Emily Dickinson's Manuscript Body:
History / Textuality / Gender
Shira Wolosky
It is difficult not to find admirable the new Franklin
edition of Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Its scholarship is
meticulous, painstaking, thorough, devoted, exhaustive, and
persevering.
It assembles what can be assembled to date
regarding variant versions, manuscript papers, writing
implements, word, line and page design, chronology and fascicle
groupings, and the epistolary and publication histories of
Dickinson's poetry. Especially exciting is the drama of Dickinson
at work, as traced in the "Introduction." This gives a vivid and
focussed sense of Dickinson in the processes of composition. The
track of her worksheets, intermediate drafts, and copies sent,
retained, revised, and recorded tells an implicit story of her
growing and changing senses of herself as poet.i Her utter
seriousness and devotion to craft come forcefully to view.
Yet this edition is as significant in what it does not
accomplish as in what it does. The book highlights, but does not
and cannot settle, what has become an increasing conundrum of
Dickinson studies: the question of what a Dickinson poem even is.
What constitutes the Dickinson text as an object of study?
Beyond this, and, to me, more pressing still, the new edition -its formats and investments -- poses questions regarding the
contexts for reading Dickinson: the ways of situating her; the
relationships of Dickinson poems to each other and to the
discourses, norms, and events that surround her -- including
women's culture and nineteenth-century American culture
generally; the directions her work may be felt to point towards
and the issues it is felt to raise; the interpretive frameworks
for construing her very language. Franklin's edition underscores
how manuscript work may suggest approaches to these questions but
does not in itself constitute answers.
Franklin's edition provides an invaluable tool for Dickinson
scholars, with its careful descriptions of manuscript features,
its new assessments of epistolary records and chronologies, its
attention to the varied forms in which Dickinson's writing took
shape as drafts, letters, fair copies, fascicles, and sets. Yet
the new Franklin edition does not accomplish a dramatic
revolution in our image of the Dickinson text. Franklin's new
Dickinson poems, as Cristanne Miller observes, look
(un)startlingly like Thomas Johnson's old ones. There are, to be
sure, important differences between the two. Most striking are
the changes in the sequence and numbering of the poems. Some
texts are thoroughly reedited. Poems are added, recombined,
redivided, excluded.
There are new assessments of dates of
composition, and the overall count of poems is altered. Still,
Franklin does not recast the fundamental sense or appearance of
Dickinson's texts. Word variants are set at the foot of the poem,
line and page-breaks are indicated through editorial notation,
stanza norms are kept. The introduction of italicized "titles" in
some sense brings Dickinson still closer to a traditional format,
Wolosky, 3
and still farther from her own practices.
This new edition, that is, lacks the dramatic impact of the
earlier Franklin Manuscript Books, with its facsimiles of
Dickinson's own writing, organized according to her fascicles and
sets. In holograph, the variants appear in all their gripping
unfinish. The lines break as Dickinson has them do, running off
or away with the paper. The changes in handwriting size and style
are there to behold. Certainly the limitations of print-format
intrudes here. But other manuscript-printings -- say, Valerie
Eliot's facsimile edition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land -succeed in printing the crossings-out, overwritings, marginalia,
annotations, and markings directly onto the printed page.ii Here,
the distance between the description and the visual object is
very great. One must reconstruct the manuscript-image out of the
written instructions. The excitement of imagining Dickinson
imagining variants and feeling their jostling for poetic space
must take place in the reader's mind, rather than being witnessed
on the page, as was the case in the Johnson edition as well.
Neither does Franklin's newly proposed re-ordering of poems
finally settle questions of chronology, nor of how much one is
able to make use of it in interpretation. Franklin himself is
careful to explain that a poem entered into a particular fascicle
may have been written any time before and may find its place of
entry through any number of circumstances. The fascicles
themselves
bear no pagination or signature markings to establish an
Wolosky, 4
internal order.
