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MARTHA NELL SMITH
The Importance of a Hypermedia Archive of Dickinson's Creative Work
"The Poems" will ever be to me marvelous
whether in ms. or type.
Susan Dickinson to Thomas Higginson
Christmas 1890
T he receptions of her writings, as well as of Emily Dickinson herself, have largely been determined by the writing technology with which the vast majority of her audiences, academic and popular, is familiar -- the print medium that produces books, collections, and variorums of poetry, volumes of letters, and other prose writings of major poets. What might be called the ideology of the book has, therefore, profoundly influenced the ways in which her writings are initially perceived and ultimately judged. Since the poet's death in 1886, printing after printing of Dickinson's poems and letters has been produced, the most "authoritative" of which are now beginning to foreground photographic reproductions (see R. W. Franklin's edition of the Manuscript Books for Harvard UP [1981] and his edition of her Master Letters for Amherst College P [1986]). These photographic reproductions reveal the importance of Dickinson's handwritten experimentations in punctuation, lineation, and calligraphic orthography. Readers can see for themselves that Dickinson's punctuation signs more closely resemble rhetorical notation marks that angle up and down or curve than the en- and em- typographical dashes into which they have translated; that she often broke her lines mid-syllable or in other unexpected places rather than according to the tetrameter, trimeter, dimeter conventions of the hymnal stanza and poetic quatrain (conventions shored up by the regularization of print and the concomitant presumptions of editors); and that her calligraphic orthography often featured such sportive details as eyes that look back at the reader in the "e's" in "seen" and "e's" in "feet" that look like spread toes (see second stanza of "A narrow Fellow in / the Grass" [P 986; H B 193 copy to Sue])1 Other photographic representations show that Dickinson illustrated some writings with her own drawings and also experimented with mixed media layouts by scissoring illustrations from books in the family library and attaching them to poems she presented to friends.2 Somewhat ironically then, advances in the technologies of these ever-changing material reproductions demonstrate what the poet herself avers about the limitations of the medium when explaining to Thomas Higginson that she is not publishing her work in the conventional way.
When Dickinson wrote Higginson "I had told you I did not print," she enclosed a clipping of "The Snake," the version of "A narrow Fellow in / the Grass" (Set 6c; P 986) which had appeared in the Springfield Daily Republican two months earlier, to demonstrate her reasons for choosing not to do so. She comments on the printed version: "Lest you meet my Snake and suppose I deceive it was robbed of me -- defeated too of the third line by the punctuation. The third and fourth were one -- I had told you I did not print -- I feared you might think me ostensible. . . " (L 316, early 1866). She appears angry because editors, presuming to know how the poem should be punctuated, inserted a comma that she had purposely omitted. By 1866 she had seen at least ten, very probably more, of her poems in print. The Republican had printed most of them, and in most of the printings Dickinson had seen alterations of her poems. According to her description of her own response to the printing, such editorial interference "defeated" her poetic objectives and dissuaded her from conventional publication via mechanical reproduction.
In Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992) I argue that Dickinson "published" herself in her correspondences and in the manuscript books of poetry (fascicles) discovered posthumously in her room and that studies of her text should take into account her method of private "book" assembly and distribution. At the first international conference in October 1992 I learned that what I had suspected is indeed true: many Dickinson scholars (e.g., Susan Howe, Ellen Louise Hart, Marta Werner, Roland HagenbÃ? ¼chle, Jerome McGann? , Jeanne Holland) agree that her unusual holograph productions and "publication" of poetry are vital to any understanding of her poetic project. So we formed a Dickinson Editing Collective, the primary purpose of which is to discuss the many (and proliferating) formidable issues that confront anyone editing (or reading an edition of ) Dickinson's writings, whether or not that particular editor or reader is conscious of those challenges. The Collective has concluded that, in addition to the new variorum being prepared by Franklin, a hypermedia archive of her writings should be produced in order to take into account her method of publication and more fully disseminate the range of her manuscript art and poetic experimentation to her readers.
