“White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862, a Weekly
Blog.” http://sites.dartmouth.edu/whiteheat/
Created and edited by Ivy Schweitzer
I tell people who ask, that Dickinson called me. That is
why I came up with a year-long project to document one of the most intense
years in Dickinson’s writing life. I am both a scholar of early American
literature with a particular focus on women, and a poet. Wanting to invigorate
my relationship to poetry as a writer of it, I thought I would immerse myself
in all things Dickinson and get as close as I could to her writing process and
to the texture and contexts of her daily writing life. There are many exemplary
biographies and accounts of Dickinson [could link to a list] and no end of
fascinating fan literature and fiction, but I wanted something more
experiential and sustained.
I had just finished a digital humanities project, The Occom Circle (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~occom/),
a scholarly digital edition of works by and about Samson Occom, an 18th
century Mohegan Indian leader, public intellectual and Christian minister. In
the course of working on that project, I explored the Dickinson Electronic Archive [put in link], an innovative research
and teaching tool created by a collective of Dickinson scholars in the wake of
the recently digitized Dickinson manuscripts by Harvard University and Amherst
College. In 1981, the world of Dickinson scholarship had been revolutionized by
the publication of Ralph’s Franklin’s The
Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, which afforded a unique view of
Dickinson’s texts as she wrote (and rewrote and preserved) them. Since then,
scholars have been busy “unediting” Dickinson’s writing, as Marta Werner
expressed it in Emily
Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing,
“undoing” a century of distorting editorial and critical work so that we can
finally begin to read what Dickinson actually wrote. Digital access to
Dickinson’s manuscripts is producing another revolution, again in Werner’s
words, “constellating
these works not as still points of meaning or as incorruptible texts but,
rather, as events and phenomena of freedom.” I wanted to explore and find a way
to present Dickinson’s poems as events of freedom.
I thought I would use the digital technologies I learned
about in The Occom Circle to create
an immersive experience for a wider audience of poetry lovers, students of
Dickinson, and folks interested in the nineteenth-century. I tried out this
approach in the two iterations of a junior level colloquium on Dickinson I
taught at my home institution of Dartmouth College, titled “The New Dickinson:
After the Digital Turn.” It was a revelation to see how our readings of the
poems changed, deepened and grew more complex and dynamic when we worked with
the digital scans of the manuscripts. As my students often commented heatedly,
they felt “gipped” when comparing printed versions of the poems with the
manuscript images. How dare the editor make those choices about diction,
syntax, line breaks, and the fixed length of Dickinson’s iconic dashes–– and
without telling us! they complained. This “new” way of reading Dickinson was
further aided by the ease of finding contextual materials on the web like
newspapers, magazines, the Dickinson
Lexicon, information about the Civil War and other players in her creative
drama. That rich mix is what I imagined our weekly blog posts would offer.
Despite recent films about Dickinson (A Quiet Passion, 2017 and Wild
Nights with Emily, 2018) that counteract the myth of the quaint recluse
removed from the world, it still seems important to ground the poet in her time
and place and suggest her engagement with contemporary events. To do so, each
weekly blog offers several sets of related materials: what was happening in the
wider world, nationally and internationally, in the local world of Amherst and
the Dickinson family, and what was afoot in the literary worlds of her moment.
These materials are not meant to be definitive or restrictive but suggestive
and opening. We cannot know whether Dickinson read about or engaged in debates
about current affairs, but they were in the air she breathed, perhaps on the
lips of her family members and in the minds of her growing circle of
correspondents. They formed part of the networks of sociability in which she
moved and created.
Each weekly blog post consists
of four parts:
1) national/international events
of the week evoked through headlines, summaries and links to major news outlets
that Dickinson’s family subscribed to and often read aloud to each other
2) biographical events of the
week in Dickinson's life, domestic circle, and expanding correspondents evoked
through daily events and letters
3) literary trends of the
week or time that form a backdrop for a cluster of poems written during the
year and curated in relation to the first two section, and evoked through
summaries of scholarship and approaches. Our goal is not to interpret poems for
readers, but to provide materials that will facilitate interpretation.
4) a reflection on and
response to the weekly events and the poems. The nature of the reflections will
vary, depending on who is reflecting. The project seeks to connect users to
scholars and poets around the world who study and appreciate Dickinson’s work
in order to offer diverse viewpoints through creative and critical musings. If
you would like to be a guest respondent, please contact the editor, Ivy
Schweitzer at Ivy.Schweitzer@Dartmouth.edu.
