Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson's Fascicles (review)

Almost every book published on Emily Dickinson over the past year or two proposes that, however sophisticated, conventional readerly strategies are insufficient for perusing the great poet's works. Thus, various new methods by which her readers can continue learning how to read her poems, letters, and letter-poems have been suggested. Looking "past normalizing critical accounts of Dickinson" (20), Sharon Cameron seeks to reorient the way readers receive the hundreds of lyrics gathered into the famous manuscript books (or fascicles) posthumously discovered in the poet's room. Pointing out that Dickinson's "fascicles trouble the idea of limit or frame" on which conventional senses "of lyric fundamentally depend" (5), Cameron maintains that poems placed in the manuscript books are not isolated lyrics but require the context of the fascicle for poetic identity. She also proposes to revise the most widely accepted attitudes towards the several types of variants that Dickinson left in those poems. Although her primary insights about these—that the variant words and lines Dickinson left on her manuscript pages are not substitutive but are constitutive parts of the poems and that poems within the same fascicle may in fact be variants of one another—are not new ones, Cameron's Choosing Not Choosing is a useful study of interest to all of Dickinson's readers.

Arguing that "revision" becomes "a phenomenon complexly integral to the poem, rather than anterior or exterior to it" (71), Cameron analyzes several different significances of the variants that Dickinson began to leave after she had produced about ten fascicles. There are the variant words and lines that Dickinson first began to place above, below, or beside words for which they provide alternative readings and then began to place at the end of the lyric, marking both the variants and places for insertion with a cross (+). Some variants modify each other rather than serving as alternatives, while others suggest a choice that is not made, and a particular choice of variant in one line may affect how we interpret the variants of another line. Variants are not simply substitutions, then, but work in multivalent ways. There are ostensibly different poems within fascicles that through verbal echoes can be interpreted as variants of each other, and ways in which variants work in relation to different poems can connect those poems so that they act as commentary on and / or extensions of one another.

For example, a variant or "outside" of one poem may echo the "inside" of another. "That Whiter Host," a variant line of "One need not be a Chamber" recalls the "White Heat" of "Dare you see a soul at the / 'White Heat'?," a poem situated several lyrics before in the fascicle Franklin has numbered 20. Viewing both these poems as interrogating the relations between death and murder, Cameron renders an exciting and illuminating interpretation of them as variants of each other. In her argument that implicitly concurs with Susan Howe and others that in Dickinson's work the "margins are made central, and are also brought into relation with the center" (70), Cameron properly puts quotation marks around conventional descriptive terms like "outside" and "inside" and in doing so shows how our standard critical vocabulary is too limited to describe Dickinson's poetic project.

Unfortunately, the fact that she does not engage recent Dickinson criticism unnecessarily limits Cameron's often profound analyses. Both Howe and Cristanne Miller have, for several years, been proposing similar reading strategies for variant words and lines; Howe convincingly argues that Dickinson's antinomian literary practices trouble not only any normalized sense of the lyric but also of the poetic line. Though, as critics like Vivian Pollak, Suzanne Juhasz, and Ellen Louise Hart have demonstrated, Dickinson also troubles literary conventions that valorize the contexts of the fascicles over epistolary contexts, Cameron does not examine placements of poems in letters or the situating of poems as letters. Therefore her analysis of addressed and signed "versions" of fascicle poems like "I showed her Hights she...