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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [First Page] [181], (1) Lines: 0 to ——— 6.02151pt ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TE [181], (1) c h a p t e r n i n e “Hamlet wavered for all of us” Dickinson and Shakespearean Tragedy I n the summer of 1877, Dickinson sent a cape jasmine to Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s wife, with the following message: “I send you a flower from my garden - Though it die in reaching you, you will know it lived, when it left my hand - Hamlet wavered for all of us - ” (L512). Her message makes the simple gift of a flower a transaction equivalent to a Shakespearean tragedy. It also underlines the way Dickinson ascribed human feelings and characteristics to her flowers, here elevating the death of a jasmine through reference to English theater’s greatest tragic hero.1 This flower has been sacrificed for Mrs. Higginson; it was taken from the poet’s garden as a sign of her love; alive when it left her hand, it is dead on arrival, a tragic hero that is predestined to die and “touch” its audience. While Mrs. Higginson will only witness the final moment of Dickinson’s flower, Emily’s reference to Hamlet’s wavering hints at its “unseen” tragic story. “Wavering” invokes a flower quivering in the wind, but also Hamlet’s struggle with mortality. All human beings share in this struggle, and Dickinson, through reference to a flower, is making Hamlet a representative figure. Shakespearean tragedy is the representation, before an audience, of the intensity of a lived life; the audience can identify with the lives and, particularly, the deaths of its characters. Hamlet’s life of wavering and his death are essential: perhaps, like Dickinson’s flower, he must die to have his story endlessly retold. In “The American Scholar” (1837), Emerson calls his time an “age of Introversion ” infected by “Hamlet’s unhappiness,” in which every thought is overanalyzed.2 Hamlet becomes an emblem for an age of procrastination, introspection , melancholy, misanthropy, irresolution, and inaction. Later, in his essay on Shakespeare, he suggests that this play attracts readers because the nineteenth century’s speculative genius is “a sort of living Hamlet.”3 Dickinson ’s use of the word “wavers” perfectly encapsulates Hamlet’s constant vacillation between alternatives of mood, action, and thought. A February 1851 article in The Indicator describes Hamlet as “a man of many theories, great moral thoughts, and the keenest sensibility; and he joined to these characteristics a will, which, though it sometimes wavered, was ultimately invincible.”4 On 24 April 1875, two years before Dickinson sent her note, an essayist in the Amherst 181 182 c h a p t e r n i n e 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 [182], (2) Lines: 16 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [182], (2) Student argued that Hamlet’s irresolution, incongruity of action, and misanthropy were a result not of madness but of a diseased morality.5 This led to his inability to distinguish between right and wrong, his heightened emotions and imagination, and his “deep brooding gloom.” Consequently, “the restraining power of his life has been destroyed, and he is incapable of self-restraint. He wavers between the good and evil—hilarity and despair.” Perhaps Dickinson’s note to Mrs. Higginson ascribes such complexity to her flower; certainly the poet shared the views of the prize-winning composition on Hamlet in the 1872 Amherst Student, which stressed Hamlet’s universality—his life “finds an echo ever in [our] own”; “to this strange mysterious existence you feel yourself linked by the bond of a common humanity”; “he is of ourselves, our flesh and blood.”6 Without using the word “wavers,” the writer suggests that in Hamlet “we see simply the wrestling of a strong human mind, with the great problems of human life and destiny. He but exhibits the mental conflict which must come to each one of us in some degree.” The essay declares that “If truest heroism lies in self-sacrifice, in devotion to another, then the life...

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