ABSTRACT
On April 16, 1862, Thomas Higginson received a letter from a then unknown poet. The letter lacked a signature. But the sender
Far from being a sign of shyness, Emily Dickinson’s decision to leave her autograph on a separate note may be interpreted as a professional strategy, eerily pointing to the practice of her relatives and editors to, as Martha Nell Smith notes, tear her signature away from letters after her death, thus giving away autographs of the author (Rowing 148). Dickinson created an interpretive framework by thus supplying her name-indicating that she knew that she was a writer of importance and more boldly, that she wanted to be recognized as such. A person’s name is not a simple affair, as J. Hillis Miller reminds us in “The Critic as Host.” Weaving the notion of the name into a discussion of (inter)textual instability Miller asks, “Who, however, is ‘Shelley’? To what does this word refer if any work signed with this name has no identifiable borders, and no interior walls either? It has no edges because it has been invaded from all sides as well as from within by other ‘names,’ other powers of writing” (243). In this study I want to consider in more detail how it is that a name, an author’s name, may in this way be understood as an effect or production of various discourses. The name Emily Dickinson does not so much refer to the biographical person as to what (many things)
has come to fill a certain author-function. To a greater extent than many other canonical writers, ‘Emily Dickinson’ is certainly an (inter)text that has been invaded in a similar fashion on all sides by “other ‘names,’ other powers of writing.” The name ‘Emily Dickinson’ is a text and, more so, this text is set in continual re-reading and hence re-writing, by every reader. Susan Howe has perhaps most explicitly theorized this problematic status of the proper name in the very title of her book on Dickinson, MY Emily Dickinson. Howe’s self-conscious appropriation of an author’s name acknowledges-in fact, announces-that such re-readings, as subjective versions, are all we can ever aspire to: there can be no definitive Emily Dickinson. Nevertheless, Howe’s title also makes clear that there is a possessive need, a desire, to appropriate, to make sense: and hence we produce ‘our’ specific ‘Shelleys,’ ‘our’ specific ‘Dickinsons.’ This study engages such critical productions of ‘Emily Dickinson’ in the twentieth century. More precisely, it examines what I take to be particularly anxious stages of producing the Dickinson text for publication and critical periods in which the production of ‘Emily Dickinson’ because of these editorial queries has been seen as particularly problematic. That is, this study analyzes specific periods of Dickinson studies for which the status of the texts of Dickinson, and the editorial questions related to the editing of those texts as works, have been articulated as problematic. There are so many versions of ‘Emily Dickinson’ available that the critic who wants to ‘figure her out’ finds herself wandering through a maze of different and differing voices. Fully aware of this situation, this study does not attempt to figure Dickinson out. Rather, ‘Emily Dickinson’ is treated as an intertextual constellation of editorial and critical narratives. This is not to deny that there are historical facts but each critic must choose to interpret those ‘facts’ according to their own desires, aims, and theses. As poststructuralist critiques of essentialism suggest, a life story can never be more than another construction, another critical imagination. ‘Emily Dickinson,’ then, is understood here as a weave of editorial and critical narratives. But then, again, if that point is settled, it is, indeed, such critical imaginations that must be the ‘stuff ’ that makes the kind of criticism literary scholars pursue meaningful in the first place. This is true for both literary criticism and textual criticism. Hence authors are given a certain stability, a certain biographical groundedness; hence texts are established as works if ever so tentatively. Needless to say, we must continue to tell stories of authors and texts, because such stories are what keep them alive, keep them within our archives of the past that also shape our future. So in different ways we continue to write about Emily Dickinson as the person who lived in Amherst and we continue to read her letters and poems as artistic
textual productions. But we need also to consider how Emily Dickinson and her work are produced through our readings of her through the archive of editorial representations and critical interpretations of her.
