Seductions of Emily Dickinson

What makes Emily Dickinson such a fascinating poet? Although

she left no personal poetics, she did define her own response to poetry

as an immediate sensual reaction: "If I read a book and] it makes

my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If

I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that

is poetry" (L. 342a). Presumably, her own poetry is most significant

not in what it communicates to a reader, but in what it does to a reader.

Is the continued popular success of that poetry not conclusive evidence

of its capacity to elicit a similarly spontaneous, visceral response from

its readers? And is Dickinson's critical reception not the visible proof

of the perpetuation of a powerful (and uncanny) reading seduction?

Relocating Dickinson within her own culture reveals the

genesis of her rhetoric of seduction. But the consequences of the rhetorical

"seduction" of antebellum readers still impact readers today.

Why do critical studies of the poet so often identify her as the classic

analysand, the female hysteric? Because transference is frequently the

engine of analysis, misshaping the reader's relationship with the text

by introducing a past scene of seduction into a present interpretive context.