Dickinson's Misery (37 page)

Thus at the end of this passage the editor's concern with the authenticity of represented feelings takes the disturbing form of a derogation of the classical sexual anatomy of the hysterical woman: “the natural craving of the affections, undefined and wandering” is like a roving womb stirring up trouble, impotent to creatively inseminate itself “in any proper sense.” The unlikely key term here is “proper.” Would the power to reproduce “in any proper sense” be a decorous reproductive power, female feelings wedded to “literary ability” not the simulacrum of male genius but somehow authentically masculine? In what sense would such a power then be “proper”? If, as Griswold goes on to write, “it does not follow, because the most essential genius in men is marked by qualities which we may call feminine, that such qualities when found in female writers have any certain or just relation to female superiority,” then what does “feminine” mean? Griswold's attempt to establish an analytical perspective on women's poetry purchases its critical value at the expense of the women poets themselves, since if one can't discern the difference between “effervescent energy” and “creative intelligence,” one may be in danger of uncritical reading.

Griswold may have been especially reactionary, but the danger of mistaking sentimental women for creative geniuses seems to have been an open secret in nineteenth-century literary magazines. In a sketch entitled “My Garden” that appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1862, “Gail Hamilton” (the pen name of Mary Abigail Dodge) began, despite the disguise of her androgynous authorial signature, by asserting,

I am a woman. You may have inferred this before; but now I desire to state it distinctly, because I like to do as I would be done by, when I can just as
well as not…. The two sexes awaken two entirely distinct sets of feelings, and you would no more use the one for the other than you would put on your tiny teacups at breakfast, or lay the carving-knife by the butter-plate. Consequently it is very exasperating to sit, open-eyed and expectant, watching the removal of the successive swathings which hide from you the dusky glories of an old-time princess, and, when the unrolling is over, to find it is nothing, after all, but a great lubberly boy. Equally trying is it to feel your interest clustering round a narrator's manhood, all your individuality merging in his, till, of a sudden, by the merest chance, you catch the swell of crinoline, and there you are. Away with such clumsiness! Let us have everybody christened before we begin.
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The comic “clumsiness” of this scenario (which will have nothing to do with the subject of the sketch, the city dweller's disillusionment with “country living”) is due less to its stated preoccupation with undisguised self-representation than to its performative parody of the transferential identifications occasioned by stylistic fictions of gender. Although the plain-dealing opening declarations attempt the impression of gender-neutrality, the implied reader is immediately cast as feminine—or at least as someone domestically knowledgeable enough to understand placesetting decorum. If “the two sexes awaken two entirely distinct sets of feelings,” do they awaken those feelings distinctly for the two sexes? That would depend, according to the passage, on where or how you “feel your interest clustering.” The strip-tease removal of “the successive swathings” which conceal “a great lubberly boy” (not very interesting) is set against the temptation to merge “all your individuality” in a narrator's manhood, only to be interrupted by “the swell of crinoline” (very frustrating).

The spectacles of identification are so shifting in this passage that the shifty relation between authentic and simulated genders and between a critical and sentimental reading emerges as the passage's point. The more often the narrator reiterates the phrase “I am a woman,” the more elaborate her subsequent rhetorical performances become, until she strikes the unmistakable pose of the sentimental Poetess: “A very agony of self-abasement will be no armor against the poisoned shafts which assumed superiority will hurl against me. Yet I press the arrow to my bleeding heart, and calmly reiterate, I am a woman.” In the guise of the most authentic possible testimony—the personal statement that demands a masochistic price—“Hamilton” offers the most affected possible performance, a melodrama quickly upstaged when she begins the next paragraph by stating that “the full magnanimity of which reiteration can be perceived only when I inform you that I could easily deceive you, if I chose.” Of course the point is that what is most genuine is already most
deceptive, since the performativity of literary identity is its least genuine (and most defining) aspect. As in Griswold's preface, the qualities considered natural or essential in the woman consist of such simulated affects, and it is that veneer of simulation over the first-person “proper” claim of authenticity that makes “My Garden” into a parody of the vicarious identities at stake in the “sentimental.”

These brief glimpses into two nineteenth-century versions of gendered “identification through a spectatorial route” begin to contextually frame my reading of Dickinson's “Master” letter in the last chapter. Another portrait of the Poetess may have preoccupied Dickinson more directly. The article, which appeared in the
Springfield Daily Republican
for July 7, 1860, was entitled “When Should We Write,” and was probably written by Dickinson's friend Samuel Bowles. The article has been linked to Dickinson's personal concerns by several of her critics, but in view of Griswold's and Hamilton's concerns over the performative force of women's claims to authentic self-expression, and especially over the reading that performance might produce, Bowles's commentary on “a kind of writing only too common, appealing to the sympathies of the reader without recommending itself to his subject” is worth considering in more detail, especially since the article gives the subgenre a name:

It may be called the literature of misery. The writers are chiefly women, gifted women may be, full of thought and feeling and fancy, but poor, lonely and unhappy. Also that suffering is so seldom healthful. It may be a valuable discipline in the end, but for the time being it too often clouds, withers, distorts. It is so difficult to see objects distinctly through a mist of tears. The sketch or poem is usually the writer's photograph in miniature. It reveals a countenance we would gladly brighten, but not by exposing it to the gaze of a worthless world. We know that grief enriches the soul, but seldom is this manifest until after its first intensity is past. We should say to our suffering friends, write not from the fullness of a present sorrow. It is in most cases only after the storm is passed that we may look for those peaceable fruits that nourished by showers, grow ripe and luscious in the sun. There are those indeed who so far triumph over their own personal experiences as to mould them into priceless gifts to the world of literature and art. Like the eider duck bending over her famished young, they give us their heart's blood and we find it then a refreshing drought. But there are marked exceptions. Ordinarily the lacerated bosom must be healed, ‘ere it can gladden other natures with the overflowings of a healthful life.
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Here Bowles shares with Griswold the concern that female literary sentimental performances may be too genuine for “the world of literature and
art”; at the same time, the editorial shares with Hamilton the anxiety that the appearance of first-person literary representation may—in the hands of “poor, lonely and unhappy” women—prove deceptive. For Bowles, however, the reader should beware of these writing women's tendency to take one in not primarily because (as for Griswold) female sentimentalism may mimic the attainments of male sensibility or (as for Hamilton) because the most sincere protestations may turn out to be “exasperating” special effects, but because such “suffering is so seldom healthful.” The adjective is intriguing, especially as it initially seems to apply to the “gifted women” themselves but then shifts to characterize the rationale for limiting the publication of their effusions. Bowles's main caution, it turns out, is that “other natures” may be infected by the un-“healthful life” of “our suffering friends.” The familiar tone betrays a paternal sympathy for these writers' “personal experiences” yet erupts into a family scene that betrays that the editor's desire to distance himself from female bleeding hearts is also a perverse attraction: the vampiric young at the mother eider duck's breast are, oddly, figures for readers receiving “priceless gifts” from exceptionally successful sentimentalists who “give us their heart's blood and we find it then a refreshing drought.” It is at the least a disturbing scene of instruction, partially due to its appropriation of imagery that was the stock in trade of female lyric sentimentalism and partially due to the “then” that should refer to the previous sentence's distinction between “personal experiences” and “triumphant” artistic craft but that instead directly follows a portrayal of “our” relation to that craft as an extreme version of natural appetite. Does “the literature of misery” not recommend itself to the editor's subject because he wishes to protect its writers from “the gaze of a worthless world” or because that world needs to be protected from its own prurient interest in representations of female suffering?

The question is not strictly rhetorical, since the precedence gained by the latter concern in the course of Bowles's article stems not only from the suspicious gender of “our suffering friends” but from contemporary suspicions about the proper subjects of the lyric genre. The most immediate subtext for Bowles's concerns over the “healthful” relation of “personal experiences” to poetic representation may have been Matthew Arnold's preface to the 1853 Edition of
Poems
, since Arnold's argument is audible in the prose of “When Should We Write.” By way of explaining why his dramatic poem “Empedocles on Etna” has been omitted from his new edition, Arnold claims that the “class of situation” to which his Empedocles belongs is one “from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived.” Such situations, Arnold writes, “are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous
state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also.”
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“Nothing to be done”: for Arnold, “if the representation be a poetical one … it is demanded, not only that it shall interest, but also that it shall inspirit and rejoice the reader: that it shall convey a charm, and infuse delight.” One can hear Arnold's prescription in Bowles's injunction that “the lacerated bosom must be healed, 'ere it can
gladden
other natures with the overflowings of a healthful life,” but the change that Bowles works on Arnold's argument is equally remarkable. Arnold's preface proceeds from the occasion of his self-censorship to a more general case for the cultural work of poetry; his call for an inspiriting poetic representation issues from his conviction that “it is impossible for us, under the circumstances amidst which we live, to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to delineate firmly. If we cannot attain to the mastery of the great artists—let us, at least, have so much respect for our art as to prefer it to ourselves. Let us not bewilder our successors.” The transcendence of personal experience in view of the aims of art, in view of the
transmission
of that art to “our successors,” serves the purpose for Arnold of both a self-overcoming and a redemption of a decadent age. Implicitly, the lyric-as-personal-testimony is a distinct symptom of that decadence and the lyric-as-vehicle-of-the-tradition might repair the damage. What is arresting about Bowles's use of Arnold is that the politics of “poetical enjoyment” have come to rest in the bosoms of women who “give us their heart's blood”—a maternal inheritance bound to bewilder “our” successors and likely to bring out the worst in “ourselves.”
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It is now more evident that the recurrent nineteenth-century complaint about women's writing as “too much nature and not enough art” was the symptom of a more general unease with the inevitable proximity between personal and literary testimony in the lyric and especially with the difficulty of distinguishing between them. Further, Bowles's translation of Arnold's worries over the fit representational place of personal pain into a worry over the fit place of women's writing aligns private suffering with a simultaneously feminized and infantilized version of the masculine self (the article is, after all, entitled not “When Should
She
” but “When Should
We
Write”). What sentimental women poets need to do, according to Bowles, is to grow up. He adds to Arnold a Wordsworthian counsel that powerful feelings be “recollected in tranquility” and thus, presumably, transformed from mere photographic miniatures into the larger masterpieces to which Arnold lamented “we” could no longer attain. If women can overcome their “suffering” natures for the sake of culture, in other
words, that is a representative way for modern culture to overcome itself. Griswold had, in fact, said as much when introducing his
Female Poets:

It has been suggested by foreign critics, that our [American] citizens are too much devoted to business and politics to feel interest in pursuits which adorn but do not profit, and which beautify existence but do not consolidate power: feminine genius is perhaps destined to retrieve our public character in this respect, and our shores may yet be far resplendent with a temple of art which, while it is a glory of our land, may be a monument to the honor of the sex.
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