Measures of Possibility: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts (review)

This book should signal the end of an era. With deft argumentation, precise measurements, and a preponderance of internal and contextual evidence at his side, Domhnall Mitchell settles once and for all textual issues that have haunted, not to say plagued, many critics' responses to Dickinson's manuscripts. Fearlessly applying the tools of positivist science and a formalism to outdo what he calls the "extreme formalism" of the manuscript "school," Mitchell lays out his case against those who have contended that incidental features such as line breaks, the shape and direction of dashes, the direction of writing, page breaks, and the calligraphic qualities of Dickinson's handwriting are significant to the meanings of the poems. Mitchell is also careful to note the genuine critical desire of editors such as Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Hart, Marta Werner, and others working outside the assumptions of the Franklin edition to present the "real" Dickinson to her readers. The problem, though, with recent efforts to restore to readers the experience of the handwritten object on the page (especially electronic editions and diplomatic transcriptions of the manuscripts) is that they in fact make invisible or indiscernible editorial decisions no less arbitrary than those they would avoid.

Mitchell merely asks readers and critics who would make much of a feature on the handwritten page for consistency; if an S is wavy and suggestive of the sea in one poem, it had better wavily signify the sea in a proximate poem or letter. If a change in the direction of the writing brilliantly plays off the sense of the poem as it turns, such a feature had better do the same the next time. Arguments regarding the significance of a handwritten feature must be applied consistently and rigorously; if such contentions fail it is because the internal evidence of the poem, evidence of Dickinson's practices across the poems, and contextual evidence of nineteenth century common practice all agree that that feature is simply commonplace, accidental, even casual.

But lest the reader think that the book is a forced march with calipers at the ready, never fear: Mitchell brilliantly, even cunningly, rereads all evidence capable of providing independent apparatuses for testing the various arguments manuscript critics have made. Such evidence is available in Dickinson's responses to the newspaper publication of "The Snake," in letters with poems to Susan Dickinson and Samuel Bowles, in envelope flaps, in the metrical virtuosity of fascicle 20, in her own handwritten copies of poems composed by others such as George Herbert, and in the copying practices of others around her such as Sue.

The book dispatches with tact and aplomb a variety of arguments regarding Dickinson's own supposed publication practices in the manuscripts; he notes that Dickinson's culture was aural, not visual; hymn meter structures her verse as stanzas, felt by the body and the cultural training of one's ear. Poems were read aloud. Dickinson's poems were read aloud by others in her set; surely they did not trouble over variants, as none were given to them; neither did they know or wonder about their poem's relation to other poems in a fascicle, as none received fascicles, not even Susan Dickinson or the Atlantic Monthly editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. To those who suggest that the line breaks in the poems are significant and ought not to be suppressed in representations of her work, Mitchell replies that Dickinson herself routinely varied line breaks as she copied poems over in their iterations as drafts; he usefully makes a distinction between a "row" of writing and a "line" of verse, the former determined by the physical constraints of the page, the latter constituted by meter and rhyme. This distinction is in aid of a larger claim: that the literary text is not identical to the material document.

Because Mitchell's argument is so persuavive, it seems almost ridiculous that he would have to laboriously make a case for reading Dickinson's writing as aural, stanzaic...