Much Madness is divinest Sense—

As one of the most famous poets in Western culture, many people have written about Emily Dickinson, and their portrayals put her in the center of the battle of “Madness” Versus Sense. There is debate among scholars as to whether Dickinson’s decision to live in isolation starting in her mid-twenties—speaking only to close friends and family, and sometimes only behind closed doors—came from an intense dedication to her work or instead from a mental health condition like social anxiety or agoraphobia. In “Neither Mad Nor Motherless” (Charyn, Jerome. LitHub, 2016), Dickinson scholar Jerome Charyn notes John Cody’s book After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (1971). Charyn says Cody “presents Dickinson as a mental case whose only manner of survival was writing her cryptic and very private poems.”

He also quotes from Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979)—a canonical text about female writers from the 1800s. They call Dickinson “truly a madwoman (a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in a room in her father’s house)” (Gilbert & Gubar, 1979). As Dickinson didn’t “[a]ssent” (Line 6) to “the Majority” (Line 4), living a life other than the one expected of her—socializing, marrying, and having children—critics put her in a figurative “[c]hain” (Line 8) and posthumously bind her to a still unknown and unproven mental health condition. With the poem “Much Madness is divinest Sense,” it’s as if Dickinson anticipated how others would perceive her after her death.

Not every critic sees Dickinson’s behavior as due to poor mental health. In her collage-like appreciation of Dickinson, My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 1985), Susan Howe says critics should note how gender can impact writers, adding, “That doesn’t mean I can relegate women to what we ‘should’ or ‘must’ be doing” (13). Howe sticks up for the nonconformist Dickinson and challenges Gilbert and Gubar’s depiction of the poet. Dickinson may not have acted how Gilbert and Gubar think an empowered woman should have behaved, but, according to Howe, that doesn’t mean Dickinson was experiencing a mental health condition: Instead, Dickinson chose to dedicate her life to reading and writing. As Howe declares, “Emily Dickinson’s religion was Poetry” (48).

In Emily Dickinson Face to Face (1932), Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi sides with Howe and presents her aunt as a playful and humorous woman who purposely curtailed her in-person encounters so she could focus on her thoughts, sharpening her “discerning Eye” (Line 2). Bianchi also notes how people unfavorably judged Dickinson when she was alive due to her choices. Continuing debates over Dickinson’s mental health show how her work’s themes still apply to the mysterious poet long after her life and death.