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.