Dickinson's Misery (47 page)

45
. F 1136; A 357. In the manuscript note that Leyda made for Amherst Special Collections, he suggests that the drawing was sent to J. L. Graves, perhaps because this piece makes so little sense if read as a self-addressed lyric.

46
. This schematic version of the function of the Real in Lacanian theory should be referred to Lacan's
Le Seminaire XX: Encore.
A translation of the seminar appears as chapter six of Mitchell and Rose, eds.,
Feminine Sexuality
. For a discussion of the temporality peculiar to the interrelation between the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary, see Jane Gallop,
Reading Lacan,
74–92. For an extended (and brilliant) application of Lacanian theory to Dickinson's poetry, see Mary Loeffelholz,
Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory.

47
. For an interesting discussion of the relevance of both the moment of death in
American nineteenth-century culture and Phelps's novel to Dickinson's poetry, see Barton Levi St. Armand,
Emily Dickinson and Her Culture,
39–78 and 117–52.

48
. By suspending the question of the “face” that Dickinson may imagine for the addressee, it will also be noticed that I am suspending the question of the reader's gender. In the poems that I am reading here, that gender seems to me strategically (rather than accidentally) indeterminate precisely because the “face” is not envisioned. For a reading of Dickinson's poems of address that emphasizes different poems in which the reader may be gendered, see Karen Oakes, “Welcome and Beware.”

49
. Emily Brontë,
Wuthering Heights,
143. In a late letter to Elizabeth Holland, Dickinson half-quotes Heathcliff's exclamation, revising it into a somewhat perverse congratulation on the birth of a first grandchild (Kathrina Holland Van Wagenen): “say with ‘Heathcliff' to little Katrina—‘Oh Cathie—Cathie!'” (L 866).

50
. For an important discussion of Dickinson's departure from the masculine romantic sublime for which Brontë's Heathcliff may stand as model, see Joanne Feit Diehl,
Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination
and
Women Poets and the American Sublime.

51
. Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,” 146. This view of apostrophe as the central, appropriative trope of the lyric is the most consistent strain in post–de Manian lyric theory in the work of Culler, Barbara Johnson, and Cynthia Chase. In this line of thought, “apostrophe” and “lyric” become synonyms for one another. My discussion owes much to these critics, but attempts to pry apostrophe and lyric a little further apart.

52
. Wolff,
Emily Dickinson,
423.

53
. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” in
Essays and Lectures,
962.

54
. For one instance in which there clearly was what Hart and Smith call a “calland-response” exchange between Dickinson and Susan through which what is now one of Dickinson's most famous poems became a joint effort, see the letters around “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (OC 96–101). Hart and Smith make a convincing argument about the “workshop” effect here, but this is not a text
addressed
to Susan. Are the directly addressed texts also to some extent co-written because they depend on the recipient's response? If so, then what would that response mean for the texts' genre?

55
. The lines are now printed as F 145, though I have adjusted them to the manuscript's design.

56
. The ode concludes a pamphlet apparently distributed at the site entitled “The American Goliah.” It was also reprinted in several papers.

57
. Bianchi, preface to
SH
, x.

58
. Robert Weisbuch,
Emily Dickinson's Poetry,
177.

59
. As in the introduction, I refer here to the now well-known debate between Lacan and Derrida, which centers on Lacan's claim at the end of his seminar on Poe's “The Purloined Letter” that “the sender, we tell you, receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form. Thus it is that what the ‘purloined letter,' nay, the ‘letter in sufferance' means is that a letter always arrives at its destination” (
The Purloined Poe
72). Derrida's argument appears in “The Purveyor of Truth,” and is
reprinted and extended in
The Post Card.
The form of my allusion to this debate echoes that of Joel Fineman in “Shakespeare's
Will
” (69, 75). I borrow the form of Fineman's response in order also to borrow his powerful answer to both Lacan and Derrida: “literary letters
always
arrive at their destination precisely because they
always
go astray.”

C
HAPTER
F
OUR:
“F
AITH IN
A
NATOMY
”

1
. Leyda's suggestion is part of his manuscript note in Amherst Special Collections (A 129); for Porter's, see
Dickinson: The Modern Idiom,
82.

2
. The references to Leyda's notion of the referential “omitted center” and Hartman's version of “revoked … referentiality” in Dickinson may be found in
note 4
of the “Beforehand.” The last phrase here is from Jane Eberwein's
Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation.

3
. Jeanne Holland, “Scraps, Stamps, and Cutouts.” For a suggestive version of the relation between public and private in Dickinson's domestic economy, see Diana Fuss,
The Sense of an Interior
. For an interesting use of this text as a starting point for speculation about Dickinson's relation to copyright and intellectual property law, see Jerrald Ranta, “Dickinson's ‘Alone and in a Circumstance' and the Theft of Intellectual Property.”

4
. Jarrell, “Some Lines from Whitman,” in
Poetry and the Age,
112.

5
. In
Becoming Canonical in American Poetry,
this loopy logic is what Timothy Morris dubs “the poetics of presence.”

6
. Mary Loeffelholz's question at the end of
Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory
is still the best one for feminist criticism generally, and it has proven far from rhetorical: “What theoretical challenges to the metaphysics of self-presence, what forms of psychic ambivalence, what gaps between revisionary intentions in language and actual linguistic performances, what absences, what distances, what differences (apart from those with a male-authored tradition) can feminist critics entertain with respect to women writers?” (170).

7
. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
Madwoman in the Attic,
582.

