1Emily Dickinson lived and wrote in an era when Shakespeare had become omnipresent in American culture; whether his works were parodied or highly praised, his authorship challenged, and his life was the object of many discussions and wild conjectures; the man and his works were discussed in all social milieus. As Lawrence W. Levine notes in Highbrow/Lowbrow, The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, “Nineteenth-century America swallowed Shakespeare, digested him and his plays, and made them part of the cultural body” (Levine 24). Amherst was no exception, despite the ambiguous relationship of New England writers like Emerson with Shakespeare1 and the puritan reserve towards the theatrical world. For a nineteenth-century woman born and raised in New England by a rather strict and stern father, Emily Dickinson was surprisingly well acquainted with Shakespeare and his works. Given the extensive quotations of Shakespeare in her correspondence and poems, it is obvious that Dickinson had had access to the full texts, and not to simplified or censored versions of Shakespeare, as was often the case for young ladies in her time2. She also took part in the Shakespearean debates that animated Amherst’s social and cultural life in the 1850s. Indeed, most of her brother Austin’s friends – George Gould for example3 – were Amherst College students or graduates, and so were the tutors of the Shakespeare club she attended. In that sense, Dickinson was perfectly aware of the ongoing debates. Shakespeare’s works were read and discussed during club meetings, as well as in many passionate articles published in The Indicator and Amherst Collegiate Magazine. As a great admirer of Shakespeare’s works, Dickinson always defended them, refusing any form of censorship of the texts in meetings of the Shakespeare club4, or discarding the controversy on the authorship of Shakespeare’s works that was sparked by Delia Bacon’s article “William Shakspeare and his Plays; an Enquiry Concerning Them,” published in 1856 in Putnam’s Magazine5. Shakespeare was the absolute and unsurpassable model, as she expressed most famously in a letter to the editor of the Springfield Republican, Franklin B. Sanborn: “Had I a trait you would accept I should be most proud, though he has had his Future who has found Shakespeare” (L_402).

3We will first turn to the self-fashioning of Dickinson’s literary persona, by studying how she represented herself in her early letters to Higginson and to her brother Austin – when she was still shaping her identity as a poet – and the response this self-fashioning triggered in her audience. We will argue that Dickinson created her literary myth along the lines of the Shakespearean myth. In My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe asserts that Shakespeare was the “supreme source” (Howe 71) for Dickinson’s poems. She also highlights the dramatic quality of Dickinson’s writing by emphasizing its ties to the genre of the dramatic monologue6. As Cornelia Pearsall explains, the dramatic monologue reveals a chameleon self, that is both created and constantly diffracted through language: “the act of the dramatic monologue […] simultaneously creates a self and alters that self” (Pearsall 84). The already complex negotiations of identity at work in the dramatic monologue are further complicated in Dickinson’s poems because of the Shakespearean intertext, especially with the manipulation of Shakespearean cross-dressed voices. We shall thus finally focus on the performance of selfhood in Dickinson’s poems, and on the problematic relation between the poet’s elusive voice and the reader.

4In the wake of Emerson’s plea for a wholly new and independent American literature in “The American Scholar,” Shakespeare was often regarded by Dickinson’s contemporaries as the iconic figure that needed to be surpassed, the literary “father” who needed to be killed. According to Marianne Novy, Dickinson’s unwavering admiration for the Bard – in contrast to her male contemporaries’ challenging of the literary myth – could be explained by the fact that women writers, especially in the nineteenth century, felt a strong kinship toward and identified with Shakespeare: for Dickinson, the Bard was not only a literary model – she considered him as much as a teacher as Higginson or Susan were to her. In a letter she wrote to her sister-in-law and lifelong friend towards the end of her life, Dickinson thus wrote: “Dear Sue – With the exception of Shakespeare, you have told me of more knowledge than any one living – To say that sincerely is strange praise” (L_757, 1882). In her introduction to the collection of essays entitled Women’s Re-visions of Shakespeare, On the Responses of Dickinson, Woolf, Rich, HD, George Eliot and Others, Novy explains:

5Novy’s last remarks seem particularly fitting for Dickinson, whose work remained virtually unpublished while she lived, and whose style Higginson referred to as being “spasmodic”8 and too unruly to be presented to readers. Similarly, this image of Shakespeare as an “outsider” seems indeed to have appealed to Dickinson, since in many respects, she was a self-proclaimed outcast, setting herself apart from the very first letters she sent to Higginson, with her strange writing style and extravagant posing, that could not have failed to distinguish her from the multitude of hopeful writers that responded to Higginson’s Letter to a Young Contributor9. In her second letter to him, Emily Dickinson – then aged 31 – represents herself as a strange and solitary girl in need of guidance:

