Dickinson's Misery (46 page)

2
. Yopie Prins,
Victorian Sappho,
3.

3
. The notion that passages of Dickinson's letters that fall into hymnal meter should be excised as individual lyrics is an old one, but its most recent and extreme practitioner is William Shurr in his
New Poems of Emily Dickinson.

4
. Anne Carson,
If Not, Winter,
ix.

5
. Isobel Armstrong,
Victorian Poetry,
111. Surprisingly, there has been no real study of Dickinson's relationship to the Victorians, or to the issues raised in Victorian poetry, and especially Victorian lyric. For Susan Dickinson's notes to
The Princess,
see Alfred Habegger,
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books,
266.

6
. Alfred Lord Tennyson,
The Princess: A Medley
(1847; 1850); this song is the introduction to Part III.

7
. “Roll on, silver Moon,” arranged by Joseph W. Turner; Oliver Ditson & Co., Boston (1847). This was the most popular arrangement and publication of the song. The Dickinsons had a large collection of sheet music which was (unlike their library, which now has a separate room to itself at the Houghton Library at Harvard) as far as I know not preserved, since it was considered ephemera rather than
literature. That sheet music is clearly one source or basis for many Dickinson lines, and speculation along these lines could open new areas of research for Dickinson scholars and students of American popular culture.

8
. Donald Grant Mitchell (“Ik Marvell”),
Reveries of a Bachelor, or, A book of the heart.
The book was a sensation, and was passed back and forth between Dickinson, Austin, and Susan. In the note in which she invokes Dickinson's letter, Carson somewhat startlingly compares Mitchell to Homer in the sense that Sappho adapts Homer's signature adjective “rosyfingered” for twilight rather than dawn and for lyric rather than epic, and Dickinson “may startle a bit of destiny for herself” out of Mitchell's “clichés” (371 n 96.7).

9
. The classic text on nineteenth-century female intimate literary and extraliterary exchange is Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's “The Female World of Love and Ritual” in
Disorderly Conduct.

10
. “Father was very severe to me; he thought I'd been trifling with you, so he gave me quite a trimming about ‘Uncle Tom' and ‘Charles Dickens' and these ‘modern Literati' who he says are
nothing,
compared to past generations, who flourished when
he was a boy.
Then he said there were ‘somebody's
rev-e-ries,'
he didn't know whose they were, that he thought were very ridiculous, so I'm quite in disgrace at present” (so Dickinson to Austin in April 1853 [L 1:113]).

11
. Here I am simply (and, I fear, reductively) condensing the argument of Jürgen Habermas in
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

12
. On Dickinson's grammars, see Carlton Lowenberg,
Emily Dickinson's Textbooks.

13
. For a lyric reading of Dickinson's frequent exploitation of pronominal confusion, see Cristanne Miller,
Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar.

14
. John (Jack) Spicer, “The Poems of Emily Dickinson,” 136, 140. The California poet “Jack” was serving a brief stint during 1956–57 as curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library.

15
. Ellen Hart is quoted in Domhnall Mitchell's
Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception,
208; I also quote Mitchell from 209. For other serious work on the letters as such, see William Merrill Decker's chapter, “A Letter Always Seemed to Me Like Immortality: Emily Dickinson,” in his
Epistolary Practices,
and Marietta Messmer's
A Vice for Voices.
Both are especially good at putting Dickinson's letters back into the nineteenth-century culture of the familiar letter, and Messmer comes close to questioning the distinction between letters and poems.

16
. Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, introduction to
Open Me Carefully,
xxvi. On the Dickinson Electronic Archive site, “Correspondences” is the only generic term for Dickinson's and others' writing as it is posted on the site. “Letterpoem” is a hybrid term that editors borrow from Susan Dickinson.

17
. Buckingham's
Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s
makes the enthusiasm of the immediate reception of Dickinson's poems evident to modern readers. This reception is especially important for, as Buckingham notes, “twentieth-century Dickinson criticism, in many ways, has been a history of mis-characterizing the nineteenth-century reception (as mostly unfavorable) for the purpose of
writing against it” (xii). Hereafter citations to this volume will be designated Buckingham.”

