“I’m Joy”

April 21, 2022 4:22 AM

I was in my mid-twenties and I had been stuck on the gerbil wheel of frustrated self-definition since childhood. “I’m ‘Jay’,” I’d say, when I introduced myself. No one heard the quotation marks, no one recognized that the body, biography, and male roles toward which my first-person pronouns pointed weren’t what I meant by “I”. In fact, until I read Dickinson’s poem, I didn’t think anyone else knew, or that language could represent, the hell of uncompletable self-definition. Dickinson, I realized, with a rush of gratitude that still brings tears to my eyes, had used the very inadequacy of the language of self-definition to articulate what her speaker and I meant by “I”.

— Supposed Persons: Emily Dickinson and “I” by Prof. Joy Ladin.

The Emily Dickinson texts discussed in the essay are:

I am alive — I guess —
July 1862 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
I'm "wife" — I've finished that —
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind —

Other essays by Joy Ladin on Emily Dickinson:

‘This Consciousness that is Aware’: Emily Dickinson’s Phenomenology as Consolation
Meeting Her Maker: Emily Dickinson’s God
‘Where the Meanings, Are’: Emily Dickinson, Prosody, and Post-Modernist Poetics
‘So Anthracite – to live’: Emily Dickinson and American Literary History
Homage to Mistress Dickinson
and finally her book: Soldering the Abyss: Emily Dickinson and Modern American Poetry

posted by Kattullus (4 comments total)

Wow, thanks for posting these. Such a valuable perspective, and deeply personal writing that really gets into the details of these rich texts while staying accessible to someone not super familiar with the relevant scholarship.

I keep trying to get friends and family to watch Apple TV’s Dickinson, so far with little success. It’s really good, and quite different than what most would expect. Very interesting thinking about how the show enacts post-modern ‘metanarrative incredulity’ in context of Ladin’s ‘Where the Meanings, Are’ essay.
posted by soy bean at 11:27 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Just the PDF without the registration stuff. (temporary file will go away after several days.)
posted by thefool at 5:34 AM on April 22, 2022

Thanks, in case anyone else was turned off by the registration, you can scroll down on each page to access the entire article. The PDF download/registration is a bit of a dark pattern trick.
posted by soy bean at 9:27 AM on April 22, 2022

Huh, odd. I didn’t get anything like that. I’m not logged in or anything like that. I’ll keep that in mind if I ever link to academia.edu.
posted by Kattullus at 9:52 AM on April 22, 2022