[Im]pertinent Constructions of Body and Self: Dickinson's Use of the Romantic Grotesque

Once upon a time, most Dickinson scholars took it for granted that the poetry was a direct, unmediated reflection of "Emily Dickinson's state of mind" (whatever they thought it to be) and made no distinction between the speaking "I" of the verse and the woman herself. Today, we are more sophisticated and can reject such modes of misreading: "For all its value in the teacher's preparation," a modern scholar has recently written, "the historical, biographical, and ideological setting of Dickinson's work is something for our student to work toward, not work from."¹

One must applaud this advance; nonetheless, I wonder whether we have not gone too far in the opposite direction—whether in our sophistication we are missing something when we do not respond to the apparently "biographical" element in the poetry. Many naive admirers of Dickinson's work still have a curious preoccupation with her personal effects and her corporeal remains (the one white dress that is believed to have been hers, even the one lock of her dark red hair that is lodged in the archives at Amherst College and sometimes reverentially displayed during her birthday week in December); and the proprietors of Emily Dickinson's material estate preserve and display intimate, personal items with the same attention that they give to manuscripts, almost as if there were some obscure, but intrinsic connection. This attitude is different from the response evoked by other major authors, and if Dickinson scholars generally distinguish between the speaker in a given poem and "Emily Dickinson, herself," the ordinary citizens who still flood into the Dickinson home continue to think they have heard the woman in the work. Perhaps they are in touch with something "real," a unique, "Dickinsonian" tonality.

More than thirty years ago, Archibald MacLeish commented upon this illusion:

No one can read these poems . . . without perceiving that he is not so much reading as being spoken to. There is a curious energy in the words and a tone like no other most of us have ever heard. Indeed, it is the tone rather than the words that one remembers afterwards. Which is why one comes to a poem of Emily's one has never read before as to an old friend.²

MacLeish has conflated a series of separate constructs (the poem, the "speaker" of the poem, and the "author") with the flesh-and-blood person who wrote the verse. And while this is undoubtedly a mistake in poetic analysis, it does respond to the vividness—the perhaps unmatched intensity of Dickinson's work.

Dickinson had a lean, mean imagination, and her irreverent humor slips like a whippet throughout the work: she loved riddles and jokes, and seems to have enjoyed making the speaking "self" (and its illusion of corporeal reality) the most profound riddle (or joke) of all. Thus her verse is saturated with the first person singular: "Poem after poem—more than a hundred and fifty of them—begins with the word 'I,' the talker's word."³ Moreover, there are body parts scattered throughout: one need only consult the Concordance entries for "hand," "hair," "foot," "brain," and the like to document this phenomenon. (The most extravagant proliferation can be found with "eye" and "eyes"—those playful puns for self; there are almost two hundred entries for them, one of the longest lists in the book!) Dickinson assaults us with "identity" at the same time that she deliberately baffles us with it; and if we entirely ignore issues of "author," "speaker," and their relationship to the "person, Emily Dickinson" ("sellf" and all of the [im]pertinent constructions of self), we may be missing something important.

Fundamentally, the big question can be construed as an issue of grammar: what is the referent for "I"? Readers who have responded intuitively, to "the author" or "Emily Dickinson"—and who have presumed that these entities are the same—feel that they have "heard" the "author" by virtue of having read the work; moreover, even when this "I" has an extravagant, carnivalesque component, it still...