Dickinson’s Misery
Dickinson’s Misery
A THEORY OF LYRIC READING
Virginia Jackson
princeton university press
princeton and oxford
Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock,
Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jackson, Virginia Walker, date
Dickinson’s misery : a theory of lyric reading / Virginia Jackson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-691-11990-2 (acid-free paper) — ISBN 0-691-11991-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886—Criticism and interpretation—History—20th
century. 2. Women and Literature—United States—History—19th Century.
3. Lyric poetry—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 4. Dickinson, Emily,
1830–1886—Technique. 5. Poetics—History—19th century. I. Title.
PS1541.Z5J33 2005
811⬘.4—dc22
2004052466
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Abraham and Rebecca Stein
Faculty Publication Fund of New York University, Department of English.
This book has been composed in Palatino
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
pup.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1
3
5
7
9
10
8
6
4
2
FOR SADYE AND WALKER
FOR YOPIE AND MARTIN
Contents
List of Illustrations
ix
Acknowledgments
xiii
Abbreviations
xvii
Beforehand
1
Chapter One
Dickinson Undone
16
Bird-tracks
“When what they sung for . . .”
Lyric Context
Hybrid Poems
Dickinson Unbound
The Archive
16
26
31
38
45
53
Chapter Two
Lyric Reading
68
“My Cricket”
Lyric Alienation
Lyric Theory
Against (Lyric) Theory
68
92
100
109
Chapter Three
Dickinson's Figure of Address
118
“The only poets”
Lyric Media
“The man who makes sheets of paper”
“You—there—I—here”
“The most pathetic thing I do”
Chapter Four
“Faith in Anatomy”
118
126
133
142
158
166
Achilles’ Head
The Interpretant
“No Bird—yet rode in Ether—”
The Queen’s Place
166
179
185
196
vii
CONTENTS
Chapter Five
Dickinson’s Misery
204
“Misery, how fair”
“The Literature of Misery”
“This Chasm”
“And bore her safe away”
204
212
219
228
Conclusion
235
Notes
241
Selected Works Cited
275
Index
293
viii
List of Illustrations
1.
The text that Dickinson penciled on Mary Warner’s
penmanship practice sheet is now Franklin’s poem 1152,
“The wind took up the northern things.”
2
2.
Emily Dickinson to Austin Dickinson, 17 October 1851.
5
3.
Emily Dickinson to Austin Dickinson, 17 October 1851.
12
4a.
Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
April 1862.
18
4b.
Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, April 1862.
19
5.
Emily Dickinson, opened envelope, around 1881.
21
6.
Emily Dickinson, opened envelope, around 1881.
23
7a.
Emily Dickinson, memo pages, around 1884.
34
7b.
Emily Dickinson, memo pages, around 1884.
35
8.
Cover page for the “Letter-Poem” section of the Dickinson
Electronic Archives.
49
Notebook of Georgina M. Wright. Mount Holyoke Female
Seminary Class of 1852.
59
10.
Page family notebook, 1823–27.
61
11a.
Emily Dickinson, around 1879.
65
11b.
Part of a wrapper for a half ream of John Hancock writing
paper, 1870s.
66
Mabel Loomis Todd’s transcript of the note to Gertrude
Vanderbilt that is now Franklin’s poem 505.
72
“Fascicle” copy of lines in fig. 12, lower half of page.
73
9.
12.
13.
ix
L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S
14a.
Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1866.
80
14b. Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1866.
81
15a.
Emily Dickinson to Thomas Niles, 1883.
84
15b. Emily Dickinson to Thomas Niles, 1883.
85
15c.
Emily Dickinson to Thomas Niles, 1883.
86
16a.
Emily Dickinson to Mabel Loomis Todd, 1883.
88
16b. Emily Dickinson to Mabel Loomis Todd, 1883.
89
17.
Cricket enclosed with fig. 16.
91
18.
Emily Dickinson to Samuel or Mary Bowles, 1861.
136
19.
Emily Dickinson to William Cowper Dickinson, around
1852.
141
From fascicle 33 (H 41).
143
20b. From fascicle 33 (H 41).
144
21a.
From fascicle 34 (H 50).
148
21b. From fascicle 34 (H 50).
149
22a.
Emily Dickinson, about 1867.
