Reading Emily Dickinson's Letters: Critical Essays

Dickinson’s Correspondence and the Politics of Gift-Based Circulation

28 Paul Crumbley Dickinson’s Correspondence and the Politics o� Gift-Based Circulation In a February 24, 2003 commentary on a cancelled White House literary symposium that was to have focused on Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Emily Dickinson,Katha Pollitt noted that though Dickinson may at first“seem the least political” (2) and therefore the least likely of the three poets to appear in a literary event deemed too politically volatile to stage, she may in the final analysis be the most political. Pollitt concludes,“every line [Dickinson] wrote is an attack on complacency and conformity of manners, mores, religion, language , gender, thought.” I want to provide historical reinforcement for this understanding by analyzing Dickinson’s circulation of poetry through correspondence as an extension of nineteenth-century gift culture.¹ My aim is not to present Dickinson as advocating a particular political agenda, but rather to show how Dickinson incorporates the independent subjectivity central to gift exchange in her own efforts to promote the democratic exercise of individual sovereignty. My own position may be seen as an extension of Geoffrey Sanborn ’s suggestion that Dickinson’s politics are grounded in an“emphasis on the subversiveness of intransitive existence”; noting that“Dickinson does not participate in Marxian or postcolonial discourses,”Sanborn proposes that the poet “does model a practice that is a precondition of those discourses: the maintenance and enjoyment of one’s distance from the properly social”(1340,1345).In what follows,I examine Dickinson’s correspondence with Helen Hunt Jackson, The Politics of Gift-Based Circulation 29 Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson to demonstrate that gift culture protocol enables Dickinson to activate the intransigence crucial to the exercise of personal sovereignty, thus making political action possible without necessarily determining what form the outward expression of that action might take.² Dickinson establishes a politically significant epistolary practice in the context of a nineteenth-century gift culture that has been thoroughly described by literary scholars and anthropologists. Mary Louise Kete provides the underlying cultural logic in Sentimental Collaborations,where she argues that“the inalienable possession of self fundamental to liberalism is produced through a free circulation of gifts of the self ”(53).A core property of the gift is its power to invest the writer’s self with a distinct presence by means of recipients who affirm that self through acts of reciprocity.Kete sums up the essential paradox:“The way to keep the self is to give it away.” When this occurs, and the self is affirmed through reception of the gift,“the isolated, dysfunctional ‘one’ or ‘I’” is translated “into a ‘we’able to act on and promote communal interests among the competing interests of other‘we’s’” (54).The resultant“‘little societies’” collectively contribute to a larger“national and authoritative‘We,’” as in“We the people,” that ultimately shapes civic culture.Kete’s association of gift exchange with the“We”of founding documents is echoed by Elizabeth Hewitt, who similarly understands that selfhood is achieved by giving the self away, though for Hewitt this is most clearly revealed through epistolary communication. In Correspondence and American Literature, 1770–1865,Hewitt argues that the Declaration of Independence is best understood as an epistolary document; it appears in numerous late eighteenthcentury and early nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals as an example of epistolary form precisely because it“offers a consolidation of signers to send word (in this case to a mother nation) of disobedience, and it testifies to its sincerity by signatory power” (12). By means of the signers, whose united interests are harnessed by the pronoun“We”(as in“We hold these truths to be self evident”), the Declaration straddles the gulf between speech and print precisely in the manner that letters do, successfully demonstrating the capacity of the letter to confer both independence and unity.³ Elizabeth Barnes makes a similar point about the unifying power of the Declaration of Independence when she describes its function within sentimental culture as bringing about “a surprising conflation of the personal and the political body” (1).⁴ Read in this cultural context , Dickinson’s gift-based distribution of poems through her correspondence surfaces as a particular expression of sentimental culture and epistolary politics. 30 Paul Crumbley Asdootherparticipantsingiftcirculation,Dickinsonproclaimsherindividuality through collaborative acts in which she discloses personal values that recipients can choose to affirm through acceptance and reciprocity.⁵ Dickinson may well have seen gift culture as a particularly appropriate venue...