The Plague of Presentism in Literary History

As I’ve grown older, experienced more, and broadened my worldview, in doing so, I have unlearned an alarming proportion of the information I was taught as fact throughout my life. To name a few examples, Benjamin Franklin did not discover electricity by flying a key attached to a kite in a thunderstorm, Julius Caesar did not respond to his betrayal with the words “Et tu, Brute?” and Marie Antoinette never proclaimed “Let them eat cake!” in response to the plight of her impoverished subjects. How much of what I thought I knew was incorrect, and why had I been so misled?

The accuracy of historical events depends most on who is telling the story, and how well that story is protected from the author’s biases. The modern ethics and expectations of a historian’s society often seep into the records they write. This is a bias called presentism, “whereby a person’s past deeds or utterances are squeezed through a present-day lens” (Simpson 264). The problem of presentism in examining history and crafting accounts is not new; for as long as history has existed, it has been refracted through the interpretive lenses of those who portray it. This becomes an issue when it is used, whether maliciously or innocently, to rewrite history rather than reinterpret. As historian Margaret MacMillan warns, we “abuse [the past] when we create lies about the past or write histories that show only one perspective” (265). Presentism, being a virtually unavoidable tendency, runs especially rampant in the material researched and taught outside of the world of academia, which means a vast majority of people and their general knowledge are misinformed. I take further issue with this when the lack of available unbiased information instills in our society an ignorant misrepresentation of a historical event or figure. How can we learn from our history if we do not examine and teach it accurately?

This is especially poignant regarding literary history, specifically in the modern-day erasure of a historical author’s personal life experiences, which contribute to the meaning of their work in many important ways. While, in many cases, it is a strength when a work is interpretive, an issue is posed when the work’s message, as its author intended it, is being entirely misconstrued. What I mean to say is this: we must stop putting our words into other people’s mouths, especially when those mouths are of internationally impactful literary figures.

I have encountered this most astonishingly in reading historical accounts of the work and life of poet Emily Dickinson. The problem of presentism in Dickinson’s history stems largely from the fact that much of her life, as she lived it, was not recorded in any annals except through her poetry and her letters to her friends and family. As her work was not published until nearly seven decades after her death, she was unknown and unacclaimed as a writer during her life. As such, there are very few primary sources from which we can glean an accurate idea of who Dickinson truly was or what kind of life she led. I would suggest, however, that she would not agree with the way she is viewed today and the way her work has been implemented into many grade school curricula. Drawing from my own experience in my junior year American Literature class, I remember reading about Henry David Thoreau in extensive detail: his life story, his spiritual ideals, his opinions about government—more than I ever cared to know about him. I finally flipped the last page in the Thoreau chapter only to find a mere two-page spread on Dickinson. On it was one poem, “There's a certain Slant of light, (320)” and three assertions: first, that she never married after a tumultuous love affair with a newspaper editor by the name of Samuel Bowles; second, that she was a devout Calvinist woman; and third, that she was an agoraphobic social recluse. Ironically, we may find each of these statements to be false with a closer look at the poem with which they were paired.

To illustrate this point, in “There’s a certain Slant of light (320),” Dickinson communicates to the reader the extent to which a distressing event changed her perspective of life, and as such, of spirituality. Dickinson sets the scene of what is presumably a ray of sunlight slanting through trees on a winter afternoon, but rather than haloing the surrounding landscape, the light “oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes—” (3-4). From the beginning of the poem, the reader can feel Dickinson’s discomfort, a sense that stems not explicitly from the diction or content, but implicitly from the rhyme scheme and meter. The ABCB rhyme scheme in each stanza, four lines per stanza, and four stanzas in the poem collaborate to create the perfect structure for a ballad quatrain, named as such for its lyrical quality and its use in hymns. Dickinson diverges from this structure, however, in her use of the trochee rather than the iamb, giving the poem a stilted, lurching rhythm and a sense of hopelessness (Shoptaw). This, along with the catalexis in the alternating tetra- and trimetric lines, makes the poem so nearly a perfect ballad, almost pleasant to the ear, but something is so obviously awry that it festers in the reader the same sense of dissatisfaction, of growing disquietude that Dickinson is experiencing herself. The “Slant of light” seems to puncture her impression of the serene winter landscape in the same way a traumatic occurrence punctures one’s life (Wilner), creating irreversible damage, cleaving in half one’s world—that before, and that after.

