Dickinson's Misery (33 page)

For, suppose you split a lark: what you will find, at least in Dickinson's first stanza, is poetry. Birdsong is Dickinson's figure for poetic writing in (by my last count) over three hundred texts, and it is the subject of her elegies for several women poets, notably Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the beautiful elegy for Brontë (F 146; fascicle 7), the death of the woman is conflated with the death of the literary pseudonym “Currer Bell,” which is said to migrate as

The place to which “Currer Bell” differed in returning is, of course, the grave, but it is also the locus of lyric,

The invisible location of the embodied source of lyric song is the familiar topos of romantic poetics that Dickinson evokes here, for, as we remember from Shelley's figuration of it, the poet is “a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, but know not whence or why.” In the romantic ideal of lyric affect, bird-poets would have no bodies. In Shelley's “To a Sky-Lark,” the object of poetic address is actually the literary dissolution of the body:

“Like an unbodied joy,” Shelley's lark bleeds only music. Dickinson's lark, however, produces a bizarrely literal (or “Scarlet”) version of Shelley's “profuse strains.” Her parody is too strong
not
to be of Shelley, but it is also mediated by yet another nineteenth-century poetic treatment of the Shelleyan lyric ideal, a rather incidental passage in Barrett Browning's
Aurora Leigh
in which the poet Aurora reflects that

That the difference between real and metaphorical identities should be remarked by allusion to a poem about the career of a woman poet who is here writing a poem alluding to Shelley goes some way toward indicating
how intimately sexual difference is associated with literary anatomies in the several birds Dickinson's text (with such violence toward the letter of its sources) begins to splinter. The “Bulb after Bulb, in / Silver rolled—” revealed in the fascicle lines echoes her elegy for Barrett Browning in which “Silver—perished—with her Tongue—” (F 600).
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In the elegy, written perhaps two years earlier than “Split the Lark—,” the relation between the poet and her aesthetic trace is also cast as consubstantial, nature and artifice having become impossible to tell apart:

Yet whereas the elegy mourns the mutual passing of “Silver” and Tongue,” “Flute, or Woman,” its conclusion also plays upon a way in which writing might alter personhood, and particularly sexual identity, as well as already be inscribed within it:

The place in which Barrett Browning made her last strains is here imagined, if only in hesitation, as a land in which lyric strains would make “our places” different. In the lines that begin “Split the Lark,” however, such a utopian possibility is checked by the incorporation of a reader who will insist that the lyric subject, in its very ethereal character, remain identifiably corporeal.
²⁷

To return for a moment, then, in a different strain, to the structure of Peirce's literally anatomized semiotic, what Dickinson's writing tends to do is to expose the “ground” of lyric reference as the oxymoron of an embodied abstraction. While Shelley's poem, bent on abstracting embodiment, is addressed to the lark, and Barrett Browning's is addressed to the pathos of such abstraction, Dickinson addresses “Sceptic Thomas,” the type par excellence of the interpreter who demands that cognitive apprehension be secured by the evidence and pathos of physical fact. Christ, we recall, admonishes Thomas for his need for substantiation, but the story of Thomas, told at the end of John, is also the occasion for one of the paradigmatic teachings of the incarnation:

    Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe.”

Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was
with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” (John 20:24–29)

Perhaps Thomas should not want to touch Christ's wounds, but as Elaine Scarry has read this passage, what Thomas finds in Christ's flesh is that “the Word of God materializes itself in the body of God, thereby locating voice and body, creator and created, in the same site, no longer stranded from one another as separate categories, thus also inviting humanity to recognize themselves as, although created, simultaneously creators.”
²⁸
Thomas's function is thus not only that of the interpreter but, in Peirce's terms, of the
interpretant:
he is himself a “mediating representation.” As such, he performs the creative office of mirroring the spiritual materiality of the embodied God—yet Dickinson's version of that reflection is rather more disturbing than Scarry's. As Christopher Benfey has pointed out, Dickinson's “Thomas's doubt and his demand for proof are as faithless and murderous as the demands of the crucifiers.”
²⁹
Murderous, yes. But perhaps Thomas's “demand for proof” has such tragic consequences in Dickinson's lines not because of his scepticism but because he represents the cultural belief that the “patent” poetic subject—both opened or dilated and published, or officially sealed—is not composed of separate categories but is materialized in and as writing.

That, at least, is the suggestion of another of Dickinson's texts in which Thomas's demand to touch the word effects a dismemberment of the identities ascribed to both gender and genre. This text (
fig. 29
) is from one of Dickinson's infamous “Master” letters, the letters “patent,” we might say, of Dickinson studies, the manuscripts that have seemed to Dickinson scholars to offer the most enticing clues to the identity of the woman behind the poems and therefore to officiate most authoritatively in their interpretation. Preserved in their unaddressed envelopes (they appear to be fair copies), and left unpublished in their entirety for almost a century, these letters have come to bear “the burden of proof” for the shelves of narratives generated by Dickinson's writing
³⁰
: her attachment to a married clergyman, her fantasies about a married journalist, her passion for her father's best friend, her schizophrenia, her abortion, her lesbian desire.
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The creative recognition that these private letters have invited has indeed located voice and body “in the same site.” The following letter, however, seems, in light of the present discussion to hint at what remains dangerous about such mutual locations—not only when, as Higginson would have it, the literal takes the place of the literary, but when the literary assumes the status of the literal.

