I’ve been thinking about the Tate essay all day. It’s not so much what he says but the implications of his essay and how these implications fit with other pieces of knowledge that I have acquired elsewhere.  What he does is simple really. He places Dickinson in her conceptual context. He outlines the cognitive transition that occurs as a consequence of the end of the Puritan theocracy and the rise of industrial life.

Where the old-fashioned puritans got together on a rigid doctrine, and could thus be individualists in manners, the nineteenth-century New Englander, lacking a genuine religious center, began to be a social conformist. The common idea of the Redemption, for example, was replaced by the conformist idea of respectability among neighbors whose spiritual disorder, not very evident at the surface, was becoming acute. A great idea was breaking up, and society was moving toward external uniformity, which is usually the measure of the spiritual sterility inside.

It is here in this breaking-up that Dickinson finds herself.  Two things Tate says about the effect of Puritan conceptual centrality:

• “It gave—and this is its significance for Emily Dickinson, and in only slightly lesser degree for Melville and Hawthorne—it gave an heroic proportion and a tragic mode to the experience of the individual.”
• This is the “puritan tragedy:” “Man, measured by a great idea outside himself, is found wanting.”

Tate cites Emerson as the one who killed this. In a really audacious (and delightful) description of Emerson, Tate says: “The Lucifer of Concord…for he was the light-bearer who could see nothing but light, and was fearfully blind. He looked around and saw the uniformity of life, and called it the routine of tradition, the tyranny of the theological idea.”  Later in the same paragraph Tate says that:

“in this way he accelerated a tendency that he disliked. It was a great intellectual mistake. By it Emerson unwittingly became the prophet of a piratical industrialism, a consequence of his own transcendental individualism that he could not foresee.

So Dickinson is questioning the paradox these two systems set up. The moral centre which emphasizes the “great idea outside” and the Transcendental (and Protestant as well) emphasis on the centrality of the individual to the universe. This is the engine of her poetry. Her obsession with how this would play out in great moments of life – like dying – makes Dickinson a voice of the climax of this conceptual change in America.