Dickinson's Misery (31 page)

Dickinson would be happy to hear that, since in her scenario of “Infection in the sentence” the transmission of a page from one subject to another is, as we saw in the last chapter, much less sure of its destination. Indeed, the “Despair” on Dickinson's manuscript page is literally predicated by the most tentative part of the manuscript: an “And” that is crossed out, a bracket before “we,” and a superscripted “may” that is underlined, either for emphasis or perhaps, like the bracket, to show that it is part of the line that ends with “inhale.” Gilbert and Gubar used Johnson's 1955 edition for their reading, so that the line on their page read “We may inhale Despair” (J 1261). It is possible that if Johnson had printed Dickinson's underlining, feminist critics at the distance of a century
may
have allowed Dickinson's pathos of indeterminate literacy to infect their theory of “the woman writer and the anxiety of authorship,” but it is also possible that it would have made no difference. It will certainly make no difference
to future readers of Franklin's edition, since he prints the line as “And we inhale Despair,” restoring the crossed-out “And” and deleting the emphasized “may.” Apparently, literary transmission is not as tentative a business for Franklin as it may have been for Dickinson—if we are to judge by the words that Franklin intentionally sets on the page, and that Dickinson crossed over, out, and under. Dickinson's misery may not be communicable at distances of centuries because writers and editors and readers may be careful, but words are careless.

Or they
may
be. If the fantasy of an incarnate literary text animates Gilbert and Gubar's reading, a related fantasy has animated the more recent feminist critical turn to Dickinson's manuscripts and the feminist critique of Johnson's and Franklin's editorial choices. That imaginary is visible in the spectacular presentation and interpretation of Dickinson's late fragments by Marta Werner that I discussed in the first chapter, but its most influential expression has been Susan Howe's insistence on a return to the manuscripts as revelations of Dickinson's “visual intentionality,” a version of textual materialism I invoked in the second chapter. We cannot experience “the layerings and fragile immediacies of [Dickinson's] multifaceted visual and verbal productions,” Howe argues, in the “authoritative editions [that] freeze poems into artifacts.”
¹¹
How can we read, critique, construct and deconstruct Dickinson's intention, Howe asks, “before we have been allowed to even see what
she, Emily Dickinson,
reveals of her most profound self in the multiple multilayered scripts, sets, notes, and scraps she left us? I cannot murmur indifferently: ‘What matter who's speaking?' I emphatically insist that it does matter who's speaking” (20). The brand of textual indeterminacy Howe takes to task here is Foucault's question in “What is an Author?”—a question that Foucault takes from Beckett. Although her own writing folds text into modern text into modern text, Howe insists that the problem with reducing the creator of the text to an “author function” is that we can no longer hear the poet's voice in her writing when it is reduced to “discourse”—or even when it is transcribed into print. That is, while Howe's reading is often focused on minute textual details (the placement of a dash, an
^x
, a -, the size of a letter, the space between letters), she reads the smallest aspects of Dickinson's handwriting not just as graphic marks, or even as performances of Dickinson's literary personae but, literally, as “
Emily Dickinson.
” “I often wake up in the night,” Howe confessed in an interview, “and think, No, I am wrong. She would not agree. She would be angry with me.”
¹²
Because it is hard to imagine that intention is entirely visible in writing at distances of centuries, Howe wakes up worrying that she does not know what the many layers of script “say” after all, and she worries that in not knowing
what they
may
say, she has personally violated Emily Dickinson, has made her “angry.” Howe's deeply invested, deeply lyrical reading of Dickinson makes writing into personhood, but verges on despair at the prospect of making a person into writing.

