"That Minute Domingo": Dickinson's Cooptation of Abolitionist Diction and Franklin's Variorum Edition

My research lately has been leading me to consider Emily Dickinson’s place within her cultural milieu, specifically as it concerns the ways she borrowed the dictions of abolition and nineteenth-century dialogues about slavery and race. I have been eager to see how the Franklin variorum edition might shed light on such ways of reading Dickinson’s poems. Her usage of abolitionist language remains subtle, piqued, never hortatory, though sometimes political in a vexed and personal way. In other words, abolitionist inflections can provide a basis for the designation of ontological states in some of her poems. In the way that Toni Morrison identifies the “Africanist influence” in much of American culture, positing “the overwhelming presence of black people” as “one of the most furtively radical impinging forces” (5) on the corpus of our national literature, Dickinson demonstrates such an influence. Her work shows a furtive impingement, and the existence of the variorum edition makes it more possible than ever to perceive it — and to perceive it in incisive ways. The Franklin variorum offers, for example, ready information on fascicle placement for relevant poems, and indicates line endings as they appear in Dickinson’s originals. Most prominently and incisively, though, and most immediately useful to my way of thinking about Dickinson, the variorum provides exhaustive versions of any one text.

Franklin’s display of different versions of a given poem provides perspective afresh that I admit feels at times as daunting as it does invigorating. His achievement excites and confounds the Dickinson scholar with the new possibilities offered: being able to see the manuscript versions of each poem spread out before me prompts me to feel, as I have at several cusps during the years of studying Dickinson, that I never quite knew her, even in the imperfect, wonderfully cryptic way that I imagined I knew her before. It feels a little like having both a court-side seat as well as a view from the blimp — coextensively. We’ve always known we were sitting somewhere in the indeterminate center with Dickinson’s poems — neither close enough to see the sweat nor far away enough to gain at least the illusion of perspective. Now we can do both, choose our seat, move during the point, get a view of the lines from wherever we want. The dynamic Dickinson proves ever redynamized.

Franklin offers the insight that Dickinson’s own method of editing depends upon browsing, in that “browsing was the chief means of dealing with them [the poems]” (Franklin 8). With the variorum, now, we, too, can browse her poems to our full delight, knowing that in the end such an approach may be the best means, on the reader’s end of things, of dealing with them, as well. In other words, the indeterminacy of a Dickinson text, as amply noted by Sharon Cameron, Susan Howe, Martha Nell Smith, Paul Crumbley, and many others, has become manifest and ours in these volumes. In mediating among several texts that compete, amplify, and hold ongoing discussions, the reader of the Franklin edition discovers once again a dynamic Dickinson whose poems prove always incipient. His insistence upon not “finishing” her work allows us as readers to engage with the most fresh, most nuanced Emily Dickinson available to us. Dickinson’s incipience remains one of the most cherished qualities of her poetry. Specifically, in this case, the ability to study the different versions of a poem calls up nuances of cultural involvement in abolition that I had not previously been able to focus upon in such a clear way.

I would like to walk through three poems, as presented in Franklin’s variorum edition, that display the utility of being able to access all known versions of a poem. Because I can weigh versions against each other, I can discern better the inflections of abolition that concern me. To this effect I will examine one poem at length and two in brief: “One of the ones that Midas touched” (Fr1488), “Civilization spurns the leopard!” (Fr276), and “A dying tiger moaned for drink...