Emily Dickinson's Manuscript Body: History/Textuality/Gender

Abstract

Emily Dickinson’s Manuscript Body: History / Textuality / Gender Shira Wolosky (bio) It is difficult not to find admirable the new Franklin edition of Poems of Emily Dickinson. Its scholarship is meticulous, painstaking, thorough, devoted, exhaustive, and persevering. It assembles what can be assembled to date regarding variant versions, manuscript papers, writing implements, word, line and page design, chronology and fascicle groupings, and the epistolary and publication histories of Dickinson’s poetry. Especially exciting is the drama of Dickinson at work, as traced in the “Introduction.” This gives a vivid and focussed sense of Dickinson in the processes of composition. The track of her worksheets, intermediate drafts, and copies sent, retained, revised, and recorded tells an implicit story of her growing and changing senses of herself as poet. 1 Her utter seriousness and devotion to craft come forcefully to view. Yet this edition is as significant in what it does not accomplish as in what it does. The book highlights, but does not and cannot settle, what has become an increasing conundrum of Dickinson studies: the question of what a Dickinson poem even is. What constitutes the Dickinson text as an object of study? Beyond this, and, to me, more pressing still, the new edition — its formats and investments — poses questions regarding the contexts for reading Dickinson: the ways of situating her; the relationships of Dickinson poems to each other and to the discourses, norms, and events that surround her — including women’s culture and nineteenth-century American culture generally; the directions her work may be felt to point toward and the issues it is felt to raise; the interpretive frameworks for construing her very language. Franklin’s edition underscores how manuscript work may suggest approaches to these questions but does not in itself constitute answers. Franklin’s edition provides an invaluable tool for Dickinson scholars, with its careful descriptions of manuscript features, its new assessments of epistolary records and chronologies, its attention to the varied forms in which [End Page 87] Dickinson’s writing took shape as drafts, letters, fair copies, fascicles, and sets. Yet the new Franklin edition does not accomplish a dramatic revolution in our image of the Dickinson text. Franklin’s new Dickinson poems, as Cristanne Miller observes, look (un)startlingly like Thomas Johnson’s old ones. There are, to be sure, important differences between the two. Most striking are the changes in the sequence and numbering of the poems. Some texts are thoroughly reedited. Poems are added, recombined, redivided, excluded. There are new assessments of dates of composition, and the overall count of poems is altered. Still, Franklin does not recast the fundamental sense or appearance of Dickinson’s texts. Word variants are set at the foot of the poem, line and page-breaks are indicated through editorial notation, stanza norms are kept. The introduction of italicized “titles” in some sense brings Dickinson still closer to a traditional format, and still farther from her own practices. This new edition, that is, lacks the dramatic impact of the earlier Franklin Manuscript Books, with its facsimiles of Dickinson’s own writing, organized according to her fascicles and sets. In holograph, the variants appear in all their gripping unfinish. The lines break as Dickinson has them do, running off or away with the paper. The changes in handwriting size and style are there to behold. Certainly the limitations of print-format intrude here. But other manuscript-printings — say, Valerie Eliot’s facsimile edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land — succeed in presenting the crossings-out, overwritings, marginalia, annotations, and markings directly onto the printed page. 2 Here, the distance between the description and the visual object is very great. One must reconstruct the manuscript-image out of the written instructions. The excitement of imagining Dickinson imagining variants and feeling their jostling for poetic space must take place in the reader’s mind, rather than being witnessed on the page, as was the case in the Johnson edition as well. Neither does Franklin’s newly proposed re-ordering of poems finally settle questions of chronology, nor of how much one is able to make use of them in interpretation. Franklin himself is careful to explain that a poem...