The Semiotic Pulsions of Dickinson’s Poetry and their Medicinal Virtues

The central thesis of this essay is that Dickinson’s work has significant implications for a critical medical humanities open to the interface between language and embodiment. We show that by employing what Kristeva would refer to as a highly effective and aesthetically potent genotextuality, Dickinson manages to transmit pain and grief. She thereby enables a process of de-insulation and sharing, which can have therapeutic effects on the reader/listener. Here, suffering is not refined into erudition, beauty or even nothingness as a result of denial. Dickinson, we argue, becomes one of Kristeva’s poet-surgeons of abjection, a poetess who cultivated not only a loyalty to malaise, but also a loyalty to overcoming the inability to share that malaise. The means by which Dickinson accomplishes this effect, we demonstrate, is via the semiotic pulsions of her language that have the potential to facilitate the establishment of a democracy of proximity, one that resonates with the deepest levels of human experience.