("I’m Ceded–I’ve Stopped Being Theirs") Essay, Research Paper
Adrienne Rich
Now, this poem partakes of the imagery of being
"twice-born" or, in Christian liturgy, "confirmed"–and if this poem
had been written by Christina Rossetti I would be inclined to give more weight to a
theological reading. But it was written by Emily Dickinson, who used the Christian
metaphor far more than she let it use her. This is a poem of great pride–not
pridefulness, but self-confirmation–and it is curious how little Dickinson’s
critics, perhaps misled by her diminutives, have recognized the will and pride in her
poetry. It is a poem of movement from childhood to womanhood, of transcending the
patriarchal condition of bearing her father’s name and "crowing–on my Father’s
breast–." She is now a conscious Queen "Adequate—Erect/ With Will to
choose, or to reject–."
From "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson," reprinted in On
Lies, Secrets, and Silences (W.W. Norton, 1979)
Albert Gelpi
Poem 508, probably composed a year or so before "My life had stood–a Loaded
Gun–," describes her psychological metamorphosis in terms of two baptisms which
conferred name and identity: the first the sacramental baptism in the patriarchal church
when she was an unknowing and helpless baby; the second a self-baptism into areas of
personality conventionally associated with the masculine, an act of choice and will
undertaken in full consciousness, or, perhaps more accurately, into full consciousness.
Since Emily Dickinson was not a member of the church and had never been baptized as child
or adult, the baptism is a metaphor for marking stages and transitions in self-awareness
and identity. The poem is not a love poem or a religious poem, as its first editors
thought in 1890, but a poem of sexual or psychological politics enacted in the
convolutions of the psyche. . . .
From "Emily Dickinson and the Deerslayer: The Dilemma of the Woman poet in
America." In Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets.
Copyright ? 1979 by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar.
Jane Donahue Eberwein
. . . the speaker disavows her infant baptism and the identity conferred with it and
then asserts another baptism enacted by and for herself. Baptism in New England Puritan
churches and their successors served as a child’s introduction to the community and as the
seal of God’s covenant with the saints. Although not conferring full church membership
(dependent upon conversion and certified by eucharistic participation), it indicated the
community’s expectation that God intended the child’s salvation. The baptized child and
young adult could pursue salvation hopefully. Yet full grace was wanting. This speaker has
experienced a narrow "Crescent" or empty "Arc" rather than a complete
circle of faith. Now, as an adult, she rejects the identity imposed on her by other
people’s choices. Perhaps she senses the frustration of those earlier covenantal hopes and
thinks of the sacramental ritual as simply another empty game by which as a child she
experimented with roles she never got to play as an adult. The dolls that she mentions
were given, after all, in anticipation of eventual mothering responsibility; yet Dickinson
never raised a child. And the string of spools prepared little hands either for manual
labor like that performed by women in New England factories (and that Dickinson never for
a moment considered) or for the fancy needlework she apparently despised. She has simply
not matured into the stereotyped woman she assumes her family had anticipated, and she
rejects her baptismal identity as a sign of those false expectations. But ritual
confirmation of the sacredness of her new identity still captures her imagination, so she
conducts her own adult baptism to seal a different sort of election–her own choice of
self-image and its symbol. Not surprisingly, the symbol she chooses is a circular one
indicative of status and plenitude. Instead of the skimpy arc or crescent, she will have a
diadem–a crown. No longer a potential part of someone else’s circle, she draws her own
circumference.
From Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation. (University of Massachusetts Press,
1985.) Copyright ? 1985 by The University of Massachusetts Press.
Diane Gabrielson Scholl
While such poems as "I’m ceded — I’ve stopped being Their’s –
" (508) use biblical types and language obliquely, they lack a center in a specified
referent or experience, such as a recognizable religious rite; the effect of such poems is
to dramatize and enhance the speaker’s progress toward an exalted status that, while also
contingent on the biblical backdrop, threatens to supersede it:
I’m ceded — I’ve stopped being Their’s —
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading — too —
Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, of Grace —
Unto supremest name —
Called to my Full — The Crescent dropped —
Existence’s whole Arc, filled up,
With one small Diadem.
