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Graphology has taught us to recognize images in handwriting that the unconscious of the writer conceals in his writing. It may be supposed that the mimetic process that expresses itself in this way in the activity of the writer was, in the very distant times in which script originated, of utmost importance for writing. Writing has thus become, next to speech, an archive of asensuous similarities, asensuous correspondences.
-Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty"
Emily Dickinson's dashes are among the most widely contested diacriticals in the modern literary canon. Written in Dickinson's distinctive hand, her unprintable, idiosyncratic notations resist the systematization necessary to be translated into typeface. All her irregular marks, including slanted and vertical slashes and ones indistinguishable from periods or angular commas, hovering between words and lines, are characterized by a suddenness of stroke that can be subsumed under "dash"; the word is thus their most apt designation.1 As her editors note, Dickinson's distinctive and erratic notational system poses extreme difficulties for translating her script into typography.2 Almost every punctuation mark in a typeset edition requires the editor to interpret possibilities, thereby simplifying the text. Unable to account for every way Dickinson employs her dash, some earlier editors concluded that she overused the literary device and advocated excising them from her poems.3 Similarly, attempts at theorizing Dickinson's dashes generally impose a systematization that does not fit many instances, requiring a variation of the qualifying clause that they are often haphazard and meaningless.4 The resistance of Dickinson's dashes to systemization, however, suggests their radical eccentricity, each dash signifying differently and multiply, visually, syntactically, expressively, and rhetorically, dependent on the poem and its immediate context.5 Moreover, examining Dickinson's dashes through two terms of Walter Benjamin-"gesture" and mimesis-enables their theorization. Their sheer plethora and often unexpected placement elicit, like Benjaminian "gestures," analysis by disrupting the context in which they are found, calling attention to themselves to be interpreted in their manifold roles. Beginning with an analysis of Dickinson's own statements about her dashes, this article demonstrates that Benjamin's theory of mimetic language accounts for their multiplicity of meanings, their fraught ambiguity, and their visualization of complex tensions.
In a letter to Emily Fowler (Ford) from perhaps the early 1850s, Dickinson comments on a dash that precedes...