Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (review)

In Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing, Daneen Wardrop provides a meticulously researched and often engrossing study of the manifold fabrics that lined Dickinson's material and poetic worlds. Throughout the book, Wardrop considers the poet's positioning with respect to the fashions of her time, as well as to the greater industrialization of textile production in the nineteenth century. Wardrop reads fashion not only as an art form in and of itself—"Clothing forms art on the pulse"—but also as an index of historical and social relationships (5). Thus she intends this very circumscribed topic to reveal the warp and weft of the poet's friendships and familial allegiances, as well as the very "stuff" of her poetry and poetics themselves. Though this final aspect of the argument is sometimes overstated or over-literalized ("To some extent, the very weave of the material Dickinson needled became the texture of the lines of her verses" [6]), Wardrop's study stands as a prismatic and ultimately useful window on the fashions that variously enlivened Dickinson's poetry and person.

Wardrop's writing is richest, and rings truest, when she lights on an item of reference that pays metonymic dividends to the subject at hand. For example, she astutely analyzes Dickinson's embrace of plural calicoes ("My sphere is doubtless calicoes" [L228, qtd. in Wardrop 92 as L370]), explaining that since calico was worn by members of different social classes during Dickinson's lifetime, the poet's embrace of its plurality was part and parcel of her productive polyvocality. This "circulatory" fabric thus becomes a viable emblem for Dickinson's protean assumption of various subject positions in her poems and letters: "[S]he preferred the unassuming fabric that permitted her the social luxury of nursing multiple identifications with different classes" (98). Resonant, too, is Wardrop's analysis of the Dickinson home's geographic proximity to the Hills hat factory in Amherst. She notes that since Dickinson continually heard the whistles signaling the start and end of the factory's work day, they became a form of musical score tracking her own mundane and conceptual rhythms: "The whistle situated her between the living and the dead, in the space of what she called the 'permanent temporarily'" (113).

Less convincing is Wardrop's effort to use such evidence to exonerate Dickinson's person from the charge of elitism, much as the following quotation tries to do: "Capable of haughtiness, sometimes scurrilously so, Dickinson was capable, too, of commiseration; blinded by bigotry at times, she also found reprieves in moments of more equalizing empathy" (98). This concern becomes a strong current throughout the book, one that can appear both puzzling and ultimately beside the point. Many of us would probably agree that while Dickinson was economically privileged, she was also unusual enough to qualify as socially marginal in other respects. It seems a mistake, though, to try to impute more social or class consciousness to this poet than was likely there; indeed, friendliness with or kindness to household servants—of which Wardrop makes much here—has never altered the facts of fundamental economic inequities, or of upper-class blindness to the same. For these reasons, Wardrop's efforts can sometimes come across as "spinning": not in the nineteenth-century needlework sense, but in the twenty-first century media sense.

Note, for example, how Wardrop glosses a very brief passage from one of Dickinson's letters to Austin, in which the poet almost breezily states that she could testify that a neighbor's servant had been beaten: "Significantly, Emily Dickinson implies that she would have testified if she had been called upon to do so, leaving little doubt that her participation would have been in favor of the servant" (112). Clearly, this is the language of speculation and hypothesis; it is hardly a convincing portrayal of Dickinson as a champion of the lower classes. (The evidence from the letter alone is not substantive enough to support the claims that Wardrop wants to...