Elle signe souvent "Emilie": Emily Dickinson and the French Critical Response

In Europe, France is second only to Italy in publishing Dickinson criticism, but this fact comes with a pervasive American avoidance of French Dickinson scholarship. American Dickinson scholars, it seems, are not reading and are certainly not citing articles and books written by French critics. Moreover, with such notable exceptions as Willis J. Buckingham's, Emily Dickinson: An Annotated Bibliography (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1970), American book-length bibliographies (e.g., Jeanetta Boswell's Emily Dickinson: A Bibliography, London: McFarland and Company, 1989) are based almost exclusively on American publications and English language journals published abroad. Generally these bibliographies include articles in foreign language journals only if such articles were in English or accompanied by an English abstract. Similarly, the annual annotated bibliography, American Literary Scholarship (ALS), excludes all foreign criticism on Dickinson in its extensive section on "Whitman and Dickinson." Instead, in alloting a rather small space to "Foreign Scholarship," with "French Contributions" falling under this category, the ALS, in the guise of an international report, further perpetrates a criticism based solely on nationality and language.

This essay thus examines, in the context of a recuperative criticism that argues for the inclusion of excluded critics, the French response to Dickinson's poetry and aesthetic accomplishment. First, however, I reevaluate the most extensive foreign critical survey to date (1876-1977), Ann Lilliedahl's Emily Dickinson in Europe: Her Reputation in Selected Countries (Washington D.C: UP of America, 1981), and treat several texts she has missed. Then, more specifically, with the assumption that this essay cannot do justice to the large body of French scholarship, I selectively discuss several French critical positions and trends, beginning from 1977, where Lilliedahl leaves off and continuing to the present.

The first French article on Dickinson was "Emily Dickinson: Essai d'analyse psychologique" (1925) in which Jean Catel translates the first stanza of a Dickinson poem (402) and parts of Dickinson's later letters. A point Lilliedahl overlooks: Catel considered his essay as a corrective to Martha Dickinson-Bianchi's The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), which Catel thought was too "pious" and contained a "regretable reticence" that hid the essential Dickinson (395). After characterizing Dickinson as having "un regret de n'être déjà plus l'enfant tremblant devant un "maître" aimé, et le désir d'être à son tour une force qui commande" (400), Catel notes the repressive paternal authority of Edward Dickinson, defines Emily's "complex paternelle" (401), and enumerates the paternal substitutes (e.g., Thomas Wentworth Higginson) that came after Edward's death. Defending his use of a psychoanalytical approach, Catel concludes that Dickinson's only recourse against these "forces aveugles" was her poetry (405). Catel wished to contravene what he believed was an American pudicity by discussing issues of subliminal sexual alignments and, in the Freudian sense, an identification of the woman with the literal, the author with the text.

Among other works, the twenties also brought Régis Michaud's Panorama de la Littérature Américaine (Paris: Simon Kra, 1926) and Albert Feuillerat's "La vie sécrete d'une Puritaine: Emily Dickinson" (1927). For Michaud, Dickinson's poetry takes the form of diurnal notes which, in describing "sa souffrance," have the effect of "pinpricks" (128). Feuillerat suggests that Dickinson carefully guarded "une poésie de tiroir, faite pour être caressée à la dérobée, comme on pleure sur les souvenirs d'un être disparu. Car Emily Dickinson ne songea jamais à étaler devant le public ces nudités de son âme" (682).

Dickinson criticism in the thirties is highlighted by John Jacoby's "L'esthétique de la sainteté: Emily Dickinson" (1931), Léon Bocquet's "La littérature Américaine" (1931), Pierre Leyris' "Poemes et Lettres d'Emily Dickinson" (1939), two more articles by Jean Catel, "Poésie moderne aux Etats-Unis I" (1933), "Poésie moderne aux Etats-Unis II" (1933), and Catel's review of Josephine Pollit's Emily Dickinson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930) and Geneviève Taggard's The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson (New York: Alfred...