As a renowned and enigmatic poet, many people have created narratives about Emily Dickinson’s life, and their varying depictions relate to pain. In “Neither Mad Nor Motherless,” the contemporary Dickinson scholar Jerome Charyn engages with John Cody’s book After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (1971). Charyn argues that Cody “presents Dickinson as a mental case whose only manner of survival was writing her cryptic and very private poems” (Charyn, Jerome. “Neither Mad Nor Motherless.” LitHub, 2016). In My Emily Dickinson (New Directions, 1985), a collage-like assessment of Dickinson by American poet Susan Howe, Howe criticizes scholars like Cody, who distort Dickinson’s life to fit “the legend of deprivation and emotional disturbance” (Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. New York, New Directions, 1985, p. 24). While Charyn and Howe contest the “legend,” the feminist scholars Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, following Cody, advance it. In Gilbert and Gubar’s canonical text about 19th-century female writers, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), they refer to Dickinson as “truly a madwoman (a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in a room in her father’s house)” (Charyn).

Scholars like Cody, Gilbert, and Gubar argue Dickinson’s pain was psychological.