My book, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820-1885, examines how literature and culture interrelate in the American Renaissance (Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1998).
Book Abstract
Fully immersed in the culture of nineteenth-century America, Emily Dickinson experimented with a wide range of poetic, prosaic, and artistic genres. Enriching the poetic vocabulary of her age and questioning the doctrines that circumscribed woman's place, she breaks the stereotyped images of the spinster aunt, the torch-burning lover, and the teary-eyed poetess. Despite her visionary qualities as a poet, she was saturated in the nineteenth-century themes of death, denial, and abnegation of love. Examined against the work of popular poets, including Lydia Sigourney, Helen Hunt Jackson, Louisa May Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, and Frances Sargent Osgood, Dickinson rejected in her more radical lyrics what I call the "limits of expression"-the prescribed topics and modes of speaking authorized for women by editors and critics. Rejecting the sentimentality with which many women's works are imbued, she mines the duplicity of the female writer's position in her poetry and in her relations with family and friends in order to undercut a range of popular pieties about death and the afterlife, marriage and motherhood, and the power and function of consolatory verse. My book recontextualizes Dickinson's poetry within three understudied areas: nineteenth-century publishing standards and the literary marketplace, the elegy and the "cult of death," and popular cultural discourses that even more closely suggest parallels among women writers, such as the language of flowers, which sought to "naturalize" conventional associations concerning men and women. Within seven chapters and three sections, each of them focussed on a single or several female poets and Dickinson, I reconstruct the literary culture of nineteenth-century America and draw on a neglected tradition of female poets who are only now being recovered for their intrinsic value and the light they shed on more canonical authors.
"'Feet so precious charged': Dickinson, Sigourney, and the Child Elegy," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 13.2 (Fall 1994): 317-38.
Abstract
Like many popular nineteenth-century infant elegists, Dickinson in her letters and poems idealized children as pious exemplars, yet she was uncertain whether their early deaths offered proof of an afterlife. Like her contemporaries, she extols the dying child as a spiritual guardian, an infant-prophet whose closeness to death makes him peculiarly able to preach to adults. But rather than dwell on an imagined prescience that forms part of his short but spiritually exemplary life, she claims that whatever knowledge of an afterlife the child may gain dies with him. In adopting the naive accents of a child, Dickinson affirmed the spiritual prescience of children, who were commonly believed to be closer to the mystery of life because of their innocence and youth. Yet she parted company with sentimental elegists, who never offered the child equal time with its parents as a speaker. Dickinson's appropriation of the myth of a post-mortem reunion allowed her aptly to convey her own frustrations as an outsider, whose questions concerning death and the afterlife were destined to remain unanswered.
"'Silent Eloquence': The Social Codification of Floral Metaphors in the Poems of Emily Dickinson and Frances Sargent Osgood," Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 15 (1998): 139-57.
Abstract
"Let me thank the little Cousin in flowers, which without lips, have language--" wrote Emily Dickinson to Eugenia Hall in 1885 (L 1002). For Dickinson, as for her contemporaries, flowers were repositories of cultural meaning and communicated emotions privately. During the 1840s and 1850s, popular female writers were adding to a growing fund of literature: the language of flowers. In a century when public speech about sexuality was not acceptable for men or women, floral imagery conveyed sexuality and allowed women more freedom of expression than had been previously available. In contrast to the modern tendency to view gender identity in the last century as either an expression of compulsory heterosexuality or covert homosexuality, nineteenth-century writers embraced a wide spectrum of sexual behaviors, so long as they were mediated through covert yet thoroughly understood discourses, like the langauge of flowers. As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg notes, a "female world of love and ritual," where women affirmed their bonds through friendships and the rites surrounding death and marriage and expressed erotic feelings for each other, coexisted with marriage and family life. Precisely because women's relationships were not closely examined or thought to be sexual, a range of emotional bonds--from heterosexual to homosexual to bisexual--were open to them in nineteenth-century America.
In this essay, I examine the culture of flowers in nineteenth-century America and two extraordinary poets, Frances Sargent Osgood and Emily Dickinson, who wield this genre in their floral poems. Drawing on the language of flowers and plants, these poets adapted floral rhetoric as a means to convey emotions and mediated passion through a rhetoric of "silent eloquence"--a language of gesture that implied meaning through a series of codes rather than through overt statement. I take this phrase from Osgood, who penned her own floral dictionaries, for it embodies the langauge of gesture through which women communicated feelings unacceptable to a reading public to each other without reserve and staked out new emotional territory for themselves. Like Osgood, Dickinson draws on common associations about flowers in order to undercut the tradition of romantic courtship, but whereas Osgood often takes an openly sympathetic view of a woman's fate, Dickinson exults in silence, secrets, and deferral of meaning, rather than its overt expression.
"'Alabaster Chambers': Representations of Death and Mourning in the Poems of Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century American Elegies"
Abstract
For many nineteenth-century artists, heaven was a geographical locale they depicted in novels, paintings, and poetry. Not only was the Victorian cemetery the earthly repository for the dead, but with its rolling hills, ornate tombs, and protective gates, it also prefigured a comforting vision of a material afterlife. For Emily Dickinson, finding heaven's spiritual coordinates proved more difficult, as she was grounded in an early awareness of the sudden and arbitrary fact of death. "Contentment's quiet Suburb," she writes in one lyric, suffers affliction, which ranges "In Acres-Its Location / Is Illocality" (J 963). Rather than encourage mourners to look forward to a time when they will rejoin the beloved dead in heaven, as the nineteenth-century elegy so often does, her poems portray dead speakers who unwittingly encourage their loved ones to die and come to them. Like epitaphs, Dickinson's poems develop a speaking situation that plays on the absence of one interlocutor which writing necessarily entails. Her poetry offers a readjustment of vision, from the vantage of either the dead who beckon to us to join them or the living who are so accustomed to remembering the dead that they seem more dead than alive. Just as painters, sculptors, and other writers set the image of the dead in canvas, stone, or verse, Dickinson displays the "State-Endowal-Focus" (J 489) that death confers by manipulating both epitaphic conventions and visual perspective in her lyrics.