A Companion to Emily Dickinson E-Book
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
- Sprache: Englisch
This companion to America's greatest woman poet showcases the diversity and excellence that characterize the thriving field of Dickinson studies.
- Covers biographical approaches of Dickinson, the historical, political and cultural contexts of her work, and its critical reception over the years
- Considers issues relating to the different formats in which Dickinson's lyrics have been published ? manuscript, print, halftone and digital facsimile
- Provides incisive interventions into current critical discussions, as well as opening up fresh areas of critical inquiry
- Features new work being done in the critique of nineteenth-century American poetry generally, as well as new work being done in Dickinson studies
- Designed to be used alongside the Dickinson Electronic Archives, an online resource developed over the past ten years
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Seitenzahl: 1197
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
Title page
Copyright page
Notes on Contributors
Editors
Contributors
Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Sources
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: Biography – The Myth of “the Myth”
1: Architecture of the Unseen
I Thought that Hope was Home – a Misapprehension of Architecture (JL 600)
Abetting the Farm
Queen of the Court, If Regalia be Dust, and Dirt
Today's Pauper is Tomorrow's Merchant
All the Little Irish
Funny Accidents
The Surprised Air / Rustics – Wear
Darkened Laddy
Same Effect as a Big Mug of Cider
Tawny Girl
Acknowledgments
2: Fracturing a Master Narrative, Reconstructing “Sister Sue”
I
II
III
IV
Acknowledgments
3: Public, Private Spheres: What Reading Emily Dickinson's Mail Taught Me about Civil Wars
“Dickinson Wars” I
“Dickinson Wars” II, or Give Peace a Chance
4: “Pretty much all real life”: The Material World of the Dickinson Family
PART II: The Civil War – Historical and Political Contexts
5: “Drums off the Phantom Battlements”: Dickinson's War Poems in Discursive Context
Acknowledgments
6: The Eagle's Eye: Dickinson's View of Battle
Imposing “Order on the Eye”: Visual Culture in the Civil War
American Romanticism: the Nationalist Prospect
Battlefield Photography
Balloon Photography
In “The Admirations – and Contempts – of Time – ,” Dickinson's Balloon Poems
Coda
7: “How News Must Feel When Traveling”: Dickinson and Civil War Media
Dickinson and Remote Suffering
Soldiers
Slaves
Conclusion: Feeling News
Acknowledgments
PART III: Cultural Contexts – Literature, Philosophy, Theology, Science
8: Really Indigenous Productions: Emily Dickinson, Josiah Holland, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Verse
I. Preadaptations
II. Juices Rich and Bland; or, What About Language?
III. “There are so many poets now-a-days!”
IV. “The things that never can come back”: Popular Verse, Print Culture, and the Expressive Hand
9: Thinking Dickinson Thinking Poetry
10: Dickinson and the Exception
Author's Acknowledgments
11: Dickinson's Uses of Spiritualism: The “Nature” of Democratic Belief
Appendix
A Preliminary List of Poems with Spiritualist Implications
12: “Forever – is composed of Nows –”: Emily Dickinson's Conception of Time
13: God's Place in Dickinson's Ecology
PART IV: Textual Conditions – Manuscripts, Printings, Digital Surrogates
14: Auntie Gus Felled It New
15: Reading Dickinson in Her Context: the Fascicles
Critical Receptions
Reading Contextually: a Case for Dickinson as Canny Editor
Reading “Alabaster Chambers”: More than Duplicates
16: The Poetics of Interruption: Dickinson, Death, and the Fascicles
Death, Closure, and Consolation: Dickinson and the Elegy
Constructing the Fascicles
Reading Between the Sheets: Dickinson and the Poetics of Interruption
17: Climates of the Creative Process: Dickinson's Epistolary Journal
18: Hearing the Visual Lines: How Manuscript Study Can Contribute to an Understanding of Dickinson's Prosody
Lineation and Spacing
Meter: Four-beat Verse
Rhyme and Alliteration
Rereading
Prosody, Elocution, and Penmanship
Conclusion
19: “The Thews of Hymn”: Dickinson's Metrical Grammar
The Metrical Grammar of the Stave
Reading for the Stave
Reading Rhythmic Texture as Text
20: Dickinson's Structured Rhythms
Acknowledgment
21: A Digital Regiving: Editing the Sweetest Messages in the Dickinson Electronic Archives
Part 1: Social Text Theory: a Short History of the Development of the Methods
Part II. Practice and Method: the Most Minute Features of Digitization
22: Editing Dickinson in an Electronic Environment
PART V: Poetry & Media – Dickinson's Legacies
23: “Dare you see a soul at the White Heat?”: Thoughts on a “Little Home-keeping Person”
I: Dickinson in the Kitchen
II: The White Heat Casts Its Shadows
24: Re-Playing the Bible: My Emily Dickinson
Acknowledgment
25: “For Flash and Click and Suddenness –”: Emily Dickinson and the Photography-Effect
Remote Photography
Second Exposure: Up-close
Over-exposed
Afterimages: Blur
Photo-Ghost
26: “Zero to the Bone”: Thelonious Monk, Emily Dickinson, and the Rhythms of Modernism
Index of First Lines
Index of Letters of Emily Dickinson
Index
Companion Website
The proliferation of affordable, portable personal computers, and the networking, on an unprecedented scale, of homes, individuals, institutions of all sorts (educational, governmental, commercial, religious, and medical), and nations, makes it possible to extend this book beyond its boundaries, to continue and record the conversations begun in these pages in ways unimaginable just a few years ago, as well as to feature far more illustrations online than would be possible in a book. To avail yourself of our perpetually updatable companion to the Companion bibliography, and to view illustrations and photographs related to essays in this volume, as well as other related essays and notes, please visit http://www.emilydickinson.org/bibliography.
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field.