My second Rank — too small the first —
Crowned — Crowing — on my Father’s breast —
A half unconscious Queen —
But this time — Adequate — Erect,
With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown —
Here the speaker describes a transfiguring experience, in some ways
related to her baptism as an infant, yet not precisely a
second baptism. She makes it clear that she is done with the water "in the country
church" and with other tokens of her
childhood. "Baptized, before, without the choice," she undergoes a figurative
baptism this time, "consciously, of Grace — ," in a
transformation of identity that appears to have cosmic significance: "Called to my
Full — The Crescent dropped — / Existence’s
whole Arc, filled up, / With one small Diadem." Her reference to a woman’s diminutive
adornment is clearly ironic in view of the
magnitude of the change described.
The poem contains an implicit contradiction. At first the speaker acknowledges that
"I’m ceded — ," suggesting that she has
been surrendered to a higher authority than the elders who officiated at her baptism. Her
choice of such a word implies her
powerlessness and withdrawal from action, but as the poem moves toward her acquisition of
the "Diadem" and her "second
Rank," she gains in stature and authority. Eventually she makes it clear that her
"Will to choose, or to reject" is the significant
agent in her gaining of a crown. Dickinson uses an association implicit in the Christian
rite of baptism and nearly lets it
overshadow the traditional doctrinal implications of that sacrament: "Baptism was, on
Biblical authority, associated with royalty; Peter conveyed the efficacy of baptismal
unction when he addressed those newly converted as a ‘chosen generation, a royal
priesthood’ (I Peter 2:9)" (Lease 43).
Certainly, one reason that readers have difficulty identifying in concrete terms the
experience recorded here is the lack of
other principals in the drama the speaker relates. After the first stanza any figures
outside the speaker’s consciousness recede,
except for her retrospective reference to her "Father’s breast — ." The poem
might describe a young girl’s conversion to
Calvinist orthodoxy, her acquisition of adult membership in the Church, but in that case
it is singularly lacking any references to
Christ. Like several of Dickinson’s poems, notably "A Wife — at Daybreak I shall be
– " (461), "I’m ceded — " can be
interpreted as descriptive of a "heavenly marriage" in the biblical sense, the
speaker taking the part of the Church as "Bride of
Christ," in the antitypical fulfillment of the type of the Bride from the Canticles;
but in that case the Bridegroom is inexplicably
absent.
In fact, the speaker in the poem, though clearly female, most resembles Christ in her
relinquishment of past earthly ties and in
the magnitude and enormity of her choice. Once a "half unconscious Queen — ,"
she is now fully Queen, "Adequate — Erect, /
With Will to choose, or to reject." The speaker’s passive posture as recipient of the
baptismal rite in the first stanza gives way
to her new resplendent self, radiant in transfiguration.
from "From Aaron "Drest" to Dickinson’s "Queen":
Protestant Typology in Herbert and Dickinson" Emily Dickinson Journal Vol
III.1 (1996). Online source: http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/articles/III.1.Scholl.html
Mary E. Galvin
In "I’m ceded—I’ve stopped being Theirs—" Dickinson makes
an explicit rejection of one of the initiation rituals of patriarchal religion, that is,
baptism. The power of this institution’s control over language and identity is
acknowledged in her specific rejection of "The name They dropped upon my face."
In a typical Dickinsonian move, however, she builds a syntactical ambiguity into the
stanza with the fourth line: "Is finished using, now." Are we to read it as she
is finished using the name now? Or that it (the name) is finished using her now? In
either case, use of the name is done with now, but the ambiguity of agent/object in the
line creates a complexity rich in implications, by the simple omission of a pronoun. For
Dickinson, such clear-cut binary distinctions need to be problematized. Tellingly, her
rejection of the religious rite and its power to name is juxtaposed in this stanza with
her rejection of the female socialization process, indicated by the dolls of childhood and
the women’s work of threading spools. The three systems of social control are mutually
supportive, and Dickinson is well aware of the interconnections among the power of naming,
the dogma of traditional Christianity, and the social construction of
"femininity."
