Impregnable of Eye: Emily D to the Rescue

In 1998, Alain De Botton published a book called How Proust Can Change Your Life. Unfortunately, a similar book about the many ways in which the poetry of Emily Dickinson can change your life hasn't yet been written, but the poetry of Emily Dickinson can change your life. Her poetry offers not only the possibility of new worlds and an alternative way of seeing, but also provides a window into one of the most unique and idiosyncratic minds of the nineteenth-century. In 1862, for example, Dickinson wrote this poem about the imagination:

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors--

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands--
To gather Paradise--

With only six months left until I give birth, I am stuck on the second line in the second stanza, "Impregnable of Eye--". I am now over the worst of the first trimester nausea, but I also have dramatic mood swings, panic attacks and fears about the unknown. What strikes me now as I read this line "Impregnable of Eye--" is the root of the word "pregnable," as meaning something that can be conquered, something vulnerable and weak. As everyone knows, Dickinson never married and remained a virgin her whole life. Apparently, she wrote to her best friend and sister-in-law Susan Dickinson that marriage was a dangerous thing. To Dickinson, a husband represented someone who could subsume her identity and therefore posed a threat to her own creativity.

Yet this is not a poem about marriage or relationships, but about poetry. Just because the etymology of the word "impregnable" hints at the vulnerability of the pregnant woman, that does not mean I necessarily have to do the same. Besides, Dickinson lived in the nineteenth-century. At that time, she could "dwell in possibility" only by refusing to marry, but women of the twenty-first century enjoy the benefits of modern medicine, can delay childbirth, can have children and not marry, or, marry, opt not to have children, and focus on their careers.

Some women claim pregnancy as the happiest and most productive time in their lives. In Vittorio De Sica's 1963 film Ieri, Oggi e Domani, Sophia Loren plays Adelina, a Neopolitan woman who cannot feel good unless she is pregnant. Her overworked husband -- played by Marcello Mastroiani -- tries to convince her that eight is enough, but to no avail: she wants more. Other pregnant women say that, as their bodies metamorphose, they shudder over their loss of autonomy. Doctors, friends, and family all give advice. Our bodies become foreign to us. Our habits change. A night out at a bar, once an entertaining prospect, now sends us into a heart-palpitating fit. We can no longer handle the cigarette smoke and the noise. We have begun to feel like just a gestating womb.

Here's where Emily D comes in. Her advice: You must become "impregnable of eye". You must build a fortress, an internal one, continue to read and to think, continue to nest and prepare for the future. Don't allow the negative possibilities to overtake the positive. Instead, use your inner eye to look out into the world, without fear. Good luck.