153
22b. Emily Dickinson, about 1867.
153
20a.
23.
Flyleaf torn from Edward Dickinson’s copy of Washington
Irving’s Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.
161
Emily Dickinson to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, around
1864.
164
Emily Dickinson, around 1870.
168
25b. Emily Dickinson, around 1870.
169
24.
25a.
x
L I S T O F I L L U S T R AT I O N S
26a.
Emily Dickinson, about 1868.
172
26b. Emily Dickinson, about 1868.
173
27.
Emily Dickinson, about 1872.
175
28.
Emily Dickinson, about 1865.
186
29.
Emily Dickinson to “Master,” around 1861.
191
30.
Emily Dickinson to “Master,” second page of fig. 29.
194
31a.
Emily Dickinson, around 1867.
200
31b. Verso of manuscript in fig. 31a.
201
32.
Emily Dickinson, fragment, around 1859.
202
33.
Detail of letter in fig. 29.
203
34.
Emily Dickinson, around 1870.
206
35.
Emily Dickinson, around 1865.
221
36.
Emily Dickinson to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, 1859.
229
37.
Joseph Cornell, Chocolat Menier. 1952, mixed media
construction.
237
38a. Chocolate wrapper, 1870s.
238
38b.
239
Emily Dickinson, 1870s.
xi
Acknowledgments
I
am fortunate to have many people to acknowledge, and to be able to
do so in print. The National Endowment for the Humanities, Princeton
University, Boston University, New York University, and especially Rutgers University and the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary
Culture are institutional names for the support that has made this book
possible. I am grateful to the Abraham and Rebecca Stein Faculty Publication Fund of New York University, Department of English, for a grant that
subsidized the lavish number of illustrations in this book. The remarkable
staff at the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Boston Public Library, the
American Antiquarian Society, Mount Holyoke College, the New York
Historical Society, the Yale University Library, and particularly Daria
D’Arienzo in Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College helped
me to see what I needed to see, and helped me to figure out what it was I
was seeing, and how to show some of it to others.
An early version of chapter 3 appeared as “Dickinson’s Figure of Address” in Dickinson and Audience, edited by Martin Orzeck and Robert
Weisbuch (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996): 77–103; it is
reprinted in expanded form by permission of the University of Michigan
Press. A portion of chapter 4 was previously published as “ ‘Faith in
Anatomy’: Reading Emily Dickinson” in Dwelling in Possibility: Women
Poets and Critics on Poetry, edited by Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997): 85–108; it is reprinted
in altered and expanded form by permission of the editors and of Cornell
University Press.
The Dickinson letters are reprinted by permission of the publishers
from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge,
Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1958,
1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The Dickinson
poems are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of
Amherst College from the following volumes: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
This book is about the people, objects, accidents, and institutions left out
of lyrics as they are handed down, and since this book itself has taken so
xiii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
many forms over the years, I wish I could account for all of the practical
social relations that brought it into being. Instead, a few names will have
to stand for many places and individuals even the longest list will inevitably omit. Many teachers and colleagues directly and indirectly enabled this project: David Bromwich, Robert Fagles, Stephen Yenser, Calvin
Bedient, Shuhsi Kao, Douglass Fiero, Earl Miner, and A. Walton Litz may
be surprised (if they are still surprisable) to find traces of their ways of
thinking about poetry still evident here; Susan Mizruchi, Diana Henderson, April Alliston, Tomoko Masuzawa, Martha Nell Smith, Priscilla Wald,
Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Amy Kaplan, Beth Povinelli, Jonathan Goldberg,
Emily Apter, Eliza Richards, Margaret Carr, Elizabeth Wingrove, Max
Cavitch, Michael Moon, Robert Gibbs, Barbara Johnson, John Guillory,
Lynn Wardley, Michael Cohen, Phillip Harper, Eric Santner, Una Chaudhuri, Nancy Ruttenburg, Mary Poovey, Patricia Crain, Jay Grossman,
Diana Fuss, Eduardo Cadava, Lawrence Buell, and Tricia Lootens have
each and all made contributions in different ways, at different times and in
different places. Adela Pinch has inspired me, in person and in print. For
several years, Mary Loeffelholz has been the best friend and smartest interlocutor anyone thinking about Dickinson could have. A late-breaking
reading by Jonathan Culler made the ending stages of this book the beginning of a conversation. I thank Helen Tartar, the gifted editor to whom
so many authors owe so much, for her support of this book. Mary Murrell
deserves an award for her patience with and advocacy for this book; I
hereby give it to her. I am very grateful to Jonathan Munk, editor and poet.
