Dickinson's Misery (44 page)

59
. The American insurance industry was founded by Benjamin Franklin, but it largely failed after the Civil War. Dickinson used the
HOME INSURANCE CO. NEW YORK
ads as stationery at just the time (1875) when the industry made a bid for the business of wealthy private homeowners like the Dickinsons. See Robert H. Tullis,
The Home Insurance Company.

60
. Gillian Brown,
Domestic Individualism.
For the place of the public sphere within the Dickinson home, see Diana Fuss,
The Sense of an Interior
.

61
. Franklin cites the letter from Jackson (F 1299) and lists all of the extant manuscript versions.

62
. Herrnstein Smith,
On the Margins of Discourse,
33. We will return to Herrnstein Smith's distinction in
chapter 3
, but for now it is worth noting that she defines literature as “fictive utterance” and at the same time defines fictive utterance as literature—specifically, as Hamlet's speech. Thus, in order to invite us to imagine the difference between history and literature, Herrnstein Smith invites us to conceive of that difference
as
literature.

63
. The bluebird's performance of what one might call art for art's sake in the lines sent to Jackson supports Loeffelholz's pairing of Jackson and Dickinson as figures suspended between the late nineteenth-century “poles of ‘bourgeois art' and ‘social art'” (
From School to Salon
, 135).

64
. As my reader will already have noticed, the question of how we refer to the “titles” of Dickinson's texts opens all sorts of other questions, and the negotiation of these questions can be awkward. Since titles designate texts as individual poems, I usually avoid the practice of using first lines as titles, but some referential title is unavoidable. Since Franklin has no doubt that Dickinson wrote poems, he provides an appendix of “Titles, Characterizations, Signatures” that Dickinson used in her correspondence to refer to her verse (F 1545–46, app. 6). For an extended meditation on, history of, and speculation about the relation between lyric titles and generic definition, see Anne Ferry,
The Title to the Poem
.

C
HAPTER
T
WO:
L
YRIC
R
EADING

1
. The
Republican
notice is cited by Jay Leyda in
The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson,
2:87, though Leyda changes the assailant's name to “Cutler.”

2
. Bowles's and Beecher's comments on the Vanderbilt shooting are reported by Alfred Habegger,
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books,
464.

3
. On Dickinson's
Drum Beat
poems, see Karen Dandurand, “New Dickinson Civil War Publications,” and “Dickinson and the Public” in Orzeck and Weisbuch, eds.,
Dickinson and Audience,
255–77. Dandurand's discovery opens important questions for Dickinson scholarship, which has been so focused on the possibility that there are more poems hidden in some attic or drawer that scholars have not gone in search of Dickinson's
public
circulation during her lifetime. Dandurand speculates that Dickinson volunteered the poems for the cause (more soldiers died of disease during the Civil War than fell in battle). If so, then she may either have conveyed them to Vanderbilt or to Richard Salter Storrs, the editor of the
Drum Beat
and an Amherst alumnus. Dandurand and others have thought Storrs the more likely candidate, but it is hard to say why, since we know that Dickinson had a correspondence with Vanderbilt while there is no evidence of a correspondence with Storrs.

4
. Todd's notes to transcript, 59, 59a, 59b, 59c, Amherst Special Collections.

5
. In Franklin's edition, the verses that Dickinson sent to Vanderbilt are Poems 505, 815, 895, and 946. They were all sent between 1863 and 1865. Franklin notes (p. 1556) that Gertrude Vanderbilt was “a friend of Catherine Scott Turner and through her of Susan Dickinson,” a note that makes it clearer why Dickinson would have corresponded with Vanderbilt as part of an intimate genteel circle.

6
. What is now Franklin's Poem 815 was first published in
Letters of Emily Dickinson (
1894), 154, as a ten-line stanza, then in
The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson
(1924), 259, and
Letters of Emily Dickinson
(1931), 152, then as J Poem 830 in 1955.

