“Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture by Sandra Runzo

Abstract

Reviewed by: “Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture by Sandra Runzo Elizabeth Hewitt “Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century American Popular Culture. By Sandra Runzo. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. viii + 255 pp. $27.95. With the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson is the American artist most beloved and fetishized by contemporary popular culture. Her image and poetry are emblazoned on countless T-shirts, tote bags, and necklaces. Her life has been reimagined in novels, plays, movies, and recently in the Apple TV+ television series Dickinson. That show, and other recent biographical films about Dickinson, have set out to transform the old stereotype of the poet as a frigid hermit into a passionate and vibrant member of her community. This rewriting has also been the central project of Dickinson scholarship over the last three decades, and Sandra Runzo’s work is a crucial part of this endeavor. “Theatricals of Day” constitutes a major project to document Dickinson’s consumption of “popular entertainments of her time” and to calibrate how this popular media manifested itself in her poetry (1). Runzo begins with P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, focusing particularly on the exhibits Barnum marketed as “What Is It?” She calls particular attention to Joice Heth, the supposedly 161-year-old enslaved woman and nursemaid to George Washington, and to William Henry Johnson, the man Barnum marketed [End Page 172] as a cross between human and orangutan. Runzo does not claim that we find allusions to either Heth or Johnson specifically but suggests instead that Dickinson’s poetry resembles the circus by exhibiting a range of personae and experiences that challenge easy classification. Her verse presents “spectacle and conundrum” (26). But unlike Barnum, Dickinson does not exploit these ambiguous identities through her poetry—she identifies with them and “explore[s] her affiliation with the alien and fantastical” (44). Runzo follows a similar kind of analogic analysis in the next three chapters. She argues that we can see evidence of Dickinson’s appreciation for the Hutchinson Family Singers, an extremely popular antebellum singing group, not only because she owned sheet music of their songs but also because of other kinds of thematic affinities: “prominent references to graves, liberty, captivity, diminutiveness, desolation, yearning, and betrayal” (55). Similarly, the influence of minstrel songs on Dickinson is indicated by the elements of minstrelsy—song, dance, masquerade, riddles, satire—found in abundance in her poetry. And we can see the importance of Harriet Prescott Spofford’s short story “Circumstance” by observing the frequency with which Dickinson’s poetry narrates stories of crisis similar to that in Spofford’s tale: “a speaker encounters a demon, a monster, a goblin, a ghost . . . [and] the ghastly and the familiar live side-by-side” (127–28). Runzo meticulously works through Dickinson’s corpus to identify what is indisputably true: Dickinson’s poetry is laced with allusions to popular entertainments. But I did find myself less persuaded by some of the more sweeping claims made by the book, which threaten an overdetermined reading of the very influences Runzo skillfully uncovers. She certainly proves that the Hutchinson Family Singers influenced Dickinson’s work, but I am less persuaded that what Dickinson appreciated about their music was the “rebellious energy” and “threat of tumult” (63). While I appreciate Runzo’s desire to push back against scholarship that reads Dickinson’s poetry as racist or apolitical, the fact that Dickinson owned sheet music by the Hutchinsons does not, for me, “evince [Dickinson’s] interest in the musical voices of the abolitionist movement” (68). They were extremely popular musicians, so it is not surprising that an avid sheet music collector like Dickinson would own their music. And, as Runzo says, her collection did not include the Hutchinson’s most celebrated abolitionist song, “Get Off the Track.” Runzo argues on behalf of Dickinson’s anti-racism because she owns sheet music for “Old Dan Tucker” and several other antebellum minstrelsy songs. I am unsure why, however, Runzo reads Dickinson’s ownership of the Hutchinson sheet music as approbation of their reformist politics but offers a very different account of Dickinson’s ownership of minstrel music...