The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (review)

"I am a poet, not a textual scholar" (153), Susan Howe states, and her poetic values inform her construction of Emily Dickinson: "I have trespassed into the disciplines of American Studies and Textual Criticism through my need to fathom what wildness and absolute freedom is the nature of expression" (2). Howe's trespasses and her notion that "absolute freedom is the nature of expression" are her business. I am concerned with her facile politicizations and her appropriation of Dickinson for her poetic agenda.

Howe asks for a "revolutionary" Dickinson criticism: R. W. Franklin's editions of her manuscript books and letters "should have radically changed all readings of her work. . . . But they haven't. This is a feminist issue" (170). Not that Howe is happy with Franklin, even though he agrees that Dickinson's manuscripts "resist translation into the conventions of print" (The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson I, ix); she again poses her objection as a feminist issue, overlooking earlier editions by women: "Editing of her poems and letters has been controlled by gentlemen of the old school and by Harvard University Press since the 1950s" (170).

But Howe's concerns exceed gender:

The issue of editorial control is directly connected to the attempted erasure of antinomianism in our culture. . . . The excommunication and banishment of the early American female preacher and prophet Anne Hutchinson, and the comparison of her opinions to monstrous births, is not unrelated to the editorial apprehension and domestication of Emily Dickinson

(1).

Indeed, "Dickinson's textual production is still being tamed for aesthetic consumption. If antinomian vision in North America is gendered feminine, then what will save it from print misfortune?" (4).

To save Dickinson from "editorial apprehension," Howe calls for "the presentation"of Dickinson's "texts through the cooperative editing of a facsimile edition of all of the poems, letters, and fragments owned by the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Amherst College Library, and the Boston Public Library, with full transcription and scholarly apparatus, by a group of scholars working together" (20). Howe insists that Dickinson's poems must be "experienced as handwritten productions—the later ones as drawings" (157)—and that "her calligraphy influences her meaning" (153). In an age of anxiety about hard copy, the "aura" of handcrafted artifacts attracts Howe, but she forgets that facsimile editions also produce textual changes. Manuscripts—their feel, paper color, size, ink color, smudges, pinholes, and whatnot—are not reproducible. Plus, a photographic reproduction of Dickinson's "calligraphy" would also "influence her meaning," even if we limit her text's "meaning" to original authorial intention and assume that she intended her poems to circulate in the form in which she left them.

Since Dickinson must also be put into print, however, Howe argues that Dickinson's line breaks, as well as all her marks and variants, should be reproduced exactly: "Unlike Franklin, I believe there is a reason for them" (139). Howe's insistence that Dickinson's overflow lines are intentional line breaks points up what is really at stake: "It takes a poet to see how urgent this subject of line breaks is" (157)—or at least a Language poet, which Dickinson may not have been. Howe's poetic commitment takes precedence over her feminism. The expanded canon includes more women, she states, but fewer poets—women and men—who use language "in an experimental way:" "It's a brutal thing. Erasure. It's a political issue that covers a wider range than gender" (171). By reading Dickinson into her poetic program, Howe writes a typological literary history, in which Dickinson is the precursor or type of Susan Howe. An American tradition of nonconformism places Dickinson as a precedent for her own writing—"filled with gaps and words tossed, and words touching, . . . letters mixing and falling away from each other," etc. (175). Of course, in instituting a genealogy for her practice, she is no longer the antinomian she thinks Dickinson was, for Howe wants a line...