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Crumbley, Paul. Winds of Will: Emily Dickinson and the Sovereignty of Democratic Thought. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2010. $53.
To reframe discussions of Emily Dickinson's interaction with her cultural moment, Paul Crumbley's Winds of Will: Emily Dickinson and the Sovereignty of Democratic Thought uses the concepts of political action in order to enrich definitions of the democratic within both Dickinson studies and general scholarship on these issues in the nineteenth century. By engaging with period-specific definitions of sovereignty, monarchy, and Emersonian individualism, Winds of Will provides its own terms with which Crumbley produces in-depth readings of Dickinson's poems and letters. Further, by historicizing gender specific cultural assumptions, Crumbley redirects conversations about public and private space toward what he argues is the motivating factor for the impenetrability of Dickinson's poetry and prose writing: a democratic interest in the sovereignty of making intellectual choices. Crumbley also engages with historical, cultural, and literary theories of public politics and the right of sovereignty, placing diverse thinkers such as John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in conversation with one another. His book explores how Dickinson privileges the powers of the imagination to encourage the development of a gymnastic and independent (sovereign) self during the process of reading. What he refers to as an interest in "democratic reading" guides Dickinson's presentation of her writing and herself, a practice that combats often conflicting nineteenth-century notions of democratic citizenship and natural womanhood (178).
That Dickinson's poetry would provide insight into social problems as a means to suggest the potential for unimagined social positions has long been a topic of literary criticism. Crumbley similarly argues that Dickinson's poems (and letters) expose the "incapacitating power" of social norms (48). According to Crumbley, "obstacles within the female imagination that prevent individual speakers from resisting social...