Review Essay: An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia

Abstract

Reviewed by: An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia Barton Levi St.Armand (bio) An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia. Edited by Jane Donahue Eberwein. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1998. 395 pp. Ever since Samuel Johnson included some snappy, pointed, and what today we might call patently ideological entries in his famous 1755 Dictionary, we expect our best reference works to be not only authoritative and informative, but engaging and enticing, with a narrative personality of their own. Jane Donahue Eberwein’s Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia is just such a production, because even though it remains a communal effort, drawing on an international range of outstanding Dickinson scholars, it still creates a unified impression. In reading it we have the sense of conversing with a learned and witty Dickinsonian polymath who ushers us gracefully yet firmly through the labyrinths of all levels and classes of Dickinson studies, a compound visionary scholar who instructs us with a boldness that sometimes has an unbuttoned freedom of expression that itself is rather Johnsonian. Let me call this fanciful and androgynous figure by the familiar name of “Cyclo”— no harmless drudge, to be sure, but a sensitive sifter of opinion as well as of fact: myriad-minded enough to serve sometimes as editor, sometimes as critic, sometimes as historian, and sometimes as muse. Speaking through the heteronym of “Jonathan Morse” in a magisterial entry on “Biographical Scholarship,” Cyclo the Fair-minded acknowledges, for example, that “Since the late l970’s, feminist rereadings of the biography have helped us to conceive of a Dickinson less fey than we once imagined, more at home in a world of women whose voices we had barely heard before” (22). At the same time Cyclo the Well-read warns us that “Susan Howe’s narcissistic equation of textual analysis with autobiography . . . carries the readerly act of identification with the text to its excitingly fanatical extreme.” And finally Cyclo the Wise sanitively concludes that “What remains from a century of biographical scholarship is perhaps only the somehow satisfying news that the life of Emily Dickinson remains definitively unknown.” This kind of sprightly summation would have appealed to Dickinson herself, who in her game of tag with Fame and of hide- and go-seek with Biography dropped more than a few arch and acerbic comments about near [End Page 112] neighbors and close contemporaries — particularly professors with the soft emptiness of “cloth pinks.” There are no such artificial blooms here, however, though there are Cyclonic entries on flowers, insects, and birds, as well as very substantial readings of major poems. Key concepts like “Ambiguity” are highlighted, and Cyclo the Cybernetic allows us to build our own chat rooms within the site of the Encyclopedia’s ever expanding web as we are deftly referred to thematically affiliated entries. Like Dickinson herself in her famous “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (P216), we can stay on the ground of “The Grave” (128) firmly located in a “Connecticut Valley” (54–55), the ethos of which owed a great deal to both “Jonathan Edwards” (95–6) and “Edward Hitchcock “(143–4). Or we can move to a second stanza that takes us directly into “Nature” (205–6), “Romanticism” (251), “Gothicism” (127–8), and “Sentimentalism” (262–263). Or, responding to the heartfelt urgings of interested friends and scholarly relatives, we might fabricate a third possibility that spirals into the more cosmic reaches of “Circle Imagery” (45), “Science” (259), “Time”(287) and “Immortality” (159–160). In this way Cyclo stimulates us to progress to the meta and the mega without ever losing sight of the minute particular, for the Dickinson Encyclopedia provides us with zoom lenses and traveling shots that continually sweep us up and along while still retaining precision of detail and clarity of focus. We may begin by looking for short subjects, but we end up staying for double and triple features done in expansive letter box format. In each entry we are expertly guided to relevant books and essays listed in a very up-to-date bibliography, and if we don’t find what we should be looking for under one heading, we inevitably find it in another. Therefore while I did not see Hyatt Waggoner’s scholarship mentioned in the...