Dickinson's Misery (36 page)

As we have seen, twentieth-century versions of Dickinson have tended to characterize her lyrics as testimonial, at the same time that the modern construction of Dickinson's authorship has tended to identify all of her written testimony (prose fragments and familiar letters, recipes and responses) as “lyric.” As I suggested in the second chapter, twentieth-century theorists of the genre verged toward extremes in response to such a hermeneutic circle, staking claim either to the pole at which the lyric may be viewed as pure figurative vehicle detached from any historical intention or to the opposite pole at which the lyric is so identified with the poet's historical intention that all of its figures may only be read in reference to it. Feminist criticism has had a special interest in mediating between these extremes, and for American feminism Dickinson has consistently proven the exemplary mediatrix. As Jane Gallop suggested, the academic feminist critic “needed Dickinson” in the 1970s because she needed “a woman who is beyond question a great poet, who can hold her own in academic circles, which, under the sway of modernism and New Criticism, valued the poet much more than the novelist, valued the poet not as a writer but as an artist.”
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By the mid-1980s when, according to Gallop, “the literary academy [was] post-structuralist and the reigning values [were] theoretical,” the academic feminist literary critic needed Dickinson to testify to the theoretical disruption of New Critical aesthetics, a testimony available in Homans's and Loeffelholz's readings of Dickinson as well as in many later poststructuralisms, including my own. Since the 1980s, as we have seen, the emergence of queer theory, “body criticism,” and, at the same time, the emergence of Dickinson's manuscripts into public view (first in Franklin's facsimile edition in 1981 and now on the Web) have encouraged revisionary interpretation and revisionary editions such as those of Smith, Howe, Werner, the Dickinson Editorial Collective, as well as the book you now hold in your hand. For all of these different and evolving feminisms, however, one central pathos remains: Dickinson is the type of the woman poet who struggles to write “I” and mean it.
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For all, historical determination and figurative power must not pull so far apart that the woman's agency may not be discerned as always figuratively or even literally alive within the poems; whatever the lyrics are said to testify
to
it is always to “Dickinson.” For all, the already determined pattern (or signature) of Dickinson-the-poet must ultimately authorize the goods circulated in her name.

In this chapter I will suggest that the enduring pathos of feminist criticism, the readerly pathos so successfully and successively personified by
Dickinson, is not only evident in the shifting lyric ideals that have governed her posthumous reception. It may also be traced to a competing poetic model in her own lifetime, a contemporary discourse from which reception severed her for most of the twentieth century, but which feminist critics have lately tried to restore: the nineteenth-century poetics of misery, or lyric sentimentalism. While twentieth-century versions of Dickinson's verse as personal testimony were frequently, even unabashedly invested in Dickinson's lyric identity, most aligned themselves with modernist canons of taste specifically against the taint of nineteenth-century sentimental excess. Joanne Feit Diehl followed this critical tradition when she attributed to Dickinson a “feminist poetics” which “emerges as an experimental project that approaches modernist theories of art” and even David Reynolds, a critic interested in placing Dickinson in the context of the feminization of nineteenth-century American popular culture, cast that culture as a set of “woman's stereotypes” that for Dickinson became “matters of literary theater and metaphorical play.”
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Cheryl Walker, whose groundbreaking book
The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900
(1982) and anthology of
American Poets of the Nineteenth Century
(1992) inaugurated the recovery of women's popular verse of the period, thought that “the more one reads Emily Dickinson the less like her contemporaries she seems.”
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Betsy Erkkila went so far as to suggest that Dickinson “set herself against not only the new commercialization and democratization of literature but also the sentimental women writers who had gained money and fame in the American literary marketplace.”
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Elizabeth Petrino concluded that Dickinson's poetry “far excelled other poets of her age,” since other poetesses “agreed to conform their verse to the publishing dictates for women,” while Dickinson refused to do so.
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Yet such attempts to characterize Dickinson as either more aesthetically and politically avant-garde, more aesthetically and politically self-conscious or selective or, against those trends, as more aesthetically and politically reactionary than other “sentimental women writers” of the period all simplified the discourse of mid-nineteenth-century sentimentalism, and especially simplified or even ignored the discourse of nineteenth-century American
lyric
sentimentalism, (or, as I will go on to argue, of sentimentalism as one of the discourses informing modern lyric reading) as emerging work on nineteenth-century American poetry is beginning to make abundantly clear.

