Suzanne Juhasz

The Dickinson sublime

This study presents readings of key poems, analyzes the origins and implications of Dickinsons idiosyncratic style, and examines comments from poems and letters relating to various topics implicated in literary theory and practice, including reading, writing, intention, power and fame.

Mother-Writing and the Narrative of Maternal Subjectivity

This essay discusses how writing from a maternal perspective can construct maternal subjectivity in a linguistic form. Maternal subjectivity is understood as the aggregate of subject positions, or “representations,” experienced by a woman who is a mother. Writing can form connections between subject positions, including those which have been split off or denied because of culturally induced ambivalence, to establish a subjectivity that is multiple rather than split. Through a reading of Mary Gordons novel, Men and Angels, I show how the texts narrative structure, as it represents a mothers discourse with her own mother, her discourse with herself, and her discourse with her child, incarnates the plurality of self positions that mothers possess and constructs a relationship or “grammar” between them. By evoking this complex maternal subjectivity, mother-writing can be understood as a gesture toward recognition–both within the text, for its characters, and outside the text, for the mother/writer.

Queer Swans: Those Fabulous Avians in the Swan LakeS of Les Ballets Trockadero and Matthew Bourne

An icon of classical ballet, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake has been performed throughout the world for more than a hundred years by major ballet companies and famous ballet dancers. It is a satisfying saga of love, longing, betrayal, death, and transcendence, brought to the stage with beautiful choreography and wonderful music. Although companies have usually made changes to Petipa and Ivanov’s nineteenth-century choreography to suit the aesthetic of the time or a particular choreographer’s vision, all in all most versions continue to follow the original in specifics and in spirit. Swan Lake is, after all, the classic of all classical ballets. In this essay I am concerned with a particular change occasionally rung in the latter half of the twentieth century, what I will call the “queering” of Swan Lake. Two contemporary renditions in particular—the versions by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, an all-male American troupe that dances in drag, and the British choreographer Matthew Bourne, whose swans are male— dramatically alter the strict conventions of gender and sexuality that make up the ideological and formal structure of classical ballet. As gender and sexuality become more like shifting sands than granite pillars, these ballets open up in ways surprising and revelatory with respect to both aesthetics and cultural politics. Yet what is “queer” about these two renditions is not the same, alerting viewers that the contemporary concept of queer is not monolithic, that its possibilities and contributions are multiple. Swan Lake’s status as the exemplary classical ballet may well make it the perfect venue for performing alternative takes on identity and alternative forms for dancing such identities. Moe Meyer has noted that the representation of queer, usually by way

Towards Recognition: Writing and the Daughter-Mother Relationship

���������� Women writers are grown-up daughters, and for many of them writing has everything to do with their relationship to their mothers. There must be hundreds of modern and contemporary novels and memoirs written from the perspective of the daughter about the daughter-mother relationship, so compelling is the desire, it seems, to write of the first and formative relationship. 1 Recognition of the mother by way of writing is often what enables many adult daughters to make art. Recognizing the separate subjectivity of the mother helps to bring a daughter’s own identity into being, even as her own vantage point or subjectivity is what permits her to recognize her mother. These remarks about subjectivity suggest that the complex weave of need, expectation, desire, anxiety, idealization, disappointment, loss, hurt, and joy that characterizes the daughtermother relationship has much to do with the tensions between connection and differentiation that it engenders. In this essay I propose that writing becomes a site, and a process, for negotiating this originary relationship, which can be understood as the source and model for all love relationships that follow. I draw on relational psychoanalytic theory to study both the dynamics of the daughter-mother relationship and the writing that adult daughters create in its service. When daughters write to and about their mothers, they are seeking to work out the complex matter of subjectivities: their own and that of their mothers. To see the mother as a “like subject,” in Jessica Benjamin’s term, the daughter needs to create her, in writing, as such; her own subjectivity both occasions and emerges from her ability to see her mother. This is the process of “recognition” that Benjamin and others have described; more specifically, it is what Benjamin calls “mutual recognition,” for

