Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820-1885 (review)

Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820–1885. By Elizabeth A. Petrino. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998. 252 pp. $19.95 paper.

“Why was Emily Dickinson obsessed with death?” “Why didn’t she ever publish her poetry?” “How did she come up with her dramatic private vocabulary?” Every teacher of Emily Dickinson’s poetry will be called upon to answer these fundamental questions, and the answers provided will have an important role in shaping their students’ understanding not only of this great American poet but also of poetic creation in general. Elizabeth Petrino’s Emily Dickinson and her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820–1885 offers a good blueprint for how to answer these and other questions, emphasizing not Dickinson’s uniqueness but her consonance with recognized traditions and patterns of nineteenth-century American women’s writing. That is not to say that Petrino erases differences between Dickinson and her female contemporaries, but rather to say that she reveals Dickinson as a poet who both observed conventional boundaries of Victorian female expression and transformed them to create her own startling, brilliant poetic voice. Like Barton Levi St. Armand and David Reynolds, Petrino answers questions of literary choice in terms more informed by cultural history than by straightforward biography or psychology.

     Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries is divided into three sections. The first describes aspects of literary publishing that shaped mid-nineteenth-century American women’s poetic expression, their sense of audience, the conditions that made publication and payment possible, and the attitudes of male reviewers. One typical reviewer disparaged Alice Cary’s work because it seemed to him “more like an experiment in poetry, than the sincere outpouring of grief” (28). Given this demand for spontaneity and sincerity from female authors and the devaluation of experimentation and craft, Petrino argues it is no surprise that Dickinson chose not to publish. Conforming to such expectations about female authors would have posed intolerable limitations on Dickinson’s style and subject matter.

     The second section of the book reads Dickinson’s frequent choice to write about death within a tradition of mourning poetry popular among nineteenth-century American women poets. Petrino presents the surprising—and convincing—observation that Dickinson’s tendency to write from beyond the grave was not iconoclastic but rather was influenced by epitaphs found on tombstones, such as “Death is a debt to nature due / Which I have paid and so must you” (108). The speaker resembles many of Dickinson’s, whose morbid intonations (“I heard a fly buzz when I died” and “Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me”) seem less eccentric when read in their cultural context. Petrino also reads the child elegies of both Dickinson and Lydia Sigourney in the context of a number of freakishly bizarre landscape paintings dominated by huge babies made upon the occasion of their death. These eerily palpable images and texts make for fascinating and entertaining reading.

     In the final section, we encounter two important female poets of the day: Frances Osgood and Helen Hunt Jackson. Petrino demonstrates that Dickinson’s use of floral imagery resembles that of Osgood, who wrote one of the many manuals explaining how complex emotions could be expressed through flowers. One wonders whether Thomas Wentworth Higginson was aware that day lilies symbolized “coquetry” when Dickinson breathlessly pressed two into his hands during their famous meeting. Another important contemporary poet of Dickinson was Helen

Hunt Jackson, who, after a meeting with Dickinson, wrote to her, “you looked so white and moth-like! Your hand felt like such a wisp in mine that you frightened me. I felt like a great ox talking to a white moth, and begging it to come and eat grass with me to see if it could not turn itself into beef!” (165; damaged copy restored). Jackson was savvy in marketing her own poetry, assertive with her...