Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (review)

Virginia Jackson opens Dickinson's Misery by calling on her readers to imagine an originary moment: the scene of the discovery of the manuscripts Dickinson left behind at the time of her death. Jackson asks us to imagine how we might classify the collection of papers we find before us. In the groundbreaking study that follows this opening gesture, Jackson emphasizes the impossibility of returning to this originary moment, arguing that our understanding of Dickinson's project as a writer has been fundamentally shaped by twentieth-century scholarly definitions of the lyric. Such definitions, Jackson suggests, have effectively created a critical blind spot in our approach to Dickinson's work, obscuring the difference between the ways that poems were written, circulated, and understood in the nineteenth century and the ways that twentieth-century scholars identified, classified and interpreted these same poems. Thus, while Dickinson is Jackson's test case and central example, she analyzes the publication and reception of Dickinson's work in order to develop a broader theory of "lyric reading": Dickinson's Misery argues that "the century and a half that spans the circulation of Dickinson's work as poetry chronicles rather exactly the emergence of the lyric genre as a modern mode of literary interpretation" (6).

Citing the work of Mark Jeffreys, Jackson notes that the lyric became the dominant poetic genre only as poetry's cultural centrality began to wane in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; even as poetry was pushed to the margins of culture, the lyric poem became the primary focus of professional literary scholarship. Jackson argues that this collapsing of all poetic genres into the category of the lyric coincides with an idealized vision of the lyric poem as the sole genre that lifts off from social and historical contingency, the genre of the solitary expressive speaker. This idealized vision of the unmediated lyric poem is, Jackson contends, the product of scholarly criticism; such a vision of the lyric flattens the complexity of nineteenth-century poetry's multiple stances, genres, and contexts. Jackson emphasizes that the critic who seeks to examine the category of the lyric—or the historical development of that category—is caught in a logical bind: the very protocols of poetic analysis the critic has at his or her disposal are the same methods that shaped scholarly understanding of the lyric genre. This is the critical tautology Jackson seeks to unravel through a series of nuanced deconstructive readings of Dickinson's poems, of scholarly studies of Dickinson poems, and of scholarly accounts of the genre of the lyric.

Jackson's first chapter examines recent editorial interventions that seek to liberate Dickinson's body of work from the limitations of earlier print versions. Reading both Franklin's 1998 three-volume variorum and the Dickinson Electronic Archives, Jackson argues that even recent editions of Dickinson's poems that foreground the significance of the manuscripts still take for granted the status of these texts as lyric poems. Jackson goes on to suggest that both print and electronic editions "are dependent on an imaginary model of the lyric—a model perhaps more constraining, because so much more capacious, than those Dickinson's early genteel editors supposed" (13). Jackson's readings point toward the ways that individual texts—pieces that mix epistolary with poetic stances, poems with variant words, or poems linked to the gifts that accompanied them—resist classification as lyrics. In her second chapter, Jackson maps out a theory of "lyric reading," examining the history of lyric criticism from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, including the New Critics' celebratory embrace of the lyric, De Man's proclamation of the death of the lyric genre, and the subsequent backlash against the post-structuralist dismantling of authorial intention. What these critical methods all share in Jackson's view is an analytic lens that collapses all poetic texts into the genre of the lyric; the proliferation of twentieth-century theoretical arguments about the genre of the lyric—the relationship between...