ABSTRACT
Edith Wylder offered one of the first significant arguments about Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts as bibliographically meaningful. Writing in 1971 she suggests that the manuscripts’ punctuation in fact serves as logical rhetorical markers, with the function of directing the reading of the poem. With ‘reading’ Wylder does not mean ‘declaiming’ or even ‘reading aloud’ but rather the articulation of the ‘tone’ of the poem, in the reader’s mind’s ear. Such ‘tone’ is an abstraction of the mind’s ear rather than a description of real, actual speech. Arguing that Emily Dickinson’s punctuation should be understood to be part of the poet’s “attempt to create in written form the precision of meaning inherent in the tone of the human voice” Wylder betrays a belief that a ‘tone’ can be ascribed a specific ‘meaning’ (4). However conditioned this argument is by an assumption that ‘tone’ is indeed easily deduced and classified, which we might want to question, Wylder offers an interesting theory of the manuscript punctuation as precisely a visual “poetic device” rather than a direction for the articulation of “actual speech” (5) 1 Wylder that is, hints at a method of reading Emily Dickinson’s work silently, as written text (albeit conditioned by voice, human speech). This theoretical distinction between actual and ‘abstract’ speech is important: it directs the reader’s attention to the visual surfaces of the text, and points in direct ways to the manuscript criticism which is the subject of this chapter. 2
This chapter explores how the current scene of reading Emily Dickinson as experimental manuscript poet has developed by way of an analysis of the editorial debates that first spawned this particular construction of the poet. The perception of Emily Dickinson examined here depends on a formulation of her poetics as based in the handwritten word and a reconsideration of her relationship to ‘publication.’ The development of the idea of Emily Dickinson as manuscript poet grew out of the publication of R. W. Franklin’s important facsimile edition of the poet’s ‘manuscript books’ in 1981. This edition has triggered a serious ‘editorial turn’ in Dickinson studies. As an exclusive edition in itself, bound in sober brown and gold, this edition calls attention both to itself (as precisely exclusive) and to the texts it ‘contains’ as unique handwritten artifacts, indeed worthy of the high production costs involved in producing such a set of books. In intriguing ways, this edition spurred both a serious interest in Emily Dickinson’s handwriting and a serious renewed interest in the editorial strategies of ‘packaging,’ which also means ‘producing’ (because it so blatantly does just that, package Dickinson as a commodity) this poet and her work.