The double bind that feminist critics of Emily Dickinson find themselves in is not new. In this chapter, I will suggest that Dickinson has epitomized assumptions about both literary and personal identity not only because those assumptions are always mediated by gender and genre, but because they participate in the notion that writing itself is incarnate. The impulse of the first part of what follows is thus historical, for in it I attempt to trace an arc away from the last hundred years' implicit identification of written letters with living persons. The question this chapter attempts to answer might be phrased, “How does writing come to be read
as
a person?” That is not at all the same thing as asking how writing came to be read as personal expression. In the fantasy of the incarnate letter that emerged in mid-nineteenth-century American thought, reading implicitly became identified with the immediate perception of the human body. If that seems an odd, though familiar idea, perhaps it is so both because of the difference between Dickinson's historical moment and our own
and
because the referential assumptions of that moment still subtend our own. That, in any case, is the implication of the Dickinson texts I will turn to in the second part of the chapter. In one small fascicle text and in the fragment of a private, now public letter, I will explore Dickinson's explicit analogies between writing and embodiment. Since such associations are deeply inscribed in the representative versions of the genre that has defined her practice as well as in representations of the gender that defined her person, my focus on writing will return to the feminist concern with the relation between the woman and the poem, a relation that Dickinson's writing made stranger than her later readers have wanted to admit. If print versions of Dickinson threaten to disarticulate the relation between the woman and the writing by abstracting her personal marks into the unmarked marks of the public sphere, the feminist reading of Dickinson in both print and manuscript has tried to restore the person to the poems, to mark the body that print makes disappear. But given the history of such interpretation, feminists might want to be careful how we do that. If we can neither place ourselves before or after the history of reading Emily Dickinson as a literary subject, in a place “Nobody knows” or
“knew,
” we may still learn to read her with almost as little hermeneutic defensiveness as she read herself. Almost. As Dickinson wrote of another poetic institution, “While Shakespeare remains Literature is firm—An Insect cannot run away with Achilles' Head” (L 368).

T
HE
I
NTERPRETANT

Two very different thinkers in Dickinson's immediate intellectual culture—the genteel critic so influential in presenting Dickinson to the public, and a linguistic philosopher who never knew anything about her—seem to have shared the strange assumption that the literal characters of the page were instinct with embodiment. In his collection
Women and the Alphabet
(assembled in 1900, though several of the essays were written earlier), Higginson told a story about “the Invisible Lady” who,

as advertised in all our cities a good many years ago, was a mysterious individual who remained unseen, and had apparently no human organs except a brain and a tongue. You asked questions of her, and she made intelligent answers; but where she was, you could no more discover than you could find the man inside the Automaton Chess-Player. Was she intended as a satire on womankind, or as a sincere representation of what womankind should be? To many men, doubtless, she would have seemed the ideal of her sex, could only her brain and tongue have disappeared like the rest of her faculties. Such men would have liked her almost as well as that other mysterious personage on the London signboard, labeled “The Good Woman,” and represented by a female figure without a head.
¹³

Higginson's interest here, as in his initial feminist argument in “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” forty years earlier, is in the cultural enfranchisement—the cultural presence—of women.
¹⁴
It is in the service of enfranchisement that he invokes the prejudice of the “many men” who idealize female obscurity in the public sphere, men who either render “womankind” incorporeal or who prefer their projected “mysterious personage” as a personification without a head.

Yet which is it to be? To be all mind or to be all body is to be “invisible” in very different ways. The severed expression of “a brain and a tongue” exerts an apposite personal agency to that of the obscenely decapitated “Good Woman”; indeed, one wonders how the Invisible Lady could be told apart from “the man inside the Automaton Chess Player” except by the advertiser's label required to identify the person within the machine. That the men who mythologized her “would have liked her almost as well” as her exclusively sexualized counterpart reveals less, perhaps, from our perspective, about the misogyny Higginson condemns than it does about his own symptomatic confusion over where to locate (or how to anatomize) the gendered identity for which he assumed advocacy. Talking
head or mute body—which would mark woman's characteristic acquisition of the alphabet, which one admit her to the culture of letters that would confer an identifiable written persona, a
literal
figural visibility?

