Emily Dickinson's Funeral and the Paradox of Literary Fame

Abstract

Emily Dickinson's careful orchestration of her own April 19, 1886, funeral transformed that event into a concluding artistic gesture, a final elegiac poem, that has much to tell us about her understanding of literary fame. Her previous statements regarding fame tell us that language powerful enough to achieve immortality did so by entering a life independent of the author, and that she-like many other nineteenth-century writers-preferred to risk obscurity rather than tether her writing to her name and the attendant historical specificity of her biography. In the context of this attitude toward fame, one that so clearly reinforces her well-known aversion to public displays of any sort, Dickinson's decision to include Emily Brontë's poem "No coward soul is mine" as the centerpiece of a decidedly unconventional funeral seems at first glance to be a surprising reversal of position. By attaching Brontë's name to her own, and in effect saying to the world that Brontë's words have found new life in her, 1 Dickinson appears to have used her own last poem-her funeral-to expand Brontë's fame, while also drawing attention to the artistic conversation they shared. 2 Despite this apparent contradiction, however, Dickinson's posthumous appropriation of Brontë's poem ultimately proves consistent with an approach to literary fame Dickinson expressed in certain key letters and poems, most particularly the poem "To earn it by disdaining it" (Fr1445) in which the speaker initially proclaims that "Fame's consummate fee" is the poet's decision not to pursue it. This poem, and others like it, collectively argue that the kind of literary celebrity worthy of aspiration illuminates, ironicallly, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman (468) "for whom the badge of true success was public neglect, because each served ideals higher than the satisfaction of the multitude" (463). Writing specifically about Dickinson's poem "The Martyr Poets," Braudy draws attention to "the silence of the artist that assures the reverberation of the work" (469). Dickinson's speaker in "Fame is