The Ocean Between Us. A Review

 A review by Maddalena De Leo of a recent Italian ebook on Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson:

Tra Di Noi L'Oceano

Mattia Morretta

Gruppo Editoriale Viator

ISBN: 9788885805491

May 2021

A recent Italian publication is finally dedicated in its entirety to the similar relationship in life as in thought of two female poets of world literature, the English Emily Brontё and the American Emily Dickinson. The book is entitled Tra di noi l’oceano, Viator, 2021 (The ocean between us) and was awarded the Antica Pyrgos International Prize in 2021. Its author Mattia Morretta, a psychiatrist, sexologist and essayist, through a careful comparative analysis of the psychic life of the two Emilys, aims above all to highlight, in addition to the common directives of their shy and reserved behaviour, the similar way of thinking and understanding life. He manages to do so by accurately comparing what the two authors have left us, their poems and writing. 

Divided into eighteen chapters each with a premonitory title plus an introduction and a summary post scriptum, the book is a refined and extremely cultured reading, with continuous references to universal literature and moments of pure psychoanalytic conceptuality with specialized lexicon sometimes difficult to understand by non-experts. What makes it stimulating is also its subtitle, based on the search for modernity in the work of the two poetesses. The author knows how to wisely answer this question and does so by examining the solitary individuality, the preponderance of self-awareness and gender independence as the three characteristics common to the two Emilys, by him sympathetically almost always mentioned with the middle names Jane (for Brontё) and Elizabeth (for Dickinson).

In fact, in each chapter, we find the characteristics of the two authors highlighted in parallel - isolation, love of nature, desire for freedom - and even if the balance concerning biographical information almost always leans in favor of Dickinson, the author's commitment is remarkable. With a number of references and comparisons to their poems, he clearly makes the reader understand the stature of the two enigmatic poetesses as teachers of awareness at the service of the imagination. Brontё and Dickinson, both solitary and elusive, lived in small provincial realities and at the same time were very far from them. In their poetry, they found answers to themes such as pain, death, illness and managed to express on paper in a much more exhaustive way everything that was precluded from them by the voluntary isolation from social life. In this way, they entered complex paths such as philosophy and imagination. Unlike other poets, this led them inexorably to a vaster and unattainable dimension that ensured their immortality. According to what the author rightly states, both Brontё and Dickinson were able to see the absolute out of everyday life, and then transfer onto the written page what they experienced in their visions. They achieved all this with an apparent silence, always in the shadow, in a strategic delay that allowed them to earn so much posthumous fame despite the absolute indifference received in life. 

These reflections are able to excuse the limited Italian bibliography of the book but well exemplify Morretta’s expertise in the careful and loving approach to the two most impenetrable poetesses of literature of all time.