Dickinson's Dashes and the Limits of Discourse

From their first publication in the 1890s until the present, Emily Dickinson's poems have been read and edited as though her stylistic innovations were imperfect attempts to convey the thoughts and feelings of speakers with fixed, unified identities. Because Dickinson's poetry consistently refuses to cooperate in this project, critics intent on imposing an aesthetics of coherence have tended to step back from Dickinson's work, blurring the details of individual poems while identifying familiar voices and dominant speaking selves in the corpus as a whole. As Margaret Dickie puts the critical situation in "Dickinson's Discontinuous Lyric Self," the apparent disjunction of Dickinson's work has "usually been resolved by the imposition of a master narrative" (228). However, David Porter expresses the frustrations inevitable in this attempt when he complains that Dickinson's poems are "the vast hoard of a traveler's snapshots without an itinerary of the trip or a map showing the destination" (293).

But if we accept Suzanne Juhasz's judgment that Dickinson is "the greatest woman poet in the English language" (Feminist 1), we must confront rather than avoid the fascinating, often maddeningly arcane details of her work, such as her orthography and syntax, that defy efforts to inscribe the poems within a unifying frame. Of the stylistic details that editors have most readily dismissed, the dash is the least accommodating to conventional readings that stress linear progression and logical coherence. The tendency of early editors to regularize the dash while leaving other features relatively untouched suggests the degree to which the dash has been viewed as the most troublesome feature of Dickinson's writing. Even the publication of the standard 1955 variorum, which includes dashes, has produced little discussion of the way the dashes influence reading. This silence is perplexing, as it indicates that although the dash may be as troublesome for readers today as it was in 1890, it has acquired a new form of invisibility, functioning as a gap in the text that readers choose either to ignore or fill with whatever graphic marker seems most appropriate to them. In this sense, acknowledging the dashes on the printed page has done the opposite of increasing appreciation for Dickinson's style: now readers individually perform the task—once the exclusive province of editors—of regularizing and dismissing Dickinson's primary form of punctuation.

Perhaps one reason the dash has been so systematically ignored is that Dickinson's idiosyncratic use of it challenges, in almost every poem, the search for a particular speaker with a fixed and unitary identity. Precisely because the implications attendant upon taking the dashes seriously are so sweeping, we prefer to inscribe the poems within an internally coherent language system rather than consider the ways they undermine fundamental assumptions of unity. And we do this despite abundant critical agreement that the dashes are important and that they act to disrupt speech. As a component of what Gary Lee Stonum refers to in The Dickinson Sublime as Dickinson's "stylistic signature" (24), the dashes produce the "disjunction" Cristanne Miller identifies in Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar (44-44), creating what Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe as "rending pauses, silences like wounds in the midst of speech" (626). An important clue to an otherwise adoring public's reluctance to pursue Dickinson's stylistic innovations is conveyed in the word "rending" and the phrase "silences like wounds" that Gilbert and Gubar so accurately employ. Here we see that the disjunction produced by the dash, which seems harmless enough on the surface, can actually threaten painfully to dismember the speech conventionally associated with poetic language.¹

But if by disrupting speech the dashes alter the status of the speaking subject, how do we read this shifting self and the corrolary shifts in voice? The theoretical work of Julia Kristeva gives us a way to approach this question. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva argues that poetry can present a signifying process that shatters discourse and "reveals that linguistic changes constitute changes in the status of the subject" (15). Poetry that is "revolutionary" in...