Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America by Peter Coviello (review)

Is it possible to say anything new at this time in queer literary history about Emily Dickinson’s experience and imagination of same-sex love? Peter Coviello thinks that it is. Following robust chapters on Thoreau and Whitman, he offers us a “Coda” (subtitled “A Little Destiny”) in which Dickinson to some extent functions as an appendage to these disappointed lovers. Dickinson, he notes, “can sound a lot like the young Thoreau: impassioned, in possession of a talent for figure and a seemingly inexhaustible lexical playfulness … very often finding in silence an ampler field for intimate avowal than in the constraints of speech” (65).

How, then, does silence play out in a letter Dickinson wrote to her beloved friend Susan Gilbert when both women were twenty-one? Quite nicely, as it turns out, because Dickinson yearns for her friend’s soulful and bodily presence, for a communion in which “‘we need not talk at all’” (66). Quoting from Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, Coviello treats Dickinson’s letter to her dearest “Susie” as a prose poem in which the speaker “make[s] ardor precious by counterpoising it to the unpredictable swiftness of mortal separation” (66).¹ To make ardor precious is to affirm the unappeasable power of longing, longing for which “the world’s language” (to quote Dickinson’s letter) is woefully insufficient.

At times Tomorrow’s Parties itself reads like a prose poem, and I am reluctant to translate its tender, exuberant language into a dryer idiom. Yet by concentrating on a single letter written well before Dickinson had reached her poetic prime, Coviello minimizes her development. How, then, did time affect Dickinson’s imagination of love once Susie had returned to Amherst and settled down next door? More specifically, what happened after Susan married the poet’s brother in July 1856, when both women were twenty-five? Decades ago, Lillian Faderman suggested that after Dickinson could no longer give Susan her love, she gave her art.² Would Coviello go there?

Not exactly. If Coviello’s Dickinson lived with the awful knowledge that every future is “too late” for love (67), she also participated in an obsessional attempt to sublimate her grief through art. Paradoxically, Coviello affirms the sublimation narrative the earlier Dickinson resisted when he describes her as engaging in a “decades-long outflowing of writings to ‘Susie’” (67). In this sense, Coviello creates an emotionally simplified narrative in which Dickinson lives out of time. Does she give up hope? Not exactly. “Indeed,” he writes, “I think one strong way to frame the decades-long outflowing of writings to ‘Susie’ is to understand them as an extended parsing of what is, for Dickinson, a bedeviling, sometimes anguishing question. … Where can two women love one another? Where can two nineteenth-century American women be present to one another in the full breath of their devotion, their need, and their ardor?” (67). The trouble with Coviello’s tragically impassioned narrative is that it narrows and dehistoricizes Dickinson. All that matters is Susan and personal narcissism. Dickinson’s sense of audience, I submit, was broader.

If Dickinson is “frozen in the alembic of an unyielding grief” (74), the fault lies not with her but with the conditions of life in nineteenth-century America. Because she was a woman, her opportunities for erotic fulfillment outside of marriage were more limited than were those of Thoreau and Whitman. She was more bound to “brute biology” (75). Coviello’s Dickinson accepts no compromises, which is why she turns to death and to eternity for answers to the problem of living unloved.

If for Dickinson tomorrow’s party with Susan can occur only after the death of the body, does that mean that lesbian women in nineteenth-century America were similarly doomed? Coviello opens the second part of his book with a...