Emily Dickinson's Brain: On Lyric and the History of Anatomy

This essay owes much to colleagues who discussed it with me and read it in various drafts: Wai Chee Dimock, Jonathan Fortescue, Kelly Hager, Vera Kutzinski, Meredith McGill, Michael Trask, and Ruth Bernard Yeazell.

1. To facilitate cross-referencing between editions, all quotations of Dickinson's poems in this essay are accompanied by two numbers. The first refers to the poem as it appears in the recent The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, ed. Franklin, R. W. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); the second refers to the poem as it appears in the familiar and now fairly obsolete The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Johnson, Thomas H. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960). The quotations themselves come from Franklin's variorum edition, which reproduces Dickinson's idiosyncratic punctuation and spelling (e.g. “opon” for “upon”) and which uses a hyphen surrounded by spaces in rendering into type Dickinson's famous dash. When more than one version of a poem exists, I have indicated which I use by including a capital letter that corresponds to the letter designating that version in Franklin's edition.

2. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Johnson, Thomas H. and Ward, Theodora, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2: 473–74. Further references to the letters are cited by volume and page number parenthetically in the text. My reading of this passage builds on that of Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 122. In her discussion of this perpetually quoted and perpetually underinterpreted passage, Sánchez-Eppler remarks that, for Dickinson, poetry is “written and measured in flesh”; my own purpose here is to bring new historical specificity to this “flesh” and its measurement and so to break down the abstraction of “the body.”

3. See, for example, #420/#332 (“There are two Ripenings — one — of sight”) with its “teeth of Frosts” and Letters 2:369, which associates the action of the frost with surgery.

4. Cutter, Calvin, Anatomy and Physiology: Designed for Academies and Families, 3rd ed. (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1846), 229. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text. For a list of textbooks in use at Mount Holyoke during Dickinson's time, see Capps, Jack L., Emily Dickinson's Reading, 1836–1886 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), 189–91.

5. Rush, Benjamin, Lectures on the Mind, ed. Carlson, Eric T. et al. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981), 17.

6. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, The Poetical Works, ed. Tilton, Eleanor M. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 101–2.

7. Whitman, Walt, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Kaplan, Justin (New York: Library of America, 1982), 255, 236, 212. The first quotation is from “I Sing the Body Electric” (section 7) and the second two from “Song of Myself” (sections 42 and 24).

8. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Nature, in Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, Joel (New York: Library of America, 1983), 10. My thinking on Emerson's famous passage relies on Brown, Lee Rust's interpretation in The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 44–45.

9. This tendency is so basic to Dickinson's poems that examples are almost needless, but for some especially striking instances, see #585/#1727 (“If ever the lid gets off my head”), #360/#512 (“The Soul has Bandaged moments”), and #320/#258 (“There's a certain Slant of light”).

10. This poem has been read for forty years in Johnson's edition as the second half of the poem beginning “A great Hope fell” (#1187/#1123), an error Franklin's edition corrects. Franklin notes that the two manuscripts are written on similar envelopes but were not pinned together by Dickinson or associated with each other in any other way by her. Johnson's error seems to me an unknowing attempt to heal the wound of this poem by finding a context for its strangely unlocated, grammatically fragmentary opening lines. I will return to this sense of the poem as centered on a wound in my reading of “Pain — expands the Time.”

11. Many critics have characterized the movement of Dickinson's poems as a progression that collapses, a movement from an opening incisive clarity to a closing conceptual shambles; the observation recurs in Dickinson, criticism from early reviewers of the first published volume, Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890), one of whom complained that “her sense of completeness was singularly dull” (Thompson, Maurice, “Miss Dickinson's Poems” (1891; rept. in The Recognition of Emily Dickinson: Selected Criticism since 1890, ed. Blake, Caesar R. and Wells, Carlton F. [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964], 29), to midcentury judgments like R. P. Blackmur's assertion that “the movement of the parts is downwards and towards a disintegration of the effect wanted” (“Emily Dickinson: Notes on Prejudice and Fact,” in Blake, and Wells, , Recognition, 215), to more recent analyses such as Porter, David's characterization of this devolution as a protomodernist abstraction loosely akin to nonobjectivist painting (Dickinson: The Modern Idiom [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981], 25–36), and Cameron, Sharon's argument that many of Dickinson's lyrics fall apart at their ends because they are disrupted by a voice that rages against death and so against endings and completed knowledge (Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979], 57–72). In my comparison of such poetic development to anatomical incision, then, I am trying to bring some historical specificity to a familiar point in commentary on Dickinson.

12. For other poems about science, see #147/#100 (“A science — so the Savans say”), which finds in the principles of comparative anatomy an analogue for the techniques of nature poetry; #179/#168 (“If the foolish, call them “flowers”), which finds scientific erudition superfluous when compared to everyday perceptions; and #391/#433 (“Knows how to forget!”), which elaborates on the disjunct between emotional truths and scientific ones.

13. See Howard, William, “Emily Dickinson's Poetic Vocabulary,” PMLA 72 (03 1957): 230.

14. For an excellent sketch of scientific culture in Amherst, see Sewall, Richard B., The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1974), 342–57. For a survey of antebellum scientific education, see Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory, “Parlors, Primers, and Public Schooling: Education for Science in Nineteenth-Century America,” Isis 81 (1990): 425–45. Baym, Nina, in her chapter on Dickinson in American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), argues that Dickinson uses the concepts of science to dismantle the natural theology that Amherst theologians and scientists — especially Hitchcock — advocated (136).

