Dickinson Unbound

8/12/2019 Dickinson Unbound

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Book Reviews

PAULA BERNAT BENNETT

Alexandra Socarides, Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics. New York: Oxford

UP, 2012. $43.70

Because indeterminacy is foundational to Dickinsons poetic, Robert McClure

Smith writes, the Dickinson poem demands performance from its reader (5).

Among scholars, these performances typically take the form of applying one or

another preferred interpretive method or grid to her workdeconstructive,feminist, Lacanian, etc. (18)the ostensible goal being to unpack the ever-elusive

meanings Dickinson put there. Doing so, literary critics have, Smith argues, become

implicated in the reading afects of the texts they purport to analyze (16), their

conscious and unconscious obsessions and ways of conguring both literature

and life, shapingand re-shapingnot only who Dickinson is but what she

wrote. My Emily Dickinson, as Susan Howe so shrewdly put it. Some of Smiths

gridsin particular the psychoanalytically-oriented oneshave largely lost their

cach today. But the process of self-seduction he describes continues apace, most

strikingly in the study of Dickinsons manuscriptsthat curious arena where the

history of the book meets feminism on the one hand and explication de texte on

the other, to produce what can fairly be called a postmodern Dickinson. For these

interpreters, not only do fragments constitute lyrics but the visuals of Dickinsons

writingsthe curve of a handwrien S or the shape of an envelope apare

equally invested with intentionality and meaning. The page itself reminds me of

a birds wing, light and delicate, enthuses Kristen Kreider of manuscript A449 (84).

In Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics, it is to Alexandra Socaridess

great credit, therefore, that, by moving slowly and deliberately, with due regardfor logic as well as detail, she resists so many of the temptations to which others

have succumbed. Socaridess study takes up where Virginia Jacksons Dickinsons

Misery leaves o. Jackson argues that in reading Dickinson through the model of

the expressive romantic lyric (7)a reading that began with Thomas Wentworth

Higginsontwentieth-century critics have distorted her work, ripping her

poems from their historical context and rendering them temporally self-present

and unmediated (9). To correct such a process of misreading (Jackson calls it

lyricization), she urges a return to the material circumstances of Dickinsonswriting (134). For Socarides, who compares herself to an archaeologist, this


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The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXI, No. 2

suggests a two-pronged approach: Because I am looking at (albeit not unearthing)

objects and . . . discerning what Dickinson did with those objects, I am necessarily

concerned with her . . . intentions (17). For her, as for Jackson, Dickinson is an

emphatically nineteenth-century poet, but also one who, as Socarides brilliantly

demonstrates, radically expanded the possibilities of the literary genres in which

she wrote.

Because Socarides uses her focus on Dickinsons compositional practices so

assiduously to rein in her own subjectivity, her book provides a test case of Jacksons

theory that returning to the manuscripts will not only re-historicize Dickinsons

writing. According to Jackson, it will also end the personif[ying] of the poet in

her verse, be it as isolated private genius, neglected postmodernist, or any

of the dozens of other Dickinsons populating Dickinson scholarship present and

past (171). While Socarides succeeds at the rst, indeed, beer than any Dickinson

scholar with whom I am acquainted, Jackson included, her treatment of the second

is more problematic. Socaridess intention is to enga[ge] Dickinsons poems on

their own terms, probing the details of her process, asking what work her temporal

and spatial interruptions are doing, and aempting to place this work within the

historical and material contexts in which they were wrien (104). To achieve

these goals, she oscillates between what Dickinson does and what she takes to be

Dickinsons intentions in doing so. Socaridess depictions of Dickinsons makingsat all stages of her career are marvelously precise and highly illuminating. But

insofar as her interpretation of the whys rests on her readings of the content of

Dickinsons poems, a content she insists can be matched to the paper on which

the poems are wrien, they are much more speculative, and proportionately less

likely to persuade.

Stripping Dickinson Unbound to its core (which omits the two most powerful

chapters in the book, that on Dickinsons epistolary practices, and that on her

handling of the elegy), Socaridess study lays out the trajectory of Dickinsonscareer. This trajectory, which moves in rough chronological order from fascicles

to loose sheets (Socarides rightly rejects the term sets), to late fragments,

describes an entropic arc from order to disorder. As Socarides depicts it, this last

statethat of disorderis the logical culmination of the themes of disruption and

resistance to endings to which she believes much of Dickinsons poetry is devoted,

and she eloquently defends it. In Dickinsons ways of making poems as in her

handling of generic conventions (the last is the subject of the two chapters that

exist independently from the arc), Socarides describes a poet who is a deliberate

craswoman, one who paid continued and painstaking aention to the problems


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Book Reviews

of closure, relation, order, and logic that writing requires (34); a Dickinson, that

is, in many respects not unlike Socarides herself.

