Dickinson's Misery (48 page)

34
. I have used Franklin's edition of the “Master” letters for the transcription; remarkably, his lineation makes it look like a poem—though not, perhaps, a Dickinson poem. As you can see, Dickinson's manuscript pages are so heavily written over and crossed out that they are left without any margin at all. I have crossed out the parts of the text that Dickinson crossed out, and then I have followed Franklin's procedure of using brackets around the sections under erasure, so that my reader can read them.

35
. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
Madwoman in the Attic,
604. The notion of Dickinson as the laureate of injury is an old one; see, for example, the somewhat patronizing 1947 British review of
Bolts of Melody,
“The Wounded Poet.”

36
. The “x” that keys Dickinson's variants clearly points to this place in the letter, and yet editors continued to place the lines at the letter's conclusion—as if the final shift in genre could heal the letter's exposure of the wound of gender. Franklin prints the two lines for the first time as a separate lyric (F 190). Thus in 1998 they became a poem.

37
. Lucie Brock-Broido's
The Master Letters
answers this question by giving fifty-two bravura performances, thus becoming one of the latest effects of the process of turning Dickinson's letters into lyrics.

38
. Michael Moon,
Disseminating Whitman,
4–5. Moon credits Allen Grossman's “The Poetics of Union in Whitman and Lincoln” with the notion that Whitman's poetry seeks to disseminate affectionate bodily presence, a notion implicated in Grossman's theory of the lyric in
Summa Lyrica
.

39
. Michael Warner, “Whitman Drunk,” in
Publics and Counterpublics,
287–88.

40
. Susan Howe,
The Birth-mark,
20.

41
. As you can see, the “poem” is written on two quarters of the flier, one half opposed to the other, and there is another “poem” (F 1135) on the other side:

One can imagine a lyric reading of “the Diamond” as commodity akin to those sold by Orr, but it would be a long interpretive stretch.

42
. See, for example, the anatomically literalized reading of this manuscript suggested by William Shurr, who in
The Marriage of Emily Dickinson
turns Dickinson's tortured figures into the narrative of an affair, pregnancy, and “a painful abortion which left her sick and bedridden” (181).

C
HAPTER
F
IVE:
D
ICKINSON'S
M
ISERY

1
. Lavinia Dickinson, letter to Mabel Loomis Todd, December 23, 1890, cited in
Ancestor's Brocades,
18.

2
. Susan Stewart,
Poetry and the Fate of the Senses,
2. Stewart actually writes that “it is precisely in material ways that poetry is a force against effacement,” a premise that is suggestive for the reading of Dickinson I have begun here.

3
. Jane Gallop,
Around 1981,
136.

4
. Of all of Dickinson's recent critics, Loeffelholz is most suspicious of the feminist critical pathos. At the end of her
Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory,
she calls for “some form of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion' in order to think process and pain in identity” (171). Her own work on Dickinson is the best possible response to that invitation; in these pages I also want to suggest that such a hermeneutics was already current for Dickinson in the least obvious (or most suspicious) place.

5
. Joanne Feit Diehl, “‘Ransom in a Voice,'” 174; David S. Reynolds,
Beneath the American Renaissance,
424. Reynolds's logic here is roughly analogous to that of Gilbert and Gubar in their reading of Dickinson's enacted trope of Victorian iconography (such as “Dickinson's metaphorical white dress”) in
Madwoman in the Attic
(620). In her consideration of Dickinson against the background of nineteenth-century women writers, Joanne Dobson has suggested a closer or less ironic relation between Dickinson and her sentimental contemporaries, yet her stress remains on Dickinson's eccentric departure from those contemporaries' conventions: “her intensely idiosyncratic reconstruction of received feminine images constitutes at once an attraction to and a critique of those modes of being, suggesting a deeply rooted conflict in her own sense of identity” (
Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence,
xvi).

6
. Cheryl Walker,
American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century,
and
The Nightingale's Burden,
108.

7
. Betsy Erkkila, “Dickinson, Women Writers, and the Marketplace,” 60.

8
. Elizabeth Petrino,
Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries,
201. See also Marianne Noble,
The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature,
and Mary Lou Kete,
Sentimental Collaborations.

9
. The 1848 anthologies included Rufus Griswold's
The Female Poets of America,
Caroline May's
The American Female Poets,
George Bethune's
British Female Poets,
and Frederic Rowton's
The Female Poets of Great Britain.

10
. My debt to both the American and transatlantic conversations about the Poetess (and to the women with whom it has been possible to create those conversations) will be clear from my allusions to the work of Prins, Lootens, Armstrong, and Loeffelholz in these pages. Everyone's thinking about Poetess poetics has been furthered by Adela Pinch, in particular in
Strange Fits of Passion
. Bennett's work, as critic and anthologist, has been foundational for anyone working in the field, Annie Finch's has been enormously suggestive, and Eliza Richards's work will usher in a new wave of Poetess studies. The new Poetess Archive created by
Laura Mandell at Miami University in Ohio (
www.orgs.muohio.edu/womenpoets/poetess/scholars.htm
) has not only a very helpful range of primary texts, but lists emerging scholarship on the Poetess on both sides of the Atlantic as soon as it appears.

11
. Of course, women were not the only sentimental lyricists. I have restricted my comments here to the figure of the sentimental poetess, but not only were there poetesses who were men (Longfellow, for example) but the gendering of sentiment is precisely what is so complex. Jerome McGann's
The Poetics Of Sensibility
suggests the intricately intertwined strains of romanticism, gender, sentiment, and poetry. See also, on the American side, Glenn Hendler,
Public Sentiments
, and
Sentimental Men,
ed. Chapman and Hendler.