The poems are not arranged
alphabetically, and there are no contents lists or
indexes to aid in locating a particular one. It is
apparent that she did not keep them in a particular
order and that browsing was the chief means of dealing
with them. (7-8)
The fascicle groupings may permit and even invite speculation,
but they cannot provide privileged evidence of textual
connections, when the methods of entry, as Franklin himself
vividly presents them, correlate neither with the order of
composition nor with any other clearly ascertainable procedure.iii
Relationships among texts abound, but none are finally binding.
Thus Franklin's new sequences do not provide clear grounds for
reconfiguring development in Dickinson's poetry, which continues
to resist narratives of chronological development and of all
types of progressive conversion -- whether romantic, religious,
aesthetic, or philosophical. Dickinson's work remains, rather, a
testimony to issues unresolved, angers unappeased, positions
embraced and resisted, in a rhetorical mode that comes close to
disputation and to aggressive and dramatic contest.
Such questions of chronology, grouping, association and
trajectory verge into problems of interpretation, which the
scholarship of this new edition can help situate but cannot
resolve. The whole turn to manuscript work, which this edition
does not directly argue but in which it participates, does not
Wolosky, 5
consolidate and indeed problematizes the constitution of the
Dickinsonian text, and perhaps even more, the contexts for
interpreting Dickinson's work. The manuscripts represent one sort
of context. They nevertheless by no means exhaust the networks of
relationship that situate Dickinson's writing. Indeed, exclusive
emphasis on the manuscript artifact may not disclose but may
rather foreclose and enclose Dickinson's art.
It is not my purpose to argue the validities or limitations
of a textual criticism based on Dickinson's notation, spacings,
dashes and punctuations, line-breaks and indentations, and other
visual features of the manuscript artifact.iv My point is,
rather, that such an approach ought not to occlude the text's
many other features; and that despite its apparent claim to
objectivity, focus on the visual artifact is itself based in a
particular ideology of the artwork. I have argued elsewhere that
the sort of twentieth-century notion of the aesthetic object
assumed by such textual manuscript criticism was itself the
result of specific social-cultural forces emerging toward the end
of the nineteenth-century.v Nineteenth-century poetry in general
does not conform to later investments in the artwork as a sealed,
self-enclosed system. Rather, poetry actively addressed and
participated in the discourses surrounding it, while retaining as
a distinguishing feature a self-conscious reflection on the
cultural exchanges it records, imports, manipulates and recasts.
This is very much the case with Dickinson as well, her
reclusion notwithstanding. Let me look briefly at two examples,
Wolosky, 6
to suggest how her texts act as cultural fields in which many of
the forces around her come into conjunction and conflict; and how
different presentations may open her text outward or enclose it
inward. The two poems -- "Victory come late" and "Title divine is
mine" -- appear consecutively, on facing pages in the new
Franklin edition (Fr194 and Fr193); are close by each other in
Johnson's Letters (L257 and L250); and are put far apart in
Johnson's Poems (J690 and J1072). This variety of presentations
dramatizes the importance of the epistolary context for reading
Dickinson. The Franklin edition reports any poem's epistolary
history but it lacks the fuller contextualization available in
Thomas Johnson's Letters of Emily Dickinson. Johnson's Letters
present the interpenetration of Dickinson's prosaic and poetic
languages as they configure variously through rhythm, image, and
material presentation in her letters, where poetry repeatedly
begins to beat in and break through her prose.
The questions of
genre that the letters pose do not much influence Franklin's
textual presentations. But, besides issues of genre, the letters
vividly face Dickinson's work outward toward people and events.
They strengthen the sense of Dickinsonian poetics as profoundly
enmeshed in her daily life, her social norms, her interests and
relationships with the people around her and the world in which
she, and they, lived. The letters, then, are an essential theatre
for seeing Dickinson's work not as reified artifacts, but as acts
of address, rhetorical fields, historical engagements, and
cultural events, as my first example demonstrates:
Wolosky, 7
Victory comes late,
And is held low to freezing lips
Too rapt with frost
To mind it!
