EJLS Reading Tools

This paper explores the possibility that Emily Dickinson was living with a form of epilepsy. It uses research by contemporary neurologists, who have differentiated how patients with epileptic seizures, and patients with non-epileptic seizures, use language features to describe their subjective seizure experiences. The features of language used by patients with epilepsy have been applied to the reinterpretation of a series of Emily Dickinson’s poems that appear to be related to neurological experiences, especially ‘inner’ poems focusing on the operations of the “Brain”, “Thought”, “Mind”, and “Consciousness”. Further contemporary research into the auras of seizures, identified four signs that could stay in a person’s memory if they remained conscious during a simple partial seizure (SPC). These are “suddenness, passivity or automatism, great intensity, and strangeness”, which provided insights into Dickinson’s ‘inner’ poem, Fr340, “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,”. The identification of the sensory manifestations of auras, such as, Somatosensory, Visual, Auditory, Vertiginous, Olfactory, and Psychic auras, has also helped to clarify aspects of Dickinson’s ‘inner’ poems, especially Fr355, “It was not Death, for I stood up,”. The autobiography of the Welsh writer, Margiad Evans, identified language use arising from epileptic episodes, including the response of ‘giggling’, and the appearance of a ‘double self’, which revealed a close association to Dickinson’s language use in a range of poems. The application of research into autoscopy and “Déjà” experiences, and their appearance in poems, strengthened critical reading interpretations as expressions of inferential epileptic experiences. Finally, the poems featuring neurological experiences are seen to possess empirical dimensions that might help to explain Dickinson’s consultations with Dr Williams in Boston during 1864 and 1865, as a quest for a diagnosis and remedy for the disruptions to her consciousness.