15. Upham, Thomas C., Elements of Mental Philosophy, Abridged and Designed as a Text-Book for Academies and High Schools (1840; rept. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), 27.

16. Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1975), xiii.

17. For a discussion of lyric and chiasmus especially pertinent to the argument of this and the following paragraph, see Paul de Man's chapter on Rilke in Allegories of Reading, where de Man appoints chiasmus as “the determining figure” of Rilke, 's lyrics because it is “the crossing that reverses the attributes of words and things” (Allegories of Reading [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], 38). In his Ends of the Lyric, Timothy Bahti argues that chiasmus is the fundamental trope of all lyrics, the.means by which such poems invert their own endings and so send the reader back into the conflicts and tensions of their openings. Bahti's argument supports my characterization of Dickinson's chiasmus as conveying a sense of the irresolvable difference at work in the poems' images of personal identity even though his accompanying invective against historicism doesn't follow from the formalist claim and is one I am trying to resist here. Even if lyric has a transhistorical tendency toward chiasmus, that technique does not arrange the same materials or shape the same type of experience from century to century or poet to poet (Bahti, , Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996], 1–16).

18. Harrington, Anne, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 103.

19. Plumer, William S., “Mary Reynolds: A Case of Double Consciousness,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine 20 (05 1860): 812. For Dickinson's reading of Harper's, see Capps, , Emily Dickinson's Reading, 175.

20. Upham, , Mental Philosophy, 249. Dickinson's sister Lavinia borrowed this book in 1851, noting it in her diary, a fact that suggests the book had a kind of perennial currency (Sewall, , Life of Dickinson, 249). Upham's term “unsoundness” helps us to hear the pun at the end of “I felt a Cleaving,” where “Sequence ravels out of Sound.” More generally, Upham's discussion of the unlocated mind moves us toward an understanding of the canceled connections suffered by Dickinson's speakers as not only generic (the alienation of the lyric speaker as a generic, transhistorical phenomenon) nor only as biographical (Dickinson the recluse) but as a preoccupation the poems share with mid-19th-century philosophy, science, and medicine.

21. On Sir Charles Bell's place in the history of neuroscience, see Clarke, Edwin and Jacyna, L. S., Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 10–13. On Bell's role in the discovery of how the spinal nerves function, see also Young, Robert M., Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth-Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall To Ferrier (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 77–79.

22. Cameron, , Lyric Time, 26. Cameron, develops further her sense of the American Renaissance body as one of disassembled parts in The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

23. Clarke, and Jacyna, , Nineteenth-Century Origins, 29. For an excellent discussion of the shift toward decentralization in 19th-century physiology, see Crary, Jonathan, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 81–96.

24. Adorno, Theodor W., “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Tiedemann, Rolf and trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 43.

25. Foucault, , Birth of the Clinic, xi.

26. Foucault, , Birth of the Clinic, 198.

27. Foucault, , Birth of the Clinic, 95–101, xii–xiv; quoted phrase on xiv.

28. My argument about this poem owes a debt to Cameron's discussion of the “self-consuming” quality of pain in Dickinson's poems, the ways in which pain paradoxically manifests itself as “a blacking and blanking out” (Cameron, , Lyric Time, 158).

29. Nott, J. C. and Gliddon, George R., Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History: Illustrated by Selections from the Inedited Papers of Samuel George Morton, M.D. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1854), 298–304. Further references appear parenthetically within the text. On the place of Types of Mankind within the history of 19th-century American attitudes toward race – especially the shift from environmental to innate differences as an explanatory model – see Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 125–38. For a demonstration of why Morton's measurements were erroneous and an analysis of why they didn't mean what he thought they meant even if they had been accurate, see Gould, Stephen Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 50–69.

30. Otter, Samuel, Melville's Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 35, 109.

31. My argument here owes a debt to Geoffrey Hartman's essay “Words and Wounds,” and specifically to his thesis that language flowers forth tropes that promise to heal the wounds language itself has made (Hartman, , Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981], 118–57).

32. Gordon, George, Byron, Lord, Don Juan, The Complete Poetical Works, vol. 5, ed. McGann, Jerome J. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 3.88. 1–3. Dickinson's “A Word dropped careless on a Page” similarly materializes and embodies the effects of reading (“Infection in the sentence breeds / We may inhale Despair / At distances of Centuries/From the Malaria” [#1268/#1261]). More generally, it might be noted that the claim that words are things is a Romantic topos, one that the poetics of Coleridge and Emerson share with the anatomical sciences I am considering here. For a discussion of how such claims collapse the distinction between the political and the linguistic, see Keach, William, “‘Words Are Things’: Romantic Ideology and the Matter of Poetic Language,” in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. Levine, George (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 219–39.

33. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Reiman, Donald H. and Powers, Sharon B. (New York: Norton, 1977), 2.3.40–42.

34. For a concise statement of the logical problems associated with romantic images such as flowers, see de Man, Paul, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” in de Man, , The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 2–17; on the practice of sending flowers to friends, see Seaton, Beverly, The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995). These two sources almost completely exclude each other's concerns: de Man is no more interested in the role flowers play in 19th-century rituals of friendship than Seaton is in exploring the problematic metaphor of her title. In bringing together the poetics of the natural sign and the custom of giving flowers, I am trying to move Dickinson criticism beyond such an impasse in which deconstructive skepticism and cultural history constitute each other's blind spots.