“Dear Susie, please be corporal”: Epistolary Ambivalence in The Letters of Emily Dickinson

While Emily Dickinson’s correspondence often evinces an ambivalence toward the letter’s disembodied, “spectral power” (MML508)—a simultaneous embrace of the letter as “a joy of Earth . . . denied the Gods” (MML1213) and a deep “disdain [of] this pen” which cannot imitate the “warm[th]” of conversation (MML101)—the ambitious scope and sheer heft of Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell’s The Letters of Emily Dickinson insistently recorporealizes the experience of reading Dickinson’s letters. Drawing together 1,304 letters written by Dickinson (including 238 letter-poems), all of her extant received correspondence, dozens of unsent fragments and phrases that Miller and Mitchell categorize as “writing notes,” and a final few pieces of “miscellaneous writing,” the volume’s sense of comprehensiveness is materialized in the weight of its nearly thousand pages. In my own experience of reading it—first cover to cover in a whirlwind, weeklong endeavor of scribbling annotations and constellating impressions, then again with more careful attention paid to those missives, moments, and phrases I had flagged as warranting an even more closely attuned second, third, or even tenth read—I was struck by the sense it affords the reader of being in time and in tune with Dickinson. It is all too easy to fall into the rhythms of her days, weeks, and years, following along as summer gives way to fall, as winter brings with it months of illness, and as the promise of spring is undercut by unseasonably harsh April snowstorms (MML284). This experience in turn facilitates a recognition of affective shifts over time—the ebb and flow of her relationships to her correspondents, to her writing life, and to the world around her—and better enables readers to identify repeated images, scenes, and rhetorical tropes whose significance may be undervalued when taken in isolation.

Much as Dickinson finds herself simultaneously drawn in by the enticements of the letter and frustrated by the limitations of what it cannot or will not do for her, there are moments where the constraints of the volume as a bound, material object make themselves known, where my personal wants were frustrated by the norms and prohibitions of the book’s form or the idiosyncrasies of everyday editorial decisions. Yet the thwarting of my desires, much like Dickinson’s, is only felt quite so poignantly as a loss because of the real promise found in the object—be that object Dickinson’s correspondence or this ambitious compilation of the same that is sure to assume a place of centrality for those wishing to immerse themselves in the world of Dickinson’s rich epistolary relationships. Rather than a more traditional review, I preface my commentary on the volume itself—the editorial choices, its organization and on-the-page aesthetics, and its potential uptake by different kinds of readers—with a case study in its practical applications. Given how many scholars will likely turn to Miller and Mitchell’s volume as a key resource for studying Dickinson’s writerly life, it seems appropriate to consider what forms of academic inquiry The Letters of Emily Dickinson might facilitate. Therefore, after providing an overview of Dickinson’s own commentary on the letter as a genre with its unique affordances and limitations, I aim to illustrate how the immersive qualities of Miller and Mitchell’s volume allow for clustered close readings that span decades and multiple correspondents. As a scholarly tool, it might open space for analyses of her correspondence that are less focused on pivotal moments in Dickinson’s life or relationships than on constellated images, resonant phrases, and recurring thematic concerns.

Before turning to that case study, it seems instructive to linger with Dickinson’s meta-commentary on the letter form, considering both its affordances and its limitations, its erotic apertures and its corporal frustrations. In a 23 January 1850 letter to Jane Humphrey, Dickinson offers an extended meditation on her pen-and-ink letters and her embodied desires, as well as their failures of congruence, which captures her sense of the written letter as a compensatory genre. She begins by drawing a...