How sweet it would have tasted!
Just a drop!
Was God so economical?
His table's spread too high
Except we dine on tiptoe!
Crumbs fit such little mouths -Cherries -- suit Robins -The Eagle's golden breakfast-- dazzles them!
God keep his vow to "Sparrows,"
Who of little love -- know how to starve!vi
What is of foremost importance is the way this text deploys
a range of discourses that shape and penetrate Dickinson's work.
Biblical allusion, economic terminology, theological claim,
religious disputation, spiritual appeal, political argument all
intersect within the field of this poem. It projects, as do many
Dickinson texts, a whole theoretics of quotation and emphasis as
a mode of transporting and transfiguring, importing and
contorting social languages, in ways that are central to her
poetic power and intention. It is, moreover, not merely
incidental that the poem is situated in the context of the Civil
War: not as mere reference but as a further historical problem
and pressure. The reference is made evident in Johnson's Letters,
Wolosky, 8
where the poem appears in a sequence of letters written to Louise
and Francis Norcross (L255) and to Samuel Bowles (L256) reporting
the utter shock over the Civil War death of Frazer Stearns,
"killed at Newbern," "Frazer is killed," "Two or three words of
lead -- that dropped so deep, they keep weighing."vii The text
offers a critique of Civil War claims; while the Civil War serves
not only as history but also as figure for cultural conflicts,
clashing interpretations, rhetorical pitches, theological
tensions.viii
A text such as "Victory comes late," then, acts as a
rhetorical field in which religious, political, and social
discourses of Dickinson's period are brought together and
compelled apart. Even the poem's formal features point (also)
outward. This text offers a rare instance of departure from
Dickinson's overwhelmingly persistent metrical pull, the
accentually rhythmic textures of her work that appeal to the ear
rather than, or alongside the eye, and which connect her poetry
to another rhetorical-historical-cultural field, that of the
hymnal.ix Yet there seems to be a reluctance in Dickinson
criticism to break out of the textual frame into history. In the
case of this poem, critical attention has been directed to
questions of conformity and resistance to the poetic conventions
and the publishing industry of her period.x History extends, that
is, only so far as the history of print, editorial, and
publishing practices. For all the discussion of permeable
boundaries between variant versions and the 'poem proper,' prose
Wolosky, 9
and poetry, circulation and concealment, the boundary of the
piece of literary paper remains somehow impenetrable.
The danger here is that historicist investigation will be
absorbed into, rather than extending, textual investigation. A
similar absorption threatens with regard to feminist criticism.
Feminist criticism signaled an attempt to release Dickinson from
the Amherst bedroom in which the seductions of biography and
powerful gender stereotypes of female limitation secluded her.
It has importantly succeeded in doing so. Still, certain
boundaries continue to be observed. Dickinson's relationships are
explored, largely, as a literary history that often takes shape
as a separate women's history. This has yielded important
findings (Joanne Dobson's Strategies of Reticence is exemplary in
this regard). Rarely, however, have studies ventured into wider
historical contexts -- economic, national, religious, republican
-- of which women's history is a part and which it influences.
Political theory, for example, offers a vital setting for
examining Dickinson's writing in terms of evolving ideologies of
the self within liberal formulations of individualism -- issues
on which Dickinson's work importantly bears no less than does
Emerson's, Thoreau's, and Whitman's. There has been a resistance
to investigating the religious matrices of Dickinson's work, as
these reflect radical transformations in American religious
sensibility and sociology -- in which women played central roles
-- and as these in turn penetrated into a broad range of
political discourses, from abolition to women's rights to social
Wolosky, 10
reform to national conflict and self-definition. A full feminist
criticism, I would argue, needs to reach both beyond the page of
literary production and beyond the domicile of woman's sphere,
when this is treated as a separate and circumscribed topic.xi
Feminist criticisms need to be more feminist still. The
investigation of women's sphere need not entail being
circumscribed within it. Women's writing should instead be
situated within a broad sense of women's culture, as situated
within American literature and culture largely.
