Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities (review)

The primary aim of Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities is to assert the value of reading Dickinson's poetry contextually and of "reading the poems in their places" (104) by means of the fascicle groupings. For Heginbotham, such groupings are "quite simply the most important clue she provided for reading the poems within them. They are Dickinson's own context" (viii). Thus, the study privileges a comparative, cross-poem and cross-fascicle interpretative structure and in particular organises itself around the examples of "repeated" poems occurring in more than one place. Such an approach allows the critic to dwell on "the effects of the pressures of the surrounding work—the contiguous poems, the shape of a book, [. . .] the peculiar tone of each book" (xi-xii).

Heginbotham tells us that there are eleven examples of repetition across the forty fascicles. She chooses not to look at all of these, but at a "representative sample" (xii) of four pairs in Fascicles 1 and 40, 6 and 10, 14 and 3, 21 and 8. However, there are potential contradictions in such a position. Firstly, we might question the assertion of the value of a contextual reading which is followed by only a partial exploration of a certain kind of meaning (although Heginbotham does cover quite a lot of ground in the examples chosen). Secondly, there seems to be some ambiguity in the way she positions herself within the larger fascicle debate. On the one hand she stresses that she wishes to avoid an overly intentionist reading of the fascicles, on the other she centers herself upon the "intentional artistry she [Dickinson] used to compile these books" (ix). One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of the study is the way in which it resists falling into the more speculative authorial approach, but it also resists pushing toward a clear conclusion of its own and thus tends to suffer from a rather unfocussed critical ambition: "what I want to share in this study is not any single interpretation but rather my own excitement at the glimpse the fascicle groupings provide in the playful and inventive mind of Emily Dickinson" (ix).

The book is organised around the pairs of poems. Chapter 1 addresses two opposing poems in Fascicle 21; Chapter 2 looks at the poems around this pairing in Fascicle 21; Chapter 3 looks at a duplicate within Fascicle 8 and between 8 and 21 and then reads across poems; Chapter 4 gives a contextual reading of two versions of a poem in Fascicles 6 and 10. In Chapter 5 Heginbotham turns her attention to other critics who have adopted a contextual reading and to the issue of intentionality in such readings. Here she places emphasis on a need to "discover what she was doing more than why she was doing it" (107), that is to avoid an (unrecoverable) intentionist approach in favor of analysis of materials. Chapter 6 looks at two further pairs of fascicles (1/14, 3/40) before the conclusions of Chapter 7. At a localised level Heginbotham works hard to illustrate "the way two poems speak to each other across the page" (5) and is able to illustrate convincingly the value of contextualised meaning for interpreting the poems. She also provides a clear context for the fascicle debate itself, although her own position is again frustratingly undefined. She states: "I come to this study with neither a conviction that the fascicles tell a unified story of passion [. . .] nor a willingness to attribute to Dickinson a prophetic sympathy for postmodern critical theory" (12-13). Instead, her position is "primarily the result of simply looking long enough at the fascicles" (13). This seems to me disingenuous, not least because Heginbotham in fact has quite a rigid conceptualisation of the fascicles as a "self-publication project" (7) which she asserts more or less uncritically throughout. This becomes problematic later on when she describes Dickinson as "the tricky editor of Fascicle 8" (59) or calls the...