As Yopie Prins and I have argued elsewhere, the category of the sentimental Poetess circulated widely from the eighteenth century onward, but 1848 was a peak year in that construction. Four anthologies of “female poets” were published in England and America in that year, evidence that the figure of the woman poet could become a brand name, even if individual
poets' names rarely survived the anthologies.
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As Tricia Lootens has argued so eloquently in
Lost Saints: Silence, Gender and Victorian Literary Canonization,
much of the nineteenth century is devoted to canonizing poetesses who are, as they were, ironically forgotten in the very process of being remembered. Prins and I have suggested that one reason for the reiterated forgetting of the Poetess is that she is not the content of her own generic representation: not a speaker, not an “I,” not a consciousness, not a subjectivity, not a voice, not a persona, not a self. Thus she is “generic” in at least two senses, an essentially empty figure that circulates in lyrics as a vehicle of cultural transmission. There is now a wealth of emerging scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic on the many cultural outlines of that figure and the many cultures she transmits. On the American side, Paula Bennett's
Poets in the Public Sphere
, Mary Loeffelholz's
From School to Salon
, and Eliza Richards's
Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle
have all emerged from the fruitful conversation about the Poetess in the last two years.
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Bennett's emphasis on women poets' participation in the public sphere, Loeffelholz's emphasis on the way women poets moved “from school to salon,” from domesticity to publicity to the canon, and Richards's emphasis on poetesses as figures of transference who “share a deep engagement with the mimic functions of the lyric” will create a rich field of study all at once. With that work, it becomes possible to ask anew what Dickinson's relation to the cultural figure of the poetess might be, or might have been. It becomes possible to use the new conversation among scholars of nineteenth-century women's verse to discern more of an old conversation among nineteenth-century women poets and their readers.
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Between approximately 1840 and 1880, or the decades central to Dickinson's writing, but before the publication of the first volumes of her work, that conversation was centrally concerned with discerning the differences and similarities between historical and figurative testimony, with defining the relationship between the one giving that testimony and the one to whom it would be directed, and with the gendered and sexualized associations attached to both. Further, as in Dickinson's lines that begin “On the World you colored,” the subject of spectacular suffering in nineteenth-century lyric sentimentalism was most often the subject of what Cheryl Walker dubbed “the secret sorrow,” an “I” forced—by circumstance or by her own modesty—to bear her burden of affection and pain in a private world.
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Yet what Walker did not point out is that since this burden is also the occasion for the poem, “the secret sorrow” is an open secret. “Misery, how fair”: pain may define the experience of the sentimental subject, but it is also the basis on which she becomes the subject of exchange—even, from our belated perspective, of tradition.

While private feeling may seem the point of first-person affective expression,
then, the popularity of the genre in the nineteenth century also indicates that sentiment was a public interest, and it is that interest itself that may account for the surcharge of the “sentimental.” As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has put it,

