Ancient Brooch and Loaded Gun: Dickinson's Lively Objects

Abstract

Ancient Brooch and Loaded Gun:Dickinson's Lively Objects Michelle Kohler (bio) Reflecting the recent nonhuman turn in literary studies, scholars have increasingly investigated Emily Dickinson's representations of animals, plants, and elements, her herbarium, her interest in science, and her modes of attention to the natural world.1 Also central to this nonhuman turn has been a new kind of attention to the material objects that comprise her manuscripts and writing practices: envelopes and shopping lists, paper and thread, leaves and crickets, even her pockets and desk. While scholars have long aimed to understand what Dickinson means by using such objects, critics have more recently intimated that these objects exert some kind of material pressure on Dickinson that eludes her control. When Alexandra Socarides, for example, argues that Dickinson's paper "by its very nature interrupts her process" or that the "poems are often made possible, or are even dictated, by the materials themselves," she implicitly asks us to think not about Dickinson's intentions for her manuscripts, as some scholars have done, but about objects exerting a lively force of their own that precisely exceeds the human writer's intention.2 In The Gorgeous Nothings (2012), Marta Werner and Jen Bervin present images of the cut envelopes on which Dickinson composed, asking us to see Dickinson "responding [End Page 227] to her materials."3 Their volume enables us to see these envelope poems as discrete objects, as gorgeous things—objects that are right there for us (indeed, the photographs are so high-resolution they invite us to lift each envelope off the page)—but also as nonhuman things that are recalcitrant and strange, that do not yield to our habitual uses. A long history of manuscript studies in Dickinson scholarship informs these ways of thinking, but they are also implicitly informed by a more recent interest in the humanities and social sciences toward theorizing the force and ontology of nonhuman objects. This nonhuman turn asks us to reconsider our assumptions about the centrality of human agency and intention and to find instead that the human is one player among many, caught up in material interactions composed of many kinds of agency, both sentient and nonsentient. A deeper consideration of Dickinson in this context has wide-ranging implications, posing new ways of thinking about many of the objects that are crucial to our reading of her poems and letters: not only paper, pencil, and dead cricket, but also clock, window, staircase, train, bullet, and gun. In this essay, I explore some ways we find Dickinson herself thinking about the activity of nonhuman, nonsentient objects, particularly during the early 1860s amid rapid technological advances and the violence of the civil War. The poems and letters I study imagine various kinds of encounters between humans and such objects, as Dickinson explores these objects' autonomous being. These encounters sideline human agency and causality, instead regarding inert matter as having a vibrant, forceful existence that is not delimited by the ways humans use it or set it in motion. We find here a Dickinson deeply curious about the world of nonsentient things and the ways these things exist, grow, change, invade, interact, and destroy when humans are not looking at them or using them. These texts artistically consider what kind of ontological existence these things have when they exist apart from us. how do they occupy space? How does this separate [End Page 228] ontology precede or follow our interactions with them? How does it shape whatever force they might then exert upon us or whatever force we might exert upon them? This essay begins by reading "I know some lonely Houses off the Road" (Fr311) to introduce Dickinson's engagement with these ways of thinking about objects and then considers several instantiations of that most famous of her objects, the loaded gun. The essay concludes by suggesting how we might enrich our approaches to her manuscripts within this framework. To trace the nuances of Dickinson's moves as she thinks about things like clocks, trains, and guns, I draw on some competing twenty-first-century theories of matter and objects, but I will not be concerned primarily with theoretical consistency; my contention...