White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Emily Dickinson's life has intrigued many people over the years.  Why did she withdraw from society, refusing to "cross [her] Father's ground to any House or town"?  Why did she write such strangely compelling poetry?  Who inspired her?

One popular reimagining of ED is William Luce's 1976 play The Belle of Amherst.  (The picture below is from Redmond, Washington's Sound Theater Company's recent production.)


You may also see part of Jennifer Levinson's performance at this video linked below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz8girAKwJM

Others are intrigued by ED's relationship to her sister-in-law, Sue.



http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/emily-dickinson-lesbian-her-letter-to-susan-gilbert-in-june-of-1852-might-tell-us-less-than-you-think/

http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/ed/node/78

Brenda Wineapple has decided to examine ED's friendship with poet, editor, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  As she points out, often people have wondered just what ED saw in Higginson.  He has been caricatured as the man who tried to regularize ED's poetry.  After all, his poetry tended to be carefully crafted sonnets, and his most well-known poems today are translations of Petrarch, the 14th century Italian poet known for his love poems to Laura, a woman he never actually met.

http://www.sonnets.org/petrarch.htm#010

http://www.sonnets.org/petrarch.htm#020

Also, take a look at the cover of White Heat above.  How old does she look?  What comes to mind when you look at her?  when you look at her next to the middle-aged man with facial hair and a military uniform?

 
It is one of the few photographs of ED.  True.  It was taken when she was a teenager.  She began to write to TWH when she was thirty.  Without fooling around with her existing photographs (which in itself is trouble and which ED's family did do), we will always have a distorted view of ED (and therefore of her relationship to TWH) if we focus on the photographs.  I don't know what I would have placed on the cover of White Heat, but something less direct and more evocative might have been better.

However, Higginson was more than "just" a translator and magazine editor, and his relationship with ED was fairly complex.  Wineapple notes its sexual tension.  Today we might consider their relationship to be an emotional affair and even emotional infidelity as TWH was married to a chronically-ill woman at the time.  Wineapple also speculates about what he gained from ED as well as about what she gained from him.  Moreover, as Wineapple points out, ED consciously chose Higginson as her mentor, for she would have been familiar with his work for the Atlantic Monthly as well as his political activism.  This is not to say that ED was politically radical or even engaged with politics.  Some of the tension in her relationship with TWH occurs when she downplays his desire to fight in the Civil War.  (He ultimately trained African-American soldiers in South Carolina.)  She was much more interested in TWH's nature writing, and her family was relatively conservative.


Below is Frederic Edwin Church's painting of Mount Katahdin in Maine, one of the many subjects of TWH's nature writing.

However, TWH tended to examine nature closely.  A more typical topic for him would be the water lily (shown below):


As you'll note from these poems, ED also likes to examine nature closely.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20949

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=180204

http://www.tcnj.edu/~carney/dickinson/poems.html#did_the_harebell



Yet Wineapple is persuasive in her readings of ED's poems with imagery relevant to the Civil War.  See these links for a few of these poems: 

Apologies for any pop-ups!

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson/10548

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Portion_is_Defeat_%E2%80%94_today_%E2%80%94

Below is a picture of Glory, a 1989 film about the company that Higginson had wanted to command.




ED and TWH's friendship began in 1862 and continued through the rest of her life despite his remarriage to a much younger woman and her intriguing relationship with Judge Otis Lord.  ED & TWH's correspondence periodically slowed, but she would send him her poems, referring to herself as his "Pupil" as late as 1884, the year before her death.  Interestingly, even then, she also toyed with submitting her poems for publication when another of TWH's proteges, Helen Hunt Jackson, contacted her about submitting them to The No Name Series.  ED sent Jackson one poem, "Success is counted sweetest":
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=174990

This poem would be published...anonymously.

After her death, TWH co-edited her poems with Mabel Loomis Todd, the mistress of ED's brother.  Todd, as it turns out, was responsible for the "regularization" of ED's poems.  TWH was more of an advocate, convincing Todd to include particular poems and writing the preface to the collected poems.  Initially, this project was successful, but 19th century readers were not quite ready for Dickinson, and Lavinia Dickinson, ED's sister and heir, soon quarreled with both Todd and TWH. 

