"Vesuvius at Home"

I recently fetched home Adrienne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (Norton 1979) to read an essay I’d seen referenced elsewhere, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision.” I love the way she introduces the essay:

The Modern Language Association is both marketplace and funeral parlor for the professional study of Western Literature in North America. Like all gatherings of the professions, it has been and remains a “procession of the sons of educated men” (Virginia Woolf): a congeries of old boys’ networks, academicians rehearsing their numb canons in sessions dedicated to the literature of white males, junior scholars under the lash of “publish or perish” delivering papers in the bizarrely lit drawing-rooms of immense hotels: a ritual competition veering between cynicism and desperation.

Well. Not much has changed since 1971. Now the old boys’ networks contain some women. Maybe I’d say not “funeral parlor” but maybe low-rent red light district. But that’s a matter of perspective.
        Having got the book home, I was distracted from the essay that prompted me to check out this volume by a more promising essay: “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson.” I was a bit blown away by this one. I thought I knew a lot about Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson (1985). I knew it was in dialogue with Gilbert and Gubar’s study of 19th-century women writers, The Madwoman in the Attic; I knew it was in dialogue with existing male scholarship on Dickinson; and I knew it was in dialogue with William Carlos Williams. But here’s something new to me, though it’s quite old (1975).
        Howe’s book is ground-breaking. It seeks to change the way we understand Dickinson’s lines, arguing also that we place more emphasis on the alternative words Dickinson retained for some of her poems. It argues Dickinson had a Promethean, even Vesuvian spark, seeks to free her from feminist and misogynist readings that call Dickinson, a child, a madwoman, an eccentric old spinster. Its central reading is of Dickinson’s “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—.” And it does this in a wonderfully suggestive and paratactic “poet’s prose” (that term troubles me a little).
        And here in Rich’s essay are the same arguments, more or less, the same poem advanced as central to our understanding of Dickinson. Rich has nothing to say about Dickinson’s lines, nothing much to say about form, absolutely nothing I can recall. But the rest is there in this essay. Was this on Howe's mind as she wrote? Is this another person to whom she was speaking? Rich doesn’t appear in the index or the bibliography of Howe’s book. So I’m left to wonder.
        Whatever was on Howe’s mind as she wrote, Rich’s essay seems very useful to read alongside Howe’s book. I suppose I’ll add—since I resolved this year to “write, write, or die” to be, when it comes to blogging, as baggy as I want—if you read this essay you’ll see a great selection of Dickinson’s poems quoted.

There are, of course, differences between Rich and Howe. Rich tends to psychologize Dickinson in a way that seems to irritate the Howe that wrote My Emily Dickinson. And Rich tends to see Dickinson’s major gift to be saying “ ‘Someone has been here before.’ ” Howe, on the other hand, sees Dickinson’s gift to be modeling the sovereign power of poetry. For Howe it’s significant that Dickinson is a woman, but it seems to be still more important that we see Dickinson’s accomplishment not as that of a woman for women but as a poet for all poets.
        Maybe this is the difference of ten years. Which I guess comes back to Rich’s slam on the MLA. There are still old boy’s networks, but now there are some women in them.