Published Recently
This paperback edition first published 2014
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
except for editorial material and organization © 2014 by Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz
Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2008)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A companion to Emily Dickinson / edited by Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz.
p. cm.—(Blackwell companions to literature and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-2280-1 (cloth) – ISBN 978-1-118-49216-1 (pbk.)
1. Dickinson, Emily, 1830–1886—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Women and literature—United States—History—19th century—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. Poets, American—19th century—Biography—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Smith, Martha Nell, 1953– II. Loeffelholz, Mary, 1958–
PS1541.Z5C65 2007
811′.4—dc22
2007001661
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Paul Abelsky, Emily Dickinson's House, Amherst, 1996; private collection of Mr and Mrs Roth
Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates
Notes on Contributors
Editors
Martha Nell Smith is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH <http://www.mith.umd.edu>) at the University of Maryland. Her numerous print publications include three award-winning books – Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson, coauthored with Ellen Louise Hart (Paris Press 1998), Comic Power in Emily Dickinson, coauthored with Cristanne Miller and Suzanne Juhasz (Texas 1993), Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (Texas 1992) – and more than 40 articles and essays. Besides co-editing this Companion to Emily Dickinson, she has also written Dickinson, A User's Guide for Blackwell (forthcoming in 2008). The recipient of numerous awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) for her work on Dickinson and in new media, Smith is also Coordinator and Executive Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives projects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia <http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson> or <http://emilydickinson.org>. With Lara Vetter, Smith is a general editor of Emily Dickinson's Correspondence: A Born-Digital Inquiry, forthcoming (December 2007) from the Mellon-sponsored Rotunda New Digital Scholarship, University of Virginia Press. With teams at the University of Illinois, University of Virginia, University of Nebraska, University of Alberta, and Northwestern University, Smith is working on two interrelated Mellon-sponsored data mining and visualization initiatives, NORA <http://www.noraproject.org> and MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge). Smith also serves on the editorial board and steering committee of NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship; <http://www.nines.org/>) and is on numerous advisory boards of digital literary projects such as The Poetess Archive <http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/womenpoets/poetess/> and Digital Dickens. A leader in innovations in academic publishing, Smith co-chairs the Modern Language Association (MLA)'s Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE).
Mary Loeffelholz received her Ph.D. from Yale University and taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before joining the English department of Northeastern University, where she is currently Professor of English and Associate Dean for Faculty and Director of the Graduate School, College of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory (University of Illinois Press 1991), From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women's Poetry (Princeton University Press 2004), and of numerous essays on nineteenth-century American poetry and culture that have appeared in American Literary History, The New England Quarterly, The Emily Dickinson Journal, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Genders, and Legacy. She is the editor of Studies in American Fiction and of Volume D, 1914–1945, of The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Contributors
Faith Barrett is an Assistant Professor of English at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. With Cristanne Miller, she co-edited Words for the Hour: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry (University of Massachusetts Press 2005). She is currently working on a book manuscript that analyzes American poetry of the Civil War era, including work by Dickinson, Piatt, Whitman, and Melville, as well as popular poetry and unpublished poems by soldiers.
Renée Bergland is Professor of English and Gender/Cultural Studies at Simmons College in Boston. She is the author of The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (University Press of New England 2000) and Computer of Venus: Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science (Beacon, forthcoming); her current project, Emily Dickinson, Planetary Poet, examines the global Dickinson.
Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minnesota 2007), and of essays on literary and visual culture in the journals American Literary History, American Literature, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Screen, and Victorian Poetry.
Sandra Chung is Professor of Linguistics, Fellow of Cowell College, and member of the Philosophy department at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her primary area of research is syntactic theory and Austronesian languages. A Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (Class of 2007), Chung has numerous articles on syntax, ergativity, Compositional Asymmetry, and prosody in Chamorro, a language of the Mariana Islands that is the main empirical focus of her research. With Ellen Louise Hart, she is working on analyses of Emily Dickinson's prosody.
Tanya Clement is an English Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland. Her focus of study is textual and digital studies as it pertains to applied humanities computing and modernist American literature. She has an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Virginia where she was also trained in humanities computing at the Electronic Text Center and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). At the University of Maryland, she has been both a Program Associate at the Maryland Institute for Technologies in the Humanities (MITH) and project manager for the Dickinson Electronic Archives (http://www.emilydickinson.org). Presently, she is a research associate for MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge at http://www.monkproject.org), a Mellon-funded project which seeks to integrate existing digital library collections and large-scale, cross-collection text mining and text analysis with rich visualization and social software capabilities.
Paul Crumbley is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Utah State University. He is the author of Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson (Kentucky 1997), coeditor of The Search for a Common Language: Environmental Writing and Education (Utah State 2005), and contributing editor for Body My House: May Swenson's Work and Life (Utah State 2006). Crumbley has published numerous essays on Dickinson and is currently completing a second book, Revolution in the Pod: Dickinson and the Politics of Personal Sovereignty.
A distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis, Sandra M. Gilbert has taught at Princeton and Stanford Universities, as well as Williams College, won NEH, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Soros Foundations fellowships, and held residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Bellagio. A former president of the Modern Language Association (MLA), Professor Gilbert has authored numerous award-winning books of literary criticism and feminist theory, as well as seven books of poetry. With Susan Gubar, she has published a series of critical studies of women writers, beginning with Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale University Press 1979) and culminating in the three-volume study of women writers in the twentieth century, No Man's Land (Yale 1987, 1989, 1996), edited The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (3rd edition 2007; 1st edition 1985), and most recently Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism (Norton 2007). Gilbert has also published seven books of poetry, most recently Belongings (Norton 2005).
