May 2003

Overview

The Dickinson Electronic Archives is a superb example of the combination of electronic texts, rigorous scholarship and advanced internet technologies and it provides an excellent academic resource of interest to scholars and general readers of Emily Dickinson alike. I only wish that the archival materials I use had been so scrupulously reproduced and contextualized. I will come back to specific examples further on.

Initiated in 1995, the Dickinson Electronic Archives (DEA) is a collaborative project between the Dickinson Editing Collective, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia and Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. A detailed description of the project with completion dates for various sections of correspondence can be found @ http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/archive_description.html The entire project is scheduled for completion by 2008. General editors of the DEA are: Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart, Marta Werner & Lara Vetter.

The site is easy to use and easy to navigate. At no time did I feel lost in a maze of embedded links and confused about where sections fit in. From the home page you are given 4 sections to choose from and each opens out into further, more detailed sections; Writings by the Dickinson family (featuring Emily Dickinson’s correspondence), Responses, Critical resources and Teaching with the archives. Aside from Emily Dickinson’s correspondence, all sections are public access, and restricted sections can be accessed by password, supplied by the editors on receipt of an email explaining your interest.

I just got a letter to my soul

The main section of Emily Dickinson’s correspondence includes scans and transcriptions of her letters to over 40 correspondents, including Samuel Bowles, Kate Anthon, Thomas Higginson and Susan Dickinson. Of most interest are Emily Dickinson’s letters to her sister-in- law, Sue Dickinson, which actually constitutes the ‘largest and most capacious of the individual correspondences (in number and diversity of documents) and, ironically, until the past decade or so, the most overlooked and understudied’ @ http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/edcintro.html Here I reveal my own fascination with the passionate letters and poems, Dickinson wrote to Sue over her life. Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart have written several books on the erotic, writer/reader relationship of these two and their influence is felt in the careful and detailed notes that accompany digital images of Dickinson’s letters and letter-poems to Sue. That said, the Sue Dickinson and Emily Dickinson Correspondence on the site can be sorted by any of 6 ways. By the first line, Johnson poem number, Johnson letter number, Franklin number, Catalog number or OMC number (Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntingdon Dickinson, edited by Smith and Hart). While the editors critique Johnson’s representations of Dickinson’s work which “artificially divide poems from letters and letters from poems, [they include his] in order to analyze and amend his editorial procedure. This section is scheduled for completion by December 2003.

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/wkintronew.htm

Just to talk about the attributes of the site for a moment, once you access the correspondence section, you are given an index of contents that lists the physical documents that have been reproduced. These are high-resolution color scans of letters and/or poems and can be viewed in close-up. A transcription is available that doesn’t attempt to homogenize Dickinson’s original text, for instance, if there is uncertainty about a word or phrase, the editors will include as many alternative readings as possible. And a detailed pop-up page of notes can also be accessed at the bottom of the page – these amount to footnotes that a scholar would include with an edited collection of correspondence, and again, varying readings/interpretations are given due attention. Of course, the most interesting information is found here. The notes are punctilious in detail and context, providing necessary information for the reader that makes sense of individual texts and the archive. In this way, the site benefits those scholars who use this material in their work but who are unable to access the physical documents due to distance or other factors. Questions about paleography sit alongside those about the generic borders of Emily Dickinson’s writing and also issues of provenance and editing. In general, the notes are capacious and specifically they point to undiscovered/unacknowledged subtexts in the Dickinson oeuvre.

As the editors note in the introduction to this section all texts have been marked up using TEI conformant XML, now I don’t know what that means exactly, but what it amounts to is quite amazing: the ability to search transcriptions, notes, digital articles and the site generally by use of a word, phrase, name or reference (these were just the examples I tried, you are not limited by drop-down menus).

The classroom electric
Teaching with the archives, comprising information relating to pedagogical uses for the Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson Archives is found at: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/fdw/

Emily Dickinson Writing a poem: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/safe/preintro.html

While this is not included in the teaching with the archives section, it easily sits with the aims of that project. The editors have included Dickinson’s poem ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers’ and the editing process it went through, mainly with Sue Dickinson as the primary reader and editor to reach completion. As Vetter and Smith argue:

