Abstract

Representative Woman

Every generation rewrites history, not excluding the personal history we call biography, according to its preoccupations and its needs. Cynthia Griffin Wolff's book "Emily Dickinson," substitutes for the romance of the Dickinson legend Freud's Family Romance, updated by recent psychoanalytic thinking on the development of babies. To this she adds a new myth of the female hero. Behind all, she weaves a third theme, a theme both contemporary and very old, the theme of the Deus absconditus, the God who has disappeared from the world, who has hidden his face. For Wolff it is Emily Dickinson's tussle with this God that makes her a hero. Emily Dickinson wrestled with the Lord, and won. She came from a long line of wrestling Puritans but her struggle was very different from any they would have owned. Wolff's treatment of her sources is at once a model of scholarly thoroughness, the book's fifty-one pages of notes contain much of its most interesting material and of invisible partiality.