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Embodied Syntax: Emily Dickinson’s Dash and the Poetics of Feminine Resistance
An Essay by Jess Lee
In Emily Dickinson’s poetry, the dash has long been a subject of fascination, both typographically and interpretively. Often dismissed as eccentric or idiosyncratic, her use of the dash unsettles the conventions of poetic lineation, grammatical cohesion, and temporal progression. But more than a stylistic quirk, the dash can be read as a deeply embodied gesture – a formal mark that disrupts, delays, and disorients the flow of thought. It opens a space within language for what cannot be said, for what resists containment in syntactic or semantic closure. When viewed through the lens of feminine aesthetic theory, Dickinson’s dash becomes not a passive gap but an active threshold, a form that embodies the poetics of discontinuity, excess, and affect. It is in this interruption that Dickinson stages a profound critique of patriarchal logics of knowledge, language, and being.
Drawing on the work of feminist theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, this essay will argue that Dickinson’s dash operates as a formal manifestation of the feminine – an opening in language where linearity falters, the body emerges, and meaning becomes porous. Her dashes do not simply break the line; they breathe through it, creating rhythmic and semantic pulsations that recall what Cixous famously calls écriture féminine, or women’s writing – a mode through which, as one passage describes, “a new language exceeding the capture of the signifier might emerge,” (Zeiher 86) commuting between unconscious desire and the body to resist the phallocentric demand for coherence and closure. Through her dashes, Dickinson invites the reader not merely to interpret but to experience her poetics as a spatial, temporal, and cognitive encounter with the incomplete, the excessive, and the unknown.
Dickinson’s use of the dash is, first and foremost, a disruption of linear temporality. It delays progression, interrupts syntax, and forestalls resolution. In poems such as “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (340), time is neither chronological nor teleological. Instead, it is recursive, implosive, and disordered. The speaker begins:
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
The dash at the end of the stanza does not simply signal a pause; it dislocates time. The repetition of “treading – treading –” enacts a ritual that is both circular and oppressive, and the dash intensifies this cyclical, almost claustrophobic movement. The “breaking through” of “Sense” is not a culmination but a threshold, one that the dash refuses to let the speaker fully cross. The result is a sensation of being suspended in a liminal temporality, neither entirely inside nor outside of sense. This aligns with Kristeva’s notion of women’s time as cyclical, monumental, and discontinuous – a time that resists the linear, progressive temporality of patriarchal history and instead embraces repetition, rupture, and return, which she “identifies with maternal subjectivity… in two modalities, repetition or ‘cyclical’ time, and ‘monumental’ time” (Everingham 32).
Indeed, the final stanza of the poem enacts a temporal implosion:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –
The last line, “Finished knowing – then –,” performs a refusal of epistemological closure. The dash after “then” does not lead to any revelation. Instead, it gestures toward a knowledge that cannot arrive, a conclusion forever deferred. Dickinson’s dash thus becomes a mechanism of epistemic suspension. In the tradition of feminine aesthetic theory, this marks a rejection of mastery and linear progress in favor of an opening to the incomplete and the unknowable. As Irigaray might observe, this is a form of writing that does not seek to totalize but to remain “in proximity” – to gesture, to approach, to remain open. It is a disruption of the “philosophic logos… [which] reduce[s] all others to the economy of the Same” (This Sex Which is Not One, 74), replacing it instead with a poetics that resists resolution, embraces sexual difference, and opens space for the subject to emerge through relationality rather than domination.
If Dickinson’s dash suspends time, it also alters the syntactic rhythm of the poem in a way that invites the body into the act of reading. The dash demands that the reader pause not in silence, but in breath. In this way, it functions as a kind of somatic punctuation, a trace of the poet’s own bodily rhythm inscribed in language. Cixous writes that feminine writing is “white ink,” a language written from the body, from the rhythms of the unconscious, from the unspeakable, insisting that women “must write through their bodies, they must invent the…language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics” (Smith). Dickinson’s dash operates precisely in this register. It is not the absence of meaning but the trace of its emergence, a place where affect and articulation meet.
