F Block--Ben on 435

Emily Dickinson and Her Many Hyphens                                                                        \\\ By Ben Eggleston

Pick up Emily Dickinson’s Poem 435[1], and one can’t help but notice the hyphens. They are sprinkled liberally, even recklessly, throughout the poem. Every line has at least one extra-long dash taking the place of a comma, a period, or inserted where no punctuation would normally be found. They are a little jarring. Depending on one’s feelings regarding proactive punctuation, they could even be alarming. However haphazard they may seem, they occupy nearly half of 435’s real estate on the page, and any self-respecting student of literature should assume that a skilled artist such as Dickinson brings method to her madness. Not coincidentally, the poem itself deals with Reason (with a capital R) and Madness, and how the one is often found in the guise of the other. The hyphens, on closer examination, help unify the poem’s structure with its message, which can be summarized as follows: Often a thoughtful observer will find Reason in seemingly mad or senseless occurrences. And often the Majority will decide that something is logical and overflowing with Reason, and anyone who dares to point out the Madness that is being overlooked will be labeled Mad themselves, and “handled with a chain.” The humble hyphen, in the hands of a master poet, becomes very expressive in this poem. It adds to the message in a variety of ways. Specifically…

The dissection of the poem into hyphenated chunks is an agent of sedition in the reader’s mind. It has the potential to create suspicion regarding the sanity of the speaker.  It is not too much of a stretch to imagine the words coming in fits and starts to a madwoman incapable of sustaining coherent thought for more than a few words at a time. Were the insane speaker to do an oral presentation, perhaps the dashes would manifest as twitches and pauses taken to collect her thoughts. If Dickinson’s intent was actually to present the speaker as a little crazy, it’s a humorous touch. The poem’s dramatic cry, “The Majority labels me as insane whenever I disagree with them,” is undermined to ironic effect if the speaker is, in fact, insane.

The impression given by 435 is that the speaker is not on board with the Majority, and is one of those who find themselves being handled with a chain for their alternative lines of thinking. The interrupted nature of 435 (courtesy of the hyphen) could then be a metaphor: My poem is interrupted just like all my intellectual endeavors are interrupted by a narrow minded, judgmental Majority. In this case, the poem’s structure serves to add a note of protest to its somewhat resigned tone.

There is a hyphen at the end of the poem, which reads like this: “…and handled with a Chain—“ A hyphen is used in between text. One does not usually end something with a hyphen. This creates the suggestion that the speaker was unable to finish for some reason. Given the message that precedes it, the hyphenated ending gives rise to the eerie feeling that the speaker has been dragged of in chains before she could finish. This makes sense according to the rules of the poem:  Choose not to side with the Majority, and you will be handled with a chain. The speaker certainly made that choice, and now she must live with the consequences.

A close reading of 435 reveals that the enthusiastic distribution of hyphens is not random, or pointless, or done just to do something different; The hyphens pull their weight in the poem by variously supporting, undermining, or adding to the message, or even all at the same time, depending on one’s interpretation.

           

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[1] As it is labeled in our class, anyway.