Monday, July 21, 2014

How Cute is Emily Dickinson?: Thoughts sparked by Barton Levi St. Armand

Exploring Emily Dickinson's cuteness is one of my ongoing projects.  As we "speak," I am reading the chapter titled "American Grotesque: Dickinson, God, and Folk Forms" from Barton Levi St. Armand's still-unsurpassed 1986 critical study, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture.  A few preliminary thoughts on cuteness in ED:
  • Reviewing the concrete rules of cuteness on a commercial website, one can extrapolate a few features beyond the classic kindenschema (baby face) described by Konrad Lorenz.  Cuteness plays with proportion; it is especially engaged with degrees of smallness; it loves paws (and the word paw); it exhibits vulnerability; and it is often concerned with animals imitating humans or children imitating adults.  All of these qualities interest ED.
  • It's necessary to remind ourselves how verbal and visual cuteness work differently.  Visual cuteness--like porn--bypasses the intellect to trigger archaic instincts.  Verbal cuteness, because it involves language, is more subtle and more flexible.  A poet can use cuteness as a tactic in one or two lines, triggering affective reactions in the reader, without making her entire poem vapidly adorable.  I think Dickinson uses cuteness as a flashpoint tactic, not as a consistent mode.  
  • I should admit that Dickinson would not have used the word "cute" in the contemporary American sense; the word was not common parlance in the 1860s, and when it was used, it meant something akin to "clever" or "piquant."  That said, ED also would not have used the terms "sexy" or even "erotic."  And yet, like eroticism (which has been much discussed by ED scholars), cuteness indexes a complex of affective triggers and responses that can be very powerful. Just as she deploys eroticism quite frequently, so too does she deploy cuteness, including and perhaps especially in her poems that wrestle with religious or spiritual topics.
  • Finally (and this is controversial and deserves its own post, so I can mention it only briefly here) the cuteness response is subjective, so not everyone will react to ED's images in the same way. Both anecdotal experience and scientific studies agree that the cuteness response is stronger in (most) women than in (most) men.  I write as a female reader with a strong cuteness response myself; I also suspect that the reason cuteness (but not sexiness) carries the stigma of triviality or even stupidity stems from its connection to women's subjective experience.
SO, on to St. Armand.  
  • St. Armand begins his chapter with a visual image of  a giant cat face. Perhaps because his work predates that of Lori Merish, he does not explicitly link the grotesque to the cute, but this cat (like Dodgson's Cheshire cat, and like modern proliferating internet cat memes) clearly embodies both. St. Armand remarks:  "Just as carpenter Gothic revels in the fanciful and the piquant, and just as the grotesque encompasses a ludicrous or comic element, so is the full picture of Dickinson's religious consciousness not without its quality of what her sister-in-law, according to Bianchi, identified as 'the impish' and what the poet herself called (in reference to a rare display of her father's humor) 'a little excess of Monkey!' The same qualities of the vernacular, the grotesque, and the comic can be found in a remarkable American primitive painting of about the year 1840." This image, St. Armand suggests, can serve as "an appropriate analog of the unique God-consciousness manifested in Dickinson's poetry" (163).
  • In the face of a Cat-God, Dickinson imagines herself as a mouse.  St. Armand quotes: "Snug in seraphic Cupboards/To nibble all the day,/While unsuspecting Cycles/Wheel solemnly away!" This illustrates one example of how Dickinson deploys cuteness.  The first two lines use numerous verbal cuteness tactics: the cupboard is seraphic (a mix of the grand and the small); the mouse is snug, emphasizing its miniaturism and its need to elicit caretaking; and it nibbles on (human) scraps.  The reader's affective cuteness-response is activated, only to be undermined by unsuspecting Cycles; the mouse's bid to be nursed, played with, or even noticed might succeed with the reader but its cuteness fails to touch the divine.
  • Perhaps then ED's cuteness is especially effective when it evokes a double response:  a sympathetic (perhaps implicitly female) reader wants to attend, to care, to play; while a remote (and of course implicitly male) God fails or refuses to be moved.
  • So, provisionally:  cuteness is a tactic that might succeed with ED's readers but that fails with God--just as we might oooh and awww over a nibbling mouse, but the cat will eat it.  I don't think this easy formulation works with all of ED's cute poems, but it works with some.  More on this later ... it's especially worth complicating because that primitive 1840 cat, while grotesque, has elements of cuteness itself: is is, after all disproportionate and neotenous. 


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