Northern Lights: Class, Color, Culture, and Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson's stylistic ambiguity, her poetics of indeterminacy, may be seen as a rejection of political rhetoric, social and historical actualities and the definitions of literary taste determined by the cultural market. Dickinson's legendary withdrawal to a room of her own defines freedom as a turn of the key: her lyric multiplicity may be seen as an extra lock on the door. In this paper, I propose that Dickinson's usage of the word 'white' illustrates certain aspects of this strategic disengagement, precisely because it promotes non-specificity, purity of reference, puzzlement, contemplation, inaction. Replacing a thought, an experience, an event with a color is at once to express something about all of those things while erasing any definite trace of their originating circumstances. And yet, 'whiteness' has a set of meanings that have changed and evolved over time. In the eighteen-fifties and sixties, white was the color of royalty, of order and tradition, against the red of republicanism and socialism. White was also the color people from a northern European ethnic background increasingly associated with purity and excellence. ¹ Two years before Dickinson died, in 1884, Francis Galton argued in Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development that there were nine distinct races, each with its own physical, moral and intellectual characteristics. ² He arranged these races hierarchically, placing Anglo-Saxons at the apex. Dickinson's dynamic and often antagonistic display of color is typical of a desire to make her texts self-sufficient, ahistorical: but if the purging of historical details attains ambiguity, historical conditions brought about the desire to rise above history in the first place. In what follows, Dickinson's relation to class, culture and ethnicity will be explored, initially through her response to the Swedish coloratura soprano Johanna Maria (Jenny) Lind, whose own artistic success will be seen to be bound up with this compound of issues.

In June of 1851, Emily Dickinson wrote to her brother Austin declining his invitation to hear Jenny Lind sing in Boston. ³ Marketed by P. T. Barnum as the Swedish nightingale, Lind had made an enormous impression during her American tour: theatres were named after her, as well as streets, schools, silverware, furniture, dams and even towns (there is a Jenny Lind in Calaveras County, California). During the week of her performances in Boston, the clipper 'Nightingale' (named in her honor) docked at harbor. ⁴ Eventually, it would have its own Jenny Lind figurehead. It sank off the coast of Norway in 1893.

Less than a month after Austin's invitation, Lind gave a concert at the Edwards Church in Northampton, which Emily attended together with her parents and sister:

Herself, and not her music, was what we seemed to love -- she has an air of exile in her mild blue eyes, and a something sweet and touching in her native accent which charms her many friends (L46). ⁵

Although Lind's phenomenal success was aided by Barnum's promotional skills, Dickinson gives additional indications as to why she attracted such immense public interest. Being foreign was one factor (it made her exotic), but the particular nature of her foreignness was another -- Lind was Scandinavian, with 'blue eyes,' in an age when things Northern were beginning to become culturally modish.

For Hans Christian Andersen, whose 1843 Nightingale had been partly inspired by his infatuation for Lind, her singing was a contrast to the ornate Italian style then in vogue. As Bente Kjølbye writes, Andersen's "fairy-tale Nightingale cannot be seen just as a conflict between the artificial and the natural, but also more concretely as an opposition between the naturally gifted Swedish nightingale and the artificial Italian opera" (Kjølbye 57). ⁶ Andersen believed that Lind's talent was innate and inherited, and therefore not a matter of training or manner: Dickinson's reaction to Lind's person rather than her songs gestures in the same direction. In order to maximize...