Socarides wants to show how reinserting Dickinsons poems withintheir original (manuscript) context produces richer texts, and she brilliantly

manages this aspect of her stated mission. Be the poem a constituent of a

fascicle, accompanyingor blended intoa leer, grouped with others like itself

in loose sheets, or wrien on the back of some random envelope, it cannot be

separated from its original manuscript context without being, in Jacksons words,

lyricized (and diminished). But insofar as Socarides bases her reading of the arc

of Dickinsons career on the relationship between container (manuscript/paper)

and thing contained (the poems themselves), she oen seems to write out of her

own desire. To take but one example, granted that the late poems are dras, not

fair copies, one can without much diculty nd many that appear to endorse

closurepoems such as Abraham to kill him (Fr1332), Of Paradise existence

(Fr1421), and Heavenly Father - take to thee (Fr1500)just as one can nd

numerous early poems that reject closure, as Socarides herself cedes. In seing

up the narrative of Dickinsons career as she does, Socarides not only imposes a

teleological paradigm on Dickinsons work, she also limits in the process what she

could say about the poems she selects to discuss. This is, I suspect, why the two

chapters that stand outside the narrative arc are so much more successful. Theyrepresent Socarides unbound, and Socarides unbound is an extremely gied and

nuanced reader.

Finally, the story Dickinson Unbound tells is as much about how Alexandra

Socarides came to conceptualize Dickinson as about Dickinson herself. That is,

it is a story of seduction. It is a thoughtful and oen illuminating story because

Socarides is a thoughtful and illuminating scholar, but who Emily Dickinson is,

and why she wrote what she wrote the way she wrote it, remains as elusive as

ever. In making the poets story her own, Socarides did no more than what mostDickinson scholars do. As Smith points out, the Emily Dickinson I fashioned in

Emily Dickinson: Woman Poetis the one I saw through the lens of my own passion.

In identifying Dickinson with the much vexed gure of the nineteenth-century

poetessa soubriquet Dickinson herself never usedJackson did the same. Part

of Dickinsons greatness lies in the way she serves as a Rorschach for her readers

obsessions, and it is a good bet that the number of Emily Dickinsons will only

grow in the years to come, which for the future of Dickinson Studies everywhere

is just as well.


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Contributors

com), and serves the City of Pacic Grove (CA) and the Lilly Conference as Poet in

Residence, and UCLA as Visiting Scholar.

SUZANNE JUHASZ is Professor Emerita of English at the University of

Colorado, Boulder. She is a founding member of EDISand the Founding Editor

of theEmily Dickinson Journal. Her work on Dickinson includes The Undiscovered

Continent: Emily Dickinson and the Space of the Mind (1983); Comic Power in Emily

Dickinson (with Cristanne Miller and Martha Nell Smith, 1993); and, as editor,

Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson (1983). Recent articles are The Irresistible

Lure of Repetition and Dickinsons Poetry of Analogy and The Amplitude of

Queer Desire in Dickinsons Erotic Language.

PETER SCHMITT is the winner of the 2012 Julia Peterkin Prize in Poetry from

Converse College, and the author of ve collections of poems, including Renewing

the Vows (2007). Since 1986, he has taught literature and creative writing at The

University of Miami.

MARIANNE NOBLE is Associate Professor of Literature at American University.

She is the author of The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (2000) and

numerous articles on Dickinson, Stowe, the gothic, and sentimentalism. She

is currently writing a book entitled Sympathetic Dialogue and the Quest for

Genuine Human Contact in American Romantic Literature, with chapters on

Stowe, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Whitman, and Douglass. She is co-editing with

Gary Stonum a collection of essays forthcoming from Cambridge UP in 2013

entitled Emily Dickinson and Philosophy.

TIM MORRIS is Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington. He

is the author of Youre Only Young Twice: Childrens Literature and Film(2000);Making

the Team: The Cultural Work of Baseball Fiction (1997); and Becoming Canonical

in American Poetry (1995). Recent articles and book chapters are The Friendly

Connes of Prose: Chicago Cubs in Fiction (2008); Shiloh in Fiction (2008); and

Auntie Gus Felled It New(2008). He is the owner of the DICKNSON list.

PAULA BERNAT BENNETT is Professor Emerita, Southern Illinois University,

Carbondale. She is the author of Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet (1990)and Poets in the

Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Womens Poetry, 1800-1900 (2003).

With Karen Kilcup and Philipp Schweighauser, she edited Teaching Nineteenth-

Century American Poetry (2007)in the MLA Options for Teaching series. Her essay,

Fascicle 16 in a Civil War Context will be coming out in Dickinsons Fascicles: A

Spectrum of Possibilities,edited by Eleanor Elson Heginbotham and Paul Crumbley.


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Dickinson Unbound