'Will You Ignore My Sex?': Emily Dickinson's 1862 Letters to T. W. Higginson Revisited

• Published in: The Emily Dickinson journal Vol. 29; no. 2; pp. 91 - 122
• Main Authors: Wang, Baihua, Fan, Xiaohong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.01.2020
• Subjects: 19th century; American literature; Anxiety; Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886); Females; Gender; Gender identity; Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (1823-1911); Historicism; Identity; Literary criticism; Men; Metaphor; Poetry; Poets; Self concept; Women; Writers; Writing
• DOI: 10.1353/edj.2020.0015
• ISSN: 1059-6879; 1096-858X

Drawing insights from critical studies of gender and nineteenth-century American women's poetry, this essay examines the letters sent from Dickinson to Higginson in 1862 in order to alert readers to hear the implicit plea in these often abrupt, imperative, elliptical, and cryptic documents: "Will you ignore my sex?". At the same time, Wang shows that Dickinson's enclosure of her name in a smaller envelope might be read as a miniature drama directed by the poet that manipulates the mode of reading and the affective experience and critical reception of her poems. Wang suggests that Dickinson mimics in miniature the historical situation of the woman writer's publishing in anonymity, in which sexual identity was first hidden, evaded, and deferred in its presentation. No matter how naïve and shy, or deliberate and pretentious, such a plea might seem to her recipient or to later readers, she argues that the request should probably be read as a sincere statement: "Please regard me as a poet instead of a lady poet." Dickinson's playful indirection reveals the anxiety of the female poet, which should not be ignored by readers of any period. Dickinson's dramatizing devices and metaphorical use of male muses to propel her own volcanic power, combined with pervasive unsexing practices in Dickinson's poetry more generally, make her legacy ambiguous for later female writers; it also complicates critical attempts to construct a female literary tradition.