Gudrun M. Grabher received her master's and doctoral degrees in English and American Studies, German, and Philosophy from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and has served as Professor and Chair of the American Studies Department there since 1994. Her special fields of research include American poetry (Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Sylvia Plath, Denise Levertov, A.R. Ammons); literary theory; comparative studies of literature and philosophy, and literature and the other arts; and more recently, Medical Humanities and Law and the Humanities in the USA. Grabher served as President of the Emily Dickinson International Society from 2004–2007 and is coeditor of the Emily Dickinson Handbook (University of Massachusetts Press 1998).
Ellen Louise Hart, editor and textual critic, writes about the history of Dickinson's manuscripts, and about prosody and the visual line in Dickinson's correspondences and verse. Her work has appeared in the Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, the Emily Dickinson Journal, Legacy, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, the Women's Review of Books, the Heath Anthology of American Literature, An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia, and Wider Than the Sky: Essays and Meditations on the Healing Power of Emily Dickinson (Kent State University Press 2007). For Emily Dickinson's Correspondence: A Born-Digital Inquiry (Rotunda New Digital Scholarship from the University of Virginia Press), Hart serves as a primary coeditor of the notes and transcriptions of Dickinson's manuscripts. In 1998, with Martha Nell Smith she co-edited Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, part of which is featured in the new Norton Anthology of American Literature (7th edition). She serves as an Associate Editor for the Dickinson Electronic Archives. She has served on the Board of the Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) since 1995 and is helping to establish a local chapter in Portland, Oregon, where she has lived since retiring from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2006.
Eleanor Elson Heginbotham, Professor Emerita of English at Concordia University Saint Paul, inspired by many of the other contributors in this volume, especially Martha Nell Smith, her dissertation advisor, published Reading the Fascicles of Emily Dickinson: Dwelling in Possibilities (Ohio State University Press 2003). She continues her interest in the subject by co-editing a collection of essays on the manuscript books, A Spectrum of Possibilities, a work-in-progress in collaboration with Paul Crumbley. She joined the Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) at its inception, and has been a member of its Board. She was awarded four NEH fellowships for summer study; three MHC (Minnesota Council for the Humanities) grants for conference planning; and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award to teach at the University of Hong Kong in 1998–99. In retirement, she continues to teach and write – on Emily Dickinson and other American writers.
Virginia Jackson is Associate Professor of English at Tufts University. Her book, Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton 2005) won the 2005 MLA Prize for a First Book and the 2005 Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa for a distinguished book. She writes on poetic theory and on various aspects of nineteenth-century US poetry and poetics, and is currently finishing a book on mixed genres in nineteenth-century verse in public.
Connie Ann Kirk, Ph. D., is a fulltime writer and independent scholar who specializes in American literature, children's literature, and Emily Dickinson. Author of Emily Dickinson: A Biography (Greenwood 2004), her many other titles include Sylvia Plath: A Biography (Greenwood 2004); Critical Companion to Flannery O'Connor (Facts On File 2007); and for younger readers, A Student's Guide to Robert Frost (Enslow 2006). Kirk occasionally teaches as an Adjunct Professor of English at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania and is currently at work on a novel.
Michael L. Manson has published articles on Robert Frost, Sterling A. Brown, Jay Wright, and Gary Soto, and he co-edited The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (University Press of New England 1997). He is currently completing a book entitled Body Language: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Poetic Form. He teaches twentieth-century American literature and culture at American University, where he serves as Academic Affairs Administrator for the College of Arts and Sciences.
Nancy Mayer is Associate Professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University. Her articles on Dickinson, the American Romantics, and Victorian women novelists have been published in various academic and literary journals. She is working on a book about ethics, narrative, and belief in Dickinson's poetry.
Cristanne Miller is Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature and Chair of the English Department at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Author of Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar (Harvard 1987), coauthor with Suzanne Juhasz and Martha Nell Smith of Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (Texas 1993), and coeditor with Gudrun Grabher and Roland Hagenbuchle of The Emily Dickinson Handbook (Massachusetts 1998), Miller also edits The Emily Dickinson Journal. She has published extensively on twentieth-century poets – including Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Harvard 1996) and Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Else Lasker-Schuler (Michigan 2005) – and is currently working on a project called “Poetry After Gettysburg,” analyzing the effect of the Civil War on US poetry from 1865 until the turn of the century.
Tim Morris teaches writing, literature, and popular culture at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he is Professor of English. He is Nonfiction Editor of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, and he is owner and founder of the DICKNSON e-mail discussion list.
Aife Murray conceived and led two public walking tours of Amherst from the perspective of the Dickinson servants sponsored by Amherst College's Mead Art Museum (1997) and the Emily Dickinson Museum (2004). She was invited to consult with the Dickinson Museum guides on interpreting newly opened domestic areas. Aífe (ee-fah) has created public art and mixed media installations on the “Art of Service.” Her book about Dickinson's maids and laborers is under contract with the University Press of New England. She has been an affiliated scholar with the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University and was awarded artist residencies with the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and with the Millay Colony for the Arts where she was named the Corrine Steel & Synnova Bay Hayes Fellow. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Chain, How2, New Hibernia Review, Titanic Operas, Signs, and Visiting Emily.
Poet, critic, and midrashist, Alicia Ostriker's most recent book is For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book (Rutgers 2007). Author of eleven volumes of poetry – most recently The Little Space (Pittsburgh 1998); The Volcano Sequence (Pittsburgh 2002); and most recently No Heaven (Pittsburgh 2005) – she has also written six major critical works – Vision and Verse in William Blake (Wisconsin 1965); Writing Like a Woman (Michigan 1983); Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women's Poetry in America (Beacon 1986); Feminist Revision and the Bible (Blackwell 1993); Nakedness of the Fathers (Rutgers 1994); Dancing at the Devil's Party (Michigan 2000), as well as editions of William Blake and Five Scrolls. Ostriker has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her honors include the William Carlos Williams Prize (1986), the Paterson Poetry Prize (1996), the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award (1996), the Anna David Rosenberg Poetry Award (1994), the Larry Levis Prize, two Pushcart Prizes (1979 and 2000). She has twice been a National Book Award finalist for poetry.
