Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson

Abstract

Mitchell reviews "Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson" by Paul Crumbley.

Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson. By Paul Crumbley.

Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky. 1997. x, 224 pp. $29.95.

Emily Dickinson's dashes appear uniform in print, but in her manuscripts they vary in length, angle, line placement, and proximity to words. It was Edith Wylder who first argued that this usage was not arbitrary, but a notational habit influenced by Ebeneezer Porter's Rhetorical Reader, a standard nineteenth-century elocution text in which acute and grave accents placed over the vowel of a word denoted rising or falling inflection. Nevertheless, most of Dickinson's editors regularized her dashes for publication. Thomas Johnson, editor of the standard texts, described her usage as "capricious," and Ralph Franklin wrote that Dickinson employed dashes casually in recipe notes as well as in letters to correspondents who do not appear to have evinced any interest in, or understanding of, innovative forms of punctuation. That Dickinson varied dashes even in circumstances in which any potential significance could not possibly have been actualized challenges the views held by contemporary "chirographic" scholars with whom Paul Crumbley aligns himself in his excellent book. Crumbley reproduces sixteen separate gradations of dash, suggesting an interpretative commitment to the integrity of each. His readings of the poems, however, brilliant as they are, do not bear out the suggestion. The dashes he describes work more generally as instruments of linguistic disruption than as a series of codes with consistent but individually differentiated meanings. When he asserts, for example, that a downward pointing dash will "visually capture" the descending curve of a life, he overlooks the plethora of sloping dashes elsewhere that have no such denotative purpose (57).

Crumbley's writing has much in common with that of previous critics for whom dashes functioned collectively as tools of disjunction. He extends the insights of those scholars in innovative directions, however, most notably in applying Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia to Dickinson's writing. He convincingly argues that the dash "challenges the linear progression of sentences and emphasizes the uncertainty of identity" (15), and that the resultant disruption is essentially dialogic, dramatizing a self caught up in languages that are not fully unified or containable. Dashes, then, facilitate a mixing of discourses, an interplay of voices. Such a conclusion, however, does not necessitate the typographic individualization of the dash that the book embraces, and it seems instead to demonstrate that the employment of dashes was more strategic, more a matter of poetics, than a visual contribution to a specific theme or mood within each poem.

Although his treatment of the angular rendering of the dash often seems redundant, Crumbley still persuades because of his exemplary readings, with their sensitive and deft openness to Dickinson's restless, relentless ambiguities. What emerges finally is a sense of Dickinson as a lyric cubist, with the dash central to her project of mixing styles and angles, deconstructing borders, interrogating authority and truth. Crumbley renders very complex ideas simply but not simplistically, and he writes elegantly. Inflections of the Pen is therefore a major and lasting contribution to the study of stylistics in Emily Dickinson.

Domhnall Mitchell, Norwegian University of Science and Technology