Emily and Susan Dickinson's exchange over the writing of "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" indicates that Sue critiqued the text while Dickinson was in the process of writing, that the effects of Sue's responses to reading the poem are evident in its various incarnations.   In other words, Sue was a vital participant in the composition and transmission of the poem. Because of that fact and because their exchange features audience response written and received by Emily Dickinson, these writings by and to her, concerning the shape and purview of the poem, are displayed and examined in this demonstration of how part of a Hypermedia Archive of Emily Dickinson's Creative Project might work. @ http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/safe/introduction.html

What is most interesting and of most pedagogical use is the interactive exercises section that allows the user to re-order the textual transcriptions of the "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers" exchange, trying out different orders through dragging and clicking. With the Versioning Machine and the Lightbox, two recently developed open-source tools, users can interact with the manuscripts on a more dynamic level, comparing the images and text of the various versions side-by-side, rearranging and rereading them in new orderings and combinations, in effect creating their own virtual editions’ @ http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/safe/exercises/

A note for Mac users, the versioning machine doesn’t work on Macs, although you can view the different versions via html.

Rare and Out of Print Resources http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/critical.html

This section comprises scans and transcriptions of essential sources that are out of print. Amongst the most interesting is John Erskine’s "The Dickinson Feud", The Memory of Certain Persons published in 1947. As the editors note, Erskine knew Sue Dickinson and her daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi and his account of them adds another perspective to the fascinating and complex story of the emotional investments that have been played out at the site of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, in particular the personal politics of Mabel Loomis Todd’s editorial practices. Also available through a link to the Humanities Text Initiative American Verse Collection at the University of Michigan are the full versions of the Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson first editions of Dickinson’s poems.

Titanic Operas http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/titanic/index.html

This dramatically titled section is found under Responses and appropriately features tributes by North American poets on the centenary of Dickinson’s death (1986). You can hear Adrienne Rich and Marilyn Hacker as well as many others via RealPlayer downloads and although the sound quality is variable it’s still possible to get a kick out of hearing such luminaries ‘in the flesh’ so to speak

The First Cut is the Deepest

Many of the questions that are raised in the notes accompanying scanned letters and letter-poems are also discussed in the section dealing with Responses. So for example, questions abut the editorial practices of Dickinson scholars in the past are addressed in Martha Nell Smith’s article ‘Omissions Are Not Accidents: Erasures & Cancellations in Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts’ @ http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/mutilation/index.html

This is a shorter and slightly different version of ‘To Fill A Gap: Erasures, Disguises, Definitions’ in Smith’s 1992 book Rowing In Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson. What she wants to argue here, is that Dickinson has been edited in such a way, from the beginning and continued in critical collections, that has obscured or suppressed her relationship and passionate feelings for her sister-in-law Sue. As Smith comments:

What was the object of suppression? What moved a hand to overwrite, underwrite, counter-write Emily Dickinson's original record?How much do we know about these violated and repressive scriptures designed to contain meaning? We know enough about them to say with certainty that this counter-writing explicitly attempts to remove loving remarks about Susan Huntington Gilbert, Emily's beloved friend who became her sister-in-law. The precision with which they were enacted is a tale all its own why erase only some letters, only some words? Why work so fastidiously with a knife to remove ink from linen? Why cut out parts of letters and leave the rest? Why blot out a poem in the middle of a manuscript book? Why not, in each instance, not only search but destroy in toto ? Why not transcribe and destroy? Why preserve the traces, the evidence of this alphabet of removal? @ http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dickinson/mutilation/mintro.html

The examples included on this page range from the intriguing to the ludicrous with alterations and disguises such as the following:

Similarly, in a letter written but two weeks earlier, as both brother and sister have been wooing Susan and after Austin has succeeded in pulling off a tryst with her in Boston, the last two letters are erased from "Susie" to make "us":

Dear Austin, I am keen, but you are a good deal keener, I am something of a fox, but you are more of a hound! I guess we are very good friends tho', and I guess we both love [S]us[ie] just as well as we can. (A 597; L110)

Hence the erasure attempts to remove a record of "Susie" being at the center of conflict between brother and sister, and to replace expression of love for the outsider with declaration of sibling affection.

This is just a tantalizing taste of what the editors uncover in Rowing in Eden and Open Me Carefully. General readers and scholars both will be reaching for their books to follow up what is offered on the site.

Books cited:

Ellen Louise Hart & Martha Nell Smith (Eds), Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Paris Press: Ashfield, 1998.

Martha Nell Smith, Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson.University of Texas Press: Austin, 1992.

Sally Newman
PhD candidate
Centre for Women’s Studies & Gender Research
Monash University
Australia