La Vague Journal - Melanie Hubbard

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).

Materially speaking, ‘the culture of ephemera’ refers to the nutrient and generative literary medium of alphabet and image, the textual scraps and commonplaces of society not yet assembled and refined by the literary imagination. At the level of culture and society, this phrase denotes the rule- governed, intentional use of meaningful linguistic scraps in various socio-historical contexts. [13]

Gnats, beetles, wasps, butterflies, and whole tribe of ephemerals and insignificants, may flit in and out and between; may hum, and buzz, and jar; may shrill their tiny pipes, wind their puny horns, unchastised and unnoticed. But idlers and bravadoes of larger size and prouder show must beware, how they place themselves within its sweep [. . . . ] Whomsoever the remorseless arms slings aloft, or whirls along with it in the air, he has himself alone to blame; though, when the same arm throws him from it, it will more often double than break the force of his fall. [18]¹

Reminding us of both Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s regret at having some of her poems “caught and involved in the machinery of the press” (Poems, 1852, Preface, n.p.), and Dickinson’s own determination to prove a “larger” fruit rather than “hurry to [ . . . ] a show and end” (F606), Coleridge’s sharp words take on the cast of a prohibition deeply inimical to the feminine. Women should remain in albums and letters. Gernes remarks, “extracts of poetry and prose, witticisms and aphorisms, were copied, memorized, and circulated for the purpose of ornamenting correspondence and conversation” (33-34). Though he grants that the ephemeral can be seen as “a minor version of Romantic aesthetics” since it celebrates “the wildness of the literary imagination” (38), its banishment to the women’s (and popular) sphere produces a dichotomy which valorizes as ‘literature’ only the permanent and monumental.

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

funeral verses, landscape sketches with tombstones, forget-me-not epitaphs, flower drawings, dramatic monologues copied from the Morning Post, puzzles, riddles, autographs of John Brown and W. Williams, facsimiles of the handwriting of Bonaparte himself imitated from specimens from recollection, numerous copies of squinting Madonnas and children [ . . .] and several privately circulated pieces supposedly the production of Lord Byron himself. [95] ²

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
Aid it in the coming
When the Bird will crowd the Tree
And the Bee be booming.

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―

The poem is about the passage of the seasons, Spring, Fall, and Winter; the speaker wishes for the coming of Spring, but wishes to "Hinder" the coming of Fall, and to "halt" the coming of Winter. The poem is also clearly about wishing to experience the vigor of life, but not its decline, and not death. If that were all there were, just the verses, that would be sufficient; they make a competent poem attentive to natural change and its implications for human mortality. But the verses' interaction with the invitation lend the poem a poignancy it would not otherwise achieve. The candy pulling is long past; the poem was written in 1876 (that, too, is long past). Not only do the seasons inevitably come―they have come, and not to a merely fictional speaker, but to the maker of the poem. The coincidence of the material―an old invitation to a candy pulling―and the linguistic―a meditation on the passage of time―has the force and wit of a pun.

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:

Buds of the open’ng Spring,
Blossoms of Summer hours,
Fruits of fair Autumn’s ripening,
Shall form my wreath of flowers.

With what a fairy skill doth memory
Call up the past, to throng the present hour.

The “present hour” of reading must always “call up the past” moment of inscription―not just the words but the friend and even the occasion of their inscription. While carefully marking the subject of death, nearby in the “present hour” and in the “wreath” to be finally laid upon the speaker’s grave, this verse remarks upon a ‘memory’ tradition of which it is the first performance. The album’s verse speaks for its owner as they anticipate ephemeral “buds,” “blossoms,” and “fruits:” aphoristic inscriptions, drawn or clipped and pasted illustrations, or a selection from a rich repository of popular verse in infinite variations. Such “flowers” of learning will simply accompany the speaker as they mark the passage of time from spring and summer to autumn―winter being elided altogether.

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.

¹ Gernes quotes from The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol 3, p. 455.
² “A lady’s album,” The Atheneum: Spirit of the English Magazines 3 (15 August 1825), 373- 376. Paraphrased in Gernes.
³ See George Monteiro and Barton Levi St. Armand’s “The Experienced Emblem: A Study of the Poetry of Emily Dickinson.” Prospects 6 (1981): 186-280 for a thorough discussion of the emblem tradition.