Invitation to Inscription:
Dickinson’s Writing on the Scraps.
I would like to offer an approach to reading at least some of Dickinson’s late jottings on what are called ‘the scraps.’ Rather than romanticizing them as the wild, partial cries of a sybil, or valorizing them for the aura of her ‘hand,’ I would like to argue that at least some of the time, Dickinson’s writing on the scraps conforms to (and of course tweaks) nineteenth century manuscript cultural practice by taking the material site of inscription to be an opportunity for meditation, even epitaph, in the Wordsworthian vein. Susan Howe was the first to observe that embossments are given place by the writing; drawings and cut-outs have been treated by Martha Nell Smith and Jeanne Holland; Marta Werner has drawn much attention to their physical details, and Virginia Jackson has cautioned against the idea of reading as ‘lyric’ what is merely coincidence. In two earlier articles of my own, I make the case that reading meaning into the coincidence of material and theme is a response to Dickinson’s own richly rendered care for, and worrying over, the necessarily material expression of thought.
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of my claiming the writing’s colloquy with the materiality of the scraps is the question of design or intention. Obviously scholars have steered clear from such sticky territory for a reason: looking for signs of design or intent can resemble dream- association or cloud-reading. Nevertheless I would contend that, like Richard Hugo’s ‘triggering towns,’ these suggestive scraps of paper seem to have prompted at least some of Dickinson’s writing. My readings have situated her poems as objects which take their materiality to be meaningful.
Now I would like to put such arguments on a historical footing, to demonstrate
that Dickinson’s practices in the manuscripts are comparable to the manuscript practices of others. Such
contexts help me make the case that Dickinson’s juxtapositions of verse and artifact drive the lyric away
from abstraction toward location, literalizing the position of a specific speaker in time. If the ‘loss’ of that
speaker to the ages is brought to us through the persistence of the poem as a monument to its moment,
that is the action of lyric Dickinson both does and undoes by writing on emphatically non-monumental
bits. We have perhaps been unable to read these pieces because the ephemeral was beneath the literary
in Romantic criticism, as Todd Gernes’ dissertation, “Recasting the Culture of Ephemera,” points out.
Ephemera was explicitly either the ‘before’ or the ‘after’ of literary production, related by metaphor to
nature through associations with “ephemeridae” (mayflies) and the “effeminare” (effeminate) (15).
As early as 1825, the Atheneum magazine can parody a popular culture of manuscript circulation which threatens to undo the distinction between ‘literature’ and dross, original and copy. A young man, taxed with making an ‘original’ inscription in a lady’s album, finds it, in Gernes’ paraphrase, already packed with
In fact one can make a stronger argument than Gernes makes for the “Romanticism” of ephemera, for it is the shadow side of Romanticism’s complex reaction to Locke. Not only is human experience explicitly private and fragmentary after Locke and Hume: the private and fleeting become the categories of human experience. In addition, metonymy or adjacency, rather than metaphor or correspondence, overtake the process of knowing. Fragments of experience are, after Hume, what the Imagination synthesizes as our experience. Finally, what we know is a product of inference—so that the tokens and scraps of our experience become evidence, and really the only evidence, of the world beyond our wills and conceptions.
Just as photographs, famously touted as images graven by the hand of Nature herself (and metonymically related to the beloved), invoke thoughts of death (the absence of what is represented) and thus participate in a culture obsessed with epitaph, stock images called emblems, literally engravings, provoke the viewer to ‘stop’ as at a graveside to read their significance. Emblematic images become the loci for particular sets of thoughts, marking in memory the rhetorical ‘places’ or topoi for meditation and use. The emblem tradition is quite explicitly linked to mementi mori, but in popular practice, album-keeping, though it is thoroughly sentimental, pulls away from orthodox Christian meditation. The ephemerality of life is the idée fixe of the emblem, as Barton St. Armand has described. 3
I observe that emblems, quite literally engravings reminding the viewer of her death and accompanied by moralizing verse and prose explications, move into album culture transformed into more secular stock images requiring a verbal performance of sorts from album inscribers. Such a popular demand for album inscriptions coordinated with images provides a historical basis for reading Dickinson’s engagement with the literal sites of her verse. While Dickinson responds to images—her own drawings, embossments, Primer cut-outs, and stamps—early and late, she also responded to other written and graphic artifacts in the manner of an album inscriber.
While others kept programs, invitations, newspaper clippings, autographs, obituaries, and verse in bound books, pasting in the flotsam and jetsam of their lives as a sort of running record (if they were that organized), Dickinson, singular as usual, jots her reflections upon the pieces in the manner of an album inscriber ‘matching’ a thought or verses with an emblematic image. Such is the case, to provide just one example in this short space, with an old invitation to a “candy pulling,” dated 1850. The poem, (F1389, A240, A240a Amherst College Digital Collections) is, as Johnson has it, "a worksheet draft jotted down in pencil on the back of an invitation from George Gould to a "Candy Pulling!" The invitation had been sent about 1 February 1850." Here is the poem:
I
suppose the time will come
Hinder it a little
Gilt
When the Corn in
Silk will dress
And in Chintz the
Apple
Red― Pink―
I
believe the Day will be
When the Jay will giggle
At his new white House the Earth
That, too, halt a
little―
Now perhaps you will think this is merely a coincidence, that reading the verse as commentary upon the invitation is going too far, especially since many of Dickinson’s jottings seem to be the product of happenstance. Partly my argument is that happenstance is in fact salient, a marker of the slim chances writing must take. But Dickinson’s writings can be read as part of a thriving culture of privately circulating verses. A scrapbook inscribed to “Miss Catherine E. Boynton”(to be found at the American Antiquarian Society) contains on its silvered opening leaf a delicately inscribed ‘initiating’ verse or dedication:
With what a fairy skill doth memory
Call up the past, to
throng the present hour.
If Dickinson is a participant in this rich tradition, it is worth asking whether she is embracing a culture in which feminine anonymity is a given. Or, if that is too leading a question (to which the knee-jerk response is “no!”), whether she is eschewing ‘the literary.’ For, far from abstracting the lyric from its moment of articulation (as the monumental and ‘literary’ must), Dickinson’s inscriptions locate writing as, in fact, ephemeral.
Melanie Hubbard’s publications include We Have With Us Your Sky (Subito, 2012) and Gilbi Winco Swags (Cannibal, 2008). Poems have appeared in Fence, Swink, Typo, horse less review, and Strange Machine. She received a PhD in literature from Columbia University, is writing a book on Emily Dickinson’s poetics and practices in manuscript, and currently teaches at New College of Florida.
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