ABSTRACT
Daphne Hampson and Luce Irigaray. Although the echoes of hymns in Dickinson’s work serve to highlight her dislocation from the religious communities and the particular versions of social cohesion and of the divine which she found to be antagonistic to her own experience of self and spirituality, her interaction with hymn culture is not based exclusively upon recalcitrance. The poetics of relation which Dickinson’s writing constructs belies a commitment to the ideas of community and relation which the hymn form encodes. However, these aspects of hymn culture are reworked and transformed in Dickinson’s poetics and evade oppositional models that do not accommodate her own experience. In this way they have affinity with the alternative models for the divine considered in current feminist theology. By arguing that Dickinson’s engagement with hymn culture goes beyond formal concerns of metre, this study seeks to move Dickinson studies forward, beyond a simple perception of her interaction with hymnody as being limited to the disruption of regularised metre and subversion of biblical tropes in the hymns of Isaac Watts. Rather, it shows that Dickinson’s hymns can be seen as positive responses to and expansions of the tropes of dissent, flight and spiritual community instigated by Watts and developed by other women hymnists. Thus re-visioning Dickinson as radically engaged with the politics of theology and the voices of hymn culture.
