Introduction

In the past three or four years, this quote wrongly attributed to Emily Dickinson went viral on social media (Twitter [now X], Instagram, Facebook, and countless blogs): “Emily Dickinson really wrote to Sue, ‘I tore open your letter and licked the envelope’s seal for any lingering taste of you’ 1 and historians say they were just friends.” Despite the lack of accuracy, the quote has become a meme mocking the heteronormative bias concerning female “friendships” and denouncing the (often deliberate) blindness when it comes to seeing and acknowledging queer relationships. Despite the pioneering endeavors of scholars like Martha Nell Smith, whose work since the early 1990s has consistently sought to take Emily Dickinson out of the closet, recent films and TV series, 2 Dickinson’s queerness remains speculative at best for some scholars or a minor – unproven – biographical detail for others, which is deemed irrelevant and quickly dismissed. This is precisely what Eve Sedgwick humorously debunks in a famous passage of Epistemology of the Closet , where she lists all the reasons for dismissing an author’s “potential” queerness. The first one particularly resonates when it comes to “Dickinson (Dickinson?)” (Sedgwick, 53): “passionate language of same-sex attraction was extremely common during whatever period is under discussion – and therefore must have been completely meaningless” (52). We live in an aggressively heteronormative society where the default perspective is “straight until proven otherwise.” But how much “proof” is it going to take to acknowledge that Dickinson was queer and that it does matter? Being queer is not a “detail,” a matter of “choice” or “lifestyle,” any more than someone’s ethnic, class, or geographical background – so why dismiss it as such? Why spend so much time wondering who among the men in Emily Dickinson’s circle of friends and correspondents was her supposed love interest and so little examining the queerer aspects of her work? As Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith underline in their introduction to Open Me Carefully, Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson : Whereas pages and pages of academic speculation have been devoted to a mere three letter-drafts that Dickinson wrote to a mysterious real or fictional character identified only as “Master,” the correspondence between Dickinson and Susan has received disproportionately little attention. ( Hart & Smith 1998 , xii) Consider, for example, the June 11, 1852 letter to Sue (L98) from which the title of Hart and Smith’s edition of the letters was taken: I have but one thought, Susie, this afternoon of June, and that of you, and I have one prayer, only, dear Susie, that is for you. That you and I in hand as we e’en do in heart, might ramble away as children, among the woods and fields, and forget these many years, and these sorrowing cares, and each become a child again – […] Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say – my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts […] If you were here, and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language. (Miller & Mitchell, 180–181) If “Susie” was replaced by a male name – let’s say Charlie or Ben – would there really have been any speculation as to the nature of their relationship? Even if this had been treated as an “adolescent crush” (Hart & Smith, xiv), it would have been enough to prove Emily Dickinson’s heterosexuality without a doubt; it would not have been considered a “passionate friendship” or a “phase” in the development of a young woman’s sexuality. Lesbianism is not a phase. Queerness is not a phase. Saying that queer people were a rare thing in the 19th century, that a woman in rural western Massachusetts could not possibly have been queer in such a conservative, puritan environment, is inane and historically inaccurate.