The Use Of Dark Diction In Emily Dickinson's 'To Be Haunted'
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Trapped. The “chamber” is dark and suffocating. Door to door, it is a maze. Ghosts are at every turn. Running is useless and hiding is foolish. In “One Need Not Be A Chamber –To be Haunted,” Emily Dickinson traps the reader inside this chamber, the most eerie and petrifying of all: the Mind. Through careful use of dark diction, Dickinson conjures up the gothic world, the landscape of the deliberately frightening, only to ironically juxtapose these images with the interior world of the Mind that “haunts” the human race unlike any other gothic setting.
Dickinson’s use of dark diction summons the traditional world of the Gothic in the minds of the audience. The very first stanza states, “One need not be a chamber – to be Haunted / One need…show more content… She writes, “Far Safer, of a midnight meeting / External Ghost” (5-6). Dickinson mocks this image in the following line where she asserts that the “midnight meeting” of an “External Ghost” is “Far safer” than confronting the “interior cooler Host.” By juxtaposing the duality between external and internal fears, Dickinson suggests that any outward horrors, even a ghost, are empty threats when compared to the most sinister of “ghosts” lurking inside ones own mind. The mind, the speaker conveys, is a Host, a “parasite” that lives inside the body and releases “toxins” in the form of fears. With the use of the capital letter, the “Host” is instantly given a strong identity and presence. The Mind, thus, is the colder, darker “person” living inside man. He is the opposite of an apparition, for He does not appear and disappear, but is always there with the power to haunt and possess the body with all the terrors it harbors. It would be “far safer” the speaker repeats again in stanza three, to be chased by “stones” in an Abbey,” than to be “unarmed” and vulnerable when encountering the Mind, for no fellow soul can penetrate this “lonesome place” (9-12). Indeed, it would be “far safer” to be physically held in the darkness of any external horrors, than to confront the darkness of the demon