ABSTRACT
The conventional view of Emily Dickinson as Maid of Amherst-virginal, pure, and sentimental-was promoted by her playacting a public pose; she was producer, director, and actor for “Emily Dickinson.” The only daguerreotype of her, taken when she was seventeen, reveals a schoolmarmish face with a discreet velvet ribbon clasped by an amulet around her neck. That Emily provoked many admirers to invent their own private Emily as, say, guardian of proper New England values or, say, quaint quirkiness. One critic, a poet, went so far as to write a book entitled My Emily Dickinson (Howe, 1985). To add to the convention (conventions born in shades and graves), “Emily Dickinson” only published ten poems in her lifetime. The other thousand-plus poems, hidden in a locked chest that contained forty hand-sewn albums, never saw the light of day. She kept her erotic life to herself. More, she kept her erotic life hidden inside locked poems that even today are not easily opened. But, far from being one who feared the pulp of living, the poems of Emily Dickinson purges convention of deadness; for not only does her language refuse dead metaphors, they shun conventionalities that “talk of Hallowed things, aloud-and embarrass my Dog” (in Benfey, 1999, p. 44).
