Summary Of To'see Comparatively By Emily Dickinson-Zisser

In her 1994 article, “To ‘See—Comparatively’: Emily Dickinson’s Use of Simile,” Shirley Sharon-Zisser “explores Emily Dickinson’s use of similes from the perspective of her meta-poetic stances and the consciousness of the untranscendable opacity of epistemological and metaphysical boundaries that so pervades her poetry” (60). Essentially, she argues that Dickinson’s similes have both linguistic and metalinguistic functions and that the two functions counterbalance each other so that the reader is forced to consider both the comparison being made as well as the language itself. She refers to the “straightforward” interpretation of a simile as “centrifugal” (i.e. having a referent outside of itself) and the metalinguistic interpretation as “centripetal”
. . the same features that are prominent in the FR2 and emphasized in or introduced to the FRl (what I shall call the “negotiated features” of the simile) also characterize an aspect of language itself. For example, in the illustrative simile constituting “the Soul’s distinct connection / With immortality” (P974), the feature “ability to reveal,” that is salient in the FR2 (lightning exhibiting “Sheets of Place — ”) and emphasized in the FRl (situations of “Danger / Or quick Calamity — ” disclosing the immortality of the soul) is also a salient feature of the form of illustrative simile itself, in which the FR2 brings to light unknown or unnoticed aspects of the FRl. (ibid)
This claim is extremely far-reaching and ultimately unsustainable: for example, in the poem “Nature — the Gentlest Mother is,” the “negotiated features” of the simile include a caring and affectionate disposition and the responsibility for helping living things grow. These features can hardly be applied to language itself, and so Sharon-Zisser’s implication that all of Emily Dickinson’s similes can be centripetal is an overstatement. This failure significantly weakens her argument, since her intent is to make broad generalizations about Dickinson’s use of simile as a
This claim seems difficult to substantiate one way or the other, but it seems highly improbable to me that a reader would (as Sharon-Zisser suggests) read a simile comparing the discardable scaffolding of a house to the human body as a temporary vessel for the soul and make the connection that “eventual discardability of the formative substance is also a salient feature of illustrative similes, where the concrete FR becomes redundant following the elucidation of the abstract FR” (64). Such a connection—the recognition of the metalinguistic function of the simile—is necessary for the reader to be caught in the “oscillation” between linguistic (centrifugal) and metalinguistic (centripetal) interpretations. Thus, because it seems so unlikely for the reader to make the leap of logic from simile to metalinguistic commentary, Sharon-Zisser’s conclusions about the relationship between simile and perception (which hinge entirely on the reader’s ability to make this connection) are unable to be substantiated and her entire