Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century

Notes

203 Notes 1. Reading in Dickinson’s Time 1. Others have written about particular kinds of changes in Dickinson’s style—with greatest attention, Brita Lindberg-Seyersted but also David Porter and Ralph Franklin. All biographers note changes in topic and style to some extent; Habegger is particularly attentive to such shifts. Among other isolated observations, Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart write about changes in Dickinson’s letter-writing practices after 1858 (Open Me Carefully) and Marta Werner proposes that Dickinson changes her conception of the poem in her later years (Open Folios). 2. Domhnall Mitchell and Mary Loeffelholz (From School to Salon 131–32) both address this positioning of Dickinson’s work as “both residual and emergent,” as Mitchell puts it, in Monarch of Perception (249). Shira Wolosky calls attention to the gendered paradigms of public and private concerns that block from our sight the poet’s full engagement with central elements of her culture, particularly pressures of the world’s disorder and the lack of theological justification for the suffering of the Civil War (“Public and Private”). 3. Susan Howe similarly writes that Dickinson’s “talent was synthetic; she used other writers . . . wherever and whenever she could use them” (My Emily Dickinson 28). 4. As evidence of this interest, the EDJ published a special issue “Dickinson’s Reading ” (co-edited by Dan Manheim and Marianne Noble) in spring 2010, and the August 2010 Emily Dickinson International Society conference in Oxford, “‘were I Britain born’: Dickinson’s Transatlantic Connections,” included around 90 presentations on aspects of Dickinson’s reading, primarily of early and mid-nineteenth-century British and European authors. See also Páraic Finnerty’s Emily Dickinson’s Shakespeare. Considerable work is also being done on her reading of writers in the United States. 5. These stories include Prescott (Spofford)’s “Knitting Sale-Socks” and “The Amber Gods” and Terry (Cooke)’s “Sally Parson’s Duty” (AM February 1861, January 1860, and November 1857, respectively; see David Cody, “Azarian School” 36–37). Cody argues that Dickinson shared “images, style, and a cultural moment” with writers such as Spofford and Cooke, who were known for their flamboyant fiction and poetry, giving several examples of phrases she borrows from these and similarly “Azarian” writers. Jonathan Morse points out the borrowing from Holland’s novel. In another example, Barton Levi Saint Armand notes that in 1862 Dickinson quoted from a eulogy for Frazar Stearns, which itself cited Revelation 7:14, in the poem “Of Tribulation – these are They,” (F113). Similarly, she recycles the final lines of Ellery Channing’s “A Poet’s Hope” in her first two lines of “If my Bark sink / ’Tis to another Sea –” (F1250, 1872). 204 Notes to Pages 4–6 6. On women publishing in the Atlantic see Ellery Sedgwick and my “Pondering ‘Liberty.’” According to Elizabeth Young, women generally dominated literary publishing during the Civil War both while the war was in progress and immediately afterward—although her examples are almost exclusively from fiction (5). In the AM, Dickinson would have read commentary primarily by men, fiction predominantly by women, and poetry by both women and men. 7. I read Dickinson family copies of the AM at the Houghton, from Volume 1 in November 1857 through the end of 1865; the issue for November 1858 is missing. While Dickinson might have read an article in a friend’s copy, it is not very likely. Similarly, the fact that pages are cut means only that someone was interested in them, not that Dickinson herself read them. 8. On Dickinson’s cut-outs, see Virginia Jackson (Misery 141, 229, 168–71); Martha Nell Smith, Rowing in Eden (119–21) and “The Poet as Cartoonist”; Socarides 76–77. Werner discusses the cutting of her own texts as a feature of Dickinson’s late compositional process (Open Folios 31–32). 9. Dickinson also marks a March 1862 AM installment of Rebecca Harding Davis’s “A Story of To-Day.” 10. It is unclear who wrote on Bowles’s card; the handwriting is neither his nor Sue’s. 11. More than one person writes in these books, and in some cases it is not clear whether the marking is Dickinson’s. For example, in Aurora Leigh and some other volumes , there is underlining and marking down both sides of some passages rather than Dickinson’s usual light pencil lines and xs. At other points, the markings clearly differ from Dickinson’s (they are squiggly or wavy, and they...