I have been fortunate indeed in my readers, editors, and collaborators,
and fortunate to have been part of a community of extraordinary readers
and writers and talkers at Rutgers. This book owes its present form to conversations with Brent Edwards, Jonathan Kramnick, William Galperin,
Harriet Davidson, Cheryl Wall, Colin Jager, George Levine, Jonah Siegel,
Myra Jehlen, Barry Qualls, Elin Diamond, and Michael McKeon. Carolyn
Williams can think one’s own thoughts and twist them around her own
faster than anyone I’ve ever met. Michael Warner’s reading of these pages
is so intimately a part of them now that his name should appear on the
title page.
As companions for the life of the mind, no one could ask for better fellow travelers than Neni Panourgia and Stathis Gourgouris, exemplary
souls. The spiritual and intellectual energy and generosity of Meredith
McGill have sustained me within and without the walls of Rutgers; Andrew Parker’s talents as someone to think with are well known. Elizabeth
Wanning Harries, Jennifer Whiting, Karsten Harries, and Elizabeth Langhorne have included me with surprising (and welcome) grace. In this
paragraph I have begun the protocol of thanking my closest kin; my lovely
xiv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
mother, Eunice Harris, my stepfather, William Harris, my sister, Julia Jackson, and brother Frank Valente have been marvels of patience and support
over the years. They have given me the great gift of taking for granted
what has often seemed to me a leap of faith; no writer of a book could ask
for more. Then, as Stathis would say, there are those people who are my
life: Most of all, this book reflects a deep and lifelong collaboration with
Yopie Prins, who anticipated every word I wrote and spelled it back to me,
letter by letter; the words I have to thank her she already knows. It also reflects and is reflected in two lives that have made it and my life infinitely
richer than either would have been without them. I dedicate this book to
Sadye and Walker Teiser because I promised, and because in their own
ways they are the lyrical subjects that transcend it while their everyday
lives have informed each word. Sadye inspires me daily to live up to her
shining example; Walker challenges me to keep up with his. Finally, I wish
that I had words to thank Martin Harries. He shares in this dedication,
since he is the genius, the genie, the re-enchantment (though I know that
he won’t accept any of those words). To say that he has made this book
and my life possible is not to say half enough; it’s a good thing that the
other half we don’t have to say.
xv
Abbreviations
A
AAS
BM
CC
F
FR
H
J
L
LT
MB
OC
Poems 1890
SH
Dickinson Papers, Amherst College Library Special
Collections. Amherst, Massachusetts
American Antiquarian Society. Worcester, Massachusetts.
Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, eds. Bolts
of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson. New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1945.
Sharon Cameron. Choosing not Choosing: Dickinson’s
Fascicles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
R. W. Franklin, ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Variorum
Edition. 3 volumes. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
R. W. Franklin, ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading
Edition. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1999.
Dickinson Papers, Houghton Library. Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Thomas H. Johnson, ed. The Poems of Emily Dickinson:
Including variant readings critically compared with all known
manuscripts. 3 volumes. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1955.
Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, eds. The Letters
of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the
Harvard University Press, 1958.
Sharon Cameron. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of
Genre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
R. W. Franklin, ed. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson.
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1981.
Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, eds. Open Me
Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan
Huntington Dickinson. Ashfield, Mass: Paris Press, 1998.
Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, eds. Poems by
Emily Dickinson. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890.
Martha Dickinson Bianchi, ed. The Single Hound: Poems of a
Lifetime. Boston: Little and Brown, 1914.
xvii
Dickinson’s Misery
Beforehand
S
uppose you are sorting through the effects of a woman who has just
died and you find in her bedroom a locked wooden box. You open the box
and discover hundreds of folded sheets of stationery stitched together
with string. Other papers in the bureau drawer are loose, or torn into
small pieces, occasionally pinned together; there is writing on a guarantee
issued by the German Student Lamp Co., on memo paper advertising THE
HOME INSURANCE CO. NEW YORK (“Cash Assets, over SIX MILLION DOLLARS”),
on many split-open envelopes, on a single strip three-quarters of an inch
wide by twenty-one inches long, on thin bits of butcher paper, on a page
inscribed “Specimen of Penmanship” (which is then crossed out) (fig. 1).