Eliza Richards is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle (Cambridge University Press 2004). She is currently at work on a project that explores the relations between the Civil War, the rise of mass media, and poetic experimentalism.
Ingrid Satelmajer is a lecturer in English and University Honors at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has articles on nineteenth-century poetry and periodical culture in Book History, American Periodicals, and Textual Cultures. She also has short stories forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, the minnesota review, and Talking River.
Alexandra Socarides is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she teaches American poetry. She is currently at work on a book that examines Dickinson's fascicles and explores the experimental poetics that these complex objects make visible.
Lara Vetter is Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Currently at work on a monograph entitled “Sparks and Scattered Light”: Religio-Scientific Discourse and Modernist Bodies, she has published articles in the Journal of Modern Literature, Genre, and Literary and Linguistic Computing. For the University of Virginia Press, Rotunda New Digital Scholarship, she and Martha Nell Smith are co-editing a selected critical edition Emily Dickinson's Correspondence: A Born-Digital Inquiry. Additionally, she serves as co-chair of the H.D. International Society and is co-editing Approaches to Teaching H.D.'s Poetry and Prose for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Press.
Jane Wald is Executive Director and Director of Resources and Collections at the Emily Dickinson Museum: The Homestead and The Evergreens in Amherst, Massachusetts. She has varied experience in public history and museums including Old Sturbridge Village. Prior to joining the staff of the newly created Emily Dickinson Museum in 2003, she was first director of The Evergreens under the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Trust.
Joshua Weiner is the author of The World's Room (Chicago 2001) and From the Book of Giants (Chicago 2006). He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, The Nation, The American Scholar, Village Voice, Chicago Tribune, Threepenny Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Yale Review, Colorado Review, Washington Post, Slate, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Maryland and serves as poetry editor at Tikkun. He lives with his family in Washington, DC.
Marta L. Werner is the author/editor of Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (Michigan 1995), Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts (Michigan 1999; republished Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH), University of Nebraska 2007), and (with Nicholas Lawrence), Ordinary Mysteries: The Common Journal of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne (American Philosophical Society 2006). Werner also serves as an Associate Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives. For her work in scholarly editing, she is the recipient of the Bowers Prize from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS) and the JoAnn Boydson Essay Prize from the Association of Documentary Editing and has published widely in the fields of textual scholarship and poetics. She is currently Associate Professor of English at D'Youville College.
Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Sources
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank all of the contributors to this volume, as well as the contributors that will participate in the online companion to A Companion to Emily Dickinson at http://emilydickinson.org/BlackwellCompanion and in the discussion forums at http://emilydickinson.org, and for that matter, all of Dickinson's readers, her kinsmen and kinswomen.
The figures in Chapter 6 are from the American Memory project, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Those in Chapter 16 are reproduced by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1118.3 © The Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College. The figures in Chapter 21 are screenshots drawn from the Dickinson Electronic Archives (http://emilydickinson.org). The figures in Chapter 25 are from the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College (25.1); the Amherst College Library (25.2, 25.5, 25.6, and 25.7); the Monson Free Library (25.3); the American Museum of Photography (25.4); Professor Philip F. Gura, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (25.8); and the Library of Congress (25.9).
Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Emily Dickinson's poems are from R.W. Franklin, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press 1998).
Introduction
Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz
Emily Dickinson (1830–86) is an author about whom almost every casual reader of American literature knows something – if only the biographical myth of a woman in white, self-secluded in her father's house, pouring out many hundreds of unpublished poems, probably driven by demons of love and loss. The “myth of Amherst” is not quite, in any simple sense, a falsehood; the phrase began circulating about Dickinson in her own lifetime, passed from neighbor to Amherst neighbor, and Dickinson was surely aware that she existed as a character in town legend. According to myth, by conventional measures she was all but unpublished in her lifetime: to the best of current knowledge, ten poems were printed between 1852 and 1878, all of them anonymously, in venues ranging from the Springfield Republican and the Civil War publication Drum Beat to the collection A Masque of Poets (certainly her most prestigious appearance in print, but still anonymous). Her critics and biographers remain divided on the question of whether Dickinson herself aspired to become an author as the nineteenth century understood authorship. Here and in other respects, the sheer number and significance of unresolved biographical questions surrounding Dickinson remain daunting.
In the past two decades, however, scholars have increasingly begun to challenge this picture's emphasis on mystery, isolation, frustration, and negation in order to focus instead on what is actually there to be known about Dickinson's life and writing – what was always there, but overshadowed by the myth. In this new perspective, what seems remarkable is less Dickinson's social isolation than the impressive number of social connections that she maintained over the course of her lifetime, and the importance of those relationships for her career as a writer and her posthumous publication. Tellingly, everyone who knew Emily Dickinson knew that she wrote poetry. To be sure, many of these relationships – perhaps even most, after the early 1860s – were sustained for long periods through letters more than by face-to-face intimacy; but in this respect Dickinson was not altogether unlike many women of her time and class. She was also like women of her time and class in that her daily life, including the leisure that enabled her to write, was enabled by the labor of many men and women – some of them known to her, others not. Her father's work as a lawyer and businessman helped retrieve the Dickinson family's prosperity from his father's missteps. Other men and women Dickinson depended on were the servants who kept the Dickinson family homes; other workers she observed glancingly as part of Amherst's social landscape. Still other, more distant relationships were embodied in the material culture of the Dickinsons' family life: like other prosperous Americans over the course of the nineteenth century, the Dickinsons were increasingly able to acquire consumer goods.
