"'Tell All The Truth But Tell it Slant - ' The Riddle of Emily Dickinson"

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Author
Brown, Kate
Keyword
First Reader Lee A. Schlesinger
Senior Project
Semester Spring 2019
Readers/Advisors
Schlesinger, Lee
Term and Year
Spring 2019
Date Published
2019

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URI
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/14337
Abstract
The riddle form shrouds its subject in ambiguity, making it nearly impossible for the reader to decipher a single meaning. Critics and scholars of Emily Dickinson have long attempted to decode the riddles buried in her work, in the hopes of uncovering the singular truth or secret regarding her poetry or her life. This practice defies the riddle form itself. Dickinson chose to impose the riddle form into her poetry because her religiously rigid, traditionalist time period discouraged the uncensored truth; she must, instead, "tell it slant." She uses the power dynamic of a riddle to her advantage, commanding over her poetic imagery, sidestepping themes she would not have been able to write about otherwise. In pondering what comes after death, she writes, "A species stands beyond--/Invisible, as Music--/But positive, as Sound--." Since it would have been considered impious to state directly what she thought the afterlife to be, or to reference the Catholic God she was expected to believe in, Dickinson uses abstract imagery to convey the essence of the answer. The interpretation of the riddle is up to us. Similarly, Dickinson encodes her true beliefs into her poems and letters as a way to share a small part, but conceal a large part simultaneously. If, according to the riddle form, there is no single meaning, why have critics attempted to find a single solution to Dickinson's riddles? In the 19th century, the time Dickinson lived, works such as Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" and Melville's "Moby Dick" touched upon the limitations of language in describing something one encounters. Language itself is a riddle. Time and again, supporting characters and literary critics have tried to turn the intentionally abstract into the concrete, to put a name to something that doesn't have one universal meaning, to solve the unsolvable.
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