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By Marietta Messmer. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. 280 pp. $34.95.
In A Vice for Voices: Reading Emily Dickinson's Correspondence, Marietta Messmer identifies letters as the core of Dickinson's art, challenging a configuration that places poems at the center of the work. Explaining that the correspondence has almost always been read autobiographically, Messmer asks how we can go beyond "a dichotomous approach" to letters and poems and move toward "a more dialogically interactive" revisionary reading (18). Claiming that letters are a radically experimental literary form exhibiting a high degree of performativity, she encourages readers to see correspondence as an innovative poetics that critiques patriarchal discursive formations. Messmer "revisits Dickinson's epistolary acts of self-fashioning from a contemporary feminist-poststructuralist perspective" (17). Her theoretical approach to intertextual interactions between and among Dickinson's "multiple discursive voices" is further informed by Mikhail Bakhtin's understanding of dialogic polyvocality in lyric poetry (20-21).
Messmer begins with a chapter illustrating how Dickinson breaks nineteenth-century epistolary conventions for women set out in prescriptive letter writing manuals. Chapters on "The `Female' World of Love and Duty" and "The `Male' World of Power and Poetry" follow and assert that while Dickinson's letters to female friends reject the...