“A woman – white – to be”

In the intersection between gender and genre, Chapter 1 investigates the “lyric pact” between Dickinson’s lyric self and its audience. Considering the lyric self as an intertextual nexus of selves and voices, I examine the hushed Shakespearean female voices in a selection of Dickinson’s poems, and I argue that Dickinson’s lyric self is a mercurial “thing/Of nothing” ( Hamlet , IV, 2, 27–28). This chapter proposes to eschew a heteronormative gendering of the figure of the poet and of lyric selfhood and examines the crisis of binarity at work in the construction of Dickinson’s dramatized lyric self.