"A Dimple in the Tomb": Cuteness in Emily Dickinson

"This is one of the reasons that people who don't like Emily Dickinson don't like her, because she has this eternally cute, kind of smirking cuteness about her, about so much of her work, especially the better known work."¹

—James Dickey, 1972

"At first, I wanted nothing much to do with her. She was like a relative I knew too well and was ashamed of. I found her cuteness, in some lines of the poems of hers that I read in school, at best weak, at worst cloying: 'I like to see it lap the Miles –' (Fr383), 'I'll put a trinket on' (Fr32)—not to mention the ubiquitous 'A Bird, came down the Walk –' (Fr359). That one annoyed me especially."²

—Annie Finch, 2008

In one of Emily Dickinson's early poems (Fr96), bees are described as "Pigmy seraphs – gone astray – / Velvet people from Vevay –."³ They are small, they are lost, they are swathed in fuzzy fabric, and they emit a charming Gallic buzz.⁴ There is a word for these little insects from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and the word is cute. During the modern era, as Emily Dickinson's critical reputation rose, her pygmy seraphs, elfin mushrooms (Fr1350, line 1), and chubby-cheeked squirrels (Fr915, lines 9-10) became something of an embarrassment. James Dickey, steeped in the gendered aesthetics of the midcentury canon, cast Dickinson's cuteness as a function of her femininity, and her femininity as a handicap. And even as feminists sought to affirm Dickinson's status as a strong woman poet, they did so by minimizing the cute factor; thus in her famous essay, "Vesuvius at Home" (1976), Adrienne rich dismisses Dickinson's "kittenish" tone as a false performance of "innocuousness and containment" that hides the more authentic and volcanic Dickinson.⁵ Rich's squeamishness (like Finch's) makes sense given the extent to which women poets have had to fight to be taken seriously. In twentieth-century America, Emily Dickinson could not be cute if she were to be powerful. To represent a poet or a poem as cute was to feminize it, and to feminize it was to diminish, objectify, or cheapen it.

Thanks partly to the battles won by second-wave feminists such as Rich and Finch, it has become less obligatory to cringe at the cuteness that pops up so frequently in Dickinson's poetry. In their pioneering study of Dickinson's humor, Susan Juhasz, Cristanne Miller, and Martha Nell Smith note in passing that "Dickinson often calls attention to her speaker and her subject as cute," remarking that such poems are "obviously designed to charm."⁶ But if a charm is a pretty trinket, it can also be a powerful spell. Even today, cuteness remains a risky strategy for any female poet, critic, or reader to embrace. Like sexiness, it sparks a physiological flood that threatens to drown a poem's more cerebral effects. And like sentimentalism, it has often been associated with low-prestige nurturing impulses.

Furthermore, cuteness is an unstable element: once the pleasure rush has been delivered, the cute can quickly turn cloying, creepy, or even repellent—a tipping point described by the artificial intelligence researcher Masahiro Mori as the uncanny valley.⁷ And, of course, the cultural devaluation of instant gratification was already underway in the nineteenth century, even as purveyors of popular culture were learning how to elicit such emotional responses using sentimental, sensational, and cute triggers. Thus, T. W. Higginson—who in his preface to Dickinson's 1893 Poems likens her to Mignon, a Goethe character whose name means cute in French—elsewhere denigrates the use of the word cute as one of many "small inelegancies" that "grate" on the ears of cultivated men.⁸ More recently, the theorist Sianne Ngai has discussed cuteness at length, stressing its power to gratify even as she insists that "the cute" is trivial—a small inelegancy—compared to major aesthetic categories like "the beautiful" or "the sublime."⁹

Dickinson, however, is nothing if not a risk-taker, and in her poems...