12
. This is the thesis of Cheryl Walker's
The Nightingale's Burden.
As my responses to her work throughout this chapter suggest, Walker and I read “the secret sorrow” in different ways: she as an enforced silencing of the female voice, I as one mode of feminine “personal” revelation. Yet anyone working on this material is in Walker's debt for making it available to other interpretations.

13
. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations of the Male Body,” in
Epistemology of the Closet,
150. Sedgwick's aim is to distinguish “the feminocentric Victorian version” of sentimentalism from “the twentieth-century one with its complex and distinctive relation to the male body,” but I would maintain that Sedgwick's arguments that the latter is the highly charged “glass closet” or “empty secret” at the center of modern culture also applies to the widely circulated “secret” at the heart of nineteenth-century culture—and, if it can so apply, then the nineteenth century must form more than a feminized bridge between the eighteenth-century honorific and the twentieth-century damning senses of the “sentimental.”

14
. The phrase is from Shirley Samuels's introduction to
The Culture of Sentiment,
4. The historical accounts of this double logic have grown too numerous to list, but one might begin with George M. Frederickson's
The Inner Civil War,
Susan P. Conrad's
Perish the Thought,
Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad's collection
Slavery and the Literary Imagination,
Anne Norton's
Alternative Americas,
and Ann Douglas's
The Feminization of American Culture.

15
. For powerful accounts of the accountability and nonaccountability involved in emerging versions of sympathetic identification in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see David Marshall,
The Surprising Effects of Sympathy
, and Adela Pinch,
Strange Fits of Passion
.

16
. None of the influential treatments of sentimentalism and gender in nineteenth-century culture has much to say about poetry: Ann Douglas's
The Feminization of American Culture
touches on poetry, but sees women's fiction as contributing to the self-consumerism of mass society; Jane Tompkins, in
Sensational Designs,
countered that nineteenth-century sentimental women's writing constituted a political resistance to patriarchal culture and patriarchal public values, but concentrated that resistance exclusively within fiction, and Richard Brodhead, in
Cultures of Letters,
claimed that women's sentimental fiction functioned as an “intimate discipline” in “the domestic-tutelary complex” of the nineteenth-century
middle class. Lauren Berlant has replied to these arguments with a theory of “the female complaint,” which, she argues, “served as a feminine counterpublic sphere whose values remained fundamentally private,” and yet Berlant also considers sentimental prose the central representation of those “values” (see Berlant, “The Female Complaint,” and “The Female Woman,” 270). The exclusion of lyric—arguably the most visible,
public
stage for nineteenth-century sentimental exchange—from such a lively debate speaks eloquently of the twentieth-century misapprehension of the period's notions of the genre. For a beginning on the place of the lyric in discussions of the sentimental, see Jerome McGann,
The Poetics of Sensibility
and Mary Loeffelholz,
From School to Salon
.

17
. Rufus W. Griswold, ed.,
The Female Poets of America,
3.

18
. In
Keywords,
Raymond Williams locates in the early nineteenth century the turn from
sentimental
as a synonym for the positively valued
sensibility
to
sentimental
as a “complaint against people who feel ‘too much' as well as against those who ‘indulge their emotions.' This confusion has permanently damaged
sentimental
(though limited positive uses survive, typically in
sentimental value
) and wholly determine
sentimentality
” (282). Williams does not comment on the role that gender plays in that “damage” and “determination.”

19
. Gail Hamilton, “My Garden,”
Atlantic Monthly,
November 1862; collected in
Gail Hamilton: Selected Writings,
31. Cristanne Miller has sensed some relevance to Dickinson of these passages from Hamilton but, curiously, becomes entwined in the prose's own tropes: “Judging by a contemporary writer's characterization of typical feminine and masculine writing styles,” Miller writes, “Dickinson shares more with the latter than with the former” (
Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar,
158). Even if, as Miller writes, “the stereotypes basically hold,” must this view mean that such types were not
effects
rather than
sources
of a given style?

20
. The editorial appeared in the
Springfield Daily Republican
for July 7, 1860, and is reprinted in Richard Sewall's
The Life of Emily Dickinson
(2:489–90). The connection between the
Republican
article and Dickinson's poetry seems to have begun with Ruth Miller's conjecture that “it seems inevitable that Emily Dickinson should have interpreted these words as a public rebuke to her … It takes little imagination to reconstruct the effect of such an article, reminding ourselves that Susan would read it, Lavinia would read it—well, all of Amherst that counted for Emily Dickinson would read it—and perhaps laugh, or what would be worse for such a proud and so self-conscious a woman, pity her” (
The Poetry of Emily Dickinson,
128, 163–64). Sewall rebutted Miller's excessively personal interpretation, but he did so on comparably personal grounds: “Whatever Emily Dickinson wrote ‘through,'” Sewall claimed, “even Bowles should have seen that it was not through a ‘mist of tears'” (490). Sewall went so far as to list the poems that Dickinson sent to Bowles, dividing them between those “on the happy and healthy side” and those which “reflect considerable ‘suffering' of various sorts.” He then included an appendix anthologizing a random selection of “the tearful lyrics … that flooded the market” in order to prove that “there were many other, and much grosser examples at hand of the literature of suffering” than those by Dickinson. The only critic who has taken Bowles's article as a symptom of a broader cultural
concern is David Reynolds, who places Dickinson as a central figure within an “American Women's Renaissance” characterized by “the new dark women's literature” (
Beneath the American Renaissance,
395). Reynolds, however, limits this literature to popular novels, and so concentrates exclusively on shared plots and themes.

21
. Matthew Arnold, preface to the 1853 edition of
Poems.