The poem, likely written in 1861, seems to follow a devastating event Dickinson suffered in the late 1850s that led to a sense of loss or rejection strong enough to cause her to withdraw into her father’s house for the last seventeen years of her life (Miller). What exactly that event was is—and always will be—a mystery to us today. Many historians speculate that, as the poem was written around the time at which Dickinson met and forged a fast friendship with Samuel Bowles, editor of The Springfield Republican, this terror was the result of a rejection from Bowles. Dickinson looked up to Bowles both as a friend and a mentor after having been denied publication several times. She sent him forty poems for review, and he published a mere seven, one of which wasn’t even under her name. Bowles, along with many of her peers in the literary scene of the mid-1800s, disregarded her work as ambiguous, unorganized, and idiosyncratic. It is regarded that this rejection, in cooperation with a rumored affair-turned-sour between the two, was the catalyst for the traumatic event Dickinson experienced (Gray). I would argue against the likelihood of this answer—there are ways of crafting a well-educated estimate based on Dickinson’s letters and works rather than merely on scandalous rumors or hearsay.

There is much stronger evidence to suggest that her trauma stems from a place of moral and religious upset. Among various events that occurred in that crucial period, one to which Dickinson reacted particularly intensely was the marriage between Susan Gilbert, her longtime friend, and Austin Dickinson, her brother, in 1856. A plethora of letters and poems written about and sent to Sue, as Dickinson called her adoringly, indicate a strong romantic and sexual relationship between the two women (Messmer). This fact alone discounts the notion that Dickinson was heartbroken from an affair with Bowles but also provides a better candidate for that immense sense of rejection or loss. Romantic refusal in itself is extremely painful, but to have had her love deny her for her own brother may have resulted in an ache strong enough to permeate all aspects of her life. In cooperation with this, Sue joined the Calvinist church alongside Austin, an institution that both fervently punished homosexuality as sinful and subjugated women as servile to men. In the words of literary critic Betsy Erkkila, “Dickinson experiences her loss of Sue to both religion and marriage as a kind of death in which Sue's life is ‘yielded up’ to the masculine and heterosexual orders of man and God.” Dickinson lost her best friend and perhaps her lifelong love to two social standards that completely rejected key parts of her identity, understandably causing a crisis that would end up transforming her view of the world, as evidenced by her work “There’s a certain Slant of light, (320).” The popular idea that a man Dickinson rarely saw created such a catastrophe is one that, in the fashion of presentism, both disregards the evidence in events that occurred in Dickinson’s life and erases the probability that Dickinson was queer, leading to a stark misunderstanding of the work and its message.

In continuing with this idea, although Dickinson is often portrayed as a champion of religion, and specfically Calvinism, in reality, she struggled with the patriarchal nature of the church. One of America’s first feminist advocates, Dickinson dedicated herself to an avant-garde spiritual ideology that rejected the vengeful, omnipotent, male God taught by the church and instead embraced a gentle, generous, feminine divinity. More than a century before her time, Dickinson, through her work, challenged the biblical and societal patriarchy in favor of promoting women as independent of, and thus equal to, men. This manifests itself in the poem’s unstable rhythm and the juxtapositional allusions to religion in her diction.

To further analyze, the “Slant of light,” though biblically a symbol of goodness, of holiness, of God’s revelation and the divine wisdom that comes with it, is characterized as an oppressive heft, a burden that inflicts “Heavenly Hurt” (1-5). She uses the phrase “Cathedral Tunes” in similar reference to this “Heft,” emphasizing the trochaic meter’s effect in undermining the expectations of the reader who anticipates a hymn and instead receives a condemnation of God’s wrongdoings. Dickinson continues on to describe the effects of this slant of light: though it hurts, “We can find no scar, / But internal difference— / Where the Meanings, are—” (6-8), conveying the gravity of this trauma, and how it, in effect, has permanently changed her fundamental identity, the “Meanings” of her being. The third stanza is continually punctured by the Dickinsonian dash, serving to emphasize not only the stilted rhythm of the trochaic foot but also the rhyme between “Despair—” and “Air—,” that, strengthened by the phrase “imperial affliction,” denotes an irreversible, “sealed” causal relationship between God in Heaven and Dickinson’s distress.

There are many events that happened in Dickinson’s life that lend themselves to the determination that, rather than a deep affinity for the Calvinist God, she had religious trauma. For one, her father’s strict and forceful parenting fostered in Dickinson, at first a fear of, then a contempt for the man and other such authoritative men in her life, including her brother, Bowles, and God. The rest of Dickinson’s family and friends continued to practice Calvinism after she rejected it, leading to a sense of isolation and abandonment, which was only intensified by what could be seen as Sue’s moral renunciation of their homosexual entanglement in her marrying Austin and joining the church (Gray). As well, the death of her mother, after whom Dickinson was named, and with whom she felt the closest in her family, led her to reach out to this God, as evidenced by her poem which opens with the line, “Of Course—I prayed—” but was neglected, prayers unanswered: “And did God care?” (1-2).

