Dickinson’s Fortunate Falls - Professor Linda Freedman's Inaugural Lecture

The myth of the Fall is an account of the catastrophic origin of evil, but it is also a story about new kinds of knowledge, human creativity and the liberation of desire. A major tension in the nineteenth-century myth of the Fall was between Providence and circumstance, events which were always going to happen and events which just happen. The latter can be empowering, indulging the idea that we may make our own world. But it can also be frightening, as creative efforts stumble on what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the ‘negative power’ of circumstance. In a slippery and contingent world, where futures are open and uncertain, human creativity could feel genuinely world-changing but it also sometimes really seemed to lack the world-making force and salvific power of God. Emily Dickinson asks a vital question about the myth of the Fall and literature: how far can creative reading and writing help build the world anew?

Linda Freedman is the author of Emily Dickinson and the Religious Imagination (CUP, 2011), William Blake and the Myth of America (OUP, 2018) and The Myth of the Fall in Nineteenth-Century Literature (OUP, 2025).