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Material things and expressive signs: The language of Emily Dickinson in her social and physical context
Abstract
On April 15, 1862, Emily Dickinson asked Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the Atlantic Monthly to confirm her impression that her verse was alive. Both her letter, which turned on the figure of a breathing body, and her enclosed poems, which served as samples of her living artifacts, presented Dickinson as a maker of verse and a remaker of human sentience. The context out of which her sense of language arose was local networks of exchange among kin, neighbors, and friends who had some connection to Amherst. This social economy of white, middle-class women involved exchanges of living artifacts from one household to another: food, stitched items, texts, flowers. The practice of trading handmade, material things that engaged Dickinson throughout her lifetime alters the perception of her as a recluse who isolated herself from others in order to develop her genius alone. Her linguistic choices and her indirect style are derived in part, from her social practice. So are several values espoused in her poetry: goods, not cash; unique artistry, not mass production; personal interaction, not the literary marketplace. The exchange of floral gifts reflected wider cultural practices of white, middle-class women: identifying flowers and sending messages through them. These "feminine" conventions offered Dickinson more than a temporary blurring of science and sentiment which was "corrected" by Charles Darwin in 1859: they freed her from some of the sexist constructions of nature dominant in her time. Her floral imagery resists the teeth and claws of Darwinian survival and the classifications of botanists. Science and religion emerge in her poetry as authorities proferring "instructive utterances" that require misreading. Her grounds for misreading include her experience with the Amherst landscape and her own body. Her various strands of earth, garden, and body imagery demonstrate how central the speaking body was to her art. By ignoring literature about diseased women's bodies and constructing gardens as primarily positive space, Dickinson found the means to let her body speak. Although speaking physical, sexual, and poetic fulness was difficult for Dickinson, she made verses that expressed the body's potential and touched others with their breath.
Subject Area
American literature|Womens studies
Recommended Citation
Cadman, Deborah Ann, "Material things and expressive signs: The language of Emily Dickinson in her social and physical context" (1991). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9207371.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9207371