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of vicariousness in defining the sentimental. The strange career of “sentimentality,” from the later eighteenth century when it was a term of high ethical and aesthetic praise, to the twentieth when it can be used to connote, beyond pathetic weakness, an actual principle of evil … is a career that displays few easily articulable consistencies; and those are not … consistencies of subject matter. Rather, they seem to inhere in the nature of the investment by a viewer
in
a subject matter.
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The popular investment by readers in the subject matter of first-person feminine suffering had its roots in a “double logic of power and powerlessness” that most scholars of nineteenth-century America now attribute to the period's culture as a whole.
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Rather than attempt to give a patchwork version of that whole (a cultural archaeology already available, in any case, in the work of those scholars), I want here to reconstruct just a small part of its logic, to translate just a few phrases from a vocabulary that has been on the whole ignored by scholarship on the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the intersection between relations of sympathy and relations of power.
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If, as Sedgwick argues, “the investment of a viewer
in
a subject matter” also amounts to the investment of a spectator (or reader) in a subject (what Sedgwick also calls “identification through a spectatorial route”), then the genre of lyric poetry occupies a privileged situation in the discursive context of sentimentality since one of its generic features is—or at least has been thought to be—the rhetorical performance of a circuit of vicarious identification. Yet the privileged situation of the lyric in literary studies has also kept it at a remove from historical critiques of “the culture of sentiment” or “the feminization of American culture”—ironically, it has seemed too personal to be included as a type of “cultural work.”
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The oversight seems especially odd when one considers the fulcrum of the sentimental as the principle of vicarious identification. There is nothing more sentimental than sentimental poetry. There is therefore no symbolic production more symptomatic of nineteenth-century America's double logic of power and victimization than the poems widely considered, then as now, too full of personal feeling to testify to anything more important than themselves.

Yet even if a case could be made for the crucial significance of sentimental poetry for an understanding of nineteenth-century public discourse, what would Dickinson's role be in such a case? Given my argument
so far about Dickinson's relation to historical generic figures, my reader will probably guess that I will argue that Dickinson worked against the grain of the sentimental lyric genre, or that she modified it, or resisted it, or tried to make sure that her reader did not confuse her writing with it. But that is not what I think. I will suggest instead that Dickinson's writing is immersed in female sentimental lyricism, and especially in the discourse of vicarious feeling—of sentimental lyric reading—that developed around that genre. If, as I have argued, lyric reading is a modern critical fiction, then sentimental lyric reading was one chapter in that fiction. Dickinson may only have become a lyric poet through the posthumous transmission and reception of her writing as lyric, but she was already a Poetess.

In the preface to his 1848 edition of
The Female Poets of America,
Rufus Wilmot Griswold began by warning his readers that

It is less easy to be assured of the genuineness of literary ability in women than in men. The moral nature of women, in its finest and richest development, partakes of some of the qualities of genius; it assumes, at least, the similitude of that which in men is the characteristic or accompaniment of the highest grade of mental inspiration. We are in danger, therefore, of mistaking for the effervescent energy of creative intelligence, that which is only the exuberance of personal “feelings unemployed.” We may confound the vivid dreamings of an unsatisfied heart, with the aspirations of a mind impatient of the fetters of time, and matter, and mortality. That may seem to us the abstract imagining of a soul rapt into sympathy with a purer beauty and a higher truth than earth and space exhibit, which in fact shall be only the natural craving of affections, undefined and wandering. The most exquisite susceptibility of the spirit, and the capacity to mirror in dazzling variety the effects which circumstances or surrounding minds work upon it, may be accompanied by no power to originate, nor even, in any proper sense, to reproduce.
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Of the many aspects worth remarking in Griswold's attitude here, his counsel that the subject matter of his volume be approached with a hermeneutics of suspicion (he calls it an “antecedent skepticism”) is most so. Although on the surface his preface takes the form of a patronizing editorial apology, not very far below that surface Griswold's language worries over the source of that apology. Why should the question of “the genuineness of literary ability” be at stake in the first place? The reason it
matters, it seems, is that women may simulate a valued literary quality precisely because that quality comes to them naturally. What is at stake for a reader of this poetry, in other words, is the value of “genuineness” itself, especially in its relation to its visual off-rhyme, “genius.” Apparently, “genius” may look “genuine” but not be, because Griswold assumes that his readers will assume that genius is associated with “effervescent energy,” “sympathy,” intellectual impatience, “exquisite susceptibility,” and, most strikingly, with “the capacity to mirror” others. Such intimate semiotic relations between genius and the characteristic symptoms of sentimentalism poise Griswold's descriptions between the eighteenth-century honorific and the later nineteenth- and twentieth-century queasy valorization of literary affect.
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They also go some way toward explaining that shift in sentiment's career, since Griswold's is not yet a discomfort with the rapt effects of heightened subjective affect but with the gendered and sexualized “power to originate” those effects.