In such an archive, photographic reproductions and publication histories of all Dickinson documents could be made available to scholars, who could in turn directly engage and more thoroughly analyze problems of translating her texts into print. In hypermedia, texts are electronically stored and managed, and textual space radically reimagined. Texts appear on the screen, not the page, and that creates new possibilities for analysis. In fact, advances in computer technology for storage and retrieval of documents take readers way beyond the confines of the page. Through various windows simultaneously displayed on the screen more than one or two pages can appear at once, and they can be from a variety of sources. Readers can, therefore, compare Dickinson's holograph of a poem, letter, or letter-poem with the various typographical translations of it by Thomas Johnson, Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas W. Higginson, Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, and/or others who have produced Dickinson poems for literary anthologies, gift books, even greeting cards. (Since the Archive is perpetually expandable, we hope to include even representations in popular culture of this beloved poet's work.) By making photographic representations of all of Dickinson's holographs available (not just of the fascicles and "Master" letters), readers can see for themselves how Dickinson integrated poetry into her prose and thus how the indentations of poems within letters in the Johnson and Ward's The Letters of Emily Dickinson are editorial impositions and not part of Dickinson's technique. Readers can also decide for themselves whether or not the typographical en- or em-dash represents Dickinson's punctuation marks or is in fact another editorial imposition. And readers can decide for themselves whether dividing Dickinson's writings into two distinct genres -- poems and letters -- best represents her creative practices. Also, readers will no longer be bound by the order imposed by The Book, whose pages always appear in the same place, but can structure the documents in any order they choose. Therefore, both macro problems of organization and genre and micro problems of accurately reproducing her marks on the page and correcting or substantiating editorial translations can be informedly addressed by multitudes of readers instead of by the few scholars who have worked directly with the manuscripts. The archive itself will call attention to problems that inhere in its representation of Dickinson's texts in electronic forms. To be interrogated are macro problems of organizing documents in networks and micro problems of evaluating the critical significance of advantages and limitations of computer enhancement of documents.
Thus the Archive will be a valuable resource for exploring theoretical implications of the structures of Dickinson's texts (both individual documents and the organization of their relationships to one another) which will contribute to textual studies in general. Even more ironic than the fact that photographic reproduction in the print medium (Manuscript Books) has revealed the importance of Dickinson's handwritten experimentations in punctuation, lineation, calligraphic orthography, and mixed media layouts is the fact that technological advancements in electronic reproduction will enable in-depth scrutiny of the impact of the following for critical understanding of her holographic production and dissemination techniques -- ideologies of generic organization of her writings into "poems" and "letters" on interpretation; characteristics determining what makes a Dickinson poem and what counts as literature in the Dickinson canon; criteria of how that literature might best be presented to her vast and varied audiences; conclusions about what counts as a page in her scene of writing. So critical beliefs about how Dickinson saw poems and letters, the poetic line, and the page, which have all been formulated by conventions of print reproduction not necessarily suitable for assessing this graphocentric poet, can now be profoundly revised by advancements in electronic reproduction that will make facsimiles of all the Dickinson manuscripts (not just the fascicles and the "Master" letters) much more widely accessible.
An invaluable member of the collective is Susan Howe, whose work on the Dickinson manuscripts (published in her slide lectures, articles, and stunning 1993 book the Birth-mark) has inspired much interest in the holographs and profoundly influenced ways in which we see Dickinson's poetic performances. Print editions are currently being completed or proposed and developed by the Dickinson Editing Collective. Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing, Marta Werner's critical study of the letters and scraps, including those supposedly sent to Judge Otis P. Lord in the 1870s, is forthcoming (U of Wisconsin P). Six University of Maryland doctoral students (Catherine Dauterman, Annette Debo, Brianne Friel, Fran Gulino, Rachel Hutchinson, and Marget Sands) are using an interactive pedagogical study of Fascicle 24 for their teaching in high schools and colleges. Ellen Louise Hart and I have been preparing an edition of the poems, letters, and letter-poems sent to sister-in-law Susan Dickinson between 1850-1886. Print editions of other correspondences (e.g., to Thomas Higginson, Elizabeth Holland, Samuel Bowles, and Fanny and Louise Norcross) should be produced.
Ellen Louise Hart and I have been particularly engaged in analyzing The Book of Susan and Emily Dickinson, Dickinson's writings to and from her most frequent addressee, her sister-in-law. Not surprisingly, this is Dickinson's most prolific correspondence. For the purposes of beginning to reconceive notions of her poetic project and re orient our interpretations so that our critical methods follow Dickinson's publication processes instead of being dictated by ideologies surrounding the production of printed books, the following are not negligible facts: that Emily and Susan Dickinson used the terms "publish" and "print" in practically identical ways; that Susan was the only contemporary reader at whose behest Emily actually revised a poem (while we know that she routinely ignored the advice of Higginson); that Emily called Susan her greatest teacher ("with the Exception of Shakespeare"); and that Susan was the f irst critical reader of the forty manuscript books (fascicles). Over the past decade, technological advances in textual reproduction like the photographic representations of the fascicles which show Susan's marks on the poems have worked hand in hand with critical advances like the development of feminist analyses to reveal more clearly Susan's immense importance as a participatory reader and sometimes coauthor of Dickinson's works. What the costs to Dickinson's readers have been of the first and then many of the subsequent literary institutions diminishing this primary relationship of hers can never be measured. What is certain is that the gains of exploring this relationship and its importance to Dickinson's literary production are inestimable. Gathering together Dickinson's poems, letters, and letter-poems to and from Susan in a single volume (now they lie dispersed and intermingled with other correspondences in six volumes) and in a hypermedia archive will enable scholars to interrogate this collaborative literary relationship of America's premier poet much more thoroughly.