18
. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Bromwich,
Romantic Critical Essays
223. It is important to note that when taken out of context, Shelley's figure of the nightingale can (and has) become a cliché that the argument of Shelley's essay actually works against. Rather than an impression of unmediated voice, what the poem gives to the reader according to Shelley is, as David Bromwich reads the “Defence,” “only the text of the poem [which] remains as a positive trace or inscription. Its sense may vanish with the mortality of the author. But its power may revive nevertheless, under a different and unfamiliar aspect, at the coming of later authors and readers who find that the traces concern them after all” (213).

19
. For another “account of the relation, for [Dickinson], of privacy to the genre of lyric poetry,” see Christopher Benfey,
Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others,
29–62. While Benfey's concerns parallel my own, he ends by emphasizing, rather than qualifying, the self-enclosure of the poems: what Dickinson “requires above all,” Benfey writes, “is that something about her, or
in
her, remain hidden from the view of others. It is the terrible exposure of existence that appalls her” (62).

20
. Percy Lubbock, “Determined Little Anchoress,” 114. Lubbock's review is of both
Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson,
ed. Conrad Aiken (London: Jonathan Cape, 1924), and
The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson,
ed. Martha Dickinson Bianchi (reprinted in London by Jonathan Cape, 1924). These were the editions that made such an impression on modernist writers like Faulkner in the twenties.

21
. For a discussion of the relation between domestic self-enclosure and the development of American individualism, see Gillian Brown,
Domestic Individualism.
Brown's premise in this book, “that nineteenth-century American individualism takes on its peculiarly ‘individualistic' properties as domesticity inflects it with values of interiority, privacy, and psychology” (1), is very suggestive for a reading of Dickinson that would take into account the specifically domestic (and thus gendered) cast of Dickinson's seclusion. The class-bound privilege of that seclusion certainly worked—as in the famous accounts of the “Myth of Amherst” which became the theatrical production
The Belle of Amherst
—to foster the spectacular domestication of the generic ideal, but one should beware of extending it (as Betsy Erkkila does in “Emily Dickinson and Class”) to a caricature of Dickinson's privileged domestic sensibility as that of a bigoted Whig.

22
. In Buckingham,
Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s,
64.

23
. Herbert F. Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric,” 242.

24
. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 348.

25
. Ibid., 350n. 33.

26
. Northrop Frye,
Anatomy of Criticism,
249–50. While Frye is citing Mill, it is important to note as well that his emphasis on the poet's own agency in “turning his back on his audience” is mediated by the modernist aesthetics of Joyce (whom he also cites) and, implicitly, Eliot.

27
. Frye,
Anatomy of Criticism,
249.

28
. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” 350n. 33. Mill removed
the reflection on the solitary cell when he revised and combined two 1833 essays for republication in
Dissertations and Discussions
(1859); it appears in his
Works
in a note.

29
. Helen Vendler,
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets,
1–2; 18–19. Vendler claims that she disagrees with Mill's version of the “overheard” as the structure of lyric reading, but she does tend to echo Mill's figures.

30
. For a more interesting line of thought about Dickinson's literal “seclusion,” see Diana Fuss's chapter on Dickinson, in
The Sense of an Interior
. Fuss emphasizes the public spaces enclosed within the private space of the Dickinson home.

31
. This introduction to Dickinson's version of what Derrida has named “the scene of writing” could be read as a reductive gloss on that idea in
The Post Card.
For a related (though very different) understanding of the importance of “the scene of writing” in American literature, see Michael Fried,
Realism, Writing, Disfiguration,
especially 93–161.

32
. The pedagogical example is relevant here, since my implicit argument throughout this book is that lyrics have been remade for consumption in the classroom: in the Johnson and Franklin reading editions that include these lines as a single lyric, but that cannot, of course, include the pencil, what will students understand as the subject of this poem?

33
. Franklin notes that Eudocia Converse, a cousin of Dickinson's mother, copied “Sic transit gloria mundi” into her 1848–53 commonplace book, and that Higginson later wrote to Todd that “a lady [who] used to live in Amherst & left there about 1852 is quite confident that the valentine to Howland was written some years
before
that time (she had a copy given [to] her then)” (F 51, 56).

