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Dorothy Huff Oberhaus. Emily Dickinson's Fascicles: Method & Meaning. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Pp. 260. $40.00.
From 1858 to 1864, Emily Dickinson, then at the height of her poetic power, organized her poetry into handmade books, carefully copying selected poems onto good sheets of paper and binding them with string. Discovered after her death, these gatherings, commonly called fascicles, were almost immediately mined for individual lyrics that could be published in thematically transparent categories. A bitter rupture between Dickinson's sister, Lavinia, and Mabel Todd, the poet's earliest editor and mistress of Dickinson's brother, set the stage for the division and disarrangement of the fascicles. What Dickinson might have wished to convey in the shape of these gatherings is a question that finally can be posed, thanks to Ralph Franklin's painstaking restoration of the 40 fascicles and IS unsewn sets in his facsimile edition, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (I98i).1
Dorothy Oberhaus' Emily Dickinson's Fascicles, the third book-length study to approach the fascicles as artistic gatherings, concerns the structure and theme of fascicle 40.2 Oberhaus presents Dickinson as a devotional poet and argues that final fascicle is a "conversion narrative" (19) and a "triumphant conclusion of a long single work, the account of a spiritual and poetic pilgrimage that begins with the first fascicle's first poem" (3). This idiosyncratic argument unfortunately confirms Harold Bloom's proclamation that "all attempts to read her as a devotional poet have crashed badly."3
Much of the trouble in this book stems from temperamental differences between the author and her subject. Where Dickinson's poems are notoriously resistant to closure and resolution, Oberhaus' imagination is insistently teleological. Where Dickinson waggishly represents religion and furiously weighs God, Oberhaus finds piety lurking in the poet's every reference to God. Oberhaus will not allow for any mischief, even in the lines, "In the name of the Bee / And of the Butterfly- / And of the Breeze-Amen!" "So shall it be," Oberhaus comments (58). Because she believes that theological acuity (evidenced in those wonderful substitutions) precludes tonal irreverence and other impieties, Oberhaus' close readings are unnecessarily monochromatic.
Oberhaus most seriously wounds her argument for a testament of acceptance by brushing off the unforgettable opus of religiously anguished and bitter...