ship and conventional religious criticism have missed. Focusing on
the patriarchal elements of nineteenth-century Christianity, feminist
scholars have, for the most part, dismissed the potentially positive
contribution of Christianity to Dickinson's art. Although they have
correctly challenged critics who have ignored the importance of Dick-
inson's womanhood to her art, almost all feminist critics have assumed
that Dickinson was distanced from the repressive nineteenth-century
American culture around her, including her religious heritage. ¹ Simi-
larly, religious critics of Dickinson's poetry have generally seen Chris-
tianity as a negative influence on her work, either limiting her in some
way or, more often, stimulating her to protest against her theological
heritage. Often the religious critics have failed to consider how Dick-
inson's gender might have shaped her art. ²

To be sure, Dickinson did question her New England culture's
understanding of deity, but at the same time, she found within the
Christian tradition ways to empower her protests. By assuming the
voice and stance of the prophet as she drew on biblical and homiletical
rhetorical techniques, Dickinson as a woman poet spoke to her culture
with a sense of authority and justification, despite that culture's pa-
triarchal slant. Her religious tradition and her innovations upon it
were precisely what enabled her to write her distinctive, unforgettable
poetry.

In the introduction to Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson, Suzanne Juhasz
sums up a feminist stance: "All [such critics] show Dick-
inson, of necessity, responding to the repressions that surround and
threaten to control her, change her into something other than she is or
might be." ³ Thanks to the work of Juhasz and other scholars sensitive
to cultural and literary contexts, we are now in a good position to
explore those elements that liberated Dickinson from the "repressions
that surround[ed] her"--specifically, her religious tradition, or, more
precisely, her participation in current innovations of that religious
past. Instead of regarding Christianity as just another patriarchal
structure, Dickinson scholars would do well to test the ways in which
she drew on her religious surroundings to achieve liberation within
her own cultural context, patriarchal as that culture was. Focusing on
the elements within her religious heritage that give her a voice, a
purpose, and authority as a female poet can illuminate her poetry in
ways that feminist and religious scholarship may miss.

Conventional critics have generally acknowledged that Dickinson
made extensive use of concepts and terminology adapted from New

-2-