The opening section of this volume represents the developing picture of Dickinson's biography through several essays addressing, in different ways, “The Myth of ‘the Myth.’ ” Aife Murray's “Architecture of the Unseen” assembles a collective biography of the Dickinsons in terms of the family's class relations, including the intricate history of the family's servants, and traces Dickinson's own shifting attitudes toward the “architectures” – including the overlooked human architectures of service – that subtended her life. Ingrid Satelmajer's “Fracturing a Master Narrative, Reconstructing ‘Sister Sue’ ” looks at the importance of Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson not only in Dickinson's emotional life, but also in efforts to bring Dickinson's writings into print after her death. Martha Nell Smith's “Public, Private Spheres: What Reading Emily Dickinson's Mail Taught me about Civil Wars” explores the significance of the rift ensuing from the close relations who “espoused the cause of the Secessionists,” and what difference knowing this lost fact makes for twenty-first-century readers' understanding of both Dickinson's life and literary practices, as well as for understanding ways in which rifts or “wars” retard knowledge production and exchange. Jane Wald's “ ‘Pretty much all real life’: The Material World of the Dickinson Family” reconstructs the Dickinson family's experience of the consumer goods and emerging technologies of the nineteenth century and considers Dickinson's incorporation of the material world into her poetry.
Among the ways the wider world entered the Dickinson households and Dickinson's writing was through the impact of the Civil War. Scholars have long recognized that the war years coincided with some of the most active years of Dickinson's life as a writer, with around half of the surviving manuscripts of her poems – according to her editors' present dating – copied out between 1861 and 1866. Harder to understand, though, is the relationship between Dickinson's extraordinary productivity as a writer and the surrounding national convulsion. Edward Dickinson had served a term in the House of Representatives from 1852–54, as legislators struggled to hold the nation together through compromise, but in 1860 he refused an invitation to run for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts on a Unionist, anti-war ticket. The Dickinson family warded off some forms of direct involvement in the Civil War; Dickinson's brother Austin paid a substitute to enter the US army in his place while his first cousin in Georgia fought for the Confederacy. Other sons of Amherst, however, including Austin's fellow Amherst College student Frazar Stearns, enlisted and died, and the war everywhere dominated Northern newspapers and magazines.
“The Civil War – Historical and Political Contexts,” the next section of this Companion, then, brings together essays on Dickinson's experience of the Civil War and her reflections on the war, and its underlying national conflicts, in her writing. As all these essays emphasize, the war produced enormous floods of popular verse, from that authored by then-famous poets like Julia Ward Howe and John Greenleaf Whittier to the anonymous verse published and reprinted copiously in newspapers across the country. Faith Barrett's “ ‘Drums off the Phantom Battlements': Dickinson's War Poems in Discursive Context” sets Dickinson's poems of the war against a range of popular Civil War writing, including a poem spoken by an animate gun that astonishingly parallels Dickinson's famous “My life had stood – A Loaded Gun.” Renée Bergland's “The Eagle's Eye: Emily Dickinson's View of Battle” explores the relation in Dickinson's poetry, and that of her contemporaries like Howe, between new technologies of war and technologies of vision. Developments like the observation balloon and aerial photography made the Civil War the first war in history “predicated on the view from above”; Bergland argues that Dickinson's poetry both explores and resists this abstracted, disembodied, unifying point of view – the point of view from which Union loyalists attempted to reimagine the nation into wholeness. Eliza Richards' “ ‘How News Must Feel When Traveling’: Dickinson and Civil War Media” looks at how the war's new media technologies, like the telegraph, brought reporting on the war home to Americans across the country with startling speed and saturation (a century before the war in Vietnam would enter US living rooms on television). Like many other poets of the war, Dickinson confronted the problem of the noncombatant's vicarious relationship to reported suffering; more so than most Civil War poets, Richards argues, Dickinson took this problem as the focus of her war poetry and of her poetry reflecting – at a distance – on slavery.
As the new scholarly work on Dickinson and the Civil War underlines with special force, Dickinson was throughout her lifetime actively immersed in nineteenth-century American literary and religious culture. Books, newspapers, and magazines entered the Dickinson family households in a steady stream. Some of these items of print culture were relatively local products, like the Springfield Republican, which thrived under the lively editorship of the Dickinson family friends Samuel Bowles and, for a time, Josiah Holland. Other household favorites, like the Atlantic Monthly (beginning in 1857) and, later, Scribner's Monthly (launched in 1870, with Josiah Holland as founding editor), were new ventures that sought and achieved national audiences. The Dickinsons' family tastes also extended to transatlantic Anglo-American literary culture; Dickinson was drawn to English literary models, especially but not exclusively literary women of high ambition like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot. Moreover, Dickinson's relationship to nineteenth-century public literary and religious culture was not entirely mediated by print. She knew a number of editors and published writers, not only through family friendships but through her own initiative in reaching out to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who corresponded with her and called upon her when he visited Amherst; through Higginson's friendship, she was sought out by her well-known contemporary, poet and novelist Helen Hunt Jackson. Next door, Austin and Susan Dickinson played host to distinguished visitors including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Olmstead, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan most likely “robbed” Dickinson of a few of her poems and passed them along to newspapers and Civil War journals. The noted Philadelphia minister Charles Wadsworth not only corresponded with Dickinson but also called upon her twice in Amherst, in 1860 and 1880.
