Dickinson's Misery (40 page)

In the early 1860s, Susan Dickinson sent Dickinson this message:

Unlike Dickinson's flower attached to the lines that begin “Whose Cheek is this?” whatever it was that Susan sent—her “this”—as metonymic substitute for her affectionate presence has not left any evidence of its exchange. What
is
evident in Susan's message is the correspondents' mutual
recognition of the nightingale's secret sorrow as an open secret that was not exactly the secret they wanted to share. Rather than identify with the nightingale as personification of female suffering, as Susan (if at arm's distance) suggests they do, Dickinson pastes the
Primer
nightingale—separated, like Dickinson, from its companion—to her sheet of paper next to a flower that metonymically substituted for “the writer's photograph in miniature” that their friend Samuel Bowles complained (in print) that women poets printed. The “this” that substitutes for the writer's affectionate presence in Dickinson's lines is the flower, which is already the substitute for the “cheek” of a woman who has, like the flower, died and been carried “safe away.”

Or is it the other way around? Is the “cheek” a metaphor for the flower, or is the flower a metaphor for the “cheek”? Martha Nell Smith, who in this as in other instances has brought the material aspects of this text to the attention of Dickinson scholars, suggests that “the layout and attachment function as commentary on the poem, and the reader must develop their intertextual connotations. Doing so, one cannot help but recognize nor resist being amused by Dickinson's caricature of popular poetry … what appears to be a relatively insignificant little ditty of a lyric in fact mirthfully interrogates common poetic praxis.”
³⁹
I agree that Dickinson's lines have everything to do with poetic practice, but it seems to me that they work to deanthropomorphize, to dissolve the caricature of the Poetess that was circulated in “popular poetry” and that she stuck to the page in the imprint of the nightingale (which Smith reads as a “the cutout of the robin”). By presenting the “cheek” of the flower to Susan, Dickinson gives her something that does not have a face, and so cannot be effaced. Or is the effacement of the flower, like the effacement of the “Darkling” wounded nightingale, the problem here, and is this an even more ambivalently inflected invitation to vicarious identification with feminized lyric suffering than Oakes Smith's poem or Susan's letter?

No. In Dickinson's lines, the flower has been rescued from personification rather than delivered into it: “I found her—‘pleiad'—in the woods / and bore her safe away—.” Alive and in context, the flower seems to have sprung from the ground of poetic tradition: appropriately caricatured in quotation marks, the name that Ronsard in the sixteenth century took for himself and six other French poets from a group of Alexandrian poets who named themselves after the seven daughters of Atlas who, in the tradition, were metamorphosed as stars, has here been returned to a very different feminine figure for lyric personification than that represented by the wounded nightingale. The “this” that Dickinson offers Susan is not a vehicle for vicarious feeling; it is and is not, to recall de Man's definition of lyric anthropomorphism, “an identification on the level of substance,”
since it reverses the tropological process de Man described when a figure “is no longer a proposition but a proper name, as when the metamorphosis in Ovid's stories culminates and halts in the singleness of the proper name, Narcissus or Daphne or whatever.”
⁴⁰
Dickinson did not write to Susan “This is my cheek,” or “this is my sorrow,” or “this is my death,” or “this is you.” She did not name the flower; by taking it from the woods, rather than killing it she seems to have rescued it from being metamorphosed into other names—or other poems.

One of the lyrics it did not become was Emerson's poem “The Rhodora,” a lyric almost as well known to highly literate New Englanders like Dickinson and Susan as the nightingales in the
Primer:

Often read as Emerson's defense of nature against culture, the lyric that Dickinson's lines echo personifies the flower found in the woods, metamorphosing “her” into the object of his romantic apostrophe, and finally into himself. In contrast, the fate to which the flower in Dickinson's lines is borne “safe away” is into Susan's hands, though what will happen to it once it gets there is much less certain than what happens to Emerson's humble flower. If the point of Emerson's poem is that, unlike the cultivated rose, the wild American Rhodora is not a traditional poetic subject (and therefore can become
his
lyric subject), then the point of Dickinson's lines is that the flower is not a subject at all. In invoking “the tradition” in which the robin covers the face of the unburied dead with leaves, Dickinson
makes it clear that, like the paper nightingale whose tiny print body cannot “sing,” the flower found not “fresh” but “‘pleiad'” in the woods is not about to say a thing. It
is
a thing, and so cannot be either alive or dead, neither figurative “cheek” nor effaced “pall.” This flower's charm was not wasted on the earth and sky, or on poetry.

