Vice Voices

Mesmer, Marietta. A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson's Correspondence. U Massachusetts Press, Amherst: 2001.

Chapter 4 - The “Male” World of Power and Poetry Austin Dickinson Dickinson's earliest letters are “related to her earliest attempts to challenge and negotiate socially prescribed roles for women, especially the relational ones of daughter and sister.” (107) Her later letters are monologic (harmonious) in tone, while the early letters are dialogic (highly conflictual). “Literature, the realm of the mind (which had explicitly been gendered male by most epistolary manuals), is the field in which Dickinson fully discards the strictures of nineteenth-century womanhood.” (113) Thomas Wentworth Higginson Dickinson deliberately delayed meeting Higginson for eight years, keeping their relationship strictly textual. “She attempts to erase any traces of her socially constructed, gendered body.” It also “[severed] any direct link between her physical self and her epistolary personae” and kept her relationship with Higginson on her own terms. (117-8) The role of signature in constructing the personae. Ungendered relational (Your Scholar, Your Friend), her father's (E. Dickinson). The actual effect is contradictory, the voices in the letters have a body. Was Dickinson's humility toward Higginson genuine? Many critics have argued that they are “pretense,” but Mesmer considers them more complex. ”Each gesture of self-denigration is carefully counter-balanced by a gesture of of self-affirmation.” (123) “In Dickinson's opinion, her relationship with Higginson depends on the maintenance of the socially sanctioned model of relationship between a (male) mentor and his (female) protegee, and thus on the maintenance of gender-inscribed hierarchy of power and authority.” (130) Master Is the “Daisy” persona a conventional Victorian representation of the woman? Messmer argues that the etymology of daisy also suggested power and creation. “In its Old English form “daegesege,” as well as Middle English “dayesye,” “Daisy” signifies “the day's eye,” that is, the sun itself. In this way, “Daisy can thus stand for both the demurely insignificant little flower/girl dependent on the sun and the most powerful ruler of the sky itself.” (131)

Chapter 5 – Manipulating Multiple Voices Higginson Mesmer states that the three sources that Dickinson quoted the most were the Bible, the writing of Higginson, and Shakespeare. Dickinson alternately treats each source with reverence and criticism, so Mesmer ultimately characterizes her attitude toward them as ambivalent.

“Dickinson maintains a high degree of dialogicity while simultaneously introducing controlling or focal voices that orchestrate, frame, curtail, and thus critique some of the other 'participants in the dialogue.” “Dickinson becomes Higginson's stylistic critic almost as much as he had become hers.” (154) Bible • Gives voice to silenced women. • Occupies the place of Christ and God. • Challenges the sacredness of the text. Shakespeare “Dickinson's strategies of incorporating Shakespearean quoations into her correspondence illustrate that he appropriates his voice(s) for her own purposes by systematically destroying their iambic pentameter structure.” (167)