Reaching for a connection: hand imagery in Emily Dickinsonâ•Žs poems

1 Introduction The image of the hand is important to Emily Dickinson scholarship as both a symbol in her poetry and as a symbol in the criticism that comments on it. While the former will be the primary focus of the present study, the latter was its original inspiration. The hand used as a metonymic representation of the author, as it appears in theoretical studies, is an especially useful lens through which to view Dickinson's writing. Roland Barthes describes the modern text as if the author's " hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins " (" The Death of the Author, " 223). While Dickinson was considered by some to be a modernist predecessor and was an almost exact contemporary of Mallarme (Barthes' seminal French modernist), the importance of handwriting, the material of the text, and the private " hand-to-hand " distribution of her poetry represents a stark contrast to Barthes' modern author (Erkkila, 14 and Aiken, xv). i Dickinson's hand, as described in scholarship, is intimately attached to her voice. Yet since her first publication, Dickinson's readers have expressed a desire to connect to the author behind the text more intimately, as if the hand that authored it were, in some way, absent. In a preface to " Sic transit gloria mundi " — Dickinson's second earliest poem, and one of a select few that was published in print during her lifetime—the editors of The Springfield Daily Republican addressed this desire in relation to the metonym of the author's hand directly: The hand that wrote the following amusing medley to a gentleman friend of ours, as " a valentine, " is capable of writing very fine things, and there is certainly no presumption in entertaining a private wish that a 2 correspondence, more direct than this, may be established between it and the Republican. ii While the tone of this preface is " playfully impersonal, " the editor's request to know the author more personally presages a central concern of Dickinson scholarship (Jackson, 137). With Dickinson, perhaps more than any other American author, the figure behind the text guides interpretation of her poetry, while concurrently remaining tantalizingly elusive. More specifically, the critical debate that carries over …