Dickinson's Misery (49 page)

22
. The questions that Arnold and the reading of Arnold raise for the interpretation of the lyric would be interesting to place into the context of Amanda Anderson's discussion of the nineteenth-century geneology of an idealized double cultural investment and detachment in
The Powers of Distance,
though the lyric as a genre is not her concern there.

23
. Rufus W. Griswold, ed.,
The Female Poets of America,
4.

24
. In Willis J. Buckingham,
Emily Dickinson's Reception in the 1890s,
64.

25
. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Sappho,” first published in the
Atlantic Monthly
(1871) and reprinted in
Atlantic Essays
(324). The German phrase, as I noted in chapter three, is from Goethe's
Faust
, though Higginson (or his publisher?) inadvertently changed Goethe's
Das-ewig
to
Die ewige.

26
. Karen Sanchez-Eppler,
Touching Liberty,
2.

27
. Ibid., 12.

28
. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
The Madwoman in the Attic,
628.

29
. Again, my claim here about Dickinson's embodiment of the hermeneutics of the genre should be distinguished from Sharon Cameron's argument in
Lyric Time
to the effect that Dickinson's poems “attempt to reverse” time and so throw “into relief the shape of the lyric struggle itself” (260). My comments are meant to indicate Dickinson's struggle with and against the lyric genre and not, as Cameron's are meant to do, to reaffirm her hyperbolic representation or personification of it.

30
. Oakes Smith's “The Poet” does not appear in the 1846 collection of her poems,
The Poetical Writings of Elizabeth Oakes Smith
but it is included in Griswold's
Female Poets of America
in 1848 (194). Griswold also wrote the preface to Oakes Smith's 1846 edition, praising her poems for “a power far above mere
intellectuality.
” One might speculate that it is precisely that sort of reception that informs the power ascribed to the nightingale in “The Poet.”

31
. Elizabeth Oakes Smith,
Woman and Her Needs,
12.

32
. On what becomes of the interpretation of Oakes Smith's figure of the poetess, see Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “Lyrical Studies.” Eliza Richards's
Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe's Circle
gives the best reading of Oakes Smith that that writer has yet received.

33
. This sentence is a necessarily reductive version of Michel Foucault's thesis in
The Order of Things
that before the seventeenth century, “being and representation found their common locus” in the parallelism of a complete taxonomical language (312). After the seventeenth century, in which Foucault locates the emergence of “man,” the problems of disorigination and reflexivity constitute the modern condition of knowing. Although the thesis is considerably complicated in
The History of Sexuality,
as several critics of Foucault have pointed out, it takes into account the rise of the concept of “man” while inadequately addressing the epistemology of
“woman” in modern discourse. Nineteenth-century sentimentalism might serve as one place to begin inflecting differently the Foucauldian paradigm.

34
. In his extraordinary reading of Marvell's poem, Francis Barker aligns it specifically with the emergence of the modern episteme charted by Foucault, tracing “a reductive subjugation of the body” that is “practised vengefully in Marvell's lyric” on the dissected anatomy of the woman he loves. See Francis Barker,
The Tremulous Private Body,
73–94.

35
. I am suggesting here that nineteenth-century sentimental lyric reading does not just “pass” or become outmoded, but leads directly to twentieth-century lyric reading. For the precedent shift in the reading of sentimental personification from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, see Steven Knapp,
Personification and the Sublime.

36
. The nightingale is missing from the copy of
The New England Primer
in the Dickinson collection at the Houghton Library (an edition published in Hartford by Ira Webster, 1843).

37
. Patricia Crain,
The Story of A,
52. The longer story that Crain tells about the European sources for the
Primer
explains what nightingales are doing as illustrations for
N
in New England.

38
. Susan's letter is included in OC, 101, and was also cited by Leyda,
The Years and Hours,
2:38.

39
. Martha Nell Smith, “The Poet as Cartoonist,” in Juhasz, Miller, and Smith, eds.,
Comic Power in Emily Dickinson,
74.

40
. Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” in
The Rhetoric of Romanticism,
241.

41
. Emerson, “The Rhodora,” (first published, 1839) in John Hollander, ed.,
American Poetry,
1:272.

42
. Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home,” (1975), 174; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
Madwoman in the Attic,
610. While Sharon Cameron did not align her extended reading of “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—” with Rich and feminist criticism, her understanding of the poem as “a dialectic of rage” that is “heroic” in “its refusal to choose” between conflicting identities has similarly utopian consequences (
Lyric Time,
55–90).

43
. Judith Butler,
Bodies that Matter,
188.

C
ONCLUSION

1
. T. J. Clark,
Farewell to an Idea,
401.

2
. Johnson published the lines as a “Prose Fragment” at the end of his three-volume edition of the
Letters,
925, in 1958; Leyda did not publish his documentary history of Dickinson until 1960. The first publication of the lines was in
New England Quarterly
in 1955 in Bingham's “Prose Fragments of Emily Dickinson.”

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