6This self-description is uncannily reminiscent of Hawthorne’s character Pearl in The Scarlet Letter: like Pearl, Dickinson seems to shun the company of human beings10, preferring that of the “Hills,” “the Sundown” and her Dog (“They are better than Beings – because they know – but do not tell”). She thus appears as a wild child, a little witch refusing to acknowledge the existence of a “heavenly Father”11 (“They are religious – except me – and address an Eclipse, every morning – whom they call their ‘Father’”). Throughout her correspondence with her “mentor,” Dickinson persistently represented herself as inexperienced and innocent, and refused to send him a portrait or reveal her age12 in order to maintain her aura of mystery.

7Dickinson’s letters to Higginson follow the dynamics of play – as defined by Benveniste, Caillois or Winnicott13 – and become closed entities in which real identities are replaced by personae abiding by the rules of the game, Dickinson being the “half-cracked poetess,” the childish pupil, and Higginson the wise mentor – two roles they kept playing until the poet’s death. Since she was told very early in her correspondence with Higginson that her poems would not be published, and went into almost complete seclusion in the 1860s, her letters soon became her only public interface, as well as the only means of circulation for her poems. In addition, letters were often read aloud to friends or family members (Finnerty 49), thus offering a form of stage by proxy to Dickinson’s epistolary persona14, who, in return, always remained a sort of virtual character, inhabiting a literary space. Dickinson’s histrionic persona changes roles depending on the targeted audience and the circumstances that dictate the performance. This phenomenon is best exemplified in her correspondence with Higginson, as well as with her brother Austin, in which she successively plays Hepzibah (L_62, November 1851) and Rosalind (L_110, March 1853), whereas Austin is associated with Clifford and Oliver15. Emily Dickinson’s histrionic conception of her literary and public self can in part be accounted for by her profound admiration of the Bard and his own “protean flexibility of identity” (Novy 4). Indeed, according to Marianne Novy, women writers identified with Shakespeare in the process of constructing their own identity as writers because

8We could thus argue that, because of her identification with “Shakespeare the actor” (Novy 2), Dickinson’s dramatization and fictionalization of herself could be compared to Shakespeare’s own fashioning of his public self, as described by Stephen Greenblatt in his study Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. According to Greenblatt, “[self-fashioning] invariably crosses the boundaries between the creation of literary characters, the shaping of one’s identity, the experience of being molded by forces outside one’s control, the attempt to fashion other selves” (Greenblatt 3). In the correspondence of the young poet with her mentor, as well as in her early correspondence with her brother (with whom she shared an intellectual, artistic – and some would say sentimental16 – rivalry), Dickinson definitely crosses such boundaries. She is in both cases simultaneously shaping her artistic identity, posing as a fictive or literary character, and trying to comply with “forces outside [her] control” – namely, nineteenth-century conventions of modesty and ladylike behavior – by ironically enacting the part of a timid overgrown child17 or that of the falsely submissive sister.

11Taking her cue from Shakespeare, Dickinson shaped her own myth by removing herself from the public eye18, and by developing an ever-changing fictionalized persona in her only “public” sphere, her letters – which shrouded her identity as effectively as the multitude of reflections in a house of mirrors makes it impossible for an onlooker to discern the real self from the reflections.

12This mode of self-fashioning, which repeatedly distorts the image of the self according to the targeted audience, is also often akin to a freakifying of the self: one of the most striking examples could be found in a July 1862 letter to Higginson, in which Dickinson refers to herself as “the only Kangaroo among the Beauty” (L_268). This image corresponds to the criteria of the grotesque as established by Bakhtin, in the sense that it blends animal and human elements (Bakhtin 314-315). The self is associated with a “Kangaroo,” an unusual animal which can be seen as a parody of human beings, since kangaroos usually stand on their hind legs. The fact that the kangaroo should be presented as grotesquely standing out “among the Beauty” conveys the image of a strange animal standing in a parlor, supposedly, among beautiful ladies, and is reminiscent of Act III, scene one of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which Bottom’s asinine head contrasts with the daintiness of the fairies. This contrast, as well as the dimension of parody, are underlined by the dissonant association of the [u:] of “Kangaroo” and the [ju:] of “Beauty”: not only does the [u:] sound like a parody of the second, but – knowing Dickinson’s Shakespearean penchant – this [u:] could also be heard as an echo to Bottom’s song in the same passage of the play, and more particularly to the term “cuckoo,” repeated twice in Bottom’s song, with the same grotesque effect19.

