New England Landscape History in American Poetry: A Lacanian Vie ...

The speaker’s perception of her environment, her ability to “see—New Englandly,” determines the nature of her voice. Such perception, however, remains rather arbitrary. Were she “Cuckoo born,” she would sing another song. Her rhetorical self-awareness begins to undercut her seeming connection to the provincial region of which she writes. Though her poem ultimately maintains the romantic approach to landscape that locates the speaker in the surroundings and vice versa, it establishes a perceptible distance between him or her and nature. This gap, from a post structural, psychoanalytic perspective, foregrounds the speaker in a system of arbitrary signifiers of New England (such as “Robin”), partially exposing the imaginary relation that the human subject makes with nature. When applied to this speaker and others in this study, such a perspective shows the reader something specific about the formative development both of the modern New England landscape and the canonized voices that inhabit it. “Béance,” one of the terms Jacques Lacan uses for the gap between the human subject and nature (Seminar. Book II 210), possesses the necessary ambiguity for this analysis. Being both “an antiquated literary term which means ‘hole or opening’ ” as well as “a scientific term used in medicine to denote the opening of the larynx” (Evans 71), this word aptly represents how poetic speakers articulate qualities that distinctly sound like the individual voices readers associate with Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and Lowell, in part because of their unique positioning around the gap between nature and a symbolically defined “New England.”

As a progenitor of modernism in American poetry, Dickinson foregrounds such a gap in this poem. However, even where her speakers demonstrate a closer romantic identification with the landscape, they both consciously and unconsciously expose the irreconcilable separation between the symbolic and nature. The romantic mirror held to the latter