This question of wide context particularly emerges at the
crux of all manuscript discussion, the challenge and mystery of
Dickinson's not-publishing. There have been proposed, and indeed
probably are, many motivations and constructions for this
(counter)action. What strikes me is how oddly narrow manuscriptbased feminist readings have become on this topic. There is,
first, the feminization of the print-culture argument. This
claims that Dickinson's decision to not-publish is situated in
her resistance against editorial and publishing practices as
male.xii Such an argument most certainly deserves consideration,
but it should be complicated by noticing that many, many
nineteenth-century women did flock into poetic print. Poetry
becomes a central mode of female expression in this volatile
historical moment, when women were at last achieving some access
to education, to publishing, to audience and market, some control
over their own productions and its earnings, and not least,
emergent new senses of selfhood to propel them toward these
Wolosky, 11
ventures.
Not all of this represents pusillanimous self-betrayal. One
would wish further to remark, for example, that Whitman coped
with a conservative print establishment by the careful and loving
production of his own work in (at least in the 1855 edition)
something close to his own terms, and undaunted by both current
poetic and publishing conventions. Emma Lazarus in the 1870s had
her first volume of poems published privately, in accordance with
considerations many of which bear on Dickinson's. These include
nineteenth-century norms of female modesty and propriety, as this
penetrated into identity as well as disciplining it externally -all cushioned, for Lazarus as for Dickinson, by wealth.xiii Each
of these of course makes a separate case. In light of them,
however, one would still need to account for Emily Dickinson's
very particular aversions and very particular negotiations of
composing, recording, and preserving her work.
Exploring Dickinson's poetic reclusion, like her personal
one, thus emphatically requires efforts toward the thickest
descriptions possible of the historical-cultural-social life in
which she is embedded. Dickinson's work has the stature of great
cultural representation, in which the widest reaches of
experience are expressed and transfigured. But recent manuscript
work seems at times to return Dickinson to her room, via personal
references that suggest a retreat to the earlier psychobiographical emphasis in Dickinson -- or rather, Emily studies.
The manuscript-Dickinson threatens to look, as Margaret Dickie
Wolosky, 12
warns, "like the old eccentric and reclusive Dickinson," "trapped
in her manuscripts" and at risk of disappearing from sight (326).
Having been so long locked in her room, Dickinson now seems in
danger of being locked in her drawer.
It is almost as if both the image of Dickinsonian seclusion
and the attempts to mitigate it have remain profoundly gendered
-- often reproducing the very isolation and gender stereotypes
from which it sets out to free her. I find it puzzling, for
example, that Susan Howe, makes the significant call for an
increased attention to Dickinson's "historical consciousness,"
but then focusses almost entirely on the text's visual
constitution (147). Manuscript study can be a foundation; but it
cannot provide the entire architecture for reading and
understanding Dickinson. My second example may illustrate:
Title divine -- is mine!
The Wife -- without the Sign!
Acute Degree -- conferred on me -Empress of Calvary!
Royal -- all but the Crown!
Betrothed -- without the swoon
God sends us Women -When you -- hold -- Garnet to Garnet -Gold -- to Gold -Born -- Bridalled -- Shrouded -In a Day -"My Husband" -- women say --
Wolosky, 13
Stroking the Melody -Is this -- the way?
Here's -- what I had to "tell you" -You will tell no other? Honor -- is it's
own pawn --
I have followed here the text of Johnson's Letters (250),
where the poem is sent as a letter to Samuel Bowles of 1861. The
Franklin version (Fr194, facing across the page from "Victory
comes late") offers no textual changes, although it does offer
fuller descriptions of line division alongside another, fully
printed variant version, sent later to Susan Gilbert Dickinson,
in 1865 (which Johnson also prints in his edition, dated "about
1863"). It is interesting, however, that Johnson prints the
concluding remark to Bowles in indented poem-format, while
Franklin, quite conservative regarding genre distinctions, does
not.