Taking Class: Memoirs of a Classroom Ballerina

I am not a real ballet dancer. I do not dance professionally; I do not perform on any stage. I am well into middle-age. I take class-three times a week, rain or shine or fatigue or stress. I go. I have done so for many, many years. I dance; and for me, and others like me, taking class is the way I do it. Taking class has a life of its own that relates to, but is different from, what class means to professional dancers. For them, the daily class is the backbone of their work. It is for learning, practicing, staying in shape, in preparation for performance. Certainly, there are elements of ballet class that we all share. Class is a set formation of exercises with which we learn and hone technique. Over and over we do the steps in different combinations, always in the same order, never with the same experience. By way of this unceasing dedication to movement in the body, we know strain and frustration-but also profound excitement, joy, and insight. However, for me and other nonprofessional dancers, who do not get to practice, prepare, and finally perform our dancing selves before an audience, class is what there is. Endlessly challenging and sustaining in its own right, taking class enables me to experience what I think of as a corporeal subjectivity-a mind and self that exist by way of the body-that I infrequently access in the rest of my life. I am a professor of English. I am a scholar, a teacher, a writer, a reader. I conduct the days of my life in a whorl of words. Language is my love and my

Emily Dickinson: The Novel

In 2007, Rose MacMurray’s Afternoons with Emily was published. In 2006, another novel with Dickinson as the main character appeared: Paolo Kaufmann’s The Sister: A Novel of Emily Dickinson, translated from the original Spanish publication in Cuba in 2003. These are the most recent novels in which Dickinson has a main role, but, in fact, most decades in the twentieth century have seen novels about the famous poet as a fictional heroine. As a Dickinson scholar, I admit that I have shunned these books. After all, there already exists in the public imagination a fictional Dickinson, the Myth of amherst—the Queen Recluse in the white dress, driven mad by lost love and scribbling obscure poetry out of her grief and solitude. This character came into being in Dickinson’s own time and still persists in ours, no doubt because of her very mysteriousness, resulting from both her elusive poetry and her elusive life. I always believed that I would see this fiction, repugnant to me, reincarnated again and again in the novels written about her. But I am happy to report that I was wrong. In twentieth-century novels spanning the decades from the 1930s to the 1990s, the fictional character Emily Dickinson seems instead to be the authors’ attempts to rectify the myth—by providing the reader with each writer’s idea of the “real” emily Dickinson. These fictions are remarkably consistent. In them Emily Dickinson emerges as a young woman whom late twentieth-century feminist critics thought we had discovered: spunky, clever, rebellious, sensitive. To quote from the novels, she is “amusing, spirited” (Come Slowly, Eden), “a rebellious spirit!” (Miss Emily). all of her quirks and queerness are admirable, and she is presented as a true heroine. In contrast, the two twenty-first century novels offer portraits that, while never questioning her genius, are much more critical of her character. Perhaps this

Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820-1885 (review)

realm of politics, had then found sanctuary in a separate sphere of writing where it survived as a literary mode of expression’’ (ix). In a creative appropriation of Benedict Anderson, Dowling argues that the Port Folio constructed an imagined community of political outsiders in the republic of letters, and that the tradition of estrangement in American literature can be traced to this literary community. The most important task of the Port Folio writers was demystification of the Jeffersonian ideology, and they established a ‘‘countermyth to the America of Crèvecoeur or Jefferson’sNotes on the State of Virginia, to bring relentlessly to light a nation whose real image is to be discovered in Franklin’s The Way to Wealth and whose protestations of republican simplicity are a transparent mask for naked self-interest’’ (23). This thoughtful and unusual book would be easier to follow if readers were given a better sense of the Port Folio itself: its format, its readership, its contributors, the appearance of an issue. The chronology could also use some clarification: Dennie’s death is narrated twice in the text, once in the middle, and once at the end, and in this way and others the text has a circular quality. But as Dowling points out, the idea of history as a circle was a preoccupation of the Federalists. This book, in which a defense of conservatives has a radical edge, might serve as the perfect example of the wheel of history.