William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson Wellcome: The Conflict of the Doctor Persona and the Christian Science Anima

Abstract

Emily Dickinson Wellcome has been called the “essential muse” of her grandson, William Carlos Williams. Paul Mariani, when bestowing this sobriquet, further states that Williams identified her “with nothing less than the deepest promptings of his unconscious self” (8). To look more deeply into Williams’s unconscious self and detect Emily’s presence, this essay relies on a close reading of three poems—“Dedication for a Plot of Ground,” “The Last Words of My English Grandmother,” and “An Exultation”—against the psychic structures proposed by Jungian analytical psychology. Emily’s adherence to Christian Science alluded to in the poems and referenced in Williams biographies will be demonstrated as a crucial component of the contra-sexual unconscious complex Carl Gustav Jung terms the anima, contrasted against the consciously constructed persona of the medically oriented ‘Doctor Williams.’