It is interesting to note the role that "They" play in this as well as in
other poems. Although Dickinson is using a seemingly ambiguous pronoun by not providing us
with a proper referent, it soon becomes very clear that "They" are her own
family members. "They" are the ones who name her and have control over the
things of her childhood. The most significant part of her relationship to "Them"
in terms of sexual politics, however, is that "They" have tried to own her, and
it is this possessive power that is the first ground of her rejection: "I’ve stopped
being Theirs—." This resistance implies, again by the use of a political term
(ceded), the definitively political nature of this rejection. Even as we can deduce that
in this poem "They" represent the people who would have the most immediate
control over her life, her family members, the ambiguity of the pronoun serves a further
purpose. In colloquial terms, "They" is often used to represent the power
structures of society itself. "They" are the legislators of life, the unseen yet
fully felt powers that institute an oppressive ideology. It is a given that Dickinson
would have experienced "Their" interdiction even if she had left her close
family circle, whether "They" took the form of a husband, lover, minister,
politician, or editor. In short, "They," when taken as the agents of sexual and
linguistic oppression, are everywhere in the world at large, and the only space where
"They" can be denied the right of occupation is within Dickinson’s own mind.
Throughout the second and third stanzas here, the issue of choice becomes central to
the poem. Denied choice in the original baptism, she is now asserting her own power and
right to choose. As in 613, "They shut me up in Prose—," it is "With
Will to choose, or to reject," that she will overcome the control "They"
have imposed on her being. Now conscious of her ability to choose, Dickinson will choose
the "supremest name," that of a poet, enabled to name herself. In this choice
she is "Called to my Full—" and although the phrasing here is incomplete
(full what? potential? being? name?), it is clear that her choice gives her a sense of
plenitude. Yet this plenitude is marked by irony. For it is the crescent moon, the Arc of
Existence, the incomplete whole that can be "filled up." The sense of plenitude
that Dickinson conveys here is not based on completion and closure, but is born out of
incompletion, potentiality, a sense of plenitude as an ongoing process, as amplitude.
Defiantly crowned and crowing from her "Father’s breast—," literally,
the "heart" of patriarchy and its religious dictates, she will (consciously)
choose to be "A half unconscious Queen—." The oxymoron implied here
indicates to some degree the complexity of Dickinson’s vision. For
consciousness—awareness of her power to choose—involves also an awareness of the
unconscious, and its power to inform both life choices and the powers of poetic vision. If
a poet refuses to acknowledge the power of the unconscious in her life, she will cut
herself off from one of the most important sources of poetic knowledge. It is with this
both/and vision, of living in the space between and beyond the dichotomous distinction
conscious/unconscious without deeming these two states to be mutually exclusive, that she
has full power. In an appropriation of sexual imagery of mate power, she names herself as
"Adequate—Erect," even as she chooses the "
"Queen," a decidedly female image. By blending the genders implied by these
words of power, Dickinson is subverting the distinctions between genders, a move that is
relevant to her choice to be a woman poet. In choosing such a crown, she is choosing her
own laurels, the crown of a poet, once again empowered only by her "Will to choose,
or to reject." In choosing to be such a Queen, she will maintain power over herself
with a self-given name and role, not one bestowed on her by others.
In a final ironic twist to this poem, Dickinson again selects a strange locution to
represent her choice. The last line ends with a dash, implying an indeterminate outcome.
But the phrase preceding this "final" dash "just a Crown—"
creates an indeterminacy of meaning. Does "just" mean "such," as in
"just the crown such as I’ve been discussing?" Or does she mean
"only," as in "I could have chosen a role even more powerful than that of
poet/Queen, but in all my modesty, I will limit myself to choosing ‘just a Crown?"’
True to her strategy of slanting the truth even as she tells it, Dickinson’s line can
sustain either interpretation.
from Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers. Westport, Conn.: Praeger,
1999. Copyright ? 1999 by Mary C. Galvin
Paul Crumbley
The child speaking in these poems triggers a retroactive appreciation for the limitless
centrifugal potential of prevocal language so frequently at odds with the stabilizing
language of the adult—that voice whose authority depends on conformity within the
social order. The child, not yet constrained by history or identity, defines for the
reader a space within which language and the speaking subject articulate a potential never
fully realized but most evident just prior to the subject’s entering history. For an
instant, the child speaks the language of pure potential. To hear this voice, we must
listen for unencumbered utterances.
Wolff’s comments are again useful in clarifying the proximity of voices that "are
not always entirely distinct from one another: the child’s [v]oice that opens a poem may
yield to the [v]oice of a young woman . . . the diction of the housewife may be conflated
with the sovereign language of the New Jerusalem . . . " (178). Thus, even in a poem
like "I’m ceded—I’ve stopped / being Their’s—" (P 508, MBED
363-64), in which the speaker is determined to sever all bonds to childhood, the advance
into adulthood is not clear. What we see instead is the hierarchic, rule- bound adult
consciousness opposed to the child’s assumption of supreme authority. Dickinson shows us
the tension that complicates and binds these very different discourses as a means of
challenging the notion that the child is subsumed by the adult. Within her formulation,
abstract social codes and the artificial demarcations of class and age are all adult means
of confining the child’s limitlessness. . . . Because the speaker retroactively recalls an
authority she surrendered unknowingly, we can hear the voice of that earlier authority in
her present determination.