34
. I am quite sure that this is the source for “Life is but Strife,” and the context makes it a hilarious message to Cowper Dickinson, whom Dickinson, apparently, did not much like. For the ballad, see Bertrand Harris Bronson,
The Ballad as Song.

35
. Patricia Crain,
The Story of A,
217–18. In
The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson,
Jay Leyda prints a page from one of Dickinson's primers,
The Poetic Gift: or Alphabet in Rhyme
(New Haven, 1844), in which, under the engraving for the letter V, accompanied by the rhyme, “For the Virtuous Maidens here, / Partaking of the meal,” Dickinson wrote her own name and those of three of her friends. We might note in passing that all of these primer rhymes are in hymnal meter.

36
. Martha Nell Smith, “The Poet as Cartoonist,” in Juhasz, Miller, and Smith, eds.,
Comic Power in Emily Dickinson,
64, 69. See also Smith's “Dickinson, Cartoonist” on the Dickinson Electronic Archive site, where one can see vivid virtual images of several of Dickinson's more colorful pieces.

37
. Camille Paglia's “Amherst's Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson,” in
Sexual Personae,
did much to popularize the whip-and-stiletto S & M Dickinson as antithesis to the poetess in white. One measure of the influence of Paglia's intentionally shocking caricature, which was published in 1990, showed up in a cartoon I happened to see with my young son one afternoon in 1995. The show, called “Superwriters,” and featured on the Warner Brothers television network, featured a group of “good guy” writers (Dickinson, Twain, and Hemingway) who must vanquish the “bad guy” writers (Sappho, Basho, and Poe). The bad guys invade the
Library of Congress and begin to destroy it: Sappho cuts all the men out of literature, Basho cuts everything down to the size of a haiku, and Poe makes everything scary. Dickinson's job is to stop Sappho, and she does so dressed in full dominatrix leather, whip in one hand and a very long cigarette holder in the other. Her voice is a good Joan Crawford snarl as she says “Because I could not stop for Death,” and Sappho keels over.

38
. Austin Warren, “Emily Dickinson,” 565.

39
. In
A Vice for Voices,
Marietta Messmer ventures the speculation that “Dickinson might initially have started to group her fascicle poems according to the people she intended to share them with; that is, within any one fascicle she might have included poems she had mailed to or considered suitable for a specific correspondent” (190). It is an intriguing suggestion. But isn't it even more likely that the fascicles served as collections of the verse she had circulated, though not necessarily to anyone in particular?

40
. Cynthia Griffin Wolff,
Emily Dickinson,
419. There are, to be precise, thirteen instances of the pronoun “you” in the lines that begin “I cannot live with you—,” as against ten instances of “I.”

41
. Dickinson's dictionary was the 1841 edition of Noah Webster's
American Dictionary of the English Language
(Springfield, Mass.: George and Charles Merriam).

42
. Sharon Cameron, “Dickinson's Fascicles,” 157.

43
. Mary Jo Salter, “Puns and Accordions,” 194. As already noted, Cameron's second book on Dickinson,
Choosing Not Choosing,
takes a polyvalent view of Dickinson's variant practice as thesis, and extends it in suggestive ways for the intersubjective situation I address here. See in particular Cameron's discussion of the way in which the variants “testify … to a suspension of normal either/or disjunctions between self and other, origin and destination, address and attention” (186).

44
. Helen McNeil,
Emily Dickinson,
19. McNeil's reading of Dickinson also argues that Dickinson is “a woman who writes rather than speaks” and her emphasis is informed (as mine is) by Derrida's interest in the “becoming literary of the literal” (
Writing and Difference,
230). I depart from her only in emphasizing what happens to the literal once it passes on, taking up where she leaves off when she writes that Dickinson's poems “now survive as unaddressed gifts” (181). For a relevant discussion of Dickinson's treatment of her audience as participants in a lyric gift economy, see Margaret Dickie,
Lyric Contingencies.