"One and One are One". .. and Two: An Inquiry into Dickinson's Use of Mathematical Signs

In The Dickinson Sublime, Gary Lee Stonum notes,

Mathematics occupies a distinctive place in Dickinson's work. Roughly two hundred of Dickinson's poems include some ref erence to mathematical terms and ideas, often in a precise and pointed way, and a number of others often implicitly depend on counting, measuring, and quantitatively assessing (133).

Stonum applies this observation to Dickinson's poems which include verbal references to mathematics in an attempt to uncover the meanings behind some of Dickinson's mathematically-oriented ideas, such as "ratio," "sum," or the geometrical "circumference" (133). Though Stonum's reading is insightful and valuable, it anticipates a more complete treatment of Dickinson's poems in their relation to mathematics, for, though Stonum notes that verbal reference to mathematics occurs in approximately two hundred of Dickinson's poems, verbal reference is not Dickinson's only reference to mathematics. Dickinson also makes visual reference to mathematics; Dickinson employs the signs of mathematics in her poems, including poems which do not make overt, verbal reference to mathematics. In the fascicles, besides the letters of the alphabet, the main signs Dickinson employs are mathematical. She uses minus signs (her dashes) to separate and join parts of sentences, plus signs to signal variants, and the line which concludes a list of numbers in a mathematics problem to separate and, perhaps, join poems.

If Dickinson is employing the signs of mathematics to construct the text of her poetry, mathematics would have more fundamental and far-reaching effects on her poems than critics have thus far suspected.¹ This essay will take three steps to suggest the fuller mathematical inquiry operating in Dickinson's poems. First, the case will be made that in creating her fascicles Dickinson intentionally employs the signs of mathematics. Second, it will be shown that Dickinson seems to use the signs of mathematics in order to signify a constant critique of certain metaphysical claims prevalent in her lifetime. Third, a brief assessment will be given of the ways in which Dickinson's use of mathematical signs might effect further readings.

Emily Dickinson was familiar with the conventional symbols of mathematics, the minus and plus signs, and the summation line. Consider the following mathematical problems, excerpted from Jeremiah Day's An Introduction to Algebra:

All of these basic arithmetic signs are present in Day's textbook, a textbook used, as Jack Lee Capps notes in Emily Dickinson's Reading, 1836-1886, during the time of Dickinson's study at Mount Holyoke (190). A glance at Dickinson's poems shows that all of these signs also are present in her work, and a consideration of the use of these signs suggests that they may be more than arbitrary or idiosyncratic forms of punctuation. Although Dickinson's use of the dash may be attributed to an allowable, though eccentric, use of punctuation and although her use of the line to mark the end of poems may be attributed to a rough approximation of printing conventions common in her day, Dickinson could have used any other sign besides the plus sign to mark her variants. This point becomes even more significant when one considers that Dickinson uses basically one sign, the plus sign, to note multiple variants. That is, Dickinson could have used multiple signifiers for her variants, and, in so doing, she could have greatly clarified and quickened the reading process, especially in poems which end with large clusters of variants. Of course, Dickinson did not choose multiple variant-signifiers. Dickinson chose a single variant-signifier that resembles a plus sign, and with that choice, Dickinson chose difficulty; investigation, searching, and choosing may be precisely what Dickinson is trying to evoke with her mathematical signs.

Employing a visual representation of mathematical signs in the construction of her poems is an activity similar to some of Dickinson's other methods [End Page...