When the speaker puts her dolls behind her and proposes for herself a new baptism
("But this time, consciously, / of Grace—"), she founds her achievement on
a historically based perception of self—all sense of accomplishment depends on the
perception that change is possible only if she clings to what she has been in the past
instead of becoming what she hopes to be. Her insistence that there be a new baptism shows
her intent to improve upon what happened "before, without the / choice." The
poem reads as a prelude rather than an entrance into new consciousness; the last line
suggests a state about to be entered and not a presence already achieved. The speaker sees
herself as having been a "half] too unconscious Queen / But this time" things
will be different, this time she possesses the "Will to choose . . . just a
Crown—." And here the poem leaves us: in a place somewhere between the child and
the adult. The speaker’s dismay at having been named and baptized without the knowledge
that she was subscribing to an external authority opens her mind to the infinity of her
experience as a child. An upward-pointing dash after "Crown" counters the
downward-pointing dash after "Queen" as a way of underscoring the speaker’s
overly simplistic belief that she can correct the error of her earlier
"unconscious" station.
Dickinson’s considerable use of visual effects like these dashes alerts readers to
the constructed nature of language that the speaker wades through in an effort to reassert
her independence. Through lineation, in particular, Dickinson further disrupts culturally
determined continuities already undermined by dashes. Separating "being Theirs"
from the first line magnifies the speaker’s detachment from her parents, a violation of
conventional notions of physical, emotional, and spiritual connectedness that is extended
to her face in line 4 and the church in line 6, and concludes with "Crown." The
collective impact of this fragmentation is first an increased awareness of the centrifugal
force that dismantles the ritual of baptism and second a heightened sense of the speaker’s
struggle to make the now disassembled ritual come together and serve her ends.
The first stanza concludes with a powerful visual comment on the unraveling of logic
that is extended through the second stanza and countered in the third. Dashes that frame
"too" at the end of line 12 combine with the misplaced horizontal cross of the
manuscript "t" to effectively reduce the symbolic coherence necessary to see
"too" as a word and not as a meaningless duster of marks (see fig. 3, page 48).
We "read" the word as a cartoon enactment of the speaker’s determination to
cease her "threading" of adult logic; now she will take advantage of her power
to act as she believes adults do by making symbols serve her authority.
This illustration of the way readers must consent to symbolic meaning by making raw
data conform to anticipated patterns sets the tone for the next stanza’s interrogation of
the highly symbolic ritual of baptism. When Dickinson situates three crosses in the spaces
between lines 18 and 20 and then writes in the word "Eye" on line 19, she seems
to be commenting on the way readers actively exercise their eyes to gather all the
physical data that must be processed before discerning meaning. The combination of three
crosses simultaneously suggests a pun on "eye" and "I" that positions
the speaker among three crosses, as if her earlier baptism corresponded to Jesus’
mortification on Golgotha—a humbling experience over which she will ultimately
achieve Christlike triumph. Ironically, the poem so effectively demonstrates the
reader’s role in the construction of meaning that it erodes the speaker’s efforts to
turn ritual authority to her own ends. Though she may not be conscious of what she has
done, her deconstruction of baptism has emptied it of the very power she wishes to employ.
By introducing a speaker who rejects a known past and is about to enter an imagined but
undefined future, the poem establishes a link connecting past and future at the instant
that the speaker’s anticipation of change is greatest. Thanks to visual signals and the
disjunctive power of dashes, we see the speaker’s entrapment in circular reasoning, where
all she imagines of a more liberated future—a future in which she has "stopped /
being Their’s"—is what she has learned from adults. As readers, we see more than
she does: that in order to achieve her aim of discarding all that she now finds burdensome
and oppressive, she must step outside of herself, creating what Kristeva describes as
"an area of chance" that makes possible the discovery of a new semantic and
ideological self: "a localized chance as condition of objective understanding, a
chance to be uncovered in the relationship of the subject of metalanguage to the writing
under study, and/or to the semantic and ideological means of constitution of the
subject" (Desire 98). We contribute to the makeup of this "area" by
reading the poem’s visual commentary on meaning construction and setting it in dialogue
with the expectations we attribute to the speaker.
