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Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (review)

Martha Nell Smith's goals in Rowing in Eden are twofold: to examine Dickinson's unconventional response to the publishing industry and to examine her equally unconventional regard for Sue Gilbert Dickinson. Smith argues persuasively that Dickinson's forty fascicles, so carefully prepared in "book form," were really "self-publications," as were the numerous poems she embedded in her letters. Through such self-publication, Smith says, Dickinson could keep intact her daring experimentations with punctuation and line breaks, which she could not do when she permitted editors to get their hands on her verse. Rowing in Eden presents convincing arguments for the importance of scholars' examination of Dickinson material in the original. Smith points out that a perusal of the manuscripts indicates that the dashes in Dickinson's poems are not a "capricious" accident of emotional "stress" as others have argued but an appropriation of rhetorical notation. The dash after "I dwell in Possibility" dances up; the one after "There interposed a Fly" drags down. In reproducing the manuscript for "The Sea Said," Smith shows that Dickinson attempted to form letters that look like waves, thereby "mocking exclusively mimetic goals for language." Smith shows that even in Franklin's Manuscript Books much is missing that is important: e.g., in Franklin's photos, erasures can't be seen, such as Todd's cancellations of Dickinson's variants on "'tis true Â— They shut me / in the Cold." Through her own careful examination of Dickinson manuscripts, Smith reveals much that has been overlooked or misunderstood by editors and scholars.