As with the Civil War, the challenge for readers lies in assessing the significance for Dickinson's writing of her rich access to nineteenth-century public cultures of letters. Several essays in “Cultural Contexts,” the next section of this Companion, explore the ramifications of reading Dickinson through this lens. Mary Loeffelholz looks at how the now-forgotten popular poetry of Josiah Holland and other nineteenth-century writers represented the burgeoning possibilities of print culture through the figure of the unpublished woman poet, and asks how this figuration might have shaped Dickinson's sense of her own writing. Virginia Jackson's “Thinking Dickinson” compares Dickinson's ways of thinking through and about lyric poetry as a genre to those of John Keats, a way of thinking that she traces back to Dickinson's and Keats' shared engagements with Virgil. Max Cavitch's “Dickinson and the Exception” first turns the lens of historicist criticism back upon itself, to ask why current forms of criticism are so worried by the idea of Dickinson's exceptionalism, and then returns to Dickinson, unfolding how Dickinson crafted a language of radical singularity from materials at hand, including those at hand in political languages of sovereignty. Paul Crumbley's “Dickinson's Uses of Spiritualism: The ‘Nature’ of Democratic Belief” argues that Dickinson was drawn to nineteenth-century spiritualism as a model of resistance to religious hierarchy and naturalized forms of social authority. Gudrun Grabher's “ ‘Forever – is composed of Nows –’: Emily Dickinson's Conception of Time” both embraces and critiques historicist contextualizations of Dickinson's fundamental phenomenological categories, like time; St Augustine and Heidegger yield as much for explicating Dickinson's poetry as do nineteenth-century clock-making technologies. Nancy Mayer's “God's Place in Dickinson's Ecology” links Dickinson's lifelong but troubled relationship to the idea of a personal god to her “ecological ethics,” which probe human difference from the natural world.
To speak of Dickinson's “cultural contexts,” however, begs the question of what exactly counts as a context; how do we decide what is near to or far from Dickinson's writing? Some of the most interesting answers to such questions have come from scholars looking at the actual material production and circulation of Dickinson's writings – have come, that is, with the manuscript revolution in Dickinson studies, beginning with Martha Nell Smith's Rowing in Eden: Re-Reading Emily Dickinson (1992) and Susan Howe's The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literature (1993). Present-day criticism focused on the manuscripts approaches Dickinson not from the starting point of what she did not do – print her poems in public venues – but rather by assuming that what she did choose to do with her writing is significant.
From the perspective of the manuscripts, Dickinson did many things with her writing besides not print it. In telling Thomas Wentworth Higginson that she did not “print” her work, she did not quite say in her own voice that she did not publish it; and she distributed at least one-third of her poems in her letters. From very early on, she incorporated verse into her active correspondence with family and friends, sometimes in the form of a copied-out poem enclosed with a letter but more often, especially in her later life, by moving freely from prose to verse to prose within the boundaries of a single piece of writing; she sometimes took advantage of the correspondence setting to enclose other items – pressed flowers, for example – with her writing, and to play her writing off those objects. For several years, from about 1858 (or earlier) to about 1866, she copied poems out onto folded sheets of stationery, stacked up several of those sheets, stabbed holes through the stack, and tied the whole stack together with a loop of string. The fascicles, as these manuscript books have come to be known, may have been a kind of private self-publication; certainly the poems in them were carefully copied and preserved. And yet Dickinson also allowed herself experiments in the fascicles that would have been impossible in the world of print publication, most famously by indicating variant readings for many fascicle poems – alternative word choices that keep the poem in suspense as to a final meaning. In the last two decades of her life, Dickinson continued to experiment; the manuscript evidence suggests that arriving at a neat copy of a recognizable poem mattered less to her, in some circumstances, than playing with the possibilities suggested by the casual, everyday medium – an advertisement, a bit of newspaper, a chocolate wrapper – or even by the more formal stationery – sporting a Queen's head or stationer's embossment – on which she wrote. For the first century of Dickinson's appearance as an author, most of these characteristics of her writing were described rather than reproduced, and therefore could only be imagined by the vast majority of her readers.
“Textual Conditions: Manuscripts, Printings, Digital Surrogates” covers a range of issues, including disagreements regarding what readers see and count as poetic and literary in Dickinson's writings, both in print and in manuscript. Tim Morris's “Auntie Gus Felled It New” compares the “graphocentric” Dickinson of recent criticism with the Dickinson of irresistible aural memory; both Dickinsons, he suggests, are products of lines of transmission prone to errors, erasures, and uncertainties. In “Reading Dickinson in Her Context: The Fascicles,” Eleanor Elson Heginbotham makes a strong case for the pleasures of reading Dickinson's writings in the contexture of the manuscript books that she assembled and left for posterity to find. Alexandra Socarides' “The Poetics of Interruption: Dickinson, Death, and the Fascicles” speculates that the interruptions parsed by readers of the fascicles – the breaks between poems and sheets of poems – form an integral part of Dickinson's experiments in the genre of elegy. Questions of genre are foregrounded by both of these essays, and Connie Ann Kirk's “Climates of the Creative Process: Dickinson's Epistolary Journal” probes Dickinson's letters as her writing journal, pointing to comments on the writerly process made over a period of decades and highlighting horizonal change as key to Dickinson's intent, dedicated compositional processes.
Focus on visual aspects of Dickinson's writing, long ignored in literary criticism, have elicited strong reactions and the next three essays in this section attend to the functions of meter, its measures, and its meanings in her work. Ellen Louise Hart and Sandra Chung make a case for visual inflections that both underscore and dynamically work against conventional meters in “Hearing the Visual Lines”; recognizing the visual as expressive provides more diverse methods for understanding relationships between prosody and meaning. On similar lines, Michael Manson contends in “The Thews of Hymn: Dickinson's Metrical Grammar” that a 4 × 4 rhythmic structure that he calls a “stave” organizes the pleasurable tension in Dickinson's poetics between the visual form of the stanza and the audible beats of meter. Cristanne Miller's “Dickinson's Structured Rhythms” starts from a familiar juxtaposition in American literary history by contrasting Dickinson's innovations in verse with those of Whitman; unfolding that oft-remarked opposition, Miller argues that Dickinson's poetry, unlike Whitman's, characteristically works in the tension between familiar, culturally orthodox hymn forms and the opposing power of syntax to emphasize, isolate, and individuate words – and persons.