There is writing clustered around a three-cent postage stamp of a steam
engine turned on its side, which secures two magazine clippings bearing
the names “GEORGE SAND” and “Mauprat.” Suppose that you recognize the
twined pages as sets of poems; you decide that the other pages may contain
poems as well. Now you wish you had kept the bundles of letters you
burned upon the poet’s (for it was a poet’s) death. What remains, you decide, must be published.1
Let this exercise in supposing stand as some indication of what now,
more than a century after the scene in which you have just been asked to
place yourself, can and cannot be imagined about reading Emily Dickinson. What we cannot do is to return to a moment before Dickinson’s work
became literature, to discover within the everyday remnants of a literate
life the destiny of print. Yet we are still faced with discerning, within the
mass of print that has issued from that moment, what it was that Dickinson wrote. As many readers have noticed (or complained), the hermeneutic legacy of Dickinson’s posthumous publication is also first of all a “sorting out”: so J. V. Cunningham remarked after what he diplomatically
called “an authoritative diplomatic text” of Dickinson’s extant corpus appeared for the first time in 1955, that “it is easier to hold in mind and sort
out the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of George Eliot, for they have
scope and structure.”2 In the pages that follow, Cunningham’s response
will come to seem symptomatic of the century’s ongoing attempt to construct the scope of Dickinson’s work, to make out of the heterogeneous
materials of her practice a literature “to hold in mind” and to hand
down—to sort her various pages into various poems, those various poems
into a book.
But what sort of book? The frustration of readers like Cunningham is
also their invitation, for the syntax perceived as missing from the “almost
1
BEFOREHAND
Figure 1. The text that Dickinson penciled on Mary Warner’s penmanship practice
sheet is now Franklin’s poem 1152, “The wind took up the northern things.” Courtesy of Amherst College Archives and Special Collections (ED ms. 452).
2
BEFOREHAND
1,800 items in the collected poems” is theirs to supply. We might say of the
range of Dickinson’s texts considered together what Norman Bryson says
of the objects in trompe l’oeil painting, that they may “present themselves
as outside the orbit of human awareness, as unorganised by human attention, or as abandoned by human attention, or as endlessly awaiting it.”3
Yet of course what this comparison to painting suggests is that such an effect is just that: Dickinson’s “items” have been successively and carefully
framed to give the impression that something, or someone, is missing.
While the recovery of Dickinson’s manuscripts may be supposed to have
depended on the death of the subject, on the person who had, by accident
or design, composed the scene, the repeated belated “discovery” that her
work is yet in need of sorting (and of reading) may also depend upon the
absence of the objects that composed it. These objects themselves mark not
only the absence of the person who touched them but the presence of what
touched that person: of the stationer that made the paper, of the manufacturer and printer and corporation that issued guarantees and advertisements and of the money that changed hands, of the butcher who wrapped
the parcel, of the manuals and primers and copybooks that composed individual literacy, of the expanding postal service, of the modern railroad,
of modern journalism, of the nineteenth-century taste for continental literary imports. All of these things are the sorts of things left out of a book,
since the stories to be told about them open out away from the narrative of
individual creation or individual reception supposed by my first paragraph. This is to say that what is so often said of the grammatical and
rhetorical structure of Dickinson’s poems—that, as critics have variously
put it, the poetry is “sceneless,” is “a set of riddles” revolving around an
“omitted center,” is a poetry of “revoked . . . referentiality”—can more
aptly be said of the representation of the poems as such.4 Once gathered as
the previously ungathered, reclaimed as the abandoned, given the recognition they so long awaited, the poems in bound volumes appear both redeemed and revoked from their scenes or referents, from the history that
the book, as book, omits.
Take for example the second number in the “authoritative diplomatic
text” to which Cunningham referred, Thomas H. Johnson’s The Poems of
Emily Dickinson: Including variant readings critically compared with all known
manuscripts. The poem is printed, with its comparative manuscript note,
as follows:
2
There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
3