Worlds of Possibility: A Hypermedia Archive of Dickinson’s Creative Work

Recent discussions and scholarly research have shown that editing Dickinson in traditional book format is becoming increasingly problematic. Thomas H. Johnson’s variorum edition of 1955, in spite of its many qualities, indeed reflects a biased conception of Dickinson’s opus, according to which the editor must select what counts as a variant and among the variants themselves, and texts are granted status ranking from “worksheet draft” to “fair copy.” As for Ralph Franklin’s presentation of Dickinson’s facsimiles of the “Master Letters,” it is not as neutral a presentation as it would seem to be. In contrast with current editorial practice, Dickinson’s steady refusal to publish her poems during her lifetime is here viewed as a challenge to the print-dominated culture that she lived in and which still rules our approach to texts. Her collaborative work with her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson on certain poems–notably “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (P 216)– together with the blurred distinction between poems and letters, show that Dickinson conceived poetry as a work-in-progress and compel us to reexamine our editorial practice. This strategy establishes Dickinson’s as a poetry that defies closure and calls for an opening up of interpretive readings and methods.A hypermedia archive of Dickinson’s poetry, featuring manuscripts and their typographical transcriptions, various editions, critical commentaries and other material, would enable readers to visualize poems as workshops, and might induce critics to ponder such questions as the importance of Dickinson’s tendency toward destabilization in her poetic project as a whole, or the implications of Dickinson’s attitude toward publication for our understanding of sociologies of literature, both in and beyond Dickinson studies. A sampler of such a hypermedia archive, set up in the fall of 1996, can be perused at http : /jefferson.village.virginia.edu/dickinson/.