Emily Dickinson May Have Been Neurodivergent

People in the past, and still today, are sometimes different from each other.

The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

Was Emily Dickinson neurodivergent?

There is, of course, no way to know for sure. Neurodivergence, or autism, wasn’t recognized as a condition until the early 20^th century, decades after Dickinson died in 1886. Even now, autism is often misdiagnosed, especially in women. Doctors often fail to recognize autism in patients sitting in front of them; you can’t read someone’s letters and poems and biography and expect to get a definitive read on the state of someone’s sensory processing.

Some people argue that, in the absence of certainty, it’s wrong to speculate at all. We can’t test Dickinson, so we should just assume she’s neurotypical—just as biographers tend to default to the assumption that everyone in the past was straight unless there is actual evidence of them saying, “I had sex with someone of my own gender today” (and sometimes not even then.) Everyone must be considered “normal” and part of the majority; most people are neurotypical should be changed to all people are neurotypical, lest we insult someone by suggesting they were unusual or didn’t fit in the expected boxes.

I think the problems with this approach should be fairly clear. And if they aren’t, you can see them illustrated in Alfred Habegger’s exhaustive and still standard 2001 biography of Dickinson, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books.

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Chronicling oddity

Habegger’s book is rightly celebrated for its sweeping erudition and close attention to the events (or non-events) of the life of Dickinson, her family, and her circle. In his chronicle of Dickinson’s day-by-day existence over her 55 years, he inevitably chronicles her famous reclusiveness and her spurning of publicity and public life.

The poet rarely left her home in Amherst, and not at all as she got older. She had intense correspondence with many people—especially her sister-in-law Sue—and some flirtations by letter. But she never married, and her physical intimacy was probably quite circumscribed. Indeed, she increasingly as she aged avoided physical face-to-face meetings with anyone not in her immediate family, and sometimes even with them. Her life was focused on a narrow range of intense interests—her poems, collecting and pressing flowers, baking bread, playing with the neighborhood children, her correspondence, her dog—and she decisively backed away from any encroachments. During the Civil War, for example, she refused to make bandages for soldiers, as many northern women did—not out of anti-union sentiment, but seemingly just because she didn’t want to.

Emily also famously refused, with rare exceptions, to publicize or publish her poems. She sent individual verses in letters to friends, and they would sometimes press her to allow them to anonymously submit them to papers or publications. Dickinson rarely agreed and when she did she seems to have regretted it. Habegger recounts one incident in which Sue recognized published lines as Dickinson’s. She casually identified them, outing Emily who

went “so white” her sister-in-law regretted having spoken. This strong and instantaneous reaction suggests there was more to her refusal to publish than a fastidious objection to the regularities of print or to the sprucings up of editors, as is often asserted.

Emily never showed anyone the 40 notebooks of fair copies of her own poems she put together herself, for herself; they were only discovered after her death. Here again, creation, preparation, collection all were done as a kind of private ritual, without interest in—and indeed with antipathy for—public or audience.

Rationalizing oddity

Habegger sees Dickinson’s fierce privacy, and her resistance to publication as a reaction to and a strategy for dealing with her difficult and sexist father, Edward Dickinson. Edward was opposed to women’s right and his writings suggest he was especially set against women expressing their opinions and ideas in the public sphere. Habegger concludes that Dickinson’s shyness and privacy were a response to her father’s views and strictures.

Edward’s…fixity helps us understand why his daughter could not assume an ordinary adult female role consistent with the exercise of her genius and why she made common cause with the neighborhood children. Yet to think of her as a victim is to exaggerate Edward’s control and belittle her ingenuity. Accepting, embracing, her exclusion from the public world, she redefined it as the freedom to do and to be whatever she chose at home. Her way of living with Father was to create a private domain of friendship, thought, and art he could not enter. What this meant, however, was that certain doors could not be opened as long as he lived.

It’s certainly possible that Dickinson was trying to cater to and negotiate around her father when she kept her poetry and her life private. But there are counterindications as well. Edward encouraged and facilitated his daughter’s education, and he didn’t restrict her reading. She was an enthusiastic fan of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and other women writers. She didn’t censure them for having public profiles. And her shyness also seems too visceral to be seen primarily as a strategy.

