turning Ed's poem into a poem by John Donne. Asserts that it is about spiritual love being more important than earthly love. Gun=body=earthly love vs. owner=spirit=heavenly love.
1971 Cody, John. "Sunset at Easter." Chapter Nine of After Great Pain: the Inner Life of Emily Dickinson. Harvard UP. 397-415.
**Classic Freudian: emphasis on bisexuality, masculine i.d., rage r.t. love. Reviews Anderson, Johnson, and Bogan. Creativity associated with masculine I.D. wi father etc. Mother -- dependent, masochistic. Sexuality & creativity linked to destruction. First person to point out doe is feminine, but biograph interp that is aggression against some woman in ED's life, ie mother. Mountains, represent feminine literary figures. Gets kind of carried away wi 3rd stanza. Caught up in Freudian sex roles: phallic woman = arrested development (409). Eider duck, conscious rejection of maternal comfort. (411) Last couplet expresses fear that "without those creative faculties which master instinctual drives" she would be uncontrollable explosion of "raw, unrestrained destructiveness and unregulated sexuality" (413). Another male critic who thinks poem is about how ED needs control; ties in with thesis that she had a full psychotic breakdown.
1975 Gelpi, Albert. "Emily Dickinson and the Deerslayer: The Dilemma of the Woman Poet in America." Rpt. in Shakespeare's Sisters: , ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1977. 122-34.
*Classic Jungian: Dilemma of woman artist whose muse is animus. Owner is "not a real human being/. . . but a psychological presence or factor in her inner life" (123-4). Animus associated with pioneer myth, man against nature. Doe line: need to sacrifice "range of personality and experience as sexual and maternal women" (126). Variant for power in last line is art [mistake here; it's next-to-last line]. Goes into thing about how art kills life/experience by freezing it in time (129). Quotes "i'm ceded" (#508) as similar "self-baptism into areas of personality conventionally associated with the masculine" (132). Good b/c doesn't confuse phallus with "privileges of the masculine" (133); sees i.d. wi masculine in social/historical r.t. biological or biographical context.
1979 Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP. 65-74.
Adv. New Crit. Focus on last stanza: speaker imagines herself immortal in order to guard against return of violence expressed in poem. Comps poem to Marvell "The Mower's Song" and another anon. 17th C poem about death to discuss how poem defends against death.
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