Performance in Correspondence: The Letters of Emily Dickinson

English

Smith, Diana

Manheim, Dan (Mentor)

English

Emily Dickinson’s use of language as a kind of performance has been the subject of careful study, and most scholars are familiar with the obscure, more calculated version of Dickinson we see in her letters to writer Thomas Higginson. However, fewer readers are familiar with her letters to her beloved friend, Elizabeth Holland. In this presentation, I will compare the Dickinson we find in early correspondences with Higginson, a public intellectual whom she did not meet until eight years into their correspondence, to the Dickinson who emerges from a close reading of her last letter to Elizabeth Holland, a friend she held so dear that she often referred to her simply as "sister." By exploring Dickinson's manipulation of identity through her use of language, I hope to reveal a more candid, sentimental version of the poet than we are used to seeing: not the Dickinson who distanced people with performative irony, but one who held friends close through the power of words alone.