Rethinking the Fascicles: Dickinson's Writing, Copying, and Binding Practices

Abstract

This article explores Dickinson's methods for constructing the fascicles and places the details of her process in relation to other verse-copying and book-making practices of the nineteenth century. Attention to Dickinson's copying and binding practices call into question the idea that the fascicles are "books of poems" in the way that they have almost always been read.

Since R. W. Franklin reconstructed Dickinson's fascicles in 1981, scholars have asked important questions about how these materials can both widen and shift our understanding of the Dickinson lyric. Each treatment of the fascicles looks at them from a different angle: while some argue that individual fascicles tell specific narratives, others consider that, taken together, all forty fascicles construct a single large story. Scholars who perform non-narrative readings locate dominant tropes, themes, and ordering mechanisms, place the fascicles within various poetic traditions, and isolate particularly meaningful features of the fascicles.¹ One of the great byproducts of Franklin's reconstruction has been the disparate critical and methodological approaches that scholars have taken in relation to these materials—approaches that were not available to Dickinson critics in the ninety years between the dismantling and reconstruction of the fascicles. ²

Yet each of these readings has been made possible precisely because their writers made one crucial assumption—namely, that the fascicles are books. While this might, at the outset seem to be a logical assumption—one that Mabel Loomis Todd made when she first called them "little 'volumes'" (Bingham 17)—an investigation of the places into which many of Dickinson's contemporaries copied their verses as well as the ways in which people were most likely to construct homemade books, problematizes this classification. By studying materials that Dickinson would have been familiar with and that in some way—visually, experientially, or compositionally—resemble the fascicles, one can see that Dickinson was influenced by many of the writing, copying, and binding practices by which she was surrounded. Creating a wider field of comparison for the fascicles provides a new way into Dickinson's project—a way that does not bring with it the century-old assumption about their status as books.

Attending to how Dickinson made the fascicles reveals that she was working with a particular unit of construction—the fascicle sheet—and, in doing so, was already thinking about the very problems of narrative, sequence, fragmentation, and genre that Dickinson scholars have been struggling with for over a hundred years. Once we see that the fascicles aren't what we've always assumed them to be—books of lyric poems whose contents can be both extracted individually and read sequentially—then we will be able to identify what they are and what kinds of poems Dickinson copied in them.

Naming the Text: Commonplace Books, Autograph Albums, and Scrapbooks

Critics' treatments of Dickinson's manuscripts inadvertently imply that no one else ever copied and kept her own writings. Yet, over two decades ago, Barton Levi St. Armand placed Dickinson's fascicle poems in a wider cultural context when he suggested that they were portfolio poems, the sort of manuscript expressions that Ralph Waldo Emerson had called for in his 1840 essay, "New Poetry" (3-5).³ At the time, St. Armand asked critics to further investigate Dickinson's material writing practices when he wrote, "This art was not exclusively literary in nature but originated in Dickinson's situation as a nineteenth-century woman who was a part of a community where many nonliterary or nonacademic arts were practiced" (9). Several critics have taken up this call and several new studies of nineteenth-century women's poetry in particular have explored the fact that American women of Dickinson's culture and class were deeply absorbed in the practice of writing, copying, and preserving their own and others' verses.⁴

Placing the fascicles within this context shifts the focus from the fascicles as something read to the fascicles as something made. As Jerome McGann has argued, present-day readers are often reticent to treat texts this way: "Today, texts are largely imagined as scenes of...