The final two essays in this section explore aspects of visibility and audibility made more accessible by editing Dickinson's writing for the digital world. Tanya Clement's “A Digital Regiving: Editing the Sweetest Messages in the Dickinson Electronic Archives” demonstrates ways in with the editors of the Dickinson Electronic Archives attempt to balance transmission (“regiving”) practices with editorial theories that are sensitive to the impossibility of capturing each unique voice's original expression, emphasizing the fact that manuscript scholars are focused on voice as well as vision and describing opportunities for conveying both in the digital realm. Lara Vetter describes in “Editing Dickinson in an Electronic Environment” how the premise that reading her manuscripts is important does not occlude other ways of accessing Dickinson's literary work. By walking readers through some details of TEI-conformant XML markup, she notes the limitations in representing creative and imaginative practices within a metalanguage that, because it is read and interpreted by a computer, relies on strict and rigid categories of hierarchy and structure, categories a poet is likely always to be troubling. Doing so, she describes ways in which Dickinson's play with poetic meaning have been preserved even within the confines imposed by encoding texts to make a computer understand them, and provides insight into the encodings that have always been necessary for their first presentation in manuscript and subsequent presentations in print.
The Companion concludes with a section on “Dickinson's Legacies.” In “Dare you see a soul at the White Heat?” Thoughts on a “Little Home-Keeping Person” Sandra Gilbert muses on Dickinson's extraordinary candor as she time and again confronts the event that awaits all of us: death. Alicia Ostriker builds on her previous work on revisionary mythmaking in “Re-Playing the Bible: My Emily Dickinson” to compare her own “odd angle” of relation to her Jewish heritage to that of Dickinson vis-à-vis her Christian heritage. Marta Werner's “ ‘For Flash and Click and Suddenness –’: Emily Dickinson and the Photography-Effect” analyzes how nineteenth-century technologies of memory circulate as objects in our own day and meditates on the single daguerreotype of the poet to explore her complex relationship to the world of mechanical reproduction and ways it has focused, blurred, refocused, and collaged our collective sense of Emily Dickinson and her work. Joshua Weiner's “ ‘Zero to the Bone’: Thelonious Monk, Emily Dickinson, and the Rhythms of Modernism” is a lively coda to the previous section's analyses of Dickinson's relationships to conventional meter and their receptions. Dickinson's suspensions and incorporations of the predictable anticipate those of modernism and jazz, and so demonstrate that art is predicated on difference as well as resemblance – a premise that underscores the objectives of this volume.
New technologies are the best hope for advancing understanding of Dickinson's manuscript work and enlarging her legacies across several media. Digital editions can now include images of primary documents rather than simply describe them or feature them partially, moving beyond reproducing representative samples of Dickinson's work (illustrating how she incorporates a chocolate wrapper or a stamp or a cutout from Dickens) to producing a full and searchable visual archive. Editions can now implement new kinds of scholarly annotation by including sound and even video reproductions. Readers of this Companion to Emily Dickinson can listen to earlier performances by Sandra M. Gilbert and Alicia Ostriker online at the Dickinson Electronic Archives (http://www.emilydickinson.org/titanic-operas). This Companion to Emily Dickinson takes advantage of the new technologies of scholarship to feature an online “Companion to the Companion” that includes images of manuscripts, Dickinson family Civil War service records, and other photographic representations that would have made the volume too cumbersome and too expensive, as well as other related essays and notes.
Some of the debates that readers will find within these pages – particularly around the meanings of Dickinson's manuscript writings and what they tell her readers about her attitude toward the idea of a “poem” – can be joined by readers who want to add their musings to the interactive wiki at the Companion site. Thus readers can now provide immediate and actual critical feedback that might in turn be usefully incorporated into scholarly work, making the collaboration between reader and author that is characteristic of reading itself something more immediately and accessibly public. So reading and study practices themselves can be and are being changed by these digital possibilities, expanding yet again what is meant by Dickinson and her “contexts.”
PART I
Biography – The Myth of “the Myth”
1
Architecture of the Unseen
Aife Murray
Emily Norcross Dickinson was pregnant with the future poet and arrived at 280 Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts with her one-year-old son Austin in tow. She surveyed the brick “Homestead” which commanded a rise and took in a view of the Pelham Hills. The west side of this house was to become her family's new quarters. A gracious Federalist-style home, the place was considered “over the top” when it was commissioned seventeen years earlier by her father-in-law Samuel Fowler Dickinson who, by local standards, had achieved a small fortune as lawyer and businessman. Her husband Edward had just bought the west half of the house to staunch the bleed of his father's ruin. To accommodate the young family, Samuel Fowler and his wife and daughters compressed themselves into the east half. An impetuous and passionate man, decidedly reckless, Samuel Fowler had committed his entire fortune in founding Amherst College aimed at preparing young men for the Congregationalist ministry. He also established Amherst Academy to educate local youth. His great granddaughter would later refer to him as a “flaming zealot for education and religion” (Bianchi 76–77).1
Four of Samuel Fowler's sons quit the town in order to separate themselves from their father's financial debts – a disaster that the eldest, Edward, hoped to forestall by buying half the house, paying his father's interest on the Homestead mortgage, and disentangling his father's debts (Wolff 29). A former legislator and town clerk, once active in town committees, and a famous orator, Samuel Fowler was, by the 1820s, financially and politically bankrupt. Those failures would loom over his children like a foreboding alter ego.
Emily Norcross packed up kitchen, furniture, and clothes while her one-year-old toddled amidst the dismantling of one home and reconstruction of another. The one she was leaving was a tenuously possessed (because of her father-in-law) portion of the widow Jemima Montague's house – and she was about to step again on terra infirma. These were assuredly tense times for the young couple setting up housekeeping next to the source of trouble. The central hallway bisecting the house front to back was surely not as ample a division as Emily Norcross Dickinson would have liked.
