| "Oberhaus's
purpose is to reveal Emily Dickinson's intended and achieved structure
in these forty sequential booklets and to demonstrate that the final
fascicle is the account of an Ignatian meditation, a detailed narrative
of individual mystical Christian conversion and experience. . . .
This is a major, iconoclastic work; it can be expected to provoke
lively reactions from leading Dickinson scholars, all of whom have
denied that Dickinson ever attempted or achieved a structured interrelationship
among her lyrics and that she ever professed sustained religious conviction."—Jack
L. Capps
Emily Dickinson's fascicles, the forty booklets comprising more
than 800 of her poems that she gathered and bound together with
string, had long been cast into disarray until R. W. Franklin restored
them to their original state, then made them available to readers
in his 1981 Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. Many Dickinson
readers believe their ordering to be random, while others have proposed
that one or more of the fascicles appear to center upon some organizing
principle.
In this important critical study, Dorothy Huff Oberhaus demonstrates
for the first time the structural principles underlying Emily Dickinson's
assembling of the fascicles. Oberhaus argues that Dickinson's fortieth
fascicle is a three-part meditation and the triumphant conclusion
of a long lyric cycle, the account of a spiritual and poetic pilgrimage
that begins with the first fascicle's first poem. The author in
turn finds that the other thirty-eight fascicles are meditative
gatherings of interwoven poems centering upon common themes.
Discovering the structural principles underlying Dickinson's arrangement
of the fascicles presents a very different poet from the one portrayed
by previous critics. This careful reading of the fascicles reveals
that Dickinson was capable of arranging a long, sustained major
work with the most subtle and complex organization. Oberhaus also
finds Dickinson to be a Christian poet for whom the Bible was not
merely a source of imagery, as has long been thought; rather, the
Bible is essential to Dickinson's structure and meaning and therefore
an essential source for understanding her poems. |
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| Dorothy
Huff Oberhaus is Professor of English, Mercy College, Dobbs
Ferry, New York. Her articles on Emily Dickinson have appeared in The Emily Dickinson Journal, The Explicator, ESQ, American Literature, and other journals and anthologies. |
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