16The first stanza features a rapid series of changes in the subject’s identity, from an unnamed anterior state to that of “wife,” “Czar,” and “woman.” All those different states follow one another so closely that they don’t seem to be granted the time to have an actual existence; as they are linked together by the dashes, working like pauses and signaling the passage to another state, they appear as a mere succession of images, as if one was flipping through a series of cartoons or snapshots of the self in various costumes. In her chapter “The poet as cartoonist,” Martha Nell Smith has retraced the importance of illustrations in Dickinson’s manuscripts: the images of the self – as a woman, as a wife, or as a czar – presented in this poem recall the clippings that Dickinson used to superpose to some of her poems (like poem *78 “A poor – torn heart – a tattered heart” for example) and letters (L_33 to William Cowper Dickinson or L_214 to Susan)20. This impression is reinforced by the presence of quotation marks, which seem to literally cut out the words from the stanza and make them stand out. The poem thus presents fleeting performances of identity, quick as a succession of snapshots; the term “performance” is here to be understood both in its linguistic sense, as a performative utterance, and in its theatrical sense, since the self is both making a performative speech act – taking on the role of a “wife,” a “woman” or a “czar” as the given word is uttered – and performing these roles for the reader. Indeed, the various denominations – “wife,” “girl,” or “woman,” all stereotypical denominations of womanhood – function metonymically as repeated subjectivating norms determining and enabling the performance of the gender and social status of the speaker (Butler in Case 270). Among this kaleidoscopic vision of a fragmented feminine identity, the irruption of the word “Czar” in the third line is thus somehow puzzling, all the more so because it is deprived of quotation marks, as if it were unobtrusively placed there. As a symbol of male power, “Czar” has a more exotic twist than “King;” it has a particular resonance in the nineteenth-century context, since, as Marjorie Garber explains, oriental objects were all the rage during that period21 (Garber 314). In addition to being part of the fantasized image of the Oriental (man or woman, incidentally), the oriental costume, and in particular the loose-fitting Turkish trousers, was particularly fashionable on the nineteenth-century stage: “On the British and American stage, in the years between Mrs Siddons and Sarah Bernardt, Aladdin was a favorite role for actresses, like Mrs Charles Kemble and Mrs Vining, in the tradition of the “Principal Boy” of the pantomime” (Garber 313). Loose-fitting trousers were common to the oriental and slave costumes, and contributed to shedding doubt on the gender of the actress22. If this instance of cross-dressing – this exotic male costume worn amid the series of traditional western female ones during the performance – is most likely to be read as a reference to a theatrical practice of the time, the overall conception of gender as a role also alludes to the practice of cross-dressing as it was featured on the Elizabethan stage. As Marianne Novy explains in Love’s Argument, Gender Relations in Shakespeare, “just as Shakespeare found his imagination struck by the stage’s transformation of subject to King and back again, he seems to have been fascinated by the image of gender as a role” (Novy 1984 188). This also seems to be true for this particular poem by Emily Dickinson, in which gender is above all a performance and in which “womanliness is simply a matter of acting” (Orgel 70), to use Stephen Orgel’s terms in Impersonations, The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. The body, underneath the label (“wife,” “girl,” “woman” or “czar”) and the costume, remains mysterious. Therefore, the emphasis laid on the speaker’s femininity, along with the kind of “gender trouble” brought on by the presence of the term “czar,” are at one with the kind of gender negotiations taking place in Shakespeare’s comedies, in which the cross-dressed heroines (played by boys disguised as women pretending to be boys) emphasize their masculinity while punning on their underlying femininity. One could think in this respect of Viola – posing as a “eunuch” (I, 2, 56), and whose own body is quite mysterious, because of its resemblance and interchangeability with her brother’s (“An apple cleft in two is no more twin / Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?” V, 1, 218-219) – in act II, scene 4: “We men may say more, swear more; but indeed / Our shows are more than will; for still we prove / Much in our vows but little in our love” (II, 4, 116-118). The pun hinges here on the possibility to confuse “We men” and “Women” as one hears Viola’s tirade; the perspective, along with the gender of the speaker, is easily reversed23. In Dickinson’s poem, the perspective shifts from a female to a male “I,” to a neutral (lines 5-6), and then back to a female perspective. This effect of constant shifting can also be observed in Viola’s musings in act II, scene 2:

18The poem thus offers a complex performance of identity, echoing that of Shakespearean heroines in the comedies, and also features the same dynamics of exhibition and dissimulation as evoked previously. Indeed, the repetition of the demonstrative “that” (“I’ve finished that – / That other state”) repeatedly points to a mysterious anterior state, which remains undefined despite the insistence. Similarly, the overwhelming presence of the pronoun “I” in the first stanza is contrasted by the absence of a stable identity: the “I” remains, in Nancy Walker’s terms, a “multifaceted nobody” (Walker 295), giving the illusion of the exhibition of an excessively defined identity, which in the end dilutes the self in a multitude of reflections, a “concert of personalizations called I” (Cixous 92). These fluctuations in identity are characteristic of the lyrical self: “underneath any declaration of identity, one can always hear alterity and alteration” (Maulpoix 159)24.

20In Dickinson’s poem, the lyrical illusion consists in making the reader believe in an apparent confessional dimension, while attempting to lose him by all possible means, entangling him in multiple voices, multiple images, and constant shifts of perspective. Moreover, resorting to Shakespearean cross-dressed voices creates the impression that the voice is “twice removed,” since it is the voice of a self speaking in the name of another, who is also posing as someone else, being cross-dressed and speaking as a man. This process of distancing and encrypting – disguising and encoding – the voice brings forth a “crypt-self, an encrypted self” (Maulpoix 159). The encryption operates on the level of the encoding of the Shakespearean text and of the self’s identity, but also on the level of the self’s transformation into a “crypt-self,” which carries with it the ghosts of other voices, “the remnants of its chimaeras and of its potentialities”25 (Maulpoix 159). For Dickinson, this distancing of the self is not so much the expression of Victorian modesty, as it is an attempt to encrypt26 the self – in every meaning of the term – and to make it as elusive as possible.

22The consecutive use of some poems in different letters sent to different addressees27 also considerably limits the intimacy of such exchanges, and in the end, such staging of the poems amounts to a form of dramatized overhearing, and a dramatization of the act of reading itself. The theatrical – and Shakespearean – quality of Dickinson’s lyric writing has been notably underlined by Susan Howe in her analysis of Dickinson’s use of the dramatic monologue: “Anonymous shape-changer, she carried the concealing farther. Her poems are monologues without a named narrator, their supreme source is Shakespeare” (Howe 71). This “shape-changing” and “concealing” of a self that would utter the dramatic monologue is illustrated in poem *365 “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?”, which also raises the question of the relation between the problematic voice and its audience. In traditional conceptions of the lyric mode, there is no direct interaction with the reader, as Jonathan Culler explains:

25The stage is indeed quite bare in this poem: the color melts away, the original red (“Red – is the Fire’s common tint”) turns into blinding colorlessness (“Without a color, but the light/ Of unanointed Blaze.”). The fire imagery, as well as the metatextual metaphors of creation and imagination all echo the prologue of Shakespeare’s Henry V; in both cases, the contrast is emphasized between the object of the performance (the confrontation with the human soul, or the conflict between “two mighty monarchies,” Henry V, prologue, 20), and the common, even vulgar, nature of its location (the village forge, and the “unworthy scaffold,” the “cock-pit,” Henry V, prologue, 10-11). In Dickinson’s poem, the tempo is given, like a metronome, by the “anvil’s even ring,” which sets the tone for the dynamics of echoes at play within the poem. Like the spectators of Shakespeare’s prologue, the spectator in Dickinson’s poem is invited to appeal to his physical senses so that the performance can actually take place: while Shakespeare’s spectators had to imagine they “saw” the prints left by the horses’ hooves (Henry V, prologue, 26-27) and felt the oppressing presence of the multitude of soldiers “crammed” within a very small space (Henry V, prologue, 12-14), Dickinson’s spectator can only feel the pulsating material29 (“quivers,” “soundless tugs – within”), and not actually see the soul, blinded as he is by the incandescence of the fire. The submissive spectator is thus only given a negative image, the melting away of the “soul” into an unrecognizable form instead of its being shaped on the anvil. Moreover, the “even ring” can also be read as alluding to a circular space, and in that case is an echo to the Shakespearean “wooden O” (Henry V, prologue, 13) – on which is now played the enigmatic scene of the unshaping of the soul. More than ever, the spectator’s “imaginary forces” (Henry V, prologue, 18) are tried, since, as everything disappears, language is the only tangible element that remains. The representation of the scene and of the self solely depends on the echo language will find in the addressee’s mind; this relationship with the audience is the key to the completion of the self-fashioning process. Culler further remarks that “the vocative of apostrophe is a device which the poetic voice uses to establish with an object a relationship which helps to constitute him” (Culler 142): in the case of poem *365, only the presence of the voice is truly asserted. Its echo in the forge is made stronger by the absence of a physical shell that would contain it; it is as if the constitution of the self was only possible through the resonance of the sound waves against the bodies and objects present in the forge, and through the echo their only physical trace – the poem – will find in its reader. The performative power of language is at the core of this enigmatic performance, during which all that “happens” is the dissolution of the form. “Nothing need happen in an apostrophic poem […]. Nothing need happen because the poem itself is to be the happening” (Culler 149). The poem is only the theater of a voice that vanishes when both the voice and the “designated light” simultaneously exit the poem and the forge, as an actor leaves the stage at the end of a scene. Like the soul that is being (un)modeled on the anvil, the performance remains liminal, oscillating between the lyrical and the theatrical; a prologue, a development with multiple transformations, and a dramatic exit unfold within the small framework of the poem. Such condensation of non-events is pushed further into abstraction as the Shakespearean practice of “making nothing out of nothing” (King Lear, I, 4), of giving birth to an illusion on a bare stage, is reenacted quite literally, in a poem that offers an incorporeal performance, delivered by a voice that is at best indirectly heard through the reading aloud of the poem. To return to the opening interrogation, the problem here is not overhearing the lyrical voice, but connecting with the voice that utters the apostrophe. Like the voices of the characters in a play, Dickinson’s lyrical voice is necessarily bodiless30, and needs to inhabit the body of another in order to have an audible existence. The poem, like a play, thus becomes the unifying unit enclosing all the voices, as well as the locus and instrument of the voices’ necessary alienation.