Here is the opening of the letter:

    Master—
      If you saw a bullet hit a Bird—and he told you he wasn't shot—you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word—
    One drop more from the gash that stains your Daisy's bosom—then would you
believe?
Thomas' faith in anatomy—was stronger than his faith in faith.
³²

Three discrete representations of the relation between body and voice, sentience and written expression make up this appeal. The first is hypothetical: imagine, reader that a bird who could talk (a poetic text?) “told you he wasn't shot” when you had seen the wound with your own eyes. As in “Split the Lark—,” the assumption here is that the wounded body will make the more compelling claim on the imagination. Bullets don't lie. (“Suppose, we think of a murderer as being in relation to a murdered person; in this case we conceive of the act of murder”). But this is a version of substantiation in the frankly fictive conditional. When the representation of the wounded body shifts, so does the
tense
of representation: now witness, reader, “One drop more from the gash that stains your Daisy's bosom.” The shift in tense can only be made on the basis of a shift in reference, from fictional “Bird” to a differently fictional “Daisy.” The more intimate address of the second figure also depends on a pseudonym, but here it is a more explicitly literary one, since this is the name Dickinson uses for the subject of the Master letters as well as for the subject of many verses on romantic love.
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The “Daisy,” then, bleeds (in catachresis) in the present tense but the question to the reader (“then would you
believe
?”) must be phrased in a deictic indicating another conditional: the deferred time of reading. “Thomas' faith in anatomy” is by this point quite explicitly a faith in the written letter
as
an anatomy, a conviction that the “one drop more … that stains your Daisy's bosom” is made of ink and that this ink embodies the quality of an identity. Thus this Thomas is said to believe not simply that the imagery of the wounded body may be used to substantiate writing—i.e., if I bleed,
then
would you believe me?—but that the materiality of writing may substantiate a body historically subject to the inversions and perversions of reading (i.e., “put your finger here, and see my hands”). Curiously, it seems to be precisely this latter conviction—so satirically indicted in the lines that begin “Split the Lark—” and rather more painfully and intimately exposed in the “Master” letter—that has informed the feminist reconstruction of Dickinson as a literary subject.

While Dickinson's writing often aggressively invites such readings, we should attend to the address on the invitation. Just after the lines in the letter
on “Thomas's faith in anatomy” we may read (or barely discern, so much of the letter is crossed out, the words typographically bracketed here partially concealed from view [
fig. 30
]):

Having made the reader complicit in the construction of the subject, and having made jarringly explicit how that complicity shifts the place of the subject from wounded Bird to wounded Daisy to the wounded and risen Christ, the letter now reveals that the wound in identity is the wound
of
identity—a letter already written there. This inscription intensifies as well as undermines Gilbert and Gubar's claim that in the way Dickinson wrote “the fiction of her life, a wound has become Dickinson's ontological home.”
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What they aptly term the “hectic rhetoric” of the “Master” letter suggests that the wound is more intimate than feminist criticism generally has imagined: it is not just a theme in the writer's “fiction,” but the very condition of ontology, the way the subject is “made” or “built”—or written. This is why the costs of opening it to view may also split it apart. Thus the childishly agrammatical “I didn't be—myself—” may mean both “I did not bring myself into being” and “What I am is not myself” (a pun that would make the line anything but the utterance of a childish persona). In effect, the distance between these two possibilities closes dramatically when “the / heart” which is not “my heart” but “the / heart in me” acquires its own agency, dwarfing the self of which it becomes much more than a part: “It outgrew me—and like the little mother—with the big child—I got tired holding him.” What is built into the self turns out to have been inseminated: as this script is increasingly determined by the reader's “faith in anatomy,” the body begins to be placed outside itself, assuming not only disproportionate size but a disproportionate gender. The “thing called ‘Redemption'” would, presumably, if it were not in quotation marks, restore the writer to herself, but marked as the word is by its own iteration, it cannot ransom her. She receives instead “something else,” is “altered” yet again, and in a way that this time occasions not a switch in gender but in genre: here the only lines of verse that punctuate the “Master” letters are keyed for insertion.
³⁶
“No Rose,” and yet “a'bloom,” “No Bird,” yet “in Ether,” the writer momentarily makes her places with her strains. There is another text that these lines literally repress, however, written in ink and crosshatched in the same pencil with which the verse was written in. After “[I] / [and], was tired—no more,” we
may
read,