Below is a link to a version of TWH's preface that appeared in the October 1891 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.  Beneath the Victorian verbiage, he quotes freely from ED's poems and letters:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/emilyd/edletter.htm

I'll close with a picture from the garden at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.  During her lifetime, ED was also known as a gardener.

Lady Mary, Celebi, and the Ottoman Empire (part 2)

While I'm online, I thought I'd post a little bit of information about Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Evliya Celebi, our authors.  The picture above is Lady Mary in "Turkish costume."  I found it at the University of North Texas' exhibit on women writers.  This exhibit also included the following concise biography of Lady Mary:

http://www.library.unt.edu/rarebooks/exhibits/women/17th.htm#Lady%20Mary%20Wortley%20Montagu

This picture of a cover of a recent biography is probably a little more colorful!  Lady Mary, by the way, is particularly known for her early adoption of immunization.


Luminarium.org's biography is more extensive than the University of North Texas'.

http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/montagu/marybio.htm

This site also has links to Lady Mary's works in various genres:

http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/montagu/marybib.htm

Britain's Twickenham Museum also has information about Lady Mary in the context of her relationship with Alexander Pope:

http://www.twickenham-museum.org.uk/detail.asp?ContentID=180

For a little more information about Pope, here is the same museum's page on him:

http://www.twickenham-museum.org.uk/detail.asp?ContentID=19

Below is a picture of the Ottoman author Evliya Celebi:

Here is a link to a biography of Celebi:

http://www.mymerhaba.com/Evliya-%C3%87elebi-Traveler-in-Turkey-138.html

Among the places that Celebi visited was Gjirokastra, Albania:

http://www.gjirokastra.org/sub_links/help_save/help_visit_evliya_celebi.html

Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism has posted Celebi's description of Van Castle in the city of Van:

http://www.kultur.gov.tr/EN/BelgeGoster.aspx?17A16AE30572D313E603BF9486D4371D58DCB41B038C3F0E



Here is more information about Celebi's travels and his writing:

http://www.sabanciuniv.edu/ssbf/evliyacelebi/eng/?rota/rota.html

http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/evliya/seyahatname.html

Lady Mary, Celebi, & the Ottoman Empire (part 1)

En 202 could also be called "The Age of Empire and After."  Heart of Darkness, of course, is very much about Empire, and our upcoming reading Things Fall Apart was written as the former colonies in Africa were becoming independent.  With Friday's reading (the letters of British satirist & literati Lady Mary Wortley Montague and the travel writing of Evliya Celebi), we have moved back in time to the 17th & 18th century and to other perspectives on Empire.

First of all, both of our readings are about the Ottoman Empire, the successor to the Byzantine Empire, which had been in turn the successor to the Roman Empire.  The Ottoman Empire lasted from 1301 to 1923 and was primarily an Islamic empire although at times it was a surprisingly diverse and tolerant empire. 

Secondly, whereas Lady Mary Wortley Montague was British, Evliya Celebi was Turkish.  In other words, he was not a traveler from an outside empire coming to describe the colonies and define the Other.  He was writing about his own country.  Moreover, in Lady Mary's day, Britain was on the rise, but it was not as powerful as it would be in Conrad's time.

Below is a map of the Ottoman Empire in 1683, the year before Celebi's death.

 

This map from Baylor University shows the Ottoman Empire from 1798 to 1923:

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire would be known as the "Sick Man of Europe."  However, if you take a course in Early Modern history or literature, you will see that this empire was quite powerful then.  During the 16th and 17th century, the Ottomans attempted to take Vienna, and not until 1683 and the Battle of Vienna did they give up.

Here is Valdosta State University's map of Europe that will show you just how far into Europe Vienna and Austria are!

