Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 19
Hypervisual Standard of Popular Culture
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From her early invitation —"Into my garden come!" (4, emphasis
added)—to her late reconciliation wherein "I'll let my Heart
just
in sight" (597), 1 believe Emily Dickinson has resolved the tension
between ocularity and gender by confirming herself within a
cosmic/confidential exhibitionism, a femininity which is seen more
than it sees and which attracts by that very allurement, rather than
by a Whitman’s naked observation and robust "Undrape!" Indeed,
Dickinson's quintessential power and enduring popularity reside in
her understandable life-long passion simply to be noticed and
appreciated—by God, by lovers, and by nature itself as her "friend."
From fantasies where "in my awkward—gazing-face/The Angels—
softly peered" (117), or where, as Queen of the universe, she is
celestially "turned round and round—/To an admiring sky—" (159), or
where, in even the smallest of states, she gaily continues to "strut
upon my stem" (135), Dickinson transfixes herself, like the "brazen"
Hester Prynne upon the scaffold, as "the point that drew all eyes."
The poet will even aggrandize her role of replacing the holiest icon of
her milieu—"See! 1 usurped thy crucifix to honor mine!" (704).
In this sacro-popular calling, not as the "Bride of Christ" but as
the American Woman/Wife, Dickinson can present herself to her
culture as the exquisite hypervisual ideal, "Dressed to meet You—
/See—in White!" (185). Moreover, she can now freely exult in a
natural "coquettishness" or alluring feminine vanity which is much
more at the root of Dickinson's popular acclaim than is generally
conceded:
A Charm invests a face
Imperfectly beheld—
The Lady dare not lift her Veil
For fear it be dispelled— (201).
It is obvious, too, that a good deal of Dickinson's appeal for her
literary mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was just this sort of
coy femininity which deftly extracted from the man all he had to
give by the woman's intuitional appeal to the voyeur's fancy.
Dickinson writes to the bemused Higginson: "While my thought is
undressed—I can make the distinction, but when I put them in the
Gown—they look alike, and numb" (Letters 2:404). Or, again, she
reveals that "I write today from my pillow" to ask the man to bear