In “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –” (591), the dash marks a space between sensation and thought, between presence and absence:
With Blue – uncertain – stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –
Here, the dash does not only separate clauses but performs a sensory rupture. The fly’s “Buzz” becomes “uncertain” and “stumbling,” a kind of sensory excess that overwhelms cognition. The dash between “the light – and me” introduces an ontological distance between the subject and perception. And in the final line, “I could not see to see –,” the doubling of the verb “see” combined with the concluding dash creates a recursive, unresolvable loop. The dash marks a failed epistemology, a breakdown of vision, but also a heightened somatic awareness. The speaker does not cease to be but ceases to “see” – a dissolution of the subject into the rhythm of her own dying. Dickinson’s dash here becomes a space of “semiotic chora,” as Kristeva calls it – a pre-linguistic, affective pulsation that both precedes and interrupts symbolic language, “a modality of signifiance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic… a rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, [where] the process by which signifiance is constituted” (Kristeva 26) begins.
Dickinson’s poetry frequently stages a confrontation between surface perception and submerged meaning, between what is consciously grasped and what lies beyond the threshold of articulation. The dash becomes the very mark of that threshold. In “Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music –” (861), the poem critiques empirical methods of knowledge acquisition:
Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music –
Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled –
Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old.
The opening dash already disorients. What appears to be a directive – “Split the Lark” – is quickly complicated by the dash, which severs action from consequence. The presumed promise of “finding the Music” is immediately destabilized. The act of “splitting” becomes violent, and the “Music” is transformed into a fragile, elusive presence, seen in the phrases, “Bulb after Bulb” and “Scantily dealt.” Dickinson’s dash undermines the logic of dissection as a means of understanding. The dash in this sense is a gesture of respect for the unknowable. It marks the place where meaning withdraws, where the feminine unconscious exceeds linguistic capture. It is, as Kristeva states, a trace of the maternal body in language – an imprint of presence that disrupts the symbolic order from within.
Ultimately, Dickinson’s dash is not a symptom of disorder but a vehicle of control – a mode through which the poet constructs a cognitive and emotional rhythm that resists conventional logic. In poems like “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” (372), the dash modulates the affective trajectory of the poem:
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
The dashes fragment the rhythm of the line, creating a halting, dissociative pulse that mirrors the speaker’s post-traumatic state. Dickinson does not describe numbness but deeply induces the process. The dash becomes a formal strategy of affective transmission, one that places the reader inside the speaker’s disintegrating sense of self. This is not a loss of control but a highly calibrated use of fragmentation to shape consciousness. Dickinson’s dash is a feminine tactic – a subtle but powerful form of poetic agency that disrupts the reader’s expectations, undermines normative structures of time and sense, and invites a different kind of attention.
Through the dash, Dickinson constructs a poetics of interruption, refusal, and affective resonance that aligns with the central tenets of feminine aesthetic theory. Her dashes do not simply fragment thought but embodies it. They carve out spaces in the text for breath, for rupture, for the rhythms of a mind and body that do not conform to patriarchal logics of order, completion, or mastery. Dickinson’s dash becomes a liminal technology: a space where time bends, where syntax hesitates, and where consciousness flickers between presence and absence.
By inscribing interruption into the very nature of her poems, Dickinson stages a radical poetic intervention – one that anticipates the critiques of phallocentric discourse developed by Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous more than a century later. Her poetry does not seek to speak the unspeakable but rather creates space for it. In this sense, the dash is not a break in meaning but its deepening and resonance. It is Dickinson’s most powerful act of writing the body – an embodied syntax of resistance and revelation, and a distinctly feminine form of poetic thought.
Works Cited
Everingham, Christine. “The Politics of Women’s Time.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, vol. 4.1, 1999, pp. 31-47. https://www.academia.edu/115512635/The_Politics_of_Womens_Time.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One. Cornell University Press, 1977. https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/irigaray-this-sex-which-is-not-one.pdf.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Columbia University Press, 1941. https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/529414/mod_resource/content/0/8.%20Julia%20Kristeva-Revolution%20in%20Poetic%20Language.pdf.
Smith, Georgia. “She Writes in White Ink: Dreams, Fantasy, and Sensation in Hélène Cixous’ The Laugh of Medusa.”, 2023. https://retrospectjournal.com/2023/12/03/she-writes-in-white-ink-dreams-fantasy-and-sensation-in-helene-cixous-the-laugh-of-medusa/.
Zeiher, Cindy. “Écriture Féminine: Spiel on Words.” Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique, vol. 14, 2024, pp. 86-104. https://lineofbeauty.org/index.php/sjournal/article/view/120/115.
Jess Lee is an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia, majoring in English Literature and minoring in Creative Writing. Jess channels his love for language and storytelling into his creative work, writing poetry that delves into themes of identity, feeling, death, afterlife, and more. He also writes critical essays on English literature. Jess is the host of Jess’ Lit, a literature and music radio show on CiTR.
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