The presentist, Christocentric, nature to see the word “God” in a piece and to label it as being devotional actively conflicts with and ignores the central message of many of Dickinson’s works. It astounds me how anyone could see even her most spiritual works as commendations of the Calvinist God rather than condemnations. It is clear from a vast majority of her religious works that her faith revolves around the kinship she feels with nature, specifically a sort of “Mother Nature” divinity. In “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—(236)” Dickinson dismisses the Calvnist idea of Heaven and instead refers to her paradise as finding her spirituality in nature. In “Sweet Mountains—Ye tell Me no lie (722),” she rejects the role of the virtuous woman, the domestic wife, and instead defines her philosophy as one that highlights the role of women in society, in stark contrast to the patriarchy present in Calvinism. She regards her deity as characteristically feminine while renouncing the masculine, yet a majority of historians disregard this fact in favor of imposing on Dickinson their own Christian standards.

Further, the poet innovatively uses diaphoric metaphor at the close of the near-ballad. “When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance / On the look of Death—” (15-16). Here she implicitly connects the physical world to the abstract concept of death, conveying the extent to which the experience has petrified her and forever changed her perspective of life and death (Machor). As a result of this “emotional crisis,” critic Donald Eulert posits, Dickinson experiences a total “loss of optimism and a questioning of purpose” that “when even nature holds its breath, seems directed to existence itself. And if there is a question of the meaninglessness of life, its corollary is a glimpse of death.” It is this implication that suggests this disturbing experience, having incited so much doubt in the poet that it shook the foundations of her faith, centered around the metaphorical death of Sue as she knew her, and on a greater scale, around the death of the fantastical, idealized worldview that came with being able to love Sue and was gone the moment she couldn’t. Dickinson struggled to find the significance of what she was feeling, and was lost when she looked to religion. As theologian Gail Ramshaw asserts, “Any religion worth its salt has to be able to deal with death,” and for Dickinson, Calvinism’s lack of explanation for death, or what occurs thereafter, except as something to be feared, a punishment for Eve’s Original Sin, was insufficient. The Dickinsonian faith is one that, instead, “[holds] death close, [working] to remove the terror,” and one that “seeks death’s ultimate meaning,” allowing Dickinson to conflate death as a concept with salvation rather than terror (Harde).

Rather than the repressed, socially anxious, unassuming woman she is portrayed to be, Dickinson was, as evidenced by her letters and her work, a lively and passionate soul. She appreciated, rather than spurned off social company, especially if that company was Sue’s. However, the loss of that company led Dickinson to, as the poem intimates, question the meaning of life as a whole. It was this moment, not simply a case of agoraphobia, that led her to lock herself in her father’s house for the next seventeen years as she pondered her purpose (Gray). As it was during this time that Dickinson produced her largest volume and highest quality of work, it is also probable that, taking inspiration from her pain, she channeled it into her work and used her time alone to perfect her craft. The mousy, timid feminine archetype many historians, as well as her contemporaries, place on Dickinson is inaccurate and disregards the vivacity in her work. It is also damaging as it works to uphold society’s view of women as quiet, demure, and compliant. Whether consciously or subconsciously, antiquated ideas are being incorporated into “historical” accounts, and the students who read them begin to adopt them, sending our societal progress increasingly backward in time.

Of course, my junior year English lesson on Emily Dickinson is just one example of how much presentism can misrepresent a famous historical figure. This essay does not work to provide a cure to the plague of presentism, but instead to bring awareness to an issue that is rarely talked about, yet is equally significantly poignant in every person’s life. When one facet of my secondary school career was so starkly misleading, how can I trust any of the information I learned? This is the question I want others to ask themselves, to question the societal norm they were taught, to wonder, why was I taught about the War of Northern Aggression, but my friend was taught about the Civil War? It is oppressive and discriminatory social standards like racism, sexism, and homophobia that often motivate the teaching of misinformation in schools, in order to uphold these standards. It saddens me to think of the way the others in my English class still envision her, as conservative and meek when, in her work, she was rebellious and assertive. It is also to bring light to the way my world was opened when I began to search for Dickinson’s truth, and the fact that, if we all yearned to learn with as much devotion, our world might have progressed so much further, our collective knowledge might be so much better informed. Thinking critically and analytically will counteract the damaging results of presentism, allowing us as a society to be better informed, to take down oppressive institutions, and to write our own history as it truly happened.

Works Cited

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Erkkila, Betsy. The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord. New York, Oxford University Press, 1992.

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