There is an additional version available. This has a
different print-format and a very distinctive editorial
presentation: in the new edition of letters and poems which
Dickinson sent to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, edited by Ellen Louise
Hart and Martha Nell Smith. This edition more experimentally
formats the poem according to manuscript-based line divisions.
But its attention to textual detail is accompanied by an omission
to mention that the poem was first sent to Samuel Bowles and not
Wolosky, 14
to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. What this edition suggests is that
Dickinson wrote the letter for and to Susan in some particular
and exclusive -- indeed, sexually intimate -- way, in accordance
with the authors' argument that Susan "was her central source of
inspiration, love, and intellectual and poetic discourse" (xi).
This of course may in some sense be the case.
But the decision
has been made for the reader, in the very presentation of the
text. Here, an appeal to manuscript has instituted an
interpretive slant, privileging a personal-biographical reference
that seems to reinscribe Dickinson within earlier romance
conventions, albeit with a different gendering. Textual
interpretation is then preempted through this preference.
Dickinson's not-publishing represents an intersection of
diverse and complex cultural forces that powerfully converge in
"Title divine -- is mine." The poem opens with an Emersonian
language of divine selfhood, but immediately qualifies it through
gender distinction. Emerson may directly claim divine Title,
identifying with a Godhead. Dickinson shows how, as a woman, her
own access to such power is complicated by gender difference and
by normative structures of hierarchy that make the woman's
position derivative rather than one of primary identification
with a (male) Godhead. She is "Wife;" indeed, crucially, "Wife -without the Sign!" That "Sign," as the poem goes on to show, is
deeply enmeshed with her senses of body. The parallel "Betrothed
-- without the swoon" invokes sexual figure only to shrink from
it. Dickinson, typically, does not specify just what title she is
Wolosky, 15
and is not claiming here. She projects at once poetic, erotic,
religious, and also economic entitlements ("Garnet" and "Gold"
are exchange values) -- exactly in their mutual implication,
their joint hierarchies, and perhaps above all, in her own
immense ambivalences regarding just this mutual and hieararchical
involvement. If she invokes marriage, she does so to gainsay as
much as to say. In her particular rhetoric of quotation, she
cites "My Husband" as what "women say," at once invoking and
distancing herself from such intimate and subordinate attachment,
from such gender role and gendered body. The act of saying is, in
fact, a central drama, and is itself a locus of intense energy
and intense ambivalence. For the "Sign" of the body is also the
"Sign" of language, the outward expression that Dickinson here
eschews: and yet does not. As in the poem "Publication is the
Auction of the Mind of Man," this poem invests in a linguistic
embodiment from which it also recoils. That embodiment includes
both textuality and the (gendered) body, each a trope for the
other, and with direct implications for Dickinson's incarnation
of her work into a private manuscript-body while refusing the
public exposure of publication (Franklin asserts that the
fascicle collections were unsuspected until her death; poems sent
in or as letters she insisted remain confidential, as is the case
here). This double stance of textual body and disembodiment is
sustained throughout the poem. She would be wife without
sexuality ("swoon"); have "Royal" power without outward "Crown."
She both would and, as she writes elsewhere, would not "be a
Wolosky, 16
Poet" (Fr348 / J506). She both would and would not incarnate
herself in texts, which she would and would not finish and
complete; would embody herself in manuscript but not in outward
publication.