Austin was almost four and Emily just two years old when Lavinia, the youngest, was born. The day after “Vinnie's” birth, the mortgage on the Homestead was foreclosed. Two months later the entire house was sold to General David Mack Jr, who had arrived to manufacture palm leaf hats for which Amherst was to become the national production center. Samuel Fowler left the Homestead in disgrace, moving his remaining family to Ohio where Lyman Beecher had offered him a post at Lane Theological Seminary. Edward and family, however, stayed on as renters and moved to the roomier east half vacated by his father. For about six years the Macks and Dickinsons continued this intimate, “pretty perpendicular” living arrangement until Edward purchased a house with two acres around the corner on Pleasant Street, allowing the family home to pass out of Dickinson hands (JL 52).
Driven to restore the family fortune and what he saw as his rightful place in the Amherst pantheon, attorney Edward Dickinson embarked on a scheme to buy back his father's house when it came on the market in 1854. To consolidate his wealth Edward may have engaged in questionable practices (such as dipping into his wards' inheritance) to raise the $6,000 necessary to purchase the place and another $5,000 to “repair” it.2 In the spring of 1855, fifteen years after he had left, Edward reclaimed the Homestead – a symbol of his regained status and an act that marked the “zenith of his career” (Mudge 77). A central piece of the Homestead remodeling scheme was a reordering of the family's spatial boundaries. The Pleasant Street house, where the family had spent fifteen happy years, had been dominated by a central stone chimney. Intellectual life had found a center in the kitchen where a table facing a north window was always “burdened with books, including Webster's Dictionary, pen, and ink paper” (Mudge 46–47; JL 129). Instead of the “kitchen stone hearth” where the teenagers gathered to do homework and talked long into night “when the just are fast asleep” – and where the reproduction of everyday life was central – this former heart of the household was reassigned, in the Homestead, to its own distinct area (JL 118). The Main Street “mansion” was grander and a much more formal abode that “required” the ongoing assistance of a maid-of-all-work. In quick order the Dickinsons hired Margaret Ó Brien, their first “permanent” maid.
Before hiring a permanent maid, the family got by on their own labor. Austin was responsible for the chickens and horse, with general oversight of the grounds and laborers, while the two girls were trained in sewing, baking, and other domestic arts. As was the common practice and family preference, temporary help was hired seasonally or for specific tasks such as laundry and dressmaking. While the children were young, helpful relatives pitched in. Delia (surname unknown) Mary, Delotia and Catherine were among the long-term (or permanent) helpers hired to keep the household on track until the children were old enough to contribute. But life was to be conducted differently on Main Street; the finer house required grander domestic plans.
“We shall be in our new house soon; they are papering now” Dickinson remarked on the progress in mid-October 1855 (JL 180). The renovations that lasted from May until November followed the then new architectural premise that “everything in architecture … can be made a symbol of social and domestic virtues” (Downing 23; quoted in Fuss 5). A dining room and conservatory were added to the eastern side of the house. The new domestic wing, consisting of kitchen, washroom, and shed, jutted from behind the dining room out toward the barn. With its own staircase to the second floor, there were three rooms above designed for live-in or temporary servants who could be segregated largely to their own wing except when serving at table, cleaning, or sewing (McClintock 149). This configuration, in which Dickinson would do the bulk of her writing, was a house where divisions between people and functions could be achieved through smaller, highly specialized rooms within a “geometry of extreme separation” (McClintock 168). In this setup, the maid is not supposed to be seen and yet, paradoxically, she must be seen in order to confirm “that class is there and negotiable in stable and unthreatening ways” (Hitchcock 21). Segregated from the family's living quarters, servants and visible signs of their labor were absent. To go from the Homestead's double parlor to kitchen, one now passed through four doors and three passageways; it was much simpler to enter the kitchen from the yard.
I Thought that Hope was Home – a Misapprehension of Architecture (JL 600)
The triumph of what's best described now as the family's “class” change was symbolized and effected by the move from Pleasant to Main Street – with so much encoded in those two names. Life in the house on Pleasant Street was just that and the move to Main Street soberly underlined the centrality of the Dickinsons' civic role and page in history. They went from the “haves” to the “have mores,” securing themselves as provincial elites.3 Noting the house sale, the local paper concluded: “Thus has the worthy son of an honored sire the pleasure of repossessing the ‘Old Homestead’ ” (Mitchell 71). But rather than glide regally, Dickinson takes a bit of wind from the over-puffed family sails by describing their November 1855 move as a straggling party of western pioneers:
I cannot tell you how we moved. I had rather not remember … Such wits as I reserved, are so badly shattered that repair is useless – and still I can't help laughing at my own catastrophe. I supposed we were going to make a “transit,” as heavenly bodies did – but we came budget by budget, as our fellows do, till we fulfilled the pantomime contained in the word “moved.” It is a kind of gone-to-Kansas feeling, and if I had sat in the long wagon, with my family tied behind, I should suppose without doubt I was a party of emigrants!
They say that “home is where the heart is.” I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings. (JL 182)
The new house and adjacent buildings made a very different dwelling than one shared along a north–south axis some fifteen years earlier. This new configuration sanctified “home [as] a holy thing,” an “Eden” whose “placid portals,” for the middle class and elite, were increasingly seen as defense against what the poor represented: degradation of the “street,” an eroticism associated with pre-industrialism (before “taylorization” or the scientific management of work advocated by Frederick Winslow Taylor), and the unruly natural world. These were things the accumulating capitalist had had to give up but still yearned for, projecting these qualities onto the poor as when Dickinson's elder nephew referred to African American waitresses as “Lurid Ladies” (JL 59; Roediger 14). Control was the “central logic” of the nineteenth-century upper-class creation and policing of spatial boundaries. Deference rituals – bowing, backing out of the room, uniforms, silence, “invisibility” – helped reduce the employer's anxiety around boundary confusion and class antagonism (McClintock 33, 71–72, 156–71; Stallybrass and White 150). It was this gesture that underscored the Homestead renovations and the addition of a “permanent” maid-of-all-work.