Habegger doesn’t discuss or mention neurodivergence. But autism, or something like autism, fits quite well with what we know of Dickinson. It dovetails with her passionate, intense interests and hobbies (not least her poetry). It fits with her mix of hypersociality and intense shyness; she loved talking to people through letters or sometimes even in her house when she could speak through a door from another room. But (like many neurodivergent people) she found face-to-face social interactions painful and difficult, and she gradually seems to have phased them out altogether.

Neurodivergent people are also disproportionately likely to be queer—a suggestive connection in Dickinson’s case. Habegger is skeptical that Dickinson and Sue were romantically or sexually involved, but other historians believe they were—or at the very least that Emily was in love with her friend and eventual sister-in-law.

Queerness can also mean asexuality. We don’t know whether Dickinson ever consummated any of her relationships in any respect. But based on what evidence we have it’s plausible that she had intense romantic feelings for both men and women (which she expressed sometimes in quite sexual poems) but was not necessarily all that interested in physical intimacy.

Wild Nights!

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

Again, there’s a limit on what we can know about someone who lived as private a life as Dickinson did. Acknowledging neurodivergence as a possibility doesn’t violate that privacy though; instead, it gives Dickinson more space to be herself.

Habegger assumes that we need to identify psychological or family causes to explain why a genius like Dickinson forswore public recognition. But the truth is that different people have different priorities and interests. Maybe Emily Dickinson was just like that because she was just like that, in the mysterious way that different people can have different mixes of talents, interests, and ambitions.

Another shy genius

Habegger brackets queer, autistic, and non-normative possibilities; in contrast, Susana M. Morris’ Positive Obsessions, a biography of Octavia Butler, address them head on.

Like Dickinson, Butler was an extremely shy and private person, who found social interactions painful and who was intensely focused on her own internal life and writing. Like Dickinson, too, Butler’s relationship to queerness was ambivalent and ambiguous—as a six-foot tall Black woman, she was generally perceived as gender nonconforming. She seems to have questioned her own sexuality at various points, though she eventually rejected lesbian identity. Her novels, however, circle obsessively around alternative sexualities and kinks—third genders, sex with aliens, sex with vampires, sex with insects, dolphin sex, tentacle sex, polyamory, queer sex—even as she seems to have had (like Dickinson) few intimate relationships in her own life.

Unlike Habegger, Morris speaks about autism directly. She notes that Butler, like Dickinson, had difficulty with formal schooling. Morris explains that:

It wasn’t that she was undisciplined, lazy, or unproductive; instead, [Butler] was what today we would call neurodivergent. She processed information and completed tasks in a way that made little sense to some of her teachers. But she was neither uninterested nor disrespectful. She was just different. [italics mine]. Over time she was able to develop hacks that allowed her to function in a world that prizes neurotypical minds, but this was a battle for much of her life.

Morris doesn’t feel the need to look for reasons to explain why Butler was like that. She simply notes that she was—and then talks about how being different affected her and how she negotiated a world that was not especially interested in cultivating difference.

Butler, unlike Dickinson, did want her work to be read and did want public accolades; she worked hard all her life to overcome her antipathy for public speaking, rather than organizing her life around avoiding face-to-face contact. Neurodivergent people aren’t all the same either; most neurodivergent people aren’t (like Dickinson and Bulter) among the greatest American authors in history, just for starters. To say that Dickinson is neurodivergent doesn’t explain her genius any more than you can explain her genius by noting that her father was a sexist jerk.

The brain away…

So neurodivergence isn’t a skeleton key. But it is a light that helps you see some possible contexts. Dickinson was unusual in many respects—but (as the biography of Butler suggests) she wasn’t that unusual. Recognizing the existence of neurodivergent people means recognizing that, yes, there are a lot of us who don’t like social interactions, who have special interests, who are motivated by the logic of obsession rather than or in addition to, the logic of fame.

Dickinson may have been influenced by her father’s ideas; she also may have just been a really private person. Neurodivergence isn’t a way to reduce Dickinson to a diagnosis; it’s a way to remind ourselves that people are complicated and strange and that enough people behave in enough different ways that you don’t necessarily need an explanation for why someone isn’t “normal”—beyond the observation that a lot of people aren’t.

If ever the lid gets off my head
And lets the brain away
The fellow will go where he belonged —
Without a hint from me,

And the world — if the world be looking on —
Will see how far from home
It is possible for sense to live
The soul there — all the time.