8
. I have again taken the liberty of altering the lineation of Franklin's edition to fit some of the details of the manuscript. Some of the lines included on this manuscript were also included in a letter Dickinson wrote to Louise Norcross in 1872 (L 2:379). In the letter, the relation between written and spoken intentionality is explicitly at issue, and Dickinson seems especially concerned about the afterlife of intention: “We must be careful what we say. No bird resumes its egg.”

9
. Gilbert and Gubar,
Madwoman in the Attic,
52. As the passage continues, Dickinson's text becomes the explicit script for “the woman writer”: “while, on the one hand, ‘we' (meaning especially women writers) ‘may inhale Despair' from all those patriarchal texts which seek to deny female autonomy and authority, on the other hand ‘we' (meaning especially women writers) ‘may inhale Despair' from all those ‘foremothers' who have both overtly and covertly conveyed their traditional authorship anxiety to their descendants.”

10
. I borrow the notion of a “pathos of indeterminate agency” from Neil Hertz's
The End of the Line,
and especially from Hertz's reading of de Man, 222–23.

11
. Susan Howe,
The Birth-mark,
20; 19. Since Howe intentionally skews her syntax and word order, it is difficult to cite her suggestions about Dickinson's texts as propositions—which is, of course, part of her point.
The Birth-mark
concludes with an interview of Howe by Edward Foster, intended, one assumes, to make it clear “who is speaking” in the book, and what she means to say.

12
. Howe,
The Birth-mark,
170. It might be interesting to compare Howe's projections to Jonathan Goldberg's suggestions in
Desiring Women Writing
that at least as early as the early modern period, “good writers” were identified as “good women,” and vice versa.

13
. Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
Women and the Alphabet,
66–67.

14
. “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” first appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly
for February 1859 (three years before the issue of that journal in which Higginson published “Letter to a Young Contributor,” the article to which Dickinson responded by sending him samples of her poems). In a prefatory note to the 1900 volume, Higginson claims that his earlier advocacy has already had “liberal” cultural effects, citing “a report that it was the perusal of this essay which led the late Miss Sophia Smith to the founding of the women's college bearing her name.”

15
. Higginson,
Atlantic Essays,
313.

16
. Ibid., 324.

17
. The transcendent and transnational notion of literature that Higginson invokes has a particular nineteenth-century American history; it was articulated by Longfellow, Higginson's professor at Harvard, as a version of Goethe's
Weltliteratur
—so it makes sense that Goethe is the author that Higginson cites without attribution here. See Virginia Jackson, “Longfellow's Tradition.”

18
. Charles Sanders Peirce,
Writings,
1:518.

19
. Ibid., 1:521.

20
. The racist overtones of Peirce's theory of indexical reference would be interesting to consider in relation to Karen Sanchez-Eppler's work, in
Touching Liberty,
on the complex rhetorical relations between abstract and corporeal personhood in various discourses of antebellum culture. Those overtones would also bear consideration in relation to the genealogy of American pragmatism, and particularly to recent empiricist trends in the American literary criticism philosophically indebted to it.

21
. Charles Sanders Peirce,
Writings,
1:522–23.

22
. Fried,
Realism, Writing, Disfiguration,
163. In
Pierce-Arrow
, Susan Howe explores a different version of Peirce's implicit emphasis on the materiality of writing. Characteristically, Howe's commentary takes the form of a series of poems on the eccentricities of Peirce's manuscripts.

23
. Robert Weisbuch,
Emily Dickinson's Poetry,
160.

24
. In the fascicle (7), Dickinson posed an eight-line alternative to the lines I include, an alternative that allows Shelley to surface in the allusion to “Asphodel” and that substitutes the proper name “Brontë” for “Nightingale,” thus making the place of return even more explictly literary:

25
. Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Aurora Leigh,
82. Helen McNeil notes the passage in Barrett Browning in connection with Dickinson's poem, claiming that the former's “feminist distinction between womanly song and male song is unmistakable” (
Emily Dickinson,
96). It seems to me, however, that if “we” are “men,” the gendered referents here must be less stable than that.

26
. Dickinson sent the elegy on Barrett Browning to Susan in 1861, and Leyda has suggested that she may also have sent a copy to Bowles.

27
. The figure of the lark as the disappointment of lyric transcendence is also, as Martin Harries has reminded me (in sweet division), in Shakespeare. In
Romeo and Juliet,
the lark is not the subject but the agent of division:

28
. Elaine Scarry,
The Body in Pain,
217. It would be interesting to read Scarry's work as a latter-day fantasy of the incarnate letter, though for her it remains a utopian possibility.

29
. Christopher Benfey,
Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Others,
94.

30
. Vivian Pollak,
Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender,
90.

31
. For a concise and amusing summary of the uses of the “Master” letters as testimonial, see Martha Nell Smith,
Rowing in Eden,
99.

32
. The letter is number 233 in Johnson's edition, dated (from the handwriting) about 1861. Johnson places it as the second in the series of the three letters to “Master,” while R. W. Franklin (1986) elaborates an argument on the basis of the handwriting that would place this letter as the final installment. Franklin's edition of the “Master” letters reproduces the letters in facsimile—going so far as to give the reader the odd mimetic experience of opening the envelope to “discover” these intimate manuscripts.

33
. For an intricate examination of the sexual logic informing the use of the signature “Daisy,” see Margaret Homans, “‘Oh, Vision of Language!'” On Dickinson's play with the literary pseudonym, see Susan Howe's hyperbolic reading of these letters in
My Emily Dickinson,
particularly her suggestion that in
David Copperfield,
“Master” Davy is “Daisy” to Steerforth and that Little Emily writes “disjointed,
pleading letters after eloping with Steerforth, addressed to her family, Ham, and possibly Master Davy/David/Daisy—the recipient is never directly specified, and the letters are unsigned” (25–26).