7
. F 946, Set 7. The difference between the “sets” and the “fascicles” is the string that binds the fascicle sheets but does not bind the sets. Since Dickinson apparently stopped binding fascicle sheets in 1865, during the time she was in Cambridge under treatment for eye trouble, Franklin views the unbound sets as a stage in the “winding down” of Dickinson's ambitions for her “workshop” (F 25).

8
. Shira Wolosky,
Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War,
7.

9
. I have no doubt that these lines did contain an enclosure, though since there is no autograph copy, I have no evidence other than the lines themselves and Dickinson's habits of correspondence that the flowers were there.

10
. Fascicle 39; MB 968.

11
.
Ancestors' Brocades,
36.

12
. Dickinson's reversal of the usual referential relations between flowers and poems was one of her favorite puns, and there are too many instances to list, but it is worth noting that in the Bullard portrait of the Dickinson children in 1840, Emily holds a flower on an open book (see Habegger,
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books,
366).

13
. The manuscript is at Scripps College. Franklin prints the lines in quatrains (F 895), the first editor to include this early version in his variorum edition. Johnson broke this manuscript (or the transcript he had seen of it) into two poems (as had Bingham in BM, 1945) and made the last one (from the last two stanzas of this manuscript, beginning “The Earth had many keys—”) the last poem in his edition (J 1775).

14
. For an account of the poem's bibliographical history, see Franklin, “The Manuscripts and Transcripts of ‘Further in Summer than the Birds.'” In “Dickinson and the Public,” Dandurand makes the point that Storrs sent copies of the paper to all of his contributors, so he would have sent a copy to Dickinson. If Vanderbilt gave the poem to the paper, however, Storrs might not have known to send the paper to Amherst—though Vanderbilt may have done so.

15
. Readers of Dickinson will recognize absurd anthropomorphism as one of her favorite tropes—as, for example, when she wrote to Louise Norcross that “it is lovely without the birds today, for it rains badly, and the little poets have no umbrellas” (L 340).

16
. The address on the first manuscript, sent to Susan in the 1850s, has been erased. Hart and Smith note that in the context of Dickinson's correspondence with Susan, “Emily's poem echoes a poem by Susan, ‘There are three months of Spring,' suggesting a call-and-response relationship in their writing life” (OC 71).

17
. Louis Menand,
The Metaphysical Club,
x. I am simplifying Menand's argument, which is not only about the failure of the particular ideas that could no longer be held after the war, but about “a certain idea about the limits of ideas” (4). Ultimately, Menand sees that failure as the generative force behind the development of American pragmatism.

18
. See Jenny Franchot's
Roads to Rome
for an argument that “anti-Catholicism operated as an imaginative category of discourse through which antebellum American writers of popular and elite fictional and historical texts indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of mainstream Protestant culture” (xvii). Dickinson does not exactly fit Franchot's sense of that category, but Franchot's argument is suggestive for a reading of the Catholic imagery that pops up here and there in Dickinson's writing, since it makes clear that such imagery was not a quirk of Dickinson's but a common, and complex, cultural currency.

19
. Diehl,
Dickinson and the Romantic Imagination,
97. Since Diehl was reading the
poem in Johnson's edition, she did not have the last eight lines sent to Vanderbilt, so she did not know how right she was about the echo of Keats. See Mary Loeffelholz's commentary on Diehl's suggestion about the echo in
Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory
, 145–46. Because Loeffelholz also had stanzas as they were printed as two different poems in Johnson's edition, she reads the last lines sent to Vanderbilt, which became the last poem in Johnson, as Dickinson's selfelegy.

20
.
Atlantic Monthly
93 (July 1865): 11.

21
. See Michael Warner's “What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?” for a reading of the way in which “violence” is defined against pastoral in Civil War poetry, specifically in Melville's elegy “Shiloh.”

22
. Compare Dickinson's “Beauty is Nature's fact” to Emerson's line in “The Rhodora” (published almost thirty years before Dickinson's lines were written): “Then beauty is its own excuse for being.” We will return to Emerson's “The Rhodora” in the final chapter, but for now we should note that among the many exchanges that seem to have gone on between these lines, Dickinson's ongoing response to Emerson was one of them.