But now we think that lyric poetry is what Emily Dickinson wrote. One of the most remarkable phases in the remarkable history of Dickinson's reception as a lyric poet has been the feminist adoption over the last twenty years of “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—” (F 764, fascicle 34) as an icon or allegory of Dickinson's claim to just the sort of lyric power I have spent this book suggesting that she did not want to have—or be. Yet since Adrienne Rich's declaration in 1974 that the poem “is a central poem in understanding Emily Dickinson, and ourselves, and the condition of the woman artist, particularly in the nineteenth century,” and Sharon Cameron's extraordinary forty-page reading of the poem as “a dialectic of rage” in 1979, and Gilbert and Gubar's subsequent analysis of “the many ways in which this enigmatically powerful poem is an astounding assertion of ‘masculine' artistic freedom” in that same year, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—” became the ars poetica, the zero-sum game of interpretation, for nearly all accounts of Dickinson's writings as
lyrics.
⁴²
It is the poem, as feminist criticism has it, that does the dreamwork of Dickinson's poetics—the artistic agency the nineteenth-century woman poet could only imagine in someone else's hands. Yet in view of my very different account of Dickinson's use of lyric figures, and particularly in view of those figures' debts to sentimental poetics, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—” begins to look like a nightmare. In it the life that just escapes figuration in “This Chasm” is, relentlessly, turned into a poem and taken back into the woods:

The plot is seamless and exact: once “identified,” this “Life” does the work of its “Owner,” becoming his vehicle so completely that the last lines can only perform the difference between the two as a riddle. The gun is powerful as long as it is a personification, a prosopopeia: it is pure, instrumental force because it is pure figure. It has been lifted so far away from the personal pronoun that inaugurates the poem that its body is recognizable in the final lines solely in relation to “His” body. The gun is not only her possessor's interpreter, she is his interpretation, his performance, his
interpretant.
When she speaks for him, it is as if “a Vesuvian face,” a face fictively attributed to a strange phenomenon, had “let it's pleasure through”—though of course the gun has no face or any pleasure. It is not alive. As Judith Butler has argued, “the normative force of performativity—its power to establish what counts as ‘being'—works not only through reiteration, but through exclusion as well. And in the case of bodies, those exclusions haunt signification at its abject borders or as that which is strictly foreclosed: the unlivable, the nonnarrativizable, the traumatic.”
⁴³
The bravura performance of Dickinson's gun excludes through reiteration, and the specter of what it excludes is it own immortality, the lyric subjectivity its readers will keep bringing into being.

That Dickinson's work has become, for her later interpreters, a purloined
texte en souffrance
is a fate her writing predicted. What she could not have foreseen was that in order to escape that fate, she would have needed to write not only outside the lyric, but outside the history that modernity has passed and identified so it can carry us away.

… and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
—
Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

L
YRIC READING
takes many forms, and I do not want my subtitle or the individual chapters of this book to give the impression that I have presented the only American model, much less the only modern model, that would be appropriate to Dickinson, or that there is any way out of the lyric or out of lyric reading as theory or practice, for Dickinson or anyone else. On the contrary, I have wanted to lead my reader into various theories of the lyric in order to think about both genre and genre formation historically. The difficulty of analyzing an object created by a certain historical perspective and at the same time analyzing that perspective itself can create an uneven pattern, or many overlapping points of focus, rather than a clearly resolved and well-framed subject. Because my argument has been that the framing of Dickinson's writing as a set of lyrics is not only an ongoing collective, historical process, but also a mistake, I have not tried to correct that mistake by deconstructing the lyric or what is sometimes called “lyric ideology,” or by constructing an alternative feminist or humanist intentional and impassioned lyricism, or by bypassing genre and taking the pragmatic way out.

Instead, I have tried to place Dickinson's variously intentional and unintentional ways of writing next to nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century ideas of lyricism that have replaced those ways of writing with ways of reading. The previous chapters may have led my reader to expect in conclusion an answer to the question of what it was that Emily Dickinson wrote. But I have not wanted to find or to offer an alternative to lyric reading; I have wanted to find a way into various lyric genres (songs, notes, letters, lists, postscripts, elegies, jokes, ads, dead crickets, valentines, stamps, Poetess verse, pressed flowers, printed paper cut-out birds) as alternatives to a singular idea of the lyric, or to an idea of the lyric as singular, or to poetry as we now tend to understand it. To call such a miscellany either a list of
genres
or to call those genres
lyric
is to suggest how capacious retrospective lyric reading can be, and also to suggest the messiness that I would like to attach to what are often purified terms, to suggest that genres themselves might be read as historical modes of language power.

That echo of de Man modifies literary criticism's tendency to read gen
res either from the inside out or from the outside in, to treat genres as if they excluded everything around them or to treat that everything as if it determined genres. Yet it also risks turning the lyric from an exclusive, hermetic genre into such a heterogeneous collage that the term devolves again into an all-purpose adjective. As
Dickinson's Misery
suggests in a number of ways, when
lyric
becomes an adjective, it evokes a theory of personal expression and abstraction that was highly problematic for Dickinson, but that has come to be highly valued in retrospect by modernism. As T. J. Clark has written in
Farewell to an Idea
, one of the distinctive features of both modernism and criticism is the nostalgia for the expressiveness they retroactively produce as what they cannot themselves be. “It seems that I cannot quite abandon the equation of Art with Lyric,” Clark writes.