Dickinson's transgressive body

S. Runzo

One could say that Emily Dickinson's body has been an obsession, both for editors and family members who have been careful in tending to Dickinson's public presentation and for readers and scholars who have puzzled over the poetic and epistolary drama. Various critical claims have attributed an impossible array of definition to Dickinson's body, naming it unmothered, virginal, pregnant, lesbian, heterosexual, asexual. Scholar Karl KeIler has imagined "Sleeping with Emily Dickinson." One might recall the many alterations to the 1847/48 daguerreotype in which Dickinson is "feminized" or glamorized with, for instance, curled hair and a ruffly collar. The introductory materials to several early editions of letters and poems stress Dickinson's many heterosexual romances, and numerous sources report the exertions expended to remove evidence of Dickinson's affections for women, particularly Susan Gilbert, through extensive mutilation and censorship of letters and poems.