Higginson's point, of course, is that, for the humanist project he has in mind, neither bisection will do. “Ceasing to be an Invisible Lady,” the lettered woman “must become a visible force: there is no middle ground.” Yet the force made visible by the disciplinary power of the alphabet remains entrenched in this middle ground in Higginson's feminist writings. In an essay on Sappho in 1871, for example, Higginson sought to endorse Welcker's 1816 article “Sappho Vindicated from a Prevailing Prejudice” by enforcing the distinction between autobiographical and dramatic reference in poetry. In response to another German scholar who emphasized Sappho's lesbian eroticism, Higginson thus writes that “he reads [Sappho's] graceful fragments as the sailors in some forecastle might read Juliet's soliloquies, or as a criminal lawyer reads in court the letters of some warm-hearted woman; the shame lying not in the words, but in the tongue.”
¹⁵
The “tongue” that tells Sappho's graceful fragments as dirty jokes is in this case a synecdoche for the pejoratively masculinized representative body (a sailor, a criminal lawyer) that commits the vulgar faux pas of taking literature—and especially poetry—literally. “It is as if one were to cite Browning into court and undertake to convict him, on his own confession, of sharing every mental condition he describes.”

Yet even as he indicts the becoming-literal of the literary—and the becoming-personal of personae—as a modern corruption more threatening than the sexual “cloud of reproach” it evokes, Higginson ends by displaying Sappho-the-woman as the index of his own civilizing aspirations. Whatever her life may turn out to have been, Higginson writes, “Sappho is gone,” and

modern nations must take up again the problem where Athens failed and Lesbos only pointed the way to the solution—to create a civilization where the highest culture will be extended to woman also. It is not enough that we should dream, with Plato, of a republic where man is free and woman but a serf. The aspirations of modern life culminate, like the greatest of modern poems, in the elevation of womanhood.
Die ewige Weibliche zieht uns hinan.
¹⁶

Under the sign of modernity, national and gendered identities are married in order to reproduce themselves as “the highest culture,” a culture re-embodied by the now elevated—because dead—woman and by the characters of a literary language. The idealizing decorporealization of power that Higginson caricatured in “the Invisible Lady” he reads in a sincere register in his citation of Goethe's
Faust.
Unattributed and untranslated
at the end of his essay, Higginson's allusion addresses an imagined community of educated readers of belles lettres, readers who are charged with reversing the errors of the sailors and lawyers, who recognize the ideally transcendent (rather than perversely literal) identity between gender and genre.
¹⁷
Yet even in the optative temporality into which the greatest of modern poems projects us (
zieht uns hinan
) Higginson's reiteration of the
grammatical
gender of Goethe's “Eternal Feminine” makes a quite literal slip. While the conceptual referent of
Weibliche
may seem to demand a feminine article, it is in the German language neuter: Goethe's line reads not
Die ewige Weibliche
but
Das ewig-Weibliche.
On the level of the alphabet, then, the difference an article (or three letters) can make enacts the conflation of gender and genre called forth by Higginson's citation. That is, it unwittingly performs the fantasy that grammar, like an anatomy, would be gendered not by arbitrary signs attached to a concatenation of mute bodies but would be subsumed by the eloquent rhetoric of natural law—the law of an embodied writing.

Higginson casts this law as, above all,
literary,
as he goes on to give various examples of the relation between literal and lettered womanhood, including not only Sappho, Faust, and Browning, but the notoriously public literary personae of Margaret Fuller and George Sand. Before turning back to a consideration of writings of the woman poet he introduced into this company in 1890 as one who “habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends,” who “was as invisible to the world as if she had dwelt in a nunnery” (
Poems
1890, iii), I want instead to turn briefly to an unlikely analogue to the theory of anatomically scripted reference that Higginson's anecdotes and allusions tended to perform. During the 1860s and 1870s, when Higginson was writing his
Atlantic
essays in Cambridge and Dickinson was writing in Amherst, the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was developing in his early lectures at Harvard the semiotic logic that became the basis of American pragmatism. According to this logic, reference is always an emphatically empirical matter: as Peirce has it, “Nothing is assumed [in the semiotic] respecting what is thought which cannot be securely inferred from admissions which the thinker will make concerning external facts.”
¹⁸
As Peirce represents these “facts,” however, what is most secure about them is that they are, like Higginson's examples, based on the assumption that identity, in order to be empirically indicative, must be both modeled on the principles of natural law and at the same time susceptible to the abstraction of written representation. Indeed, Peirce's creation of the semiotic appears to have depended upon his presentation of writing as already embodied.