From the opening pages of her book, Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination, Linda Freedman is keen to stress the kind of study she is not writing:

Freedman may not be the first Dickinson critic to seek to disentangle issues of faith from those of biblical engagement, but she puts the case for such differentiation in such emphatic terms that it could be said to constitute a significant moment in Dickinson criticism, one around which those who share her view can coalesce and gather momentum. At the heart of the study that follows is a focus on how Dickinson's religious culture furnished her with an essential vocabulary with which to “think through” the dilemmas of poetry as much as those of faith (2). Arguing for “a critical flexibility between literature and theology” (3), Freedman explores the ways in which both disciplines circle the problem of “embodiment” (in Christological and textual terms) and uses this as a nexus within which to read Dickinson's “religious” poems.

Any approach to Dickinson's theologically charged poems and letters necessarily confronts the issue of the poet's elusive, shifting tone and Freedman addresses this from the outset:

This is one of those moments (and there are many in this book) where Freedman shows considerable skill in capturing the complex registers of Dickinson's poetic voice – in this case, the tension between “ironic distance” and “empathic investment” so central to this poet's work. A respect for the sheer difficulty of such critical negotiation animates Freedman's analysis and produces some very fine readings of individual Dickinson poems – readings that clarify the issues at stake for the poet, yet also remain true to the deliberate (almost cherished) uncertainty at the heart of Dickinson's work.

The structuring principle of Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination is the Gospel story, with diversions into the Old Testament narratives of Abraham, Jacob and Moses. The chapters are organized chronologically around such key Christological events as Incarnation, Baptism, Transfiguration, Gethsemane, Calvary and Resurrection. The strongest chapters are those that frame both book and Gospel narrative: Incarnation and Resurrection. The first of these (“A Word Made Flesh”) focusses on the problem inherent in Calvinist incarnation theology: “how to hold humanity and divinity together in a single relationship” (20) or, put another way, the problem of “the God-man” (a concept that the Unitarian William Ellery Channing dismissed as “a ludicrous assault on human reason” (31)). For Freedman, Dickinson's attraction to such a problematic concept lay in the conceptual framework it provided in which to explore issues of poetic “embodiment.” Since God remains “partly hidden, not fully revealed even in his own revelation,” divine revelation offered a suitably imaginative model for the difficulties of representation itself: “The gap between the thing-in-itself and the image of the thing” (16–17). The chapter charts earlier attempts by New England theologians to negotiate that gap: from seventeenth-century Puritan typology, to Jonathan Edwards's affective preaching, to Unitarian rationalism and, finally, to Emerson's inversion of incarnation theology through which “God's condescension to be man” becomes “man's ability to be God” (30). Into this historically resonant landscape, Freedman sets Dickinson's attempt to articulate the relationship between Incarnation and human language in “A Word Made Flesh” (Fr1715), an attempt which ends tantalizingly poised on the “hinge” (178) of simile: “Could Condescension be/Like this consent of Language/This loved Philology” (emphasis added).

The chapters that follow focus on baptismal naming (as a means of exploring the shift from pre- to postlapsarian concepts of language and as a framework within which to explore Dickinson's “performative poetic stance” (64)), “transfiguration” (here linked through comparative religion to “[m]ythological sun-gods”), the concept of “the quest” (in its classical, biblical, Romantic and artistic configurations) and the “sacrifice” of Calvary – the Gospel event which “returns us to the problems of … the compact union of humanity and divinity … at the very moment [when union] is about to be dissolved” (126).

The final chapter (“Resurrection”) also returns to the ground of paradoxical unions, approached this time from the altered perspective of the grave: more specifically, the relationship between the human body and its resurrected form. Freedman offers nuanced and insightful readings of Dickinson's poetic responses to St. Paul's articulation of the dilemma of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 (“How are the dead raised and with what body do they come?”). Given the centrality of this biblical text to nineteenth-century American culture and Dickinson's own sustained engagement with Pauline theology in numerous poems and letters, it is an aspect of Dickinson's work that has attracted scholarly attention; what Freedman brings to this debate, however, is a stress on the relationship between the “resurrected” body and poetic representation. For Freedman, it is this relationship that defines Dickinson's own poetic “gestures” towards a theological dilemma that cannot (of necessity) be fully expressed: “The resurrected body … becomes part of the semiotics of loss, gesturing towards something that cannot be fully regained” and which “the poetic gesture of the simile and the narrative gesture of allegory … can only begin to enact” (159). What she also attempts here (and throughout the book) is to connect an argument grounded in theology with issues of poetic materiality and process. Drawing on the transformative impact of manuscript studies upon our sense of “the forms in which Dickinson's ‘poems’ come” and the inadequacy of a critical vocabulary of “fixity” (“poem,” “letter,” “dash,” “variant”) in the face of the fluidity of her manuscript marks and practice (ix–x), Freedman posits connections between ostensibly thematic concerns such as “quest” and the consciously unfinished journey of Dickinson's own poetic practice. At times, these alignments can feel strained but in the case of the “finished Creatures” (161) of Pauline resurrection, the alignment is mutually suggestive: “She asks how and if poems can be finished as she thinks about the forms in which they might be renewed and said to live again” (158).

In such a wide-ranging and ambitious study, there are inevitably some losses (the sense, in places, of an argumentative thread obscured by detail and diversion) and some omissions. The most significant omission is an adequate treatment of the impact of German higher criticism upon how nineteenth-century America read its Bible. Throughout the book Freedman employs general terms such as “liberal theology” and “comparative religion” to cover quite diverse hermeneutical practices and ones that were clearly influenced by the historical-critical method of the higher critics. Although reference is made to “German theologians” (with brief mention of David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach in particular), such reference does not adequately indicate the input of key figures into a hermeneutical method that stressed the extent to which the Bible was a human-historical document, one reflective of the expressive practices of the various cultures it encompassed. Freedman is right to claim that Dickinson's culture was increasingly aware of the possibility of reading its Bible as, at least partly, a literary text, but such insights would have been sharpened considerably by being traced to the influences of German theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and Johann Gottfried Herder (whose 1782 The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry was a landmark text in the area of comparative religion) and their dissemination by American theologians such as James Marsh and Theodore Parker (again, Parker is cited only briefly).Footnote ¹ Similarly, although mention is made of George Eliot's 1846 translation of Strauss's Das Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus: Critically Examined), this merited much deeper investigation: in a study that is otherwise so engaged with the hermeneutical problem of Christ, a more detailed examination of Strauss's insistence on the humanity of Christ and its reverberations within American culture would have greatly enriched the argument.Footnote ²

Such omissions, however, simply point to the rich store of theological debates that surrounded Emily Dickinson – the fascinating hermeneutical landscape within which she lived, thought and wrote. Freedman's book offers one perspective on that crucial landscape and it is one in which theology and literature are held (as was the author's aim at the outset) in mutually informing, necessarily complex, and ultimately illuminating relationship. Literature and theology are not necessarily comfortable bedfellows – nor should they be. It is a testament to the strength of Freedman's analysis that she reminds us how the creative and intellectual friction between the two constituted their attraction for this poet – and account for the sheer nerve of her finest work.