Dickinson Reading

No one who works on Dickinson can fail to be struck by the extraordinary quality of her mind and its unerring take on the issues she addresses. In the mid 1980s, when I was preparing the book on Dickinson for the Macmillan Women Writers Series, I found myself wanting to search out the sources and triggers of her thought -her culturally specific intellectual formation. What were the contemporary debates with which she was engaged? When at the age of fourteen she extolled her "big studies" at Amherst Academy—"They are Mental Philosophy, Geology, Latin, and Botany. How large they sound, don't they?" (L6)—I wondered about the particular nature of those studies. What was Mental Philosophy? What exactly did she study? What did she read? I knew intriguing things: for example, that Edward Hitchcock, President of Amherst College, was a Professor of Theology and Geology. But how did this particular convergence of ideas come to be? What did she find in her textbooks and the books in her family library? The pages of The Springfield Republican edited by Samuel Bowles? The Hampshire and Franklin Express? The Atlantic Monthly? Harper's and Scribner's?

Since 1992 with the aid of a series of Australian Research Council grants, I have been working my way through the family library in the collections at the Houghton Library at Harvard and the John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence Rhode Island. My Research Assistant and I have worked through The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's and The Springfield Republican and are half way through The Hampshire and Franklin Express and Harper's. The study of Dickinson's reading demonstrates that she was actively engaged with her contemporary milieu and that her writing represents a dialogue with nineteenth-century debate—providing unique insight into the interaction of texts with their contexts. It is increasingly obvious that she was not only for all time, but of her age, in Sewall's words, "She comes to us increasingly as the summation of an era" (Sewall 671).

Close work with the periodicals and the library has suggested a very intimate relationship between Dickinson's poetic texts and the texts of her culture—demonstrating that a text does not exist in a vacuum but is always generated in dynamic relation to other texts. Kristeva credits Bakhtin as being one of the first to replace the idea of "the static hewing out of texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exist but is generated in dynamic relation to another structure." For Bakhtin the literary word represents "an intersection" of other texts, "a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee [who may simply be the writer as reader of other texts], and the contemporary or earlier cultural context." A writer participates in history through "a process of reading-writing; that is, through the practice of a signifying structure in relation or opposition to other texts or structures." Bakhtin's insight is that "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another." Dialogue is "a writing where one reads the other" (Kristeva, Desire in Language, 64-68).

Even the most private self-utterances of our inner speech are, for Bakhtin, "socially oriented" and "completely dialogic, totally saturated with the evaluations of the possible listener or audience." For, he writes, "as soon as we begin meditating about some question, as soon as we start to think it over carefully, our inner speech . . . immediately assumes the form of questions and answers, assertions and subsequent denials, or to put it more simply, our speech . . . takes the form of a dialogue" (Shukman, Bakhtin School Papers, 118-9). Bakhtin warns the historian of literature against "turning the literary milieu into an absolutely enclosed and self-sufficient world" for, he writes, "the uniqueness of a category, or rather a milieu, can only be based on the interaction of this category, both in its whole and in the form of each element, with all other categories in the unity of social life" (89). The literary text is valuable precisely because of its dynamic relation with its...