Inventing Emily Dickinson
Joyce Van Dyke
With a name like Hero, the heroine of Much Ado about Nothing could hardly escape the villain's slander: "Leonato's Hero, your Hero, every man's Hero." Our image of Emily Dickinson seems to have succumbed to a similar confusion: reading about her creates the bewildering impression that she is "his Emily, her Emily, everyone's Emily." The widely varying portraits of her could well be collected in a comparative volume such as Samuel Schoenbaum produced in Shakespeare's Lives.
Like Shakespeare whom she read and quoted and passionately admired all her life, Dickinson had a provincial background and a relatively scanty formal education. The difficulty in understanding her development is compounded by the fact that, as with Shakespeare's "lost years" (between his departure from Stratford and his appearance as a successful London playwright), the beginning of her poetic productivity coincides with the period during which least is known about her. The poetry of both has encouraged speculation about the identities of their love objects. In both cases, too, the poet's apparent lack of will to publish—the posthumous publication of half of Shakespeare's work and virtually all of Dickinson's—has added textual uncertainties and questions of intention to the whole boggy swamp of speculation. But Shakespeare wrote for a public medium, and his artistic development after he emerged as a London playwright is evident. And he was not a woman.
Biography, which Lytton Strachey called "the most delicate and humane of all the branches of writing," must take an interest in the elementary fact of sex. And in Dickinson's case it has taken an interest, but of the wrong kind. Attention has
