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 affects of the texts they purport to analyze (16), their conscious and unconscious obsessions and ways of configuring 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 handwritten S or the shape of an envelope flapare 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 regard for 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 off. 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 Dickinsons writing (134). For Socarides, who compares herself to an archaeologist, this

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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 first, indeed, better 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 attempting to place this work within the historical and material contexts in which they were written (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 makings at 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 written, 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 Dickinsons career. 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 craftswoman, one who paid continued and painstaking attention to the problems

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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 within their 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 letter, grouped with others like itself in loose sheets, or written 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 often seems to write out of her own desire. To take but one example, granted that the late poems are drafts, not fair copies, one can without much difficulty find 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 find numerous early poems that reject closure, as Socarides herself cedes. In setting 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. They represent Socarides unbound, and Socarides unbound is an extremely gifted 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 often 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 most Dickinson scholars do. As Smith points out, the Emily Dickinson I fashioned in Emily Dickinson: Woman Poet is the one I saw through the lens of my own passion. In identifying Dickinson with the much vexed figure 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 Pacific 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 EDIS and the Founding Editor of the Emily 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 five 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 Confines 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 NineteenthCentury 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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