This participation in the speaker’s desire for change increases our awareness of a
primary instability that de-centers the subject. Our activity as readers parallels that of
Dickinson who, as poet, reads what she has written and responds by creating new text based
on her experience as a reader of her own words. The visual signals built into the poem are
our clearest indication that she wants readers to participate with her on this level. If
the voice that emerges is allowed to register the many shifts in perspective that
inevitably occur as the writer grasps the implications of a particular stance or attitude,
the resulting poem is necessarily made up of many voices, not a single unified voice. As
the poem’s interplay of thought and perception proceeds, each voice is subjected to the
same destabilizing process, and each voice acquires new form as new choices occur to the
writer and the readers. The area of chance defined by the repeated rupturing of logical
sequence feeds a growing realization that the self is far greater than any linguistic
manifestation. In this sense, Dickinson’s child speaker surfaces through a voice that
dissipates once it enters language, making the child the least stab1e of all
Dickinson’s speakers. Listening to the child, therefore, is always a matter of
hearing a voice that mutates in the direction of adulthood even as it speaks. If we as
readers decide that the speaker who claims that she has already "ceded" in the
first line is the same speaker who is in the act of choosing in the last line, we do so as
a matter of choice, not because the poem commands such a reading.
In order to consider the broader dimensions of the poem, as readers we must consider
the poem’s overall coherence. At the outset we know only that the poem inhabits a space
created by the writer, the speaker, and the reader. As we read the poem in its entirety,
we notice shifts from present to past as the speaker aggressively denies the objects and
actions of her past and struggles to define a future she lacks the language to describe in
concrete terms. We can immediately see how concrete and abstract language correlate with
the speaker’s movement from past to present and future tenses. "They
dropped" water on her face in the past, but she is "ceded" now; she was
"Crowned—Crowing—on [her] / Father’s breast" before, but now she
is" Adequate— / Erect."
We can see also that the longest continuous syntactic units occur in the first stanza,
where the greatest attention is given to the past. Dickinson chooses not to use a period
that would close the door on the ordered and concrete past that has taken up so much of
the speaker’s life and dictated so much of the poem’s form. When in the second
stanza we are told that "Existence’s whole Arc" is now "filled up, /
With one small Diadem" we hear a voice mocking the linear progression of historically
grounded sentences. Following visual effects that assert the role of the "Eye"
(and "I") in constructing meaning, the speaker’s words communicate her refusal
to accept as sufficient a diminished perception of self and world: a "small
Diadem" fills "Existence’s whole Arc."
In the final stanza, the speaker dismisses the past, reducing all recollections to
impotent fragments no longer able to impose order on the poem’s form. The "Will
to choose" is finally "will" in the service of a speaker struggling to
assert her power "to choose, / or to reject" and who decides to "choose,
just a / Crown." We are left with a speaker who, by assuming the crown, claims
dominion over time and identity. The inconclusiveness of the last line, as signaled by the
disjunctive dash, reminds readers of the discrepancy between pure potential and the
certainty of limited existence. The poem shows us that the crown symbolizing the
speaker’s achievement of personal authority is incapable of fulfilling the
child’s expectations because its power depends on conformity within established
symbology. Situated at the threshold of a present that is about to unfold, the speaker
approximates as closely as possible the limitless potentiality that characterizes the
child. Our efforts to imagine the experience the speaker seeks to recapture take us back
through heteroglossia to the materiality that predates and surrounds even the most potent
symbols.
"I’m ceded—I’ve stopped / being Their’s—", demonstrates that the
child’s voice must be thought of in dialogue with other voices. To hear the child is also
to hear the voices that instruct, curse, comfort, and punish an innocent, unformed
consciousness. These voices represent social discourses on parenting and religious belief,
for instance, that enter poems as verbal distillations of the environment readers must
interpret according to their understanding of prevailing conventions. Speaker, writer, and
reader construct meaning through a process of affirming or denying values perpetuated in
these discourses. Consequently, speakers define themselves in terms of voice properties
perceivable within the reader’s horizon of expectation. Because the child trusts adult
authority, the child articulates conventional social expectations in the baldest terms
imaginable and in this way informs the reader’s horizon.
from Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson. Copyright ?
1997 by The University Press of Kentucky.