ABSTRACT
In a letter written to her close friend and future sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, Emily Dickinson anticipates the challenges that her poetry continues to pose for contemporary feminist critics at the same time that she prefigures important themes that would reappear later in the poetry. Dated II June 1852, when Dickinson was twenty-two and about ten years before she began to produce the body of her poetic work, this letter closes with an important warning to its reader and to Dickinson's readers generally: 1
Emilie-
While the topic of this essay is the relation that appears in Dickinson's poetry between the ideology of domesticity and women's claims to historical agency, I will begin by establishing how a series of issues raised in this letter are relevant to that topic. First, the letter provides all the terms necessary to understand the relationship between Dickinson's situation as a woman writer and her seeming lack of interest in historical and social issues, as attested by her self-enforced seclusion within her father's home. 2 Second, the letter's injunction to "open me carefully" suggests that the perennial debate over Dickinson as "private poet" can be understood in terms of our habits of reading rather than the author's individual eccentricities or any external historical determination of her life's choices. Finally, in its address to another woman, this letter enacts the dynamics of identification between women in the construction of feminine subjectivity. But the letter goes further, to confront dramatically the difficulties women writers face in finding a space, both a social
position and a textual position of enunciation, where women can speak and have their speech legitimated as a historical event.