Dickinson's inhibition against inhabiting textual body is
deeply inscribed within her contemporary (and in many ways, our
continuing) women's culture.xiv Dickinson's refusal to publish, as
Franklin insists, was a positive decision. The postscript lines
to "Title Divine -- is mine!" which Johnson's Letters foregrounds
by indenting them, warns Samuel Bowles against telling: "Honor -is its own pawn." Such guarded expression, using the cultural
language of honor, does not simply "bypass limitations" that
women endured (Petrino, 211). It also accedes to them. As
Dickinson remarks, "I would as soon undress in public, as to give
my poems to the world."xv
Yet it would be unfair to consider Dickinson's a form of
pathological textual agoraphobia, since the agora, public space,
was exactly what women were debarred from entering. Dickinson at
once obeys and assaults such restrictions. Her manuscript-art as
a form of publishing-reclusion, combines, as does her
biographical reclusion, defiance and conformity to the specific
norms of nineteenth-century female culture of domestic
confinement within the cult of the separate spheres. She at once
observes, and also challenges and exposes, cultural expectations
for women; taking restriction to an extreme which also released
her into the self-assertions of her art. Her stances further
Wolosky, 17
suggest the placement of women within a broad social-cultural
history, implicating religious values, metaphysical traditions,
economic divisions and liberal ideologies of American identity,
which, as this text shows, differently entitle women and men.xvi
Dickinson's poems, then, are not only pages of script, but
also cultural representations, rhetorical fields, spiritual
contests, personal expressions, aesthetic compositions,
linguistic theorizings, power struggles, woman's voicings, and no
doubt much else. Hers is a poetry that dwells in possibility. The
page of script, which Franklin's work has made more fully
available, must certainly ground any of these readings. But such
grounding should not be taken in the sense of restricting freedom
of movement; it rather must serve as foundation and warrant for
interpretive possibility.
Works Cited
Bennett, Paula. Nineteenth-Century Women Poets. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993.
Carney, Mary. "Dickinson's Poetic Revelations: Variants as
Process." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5 (1996):
Dickie, Margaret. "Dickinson in Context." American Literary
History Vol. 7 No. 2 (Summer 1995): 320-333.
Dobson, Joanne. Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989.
Douglas, Anne. ""The Scribbling Women" and Fanny Fern: Why Women
Wrote," American Quarterly 23 (1971): 3-24.
Eliot, Valerie, editor. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and
Transcript of the Original Drafts. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., 1971.
Wolosky, 18
Franklin, R. W., editor. The Poems of Emily Dickinson, variorum
edition. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1998.
Franklin, R. W., editor. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson.
Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1981.
Hart, Ellen Louise and Smith, Martha Ness, editors. Open Me
Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington
Dickinson. Ashfield, Massachusetts: Paris Press, 1998.
Howe, Susan. The Birth-mark. Hanover and London: Wesleyan
University Press / University Press of New England, 1993.
Johnson, Thomas, editor. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955.
Johnson, Thomas, editor. The Letters of Emily Dickinson.
Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1958.
Leyda, Jay. The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson. New Haven:
Yale UP, 1960, Volume II.
Miller, Cristanne. "Whose Emily Dickinson." American Literary
History, forthcoming.
Mitchell, Domhnall. "Revising the Script: Emily Dickinson's
Manuscripts." American Literature, Vol. 70, no. 4, (Dec. 1998):
705-738.
Petrino, Elizabeth. Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries.
Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1998.
Reynolds, David S.. Beneath the American Renaissance. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989.
Scott, Joan. "History and Difference." Learning about Women:
Gender, Politics and Power, eds. Jill K. Conway, Susan C. Bourque
and Joan W. Scott. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press,
1989): 93-118.
Wolosky, Shira. "Santayana and Harvard Formalism," Raritan Vol.
XVIII:4 (Spring 1999): 51-67.
Wolosky, Shira. Poetry and Public Discourse:American Poetry 18551900, The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. III,
forthcoming.
Wolosky, Shira. Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1984.
