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Wrestling with silence: Emily Dickinson's Calvinist God.(Critical essay)

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From: ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly)
Date: 20060301
Author:Zapedowska, Magdalena

 
Silence is all we dread. 
There's Ransom in a Voice-- 
But Silence is Infinity. 
Himself have not a face. (Fr 1300) (1) 

The tension between Emily Dickinson's deep anchoring in New England Calvinism--or orthodox Congregationalism, as the denomination came to be called--and her recognition of the inadequacy of the Calvinist heritage to contemporary spiritual experience inspires some of her most intense, ferocious, and distressed verse. Summarizing a half-century of change in Dickinson's religious culture, Jane Donahue Eberwein observes: "In her childhood, belief seemed all but ...