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EMILY DICKINSON and the PROBLEM of GENRE By EMILY DICKINSON AND THE PROBLEM OF GENRE by ALEXANDRA ANNE SOCARIDES A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of Professor Meredith McGill and approved by _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2007 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Emily Dickinson and the Problem of Genre by ALEXANDRA ANNE SOCARIDES Dissertation Director: Professor Meredith McGill This dissertation seeks to bridge the gap between literary and cultural approaches that has long been a hallmark of Dickinson criticism. By returning to the materials that Dickinson used when constructing her fascicles, to the cultural practices that she adopted and rejected in the process, and to the specifics of her writing and binding process, this dissertation argues that her manuscripts raise, instead of resolve, questions about genre and nineteenth-century poetics. The opening chapter undertakes a material analysis of the fascicles. By focusing not just on how texts are read, but on how they are made, it demonstrates that the fascicles are markedly different from the commonplace books, autograph albums, and scrapbooks into which nineteenth-century women ordinarily copied verses, as well as from homemade hymnbooks, diaries, and collections of sermons. The second chapter explores Dickinson’s fascicles in relation to her letter- writing practices, analyzing where the two practices intersect and highlighting the ways in which Dickinson relied on the existence of both to rethink the formal structures and the rhetorical strategies of her poems. The third chapter explores Dickinson’s poems on ii death, analyzing how the fascicle form undoes the expectation of closure that is intrinsic to the elegy proper and arguing that the structure of the fascicles—as internally-divided clusters of poems that accumulate across the sheets—allows Dickinson the latitude she needs to return to the scene and subject of mourning over and over again. The final chapter reads Dickinson’s fascicles in relation to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, analyzing how the two poetic projects respond to a Wordsworthian notion of poetry that sutures the past and present together. Throughout, this dissertation treats Dickinson’s writing practices as integral to her poetics, seeking to move beyond literary histories that focus on the poet’s finished product to analyze the struggle with genre that is visible in the poet’s process. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Table of Contents iv List of Illustrations v Introduction 1 1. Rethinking the Fascicles: Dickinson’s Writing, Copying, and Binding Practices 11 2. Managing Multiple Contexts: Dickinson, Circulation, and the Limits of Poetry 60 3. The Poetics of Interruption: Dickinson, Death, and the Elegiac Tradition 107 4. Fractured Selves: Dickinson, Barrett Browning, and the Problem of Recollection 155 Bibliography 191 Curriculum Vita 201 iv List of Illustrations 1. Making a Fascicle 2. One page of a fascicle sheet (from Fascicle 5, Sheet 3) 3. Excerpt from Miss Bradlee’s Commonplace Book 4. Excerpt from “Flowers of Genius” 5. Back page of “The Album Writer’s Assistant” 6. Ruth Henshaw Bascom’s Diaries 7. Opening page of sermon 8. Four pages of Fascicle 7, Sheet 1 9. “As if I asked a common alms –” (from Fascicle 1, Sheet 2) 10. First page of Fascicle 1, Sheet 1 11. Johnson and Ward’s 1958 version of Dickinson’s third letter to Higginson 12. Dickinson’s third letter to Higginson (1862) 13. Dickinson’s letter to Bowdoin (1851) 14. Dickinson’s letter to an unidentified recipient (1885) 15. 1878 version of “Two Butterflies went out at Noon –” 16. The “Or” in “All overgrown by cunning moss” (from Fascicle 7, Sheet 1) 17. “She went as quiet as the Dew” (from Fascicle 7, Sheet 2) 18. “She died – this was the way she died.” (from Fascicle 7, Sheet 3) 19. Slip inserted into Fascicle 7, Sheet 3 20. “Because I could not stop for Death –” (from Fascicle 23, Sheet 1) 21. “From Blank to Blank –” (from Fascicle 23, Sheet 2) v 22. “There’s been a Death, in the Opposite House” (from Fascicle 27, Sheet 1) 23. First two pages of Fascicle 15, Sheet 1 24. First two pages of Fascicle 12, Sheet 5 25. First three pages of Fascicle 13, Sheet 5 vi 1 Introduction What Are Dickinson’s Fascicles? Between 1858 and 1864, Emily Dickinson copied and bound over eight hundred of her poems into forty homemade books. Mabel Loomis Todd was the first to use the word “fascicle” to describe these books, but she was the last one to see them in this form, because she unbound them in order to publish the poems as individual lyrics. For most of the twentieth century, readers would know Dickinson as the writer of hundreds of small, often