Wolosky, 19
Notes
i. To give one example, when we come upon Dickinson as she
assembles her first fascicle in 1858, Franklin observes:
"Something regarding her poetry had changed for her, as shown not
only in the number of poems, which continued to grow, but also in
the omission of the earlier ones. There may have been a major
stocktaking in 1858, a sifting and winnowing of her entire
corpus," Poems, (11).
ii. Susan Howe offers an alternative print-representation in The
Birth-mark. Paula Bennett likewise attempts a more textually
faithful print-version in Nineteenth-Century Women Poets.
iii. See, for example, Franklin's account of "A Wife at Daybreak",
as written in 1861, revised in 1862, and entered into Fascicle 32
in 1863. Susan Howe makes this point: "Maybe the poems in a packet
were copied down in random order, and the size of letter paper
dictated a series; maybe not," The Birth-mark, (144).
iv. Domhnall Mitchell has rigorously offered such arguments in
"Revising the Script: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts."
v. See Wolosky, "Santayana and Harvard Formalism." Domhnall
Mitchell similarly warns against imposing twentieth-century
poetics and aesthetics only nineteenth-century textual practices
(732).
vi. I follow here the text of Johnson's Letters, which does not
differ in any way from Franklin's version of the letter as sent to
Samual Bowles, although Franklin includes information on line
division. There is, however, another variant fascicle version,
which Franklin prints out and Johnson himself uses in his Complete
Poems.
vii. Samuel Bowles, Johnson reports, had himself written to Austin
and Susan Dickinson: "and then the news from Newbern took away all
the remaining life. I did not care for victory, for anything now."
(Newbern, Johnson adds, was a Union victory.) The Franklin
edition, like Johnson's three volume Complete Poems, notes that
this poem constitutes an entire letter to Samuel Bowles in about
1861, and was subsequently transcribed for Fascicle 34 (H132)
about the second half of 1863.
viii. I discuss this cultural and rhetorical context for
Dickinsonian textuality in Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War, here I
argue that Dickinson's writings are assertive engagements with the
history and cultural events around her.
ix. Cristanne Miller emphasizes this aural and metrical element in
Dickinsonian poetics, (19).
Wolosky, 20
x. Mary Carney, "Dickinson's Poetic Revelations: Variants as
Process," (136).
xi. Joan Scott makes this point: "For the most part, histories of
these different groups were written as separate narratives
alongside or in opposition to what was dubbed "mainstream
history." . . . The new women's history was often cast in terms
that affirmed the separateness and difference of women in implicit
contrast to the world of men already known to history: women had a
separate culture, distinct notions of the meaning of work and
family, identifiable artistic or literary signatures, and
particular forms of political consciousness." "History and
Difference," (110).
xii. Ann Douglas is perhaps the first to explore women's writing
in relation to male editorial and publishing management, in
"The Scribbling Women" and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote,"
Other critics who discuss print history include David S. Reynolds,
Beneath the American Renaissance. In terms of Dickinson, Susan
Howe makes this case in The Birth-mark, where she writes: "Now she
is her sex for certain for editors picking and choosing for a
general reader reading" (140) and that "editing of her poems and
letters has been controlled by gentlemen of the old school and by
Harvard University Press" (170). For an overview of a printculture interpretation of Dickinson's publishing choices, see
Elizabeth Petrino, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries.
xiii. For a fuller discussion of modesty in nineteenth-century
women's literature see Wolosky, Poetry and Public
Discourse:American Poetry 1855-1900, The Cambridge History of
American Literature, Vol. III, forthcoming.
xiv. Susan Bordo in Unbearable Weight traces a very powerful and
very alarming history where cultural pressures inscribe themselves
into ideologies, and indeed the flesh, of women's bodies, that
connects nineteenth-century female norms and their pathologies to
the anorexia of today.
xv. Leyda, quoting Ellen E. Dickinson, wife of Emily Dickinson's
cousin Willie, in the Boston Evening Transcript, Oct. 12, 1895,
(482).
xvi. For feminist analyses of liberal individualism see, for
example, Joyce Appleby, Carole Pateman, Jean Bethke Elshtain,
Susan Moller Okin.