“The Fossil Bird-Tracks”: Emily Dickinson Performing Archaeologically

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Notes

¹ In addition to Victoria Morgan’s Emily Dickinson and Hymn Culture: Tradition and Experience (2010) and Cristianne Miller’s Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (2012), George Boziwick’s essay “Emily Dickinson’s Music Book: A Performative Exploration” (2016) and his forthcoming book, along with Gerard Holmes’s “‘Invisible, as Music – ’: What the Earliest Musical Settings of Emily Dickinson’s Poems, Including Two Previously Unknown, Tell Us about Dickinson’s Musicality” (2019), begin to approach an analysis of Dickinson’s work as a poet in relation to the music and musical cultures that influenced her poetry or that her poetry itself inspired.

² In the United States, interests in regional dialects finds tensions with more national interests in establishing an American version of British English. For further reading, see Gavin Jones’s Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (1999) and Jill Lepore’s A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (2003).

³ For more on black soldiers in the Civil War, see Chandra Manning’s Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. First Vintage Books ed. 2017; Deborah Willis’s “The Black Civil War Soldier: Conflict and Citizenship.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 51, no. 2, 2017, pp. 285–323.

⁴ Sarah Bradford’s biography on Harriet Tubman includes a number of moments in which Tubman explains how she used song as code through which to communicate during her work shepherding people to safety in the underground railroad. See; Bradford’s Harriet: The Moses of her People (1886).

⁵ Stoever’s arguments across this book demonstrate how conceptions of race, both blackness and whiteness, produce ways of listening to sound and voice that become largely demarcated along color lines. In part, her book further develops the role that the nineteenth century plays in shaping twentieth century listening practices.

⁶ Gerard Holmes’s recent essay, “’Invisible, as Music – ‘: What the Earliest Musical Settings of Emily Dickinson’s Poems. Including Two Previously Unknown, Tell Us about Dickinson’s Musicality” (2019), also mentions Dickinson’s early framing as unmusical by her early reviewers. He writes, “The myth of Dickinson the recluse was reinforced by the notion that readers of her own time heard her as unmusical” (75). Holmes cites a number of early reviews, as I have also done above, that remark upon Dickinson’s strangeness, one that I am pursuing in this essay as having roots in the antebellum and Civil War periods when black song began influencing aspects of the larger cultural imaginary.

⁷ I refer to Higginson‘s articles on slave revolts published in the Atlantic Monthly (1859–1862) and his account of his time as leader of the First South Carolina Volunteers published in Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869).