26The lyrical voice itself – as we have seen – is not a single voice, but a web of voices, made of the self’s disguises, of the voices of other poets, and of the influences that have helped to shape it. While her contemporaries were striving to “disinfect”31 their voice from the overwhelming British influence, Dickinson seems to fully embrace and acknowledge Shakespeare’s dramatic voice as a part of her own lyrical voice. The influence of Shakespearean theatricality on the construction of Dickinson’s lyrical self is particularly palpable in her equation of the lyrical self with an actor, an “o without a figure” (King Lear, I, 4, 174), a nomadic linguistic construct, as well as in her practice of dramatic illusion. In the end the lyrical and theatrical modes operate the same attraction, the same bewitching, of the reader, who, although he knows what he is given to see isn’t real, willingly accepts the illusion, accepts to become entrapped by the performance while it lasts. Dickinson’s stand of “looking back” to Shakespeare in the process of constructing her literary self – thus apparently going against the tide of her contemporaries looking to the future of American literature – is, as Adrienne Rich explains in her essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision,” an empowering act of self-discovery32 for a nineteenth-century New England woman writer. This exploration of the voice of a controversial33, albeit canonical, author allowed Emily Dickinson to shape her own unique and modern voice, and also triggers interrogations towards the literary self which in many respects prefigure modernist interrogations about identity34.

27“When Dickinson tells Sanborn that the ‘Future’ of literature is Shakespeare, she is speaking of his universality, not his nationality”35 (Finnerty 82): Dickinson’s looking back to Shakespeare, her extensive playing with and appropriation through a re-encoding of the Shakespearean intertext is not therefore to be seen only as a political act of Americanization of a British author, as her contemporaries might have considered it. Through her constant exploration of Shakespearean negotiations of selfhood, not only does Dickinson “adopt and adapt” (Granqvist 17), but she also uses Shakespeare as a vehicle of modernity. The Shakespearean conception of a protean self, often breaking out of fixed gender categories, is thus paving the way for the very modern construction of an impersonal self, enacting impersonality through successive fragmentations of the self and an escape from boundaries of selfhood more generally. In her chapter on “Simone Weil’s performance of impersonality,” Sharon Cameron explains that “genius inheres in the brilliance of seeing outside of one’s perspective and outside of perspective generally, in ‘that attention that is so full that the ‘I’ disappears’” (Cameron 117). Such “performance of impersonality” and “seeing outside of one’s perspective” is also enacted in Dickinson’s writing through the constant encryption of the self – the mark of true literary genius according to Cameron, since “only genius could tolerate such a position without seeking to orient itself. Only genius, indifferent to outcome, could regard this vertiginous state as a foundation” (Cameron 118).