Emily Dickinson’s Second Thoughts
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/camqtly/bfw031
ISSN1471-6836
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoEmily Dickinsonwasapoetofsecondthoughts. ‘A Doubt if it be Us | Assists the staggering Mind’, she wrote in 1865. To many of us, inhabiting such turns of thought proves seductive. Dickinson’s manuscripts put us in mind of what Susan Howe calls ‘Cancelations, variants, insertions, erasures, marginal notes, stray marks and blanks’.1 To David Porter, she writes ‘the verbal equivalent of sfumato’; for Marta Werner, Dickinson’s poems are a ‘mob of traces’.2 This aphasic intimacy is made even more meaningful by scrutinising Dickinson’s revisions – by registering, for instance, the plus sign she attached to a word she was tempted to substitute, and tracing a route to the corresponding cross at the bottom of the poem where an alternative to the original shimmers. To consult Dickinson’s fascicles is to encounter, through the variations that she often penned in the margins, or between the lines of the manuscript albums she began to hand-stitch in 1858, a sub-stream of second lives. The experience of reading Dickinson, then, prompts us to reflect on how we inhabit doubt. What does it look like on the page? Should we attempt to follow a mind in the course of changing direction? How might we begin to account for Dickinson’s revisions and indecisions?
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