cryptic individual poems. R. W. Franklin’s reconstruction of the fascicles in 1981 gave scholars their first published access to Dickinson’s original groupings, raising new questions about her writing process, intentions, and poetics. Since then, critics have generated various readings of these materials: some treat the fascicles as autobiographical narratives or as lyric sequences, while others analyze the dominant tropes and images that run throughout each fascicle.1 Instead of proceeding from the assumption that the fascicles are meant to be read as books of poetry, this dissertation looks anew at these objects in order to argue that they are sites of discontinuity and experimentation. In returning to the fascicles, I not only shift attention from Dickinson’s individual poems to the generic consequences of her poetic practices; I illuminate the ways in which her poetry and poetics were in dialogue with those of her contemporaries. One of the things that has been missing from the tradition of criticism on the fascicles is an analysis of what these objects can tell us about Dickinson’s compositional practices. By looking closely at these forty fascicles—each of which measures 1 For the major studies of the fascicles, see Ruth Miller, Shurr (Marriage), Rosenthal and Gall, Cameron (Choosing), Oberhaus, and Heginbotham. See the section, “Reading the Fascicles: A History of Criticism,” in Chapter 1 for my analysis of these studies. 2 approximately five inches across by eight inches long and each of which is composed of paper that is mostly cream, either wove or laid, with light ruling—we can see that making the fascicles was a detailed and time consuming process.2 Dickinson made clean copies of her texts onto folded sheets of stationery, stacked these sheets, made two holes through them along the left-hand margin, and bound them together with string (fig. 1). She did not do this with everything she wrote during these years, and she did not copy and bind the pieces as they were written. Consequently, texts that were written in different years sometimes appear in the same fascicle, and in several instances the same text appears in more than one fascicle.3 Each fascicle contains between four and seven folded sheets of stationery, yet in several fascicles Dickinson also included single leaves and slips of smaller paper, in most cases to include the end of a text or its variant words. Dickinson most often marked the end of each entry and the beginning of the next with a portion of blank space, a single line drawn horizontally across the page, or simply the beginning of a new page. Her entries often consume more than one page of the same folded sheet, but only once did Dickinson allow a text to continue onto the next sheet.4 She did not number, title, or 2 All material observations about the fascicles come from Franklin’s comments in his introduction to The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson and from my first-hand experience with the fascicles housed at the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College and the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Many thanks to the Emily Dickinson International Society for providing me first with a graduate research fellowship and later with the Scholar-in-Amherst Award, both of which enabled me to work with the fascicles at Amherst. Many thanks to the Mellon Foundation for providing me with a grant to work at the Houghton Library. 3 See Heginbotham for a detailed analysis of the poems that appear in more than one fascicle. 4 While Franklin argues that this occurs in two places (Fascicles 2 and 33), the mutilation of Fascicle 2 that took place after Dickinson’s death makes it impossible to deduce this about that fascicle. I discuss this situation at length in Chapter 1. 3 otherwise mark the fascicles themselves or the texts that appeared in them. When she was finished copying and binding, she destroyed her earlier drafts.5 By returning to these materials and to the writing practices that they make visible, I aim to look anew at these objects and to open up some of the questions that previous literary analysis has closed down. For instance, what does Dickinson’s curious and insistent practice of making fascicles have to do with the forms and central concerns of the poems she copied and bound in this way? How does the existence of the fascicles change our understanding of her rich and varied correspondence? How did she use these assortments of poems that are both flexible and tightly bound to experiment with the limits of genre? By attempting to answer such questions, I have placed myself in the bizarre position of reader and interpreter of texts for which Dickinson may have never imagined such an audience.
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