Insecurity and Abandonment - Feelings in the Poem 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain'
Emily Dickinson invites readers to consider alternative ways of being and thinking by presenting individuals who feel displaced and alienated in patriarchal societies, leading them to reject social norms in order to assert their unique perspective of the world. Emily Dickinson's allegorical poem 'I felt a funeral, in my Brain' (1896) explores the persona's inner turmoil after abandoning foundational beliefs, which leads to her descent into madness.
In 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain', Dickinson provides the reader with insight into the sombre perspective and fragmented thoughts of individuals who choose an alternative way of thinking, by highlighting the struggle that they endure in understanding their significance in the world. Dickinson's refusal to reconcile established, protestant ideology of the 19th century, and instead pursue an unaccepted, transcendentalist way of thinking, stems from her defiance to attend Amherst's First Congregational Church after childhood. Dickinson's 'Funeral' allegory, first established in: 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain', symbolises the death of her rationality due to her unconventional way of thinking, while also inviting the reader into her troubled interior world.
Dickinson's epizeuxis to portray the funeral drums 'beating-beating' and the boots of mourners 'treading-treading', symbolise the incessant, perennial feeling of discomfort and insecurity that the persona experiences after asserting her transcendentalist way of thinking. The persona's psychological torment and fragmented thoughts are evident in the asyndetic verse: 'Wrecked, solitary, here', where she abandons traditional syntax to convey her disrupted thought, and Susan Howe asserts that Dickinson: 'built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders'. The persona's increasingly tenuous hold onto accepted ways of thinking finally breaks in the metaphor: 'The plank in reason broke and I dropped down and down', marking the moment where the persona abandons the Christian teachings of wider society, which previously provided her with a sense of reason, and her resulting descent into insanity is akin to the sensation of the floor beneath her disintegrating, as she is thrust into a state of freefall. However, Dickinson's decision to leave her poem incomplete with an em dash gives the reader a sense of hope and portrays this downward spiral, not merely as descent into despair, but as a process of ritual purification from which she emerges with an alternative, transcendentalist way of thinking that liberates her.
Overall, while Dickinson gives reader an insight into the struggle individuals may endure when rejecting foundational beliefs that provide them with security, she ultimately celebrates those who respond to spiritual doubt by developing alternative ways of thinking. In this poem the autor shows how being a displaced human look like.
