Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception (review)

In the final chapter of Emily Dickinson: Monarch of Perception, Domhnall Mitchell describes how he would sit for hours in the Jones Library in Amherst, contemplating the world that Emily Dickinson looked out on from the four south- and west-facing windows of her Main Street home (295). With that view in mind, Mitchell joins the ranks of critics constructing the historical context for reading Dickinson’s poems and letters. The first half of his study aligns Dickinson with the economic and political pursuits of her father and brother, analyzing Whig political thought, Yankee entrepreneurship, and the ideologies of upper-class Protestant havens of power.

The building of the railroad in Amherst, changes in domestic architecture, the indoor cultivation of flowers, and the ideology of print are sites from which Mitchell rereads Dickinson’s work. What emerges is a poet whose vocabulary and lyric strategies of writing and private distribution clearly expose both her class anxieties and aspirations. For instance, Dickinson wrote about flowers “because gardening was taken as a serious cultural pursuit in the nineteenth century” and “was part of a genteel woman’s most important accomplishments” (153). Flowers both enhanced and limited her writing, its vocabulary and metaphors.

Further, Mitchell believes that his retrieval of the historical and economic conditions of Dickinson’s poetry rescues her from the constant privatizing and reprivatizing of her language by well-meaning critics. Under his critical scrutiny, Dickinson becomes a “complete personality with prejudices, dislikes, fears, and desires” (153). Despite his moralizing, this study teases out new meanings while it reproduces significant issues plaguing Dickinson scholarship. How to avoid the ink-plot syndrome when contextualizing her poetry? For instance, the weight of Amherst’s railroad history and Dickinson’s family involvement opens specific poems to class politics and family drama, but the echoes of this context never end. At times, individual poems are overwhelmed by their resonance.

The second half of the book reads more like an in-house debate among Dickinson scholars over the nature of the manuscript copies of her poems. The authorial intention of the “original” has lead to an industry of speculation about Dickinson’s methods and meaning. Ralph W. Franklin’s 1981 edition of Dickinson’s manuscripts and the consequent series of books and articles interpreting the fascicles, Dickinson’s hand-sewn groupings of poems, has increased the crisis or play of meaning, depending upon one’s critical assumptions. Mitchell comes out against the game of creating narratives for individual sequences of poems. He aspires instead to conceptualize the fascicles as a “species of lyric cubism” (192), rendering narrative time subservient to the contested, contradictory voices in and between clusters of poems.

Clearly influenced by theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu, Mitchell, in the final analysis, represents Dickinson’s poetics and social world as politically conservative and anxious about propriety, privacy, and property while granting her the power to transgress and subvert these very conventions and restrictions.