As influence, muse, and advisor whose editorial suggestions Dickinson followed, Susan played a primary role in Dickinson's creative processes. Emily Dickinson wrote Susan Dickinson for more than thirty-five years, from late 1850 when both women were barely twenty to May 1886 when Emily died at the age of 55. During that time, Dickinson sent Susan significantly more writings than she sent to any other correspondent (by Thomas Johnson's count, Dickinson sent her next most frequently addressed correspondent, Higginson, considerably fewer than half the number of writings that she sent to Susan). The number of texts alone (more than 400) is evidence that Susan was the poet's most trusted reader and critic, and Susan's commentary on the first printed volume of Emily's poems is telling in that it suggests that the work of this poet cannot be contained in conventional typography. After publication of Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890) by Higginson and Loomis Todd, Susan wrote to William Hayes Ward, editor of the Independent, with authority: "I have a little article in mind, with illustrations of her [Emily's] own, showing her witty humorous side, which has all been left out of her [Emily's sister Lavinia's (or so Susan called that first edition)] vol." Susan was the first and, for nearly a century, the only critic to make such a point of the cartoonlike little sketches and layouts that are sometimes found in Dickinson's correspondences. And, when transcribing the poems, Susan was the first (and, for the first century of Dickinson studies, the only) editor to follow Dickinson's schemes of lineation and unusual methods of punctuation (angling dashes, e.g.) faithfully. Her primary lifelong correspondent and most a stute contemporary reader immediately complained that the range of Dickinson's writings was not on display in the Higginson-Todd publication, and Susan, in effect, remarks that understanding of the poetic project would therefore be severely limited. Since poetry originated in the writing to Susan, as did the hybrid genre, the letter-poem, and since the writings to her showcase experimentations in style, punctuation, lineation, drawings, mixing media, and calligraphic orthography, it is no surprise that she was dissapointed to see conventional modes of print representation displace Dickinson's highly self-conscious, often humorous textual play. Studying the "book" that Emily "published" to Susan will therefore be of especial interest to textual scholars, will profoundly enhance critical understanding of Dickinson's relationships to literature and literary production, and, since Dickinson actually rewrote a poem at Susan's behest and since their correspondence renders much evidence of collaboration, will advance analyses of literary criticism's discursive contruction of the autonomous author.
Organizing Dickinson editions according to the audience to whom the bodies of her literature were addressed instead of according to genre and highly debatable chronologies (the system used during the first century of reproducing her writings in order to make books) will enrich Dickinson studies and studies of American literature and literature in general in ways listed above as well as in ways that are yet to be imagined. The Dickinson Editing Collective wants the re-editing of the poet's works to reproduce more faithfully her publication method and experimentations with genre and poetic technique by developing a series of bibliographic editions and electronic archives of her correspondences.
McGann? 's development of document structures for the hypermedia archive of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's writings and pictures will likely provide templates that can be adapted for the Dickinson archive. Obviously, development of the electronic Dickinson archives are in their most rudimentary stages, but they already share some primary goals with McGann? 's for the Rossetti archive. First, the Collective wants to build an expandable database of Dickinson's writings, drawings, and layouts; second, the Collective sees the Dickinson archive as a theoretical tool for exploring structures of textual reproduction in general.
Structure of the Dickinson Archive
Presently plans are for the Archive to be a marked-up structure (SGML) organizing five interrelated bodies of material. Since work on the hypermedia archive will begin with the documents sent to Susan Dickinson, descriptions of their organization will serve as example for the purposes of providing a proposal and model for developing the entire Archive. The five bodies of material are as follows:
1. Files containing facsimile images of all Dickinson's original manuscripts; i.e., all letters, poems, and letter-poems sent to Susan (one file per document).
2. Files containing e-text (electronic text) versions of the original manuscripts.
3. Files containing facsimile images of all printings of Dickinson's writings; i.e., facsimile images of printings by Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Susan's daughter), and Thomas H. Johnson and R.W. Franklin (variorum editors).
