Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (review)

In their excellent study, the three well-known Dickinson scholars, Suzanne Juhasz, Cristanne Miller, and Martha Nell Smith, manage successfully to revise Emily Dickinson's reputation as a dead-serious poet.

The book consists of five parts. The three central chapters are an individual essay each by Juhasz, Miller, and Smith. These are framed by an introductory and a concluding chapter co-authored by all three of them. In these framework essays, the first entitled "Comedy and Audience in Emily Dickinson's Poetry," the second "Comic Power," the essential terms mentioned in the title, comedy and power, are explained and elaborated, and the audience is emphasized as a necessary constituent of the comic effect. In their individual essays the authors work out different modes of comic power in Dickinson: tease (Juhasz), cartooning (Smith), and excess and grotesquerie (Miller).

As they point out in the introductory chapter, Juhasz, Miller, and Smith's aim is not so much to deconstruct the notion of Dickinson as the great tragedienne but to call to attention another side of Dickinson that has been grossly ignored but is as present as the gloom of death and the perennial enigmas of love and immortality. The study of Dickinson's comic power thus adds another side to the many-layered Dickinson portrait, which reveals a basic human touch of the great poet.

Comedy and humor are stereotypically unfit for a lady; however, as the authors argue, they are also a means of affirmation, subversion, and transformation. Emily Dickinson manages to evoke many a good laugh in the reader, especially through her frequent and excellent use of language play. That comedy may work at all, an audience is required, an audience that shares and responds. Moreover, the joke must be performed. The authors draw on reception theory, especially on Umberto Eco's and Iser and Jauss's arguments, to define their own concepts of comedy.

In her article "The Big Tease" Suzanne Juhasz argues that tease, as both a safe and provocative strategy, is Dickinson's response to patriarchal power in that it serves as an "amplifier of transformational possibilities." As such, it is the little girl's/the woman poet's effective means to speak in spite of her having been silenced: to speak about topics unfit and taboo for the nineteenth-century woman (e.g., sexual love) and to question and shake commonly accepted definitions. Moreover, since Dickinson's poems are, for Juhasz, always about language, the poem itself is a tease shaping that which is unsayable and ultimately unknowable (e.g., death). One could therefore suggest that, for Juhasz, Dickinson's comic power is an adequate means to grapple epistemologically with the most evasive and mysterious themes, such as death, love, or immortality.

In her essay on "The Poet as Cartoonist," Martha Nell Smith pursues two aims: on the one hand, she studies some of Dickinson's layouts and sketches; on the other, she examines her comedic sketches in language (Smith). Comedy or the comic as an aesthetic concept has been defined in numerous and different ways. However, one characteristic of the comic usually agreed upon is the fact that its essence lies in contrast, and that the comic is often a result of a juxtaposition of the material and the spiritual. Since the spiritual is meant to prevail, comedy applies best to those arts which are least material. Literature and painting (in this case cartooning) are therefore most inviting to comic effects. Martha Nell Smith, like her colleagues, stresses the fact that Dickinson exposes, questions, deconstructs and transforms major types of cultural authority by "cartooning." For Smith, too, the reader/audience participation plays a decisive role.

Cristanne Miller, an expert on Dickinson's language and grammar, convincingly displays Dickinson's narrative and imaginative excess as a means to create humorous effects. Miller argues that Dickinson's most frequent themes—pain, loss, death, and suffering—are beyond the boundaries of the knowable and that the poet therefore often...