Emily Dickinson and Responses to Modernism

The following quote comes from Chapter 1 of Shari Benstock’s Expatriate Modernism: Writing on the Cultural Rim. I’ve bolded the parts that feel particularly resonant with what we’ve discussed in class concerning early reactions to Dickinson.

“In Gertrude Stein’s writing the hidden seam of female writing is traced against the formal logic of grammar, syntactic structures, and philosophic categories, not merely resisting the grammatical law but writing itself in, around, against, and through that law. Similar traces of female Modernism appear in the spacings of mina Loy’s texts, in H.D.’s use of time, in Jean Rhys’s use of pronouns, in Virginia Woolf’s use of dashes and ellipses. These tracings – existing as effects of the female Modernist experience – have often been read as a textual subsultus symptomatic of failings of Modernist forms… Gertrude Stein’s theoretical writings on the nature of linguistic expression under the laws of grammar and logic have been taken as evidence of her lack of understanding of syntax and structure and her inability to conceive of logical arguments. Modernist innovation in poetic punctuation and capitalization, evident from the earliest examples of Mina Loy’s poetry, have been attributed to e.e. cummings, making Loy’s contributions derivative rather than originatory. H.D.’s restatement of temporal functions in both poetry and prose has been thought to be a falling away from Modernist norms, a confusion of Imagist clarity rather than a reconceiving of textual temporality. Jean Rhys’s use of pronouns has been overlooked and Virginia Woolf’s use of dashes and ellipses has most often been thought to mark moments in her texts when language failed her.

Such oversights, misreadings, and inverted interpretations occur with remarkable consistency in the history of Modernist criticism, suggesting that the effects of the female Modernist experience must be denied… Something about these Modernist texts is blinded –– and blinding –– the record of expatriation dispersed and displaced throughout the text, often appearing to be something else calling attention to itself as a presumed gap, a loss, a failure, a silence, a formal fault.”

Emily Dickinson wasn’t a Modernist, obviously, but how interesting is it that receptions of her are part of a broader history of literary criticism, in which we are quick to label female writers’ experimentations as faults or absences, products of failure or ignorance rather than deliberate choices. Much to consider, in how we read literature and its criticism and in how the rebellions from form presented by Whitman and Dicksinson are remembered in popular culture.