Nei sobborghi di un segreto: Vita di Emily Dickinson (review)

Bulgheroni, Marisa. Nei sobborghi di un segreto: Vita di Emily Dickinson (On the Outskirts of a Secret: The Life of Emily Dickinson). Milan: Mondadori, 2001.

"Biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied"

Readers of this journal have already been informed of Marisa Bulgheroni's longstanding contribution to Dickinson studies in Italy. Her first critical essays go back to the early sixties and her edition of Emily Dickinson's complete poems, Tutte le Poesie, in the handsome Meridiani volume was published by Mondadori in 1997 and reviewed here in 1999. This life-long commitment to Dickinson has now culminated in the daunting undertaking of a new and highly original biography of the Amherst poet.

What makes Bulgheroni's biography so original is not an appraisal of the life in view of new findings or even a new assessment of the major queries that still characterize the events of the poet's life. As the dust jacket informs us, "This biography has its roots in the conviction that Emily Dickinson invented herself day by day: that her masks—the student, the gypsy, the queen, the lady in white, the nun, the sorceress—are theatrical roles prompted or imposed by lived experience." The task for the biographer, then, becomes that of moving to the locale where the poet lived, nei sobborghi del segreto, "the woods where she first gathered wild flowers, the rolling hills of her winter sleighrides," listening to the choral accompaniment of her closest family and friends, her acquaintances and correspondents, not to mention of course the many objects of her desire.

In this perspective, the biography could only be an inspired and lyrical recreation of the Amherst setting and the people who lived there. Considering the circumstances which led Dickinson to assign herself a life of confinement, this recreation becomes the narrative of a unique symbiotic relation between the biographer and the biographied. As Bulgheroni herself puts it in the section devoted to the nature of the poet's inspiration, "Melodia o Stregoneria?" ("Melody or Witchcraft?"), the author of "My Life had Stood a Loaded Gun" has this cautionary message to relay to any would-be biographer: "Be careful when handling my life: it might explode in your hands. Don't look for me in hidden places—that's not where I am. Listen instead to my fiery voice, to its sulphurous echoes" (183).

This is precisely what Bulgheroni does in her engaging recreation of the poet's life. In setting the scene for the key "Mystery Story" of the poet, the prelude to the presentation of the three Master letters which in her words "certify the birth of the poet" (160), Bulgheroni writes: "Let's imagine a winter night in 1861: Emily is sitting at her little cherry writing desk, a fragile, elegant, rickety table—even too shiny these days after being polished by the eyes of so many visitors. The moon, rotating around the Homestead, stops to look at that single lighted window and there it hovers, 'a foreign traveller' - looking like 'a head a guillotine slid carelessly away' or 'a stemless flower /upheld in rolling air /by finer gravitations /than bind the philosopher'" (153).

The biographer is obviously echoing the poet's own voice for we can hardly fail to recall the poem "I watched the Moon around the House" (J629), which functions as a subtext to the author's description: "She stopped - a Traveller's privilege - for Rest," "...a Head - a Guillotine /Slid carelessly away," "like a Stemless Flower /Upheld in rolling Air," "engrossed in Absolute," and the closing "it's advantage - Blue -" are all lines which Bulgheroni works into her writing creating the cumulative effect of a collage where the poet's voice is practically indistinguishable from that of her biographer.

What is the reader to make of this operation? The two voices are so in unison that it would be inadequate to...