4. Files containing e-text versions of all printings.
5. Files containing e-texts of related textual, critical, biographical contextualizations; i.e., from textual notes and critical commentary about the Emily-Susan correspondence and relationship to layouts of the Homestead and the Evergreens (Dickinson houses in which the two women lived side-by-side for more than thirty-five years), to maps of Amherst, to Jay Leyda's compilations of contemporary reviews, newspaper articles, national and local events (in Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson), etc.
As is clear from the description above, we think assembly and organization of the Dickinson documents should be correspondence by correspondence (thus one link among documents will be those Dickinson addressed to a particular contemporary audience), but we intend to exploit fully the hypertextual organization of the Archive. Every document will be imbedded in a complex network of related documents and materials. Every poem, letter-poem, or letter will be linked to the correspondence in which Dickinson first placed it, as well as to the printed volume(s) into which it has been translated, as well as to Dickinson's and/or other's reproductions of lines in other contexts.
Besides McGann? 's Rossetti project, the hypertext edition of another body of nineteenth-century American literature, Thoreau's Notebooks, is being developed (especially relevant to the Dickinson Archive), as are the Perseus Project, the Dartmouth Dante Project, and numerous others. Also, the project to restore the Evergreens, Susan Dickinson's house, includes plans for developing a hypermedia archive of all materials and documents in and related to the house, and the Dickinson Editing Collective plans to work with the Martha Dickinson Bianchi Trust on this archive. Similarly, this year I have starting using interactive television for working with Maryland high school teachers on instructional innovations, and archives like that being developed by UMCP doctoral students of fascicle 24 as a pedagogical tool will be ideal for use in this electronic network. Thus the Dickinson Archive will have a wide range of appeal -- to the scholarly community and those engaged in the most sophisticated research and for curriculum development at practically all levels of the education system.
Editorial decisions are always interpretive, and happily, such an archive would enable many more of Dickinson's readers to make such decisions for themselves. In closing, I will say what I have said before. If we are to adopt any rule for interpretation of what the various and unpredictable yet traceably evolving Dickinson holograph marks mean, then it should be a lesbian rule like that commonly invoked in the seventeenth century. The term comes from the lesbian rule that is "a mason's rule of lead, which could be bent to fit the curves of a molding (Aristotle Eth. Nic. v x 7); hence fig., a principle of judgment that is pliant and accommodating" (OED). Accommodation and consideration should characterize our critical exchanges as we contemplate what counts as the scene of writing, as the poetic mark on the page, as the most productive method of organizing Dickinson's writings for study. As Franklin, her most conscientious editor to date, has reminded us, no edition can truly be authoritative, for the author herself did not prepare her works for print publication and left no detailed instructions for how her writings should be represented in books. The few guided commentaries that Dickinson did leave indicate that she would remind readers that to "publish" and to "print" are not the same thing, and that in our interpretations of her marks and their meanings we should dwell in possibility, not closure.
Endnotes
1. I would like to thank Marget Sands for bringing this to my attention. She is completing her dissertation, "Emily Dickinson's Textactic Body," at the University of Maryland.
2. Photographic reproductions of a mixed media layout
of "A poor -- torn Heart -- a tattered heart" (P 78; H B 175)
appear in Comic Power (79) and Rowing in Eden (120); of mixed
media layouts of "Whose cheek is this?" (P 82; H B 186) and "My
`position'! / Cole" (L 214; H B 114) in Comic Power (73, 83);
and of an illustration satirizing her Whig father flipping his wig (L 144;
A 617) in Katharine Zadravec, "Emily Dickinson: A Capital Visitor"
(27) and Comic Power (75).
Works Cited
Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth. Dickinson Papers. Amherst College Special Collections, Amherst, MA. Manuscripts will be indicated by "A" and the library catalogue number.
------. Dickinson Papers. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Manuscripts will be indicated by "H" and the library catalogue letter and/or number.
------. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Eds. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1958.
------. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1955.
Franklin, R.W., ed. The Manuscripts Books of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard UP, Belknap Press, 1981.
Juhasz, Suzanne, Cristanne Miller, and Martha Nell Smith. Comic Power in Emily Dickinson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1993.
Smith, Martha Nell. Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1992.
Zadravec, Katharine. "Emily Dickinson: A Capital Visitor," Emily Dickinson: Letter to the World, ed. Zadravec, 26-33. Washington, D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986.
MARTHA NELL SMITH is author of Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992), and, with Suzanne Juhasz and Cristanne Miller, co-author of Comic Power in Emily Dickinson (1993). With Ellen Louise Hart, she is currently completing The Book of Susan and Emily Dickinson. She has also published on H. D., Toi Derricotte, Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich, other modern and contemporary women poets, and rock and roller Bruce Springsteen. She is completing a volume on lesbian / gay images in American popular culture and is Associate Professor at the University of Maryland at College Park.