Partnership in Possibility: The Dialogics of "his efficient daughter Lavinia and his poetess daughter Emily"

Without [Vinnie] life were fear, and Paradise a cowardice, except for her inciting voice.

Emily Dickinson (L827)

In an October 10, 1890 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Austin Dickinson appeared to conflate genius with the masculine gender. He equivocally expressed doubts regarding the publication of his sister's "little volume," while he simulaneously thanked Higginson for his "public endorsement" to legitimize Dickinson's art. Austin's teleological gaze then turned to egalitarian condemnation concerning his other sibling and her accomplishments. While questioning the wisdom of publishing one sister, Austin stridently denounced the other:

Whether it was, on the whole, advisable to publish is yet with me, a question, but my Sister Vin, whose knowledge of what is, or has been, outside of her dooryard is bounded by the number of her callers, who had no comprehension of her sister, yet believed her a shining genius, was determined to have some of [Emily's] writing where it could be read of all men, and she is expecting to become famous herself thereby, and now we shall see.

(Bingham, Ancestor's Brocades 66)

Seemingly in answer, Lavinia Dickinson wrote publisher Thomas Niles nearly a year later, expressing her eagerness "that the whole world have the opportunity to enjoy [Dickinson's] genius as she was too shy in life to take her rank" (105). Vinnie it seems, understood her sister and her genius well. This understanding, in conjunction with the dialogue shared by Lavinia and Emily Dickinson, facilitated the creative process of Dickinson's poetry and enabled the publication of Dickinson's poems and letters.

The dialogic and interanimative sphere the sisters forged for themselves served as a survivalist response to traditional Romanticism's dictates regarding genius and gender that threatened to negate the woman artist. The ripples of Austin's specular gaze have resonated throughout Dickinson biography; the sisters have been portrayed as a stereotypic, diametrical pair since the beginning of their collaboration. Yet the bond Lavinia and Emily shared spanned half a century and found its praxis and power in a live protean tapestry of dialogism. By viewing their differences as dyadic and positive, aspects Patrick Murphy notes in Literature, Nature, and Other as instrumental for heterarchical conversation in which each voice shares mutually constitutive value, the sisters could choose active agency and forge a fluid, new space for themselves that was relational and not alienational (12).

Through collaborative dialogics, the two women could employ their differing ideologies, subjectivities, and positionalities, what Donna Haraway terms "situated knowledges," to alter the face of American literature (198). Richard Sewall reminds us that Lavinia was "indispensable to [Emily] in many ways" and "in one final way she was indispensable to posterity. Her complete belief in Emily during her life was transferred to the poems after Emily died" (I: 129). This "furious determination," Sewall suggests, "may have come in part from her having shared however humbly, in the practice of the art" (I: 151). Examining documentary evidence through the Dickinsons' letters and poems indeed reveals Lavinia's participatory artistry; these writings also unveil the dialogic space occupied by the sisters, a space that not only enabled a heterarchical discourse to thrive and grow, but a sphere that also artistically energized the other. Mikhail Bakhtin describes this dynamic interplay of voice as a "living . . . thing" that exists on the "borderline between oneself and the other" ("Discourse in the Novel" 293). The discourse derived from the Dickinson's relational space could most assuredly energize Emily's artistic creations, ultimately transforming her "private" work into art exposed to the public gaze.

In "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin defines dialogic as "the authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape" (272). "That dialogic," he continues, is born of "a struggle among socio-linguistic points of view" (273). Confronted with the egoism of a Romantic tradition that considered women incapable of the genius necessary to produce great art, women such as Emily and Lavinia were forced to challenge the societal configurations of "art" and "woman" and the codification of the...