23
. L 324; Boston Public Library manuscripts 21 and 22.

24
. Habegger, in
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books,
calculates the dog's age, and speculates that the dog may have been named for St. John Rivers's dog in
Jane Eyre
(226), a speculation that would mediate even Dickinson's relationship with her dog through literature.

25
. Dickinson's letter to Higginson in June 1864 is a striking condensation of life, death, and literature: “Are you in danger—I did not know that you were hurt. Will you tell me more? Mr. Hawthorne died” (L 290). For a partial account of Higginson's experiences as the white leader of a group of black soldiers during the war, see his autobiographical account in
Army Life in a Black Regiment.

26
. It was actually Helen Hunt Jackson who was responsible for the publication of the lines that begin “Success is counted sweetest” in what she called a “volume of ‘no name' poetry” in 1878 (
A Masque of Poets,
Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878). A copy of the book was sent to Dickinson either by Jackson or by Roberts Brothers as a matter of course, but Dickinson seems to have considered the book a gift from the publisher himself, so she sent a thank-you note to him, thus initiating a private correspondence. The exchange between Dickinson, Jackson, and Niles is included by Johnson as L 573a, 573b, 573c, and 573d.

27
. It should be said that the intimacy of textual gift exchange does not mean that those gifts do not participate in their own economy, and it would be interesting to speculate along these lines in relation to Marcel Mauss's classic text on cultural economy,
The Gift.
In the context of the exchange with Niles, Dickinson seems to have transgressed his sense of the decorum that separated gift and business exchange when she sent him her own copy of the Brontë sisters' poems (L 813, 813a, 813b).

28
. On the relation between singular objects and commodity forms, see Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things.” For an extended discussion of the relation between “thing theory” in anthropology, art history, political science, and
American literary studies (a discussion I wish I could expand here in more detail), see Bill Brown, “Thing Theory” and
The Sense of Things
.

29
. Austin Warren, “Emily Dickinson,” in Lubbers, ed.,
The Recognition of Emily Dickinson
, 268–86. Warren's response to the 1955 Johnson scholarly edition was nostalgia: “This is not the edition in which to enjoy Emily,” he wistfully remarked. “I recall the pleasure of reading her in the slender gray volumes of the 1890s. For pleasure, as for edification, Emily should not be read in big tomes, or much of her at a time” (269).

30
. Todd's comment is cited by her daughter in
Ancestors' Brocades,
17, in a story Bingham compiles from a number of sources, including the draft of Todd's essay, “Emily Dickinson's Literary Début,” which appeared in
Harper's Magazine
for March 1930, as well as Todd's diaries and their personal conversations. Thus both Todd's account itself—and Bingham's account of it—are intended for both a private and public audience.

31
. In a juicy account of the affair between Dickinson's brother and her editor, Polly Longsworth published letters back and forth between them, from this period and others. Toward the end of September 1883, Todd wrote to Austin asking him to “destroy this,” and commenting, “how the crickets are chirping today” (
Austin and Mabel,
169).

32
. Cited in Longsworth,
Austin and Mabel,
168.

33
. Porter,
Dickinson: The Modern Idiom,
9.

34
. Yvor Winters, “Emily Dickinson and the Limits of Judgment,” in
In Defense of Reason,
283–99.

35
. Notice that the 1891 editorial substitution of “Calls forth” for “arise” in these lines attributes the “canticle” to the season, whereas in the manuscripts its source is left in suspense.

36
. John Crowe Ransom,
The New Criticism.

37
. This is why, as Jonathan Arac points out, “for New Criticism ‘lyric' was not an object of theoretical concern. Allen Tate locates ‘structure' not in ‘genre' but in ‘language.'
The Well Wrought Urn
is about ‘poetry,' not about lyric, and this ‘critical monism' was attacked in
Critics and Criticism
(1952) by R. S. Crane, a Chicago neo-Aristotelian for whom genre was deeply important” (“Afterword: Lyric Poetry and the Bounds of New Criticism,” 352).