The Implicit Intimacy of Dickinsons Dashes Essay -- Emily Dickinson a

The Implicit Intimacy of Dickinson's Dashes The dash in Emily DickinsonÂ’s poetry, initially edited away as a sign of incompletion, has since come to be seen as crucial to the impact of her poems. Critics have examined the dash from a myriad of angles, viewing it as a rhetorical notation for oral performance, a technique for recreating the rhythm of a telegraph, or a subtraction sign in an underlying mathematical system.1 However, attempting to define DickinsonÂ’s intentions with the dash is clearly speculative given her varied dash-usage; in fact, one scholar illustrated the fallibility of one dash-interpretation by applying it to one of DickinsonÂ’s handwritten cake recipes (Franklin 120). Instead, I begin with the assumption that Ââ€Å"text† as an entity involving both the reading and writing of the material implies a readerÂ’s attempt to recreate the act of writing as well as the writerÂ’s attempt to guide the act of reading. I will focus on the former , given the difficulties surrounding the notion of authorial intention a.k.a. the Death of the Author. Using three familiar Dickinson poems—Ââ€Å"The Brain—is wider than the Sky,† Ââ€Å"The Soul selects her own Society,† and Ââ€Å"This was a Poet—It is that,†Ãƒâ€šÃ¢â‚¬â€I contend that readers can penetrate the double mystery of Emily DickinsonÂ’s reclusive life and lyrically dense poetry by enjoying a sense of intimacy not dependent upon the content of her poems. The source of this intimacy lies in her remarkable punctuation. DickinsonÂ’s unconventionally-positioned dashes form disjunctures and connections in the readerÂ’s understanding that create the impression of following Dickinson through the creative process towards intimacy with the poet herself. This implicit intimacy becomes clear ... ...ickinsonÂ’s highly personal notations. Ironically, what at first seems an idiosyncratic stylistic effect operates to create a deep sense of intimacy between the reader and the creative process of a highly reclusive individual. Far from distancing the reader, the dash actually provides a gateway between the act of reading and the poetÂ’s moment of creation, only possible if we view the text as a shifting co-creation of reader and poet. Works Cited: Edith Wylder, The Last Face: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971). Jerusha Hall McCormack, Ââ€Å"Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,† American Quarterly 55.4 (2003) 569-601. Michael Theune, Ââ€Å"Â’One and One are One’†¦and Two: An Inquiry into DickinsonÂ’s Use of Mathematical Signs,† The Emily Dickinson Journal 10.1 (2001) 99-116.