For more detailed information about the Ottoman Empire, see this link to the BBC's site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/ottomanempire_1.shtml

Korkut Ozgen has also put together an impressive site on this empire.  Here is a link to his pages on the empire's art and culture:

http://www.theottomans.org/english/art_culture/index.asp

Three or four years ago the Sackler Gallery had a wonderful exhibit on clothing and textiles from the Ottoman empire:

http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/StyleStatus.htm

DC's Textile Museum has an online exhibit on Ottoman embroidery:

http://www.textilemuseum.org/fsg/index.html

However, after reading Lady Mary's letters, you may be curious about harems!  Here, too, is an article from the Topkapi Museum's web site.  This museum is affiliated with Bilkent University, a university in Turkey's capital, Ankara.

http://www.ee.bilkent.edu.tr/~history/harem.html

Here is a site on paintings of harem life, a popular Orientalist genre:

http://www.harem.org.uk/

I will close with an example of this genre, Theodore Chasseriau's "Scene of the Harem, Moorish Dame in Bath."  This painting dates from 1854.


As you may see from Renoir's painting from 1872, this genre of art included paintings of Frenchwomen dressed in "harem" costumes.

 

Life Writing

One genre that we'll be studying in EN 202 and that may seem new to you is life writing. Life writing includes autobiographies, biographies, journals, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, and even letters.  Although, at first glance, this genre seems to belong more to history or sociology, reading life history can shed light on the ways that literature shapes how we think and feel as well as influences on literature itself.  Some of the earliest novels like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders even represent themselves as memoirs or autobiographies.  (A memoir covers a part of one's life whereas an autobiography treats the whole of one's life.)  And some life writing like Harriet Jacobs'  Incidents and Samuel Pepys' Diary is not only fascinating but well-written and worth studying as literature.  For example, how does Harriet Jacobs tell her life story in such a way that it appeals to her audience?!  How does she depict herself, Dr. Flint, and her grandmother?  (Note that although Pepys did not want people to read his diary, both Incidents and the Interesting Narrative were written to be read *and* to change people's minds about slavery.)

Here are some links on the study of life writing (or life history):

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/clhr/

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/english/usba/usba.html#field

For those of us who know (a little) French, this site is invaluable as it is associated with Philippe Lejeune, one of the literary scholars to focus on autobiography:

http://www.autopacte.org/

This list from California's Center for Autobiographic Studies explains the difference between autobiography and memoir as well as outlining the different forms of autobiography.  The audience is someone wanting to write and perhaps even publish an autobiography or memoir, but I think that you'll find this list to be useful.

http://www.storyhelp.com/autotypes.html

By the way, Beatrice Wood wrote her autobiography, I Shock Myself, when she was in her early nineties.  Almost ten years later she actively participated in a documentary on herself and her work.  Ms. Wood was also one of the models for Rose in Titanic.  Here is a link to a site with examples of her artwork:

http://artscenecal.com/ArtistsFiles/WoodB/WoodBFile/BWood.html

However, life writing is not simply published or unpublished autobiographies and memoirs.  Here is a link to a project from several universities in Hawaii.  It exemplifies the work that scholars are doing in this area.

http://www.hawaii.edu/biograph/cbrbiohiariyoshi.html

There is also the Legacy Project, a collection of correspondence between service members and their loved ones.

http://www.warletters.com/index.html

To read some of these letters, go to this site:

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/battlelines/index_good.html

This database includes women's letters and diaries from the 1600s to 1950:

http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/NWLDlive/

Here writers discuss their motivations for keeping journals--and preserving their life writing:

http://fraglit.com/impassio/k-essay.htm

http://fraglit.com/lwc/archives/38

A literary scholar writes about her experience reading the published diaries of 18th c. novelist Frances Burney D'Arblay:

http://www.jimandellen.org/burney/fanny.divergent.html

Lifewriting is also an important part of national identity:

http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/segan/CANLIN.HTM

Of course, we must not forget biography and collections of biographies.  Lucy Hutchinson's biography of her late husband continues to intrigue literary scholars:

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/Lucy%20Hutchinson.htm

I've cited a number of works by women, but one of the most famous literary biographies is James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson...and earlier Johnson himself wrote a collection of literary biographies:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/Guide/lives.html

I really am only scratching the surface, but I think that adding life writing to EN 202 gives us a much fuller and richer idea of world literature.  If you know French, Spanish, or another language, I would be interested in seeing what you might find in the area of life writing!