Chapter 5 - The “Relict of a Friend” and Associative Inscription

Summary

What does Dickinson’s writing on used, printed, or already written-upon scraps of paper indicate about her poetics? I argue that Dickinson’s late writing on bits of envelopes and advertisements resembles the inscriptive writing of her peers and was part of a mass culture of elegy, souvenir, and memory place. If associationism and skepticism transform rhetoric and science, they also affect the way ordinary people think about their lives. Dickinson participates in a popular culture that understands memory to be associative, unbidden, and dependent upon particulars. I examine emblem culture, the popularity of friendship albums, and scrap-keeping to argue that Dickinson’s participation in a culture which ascribes memorial meaning to the artifacts of everyday life is the key to her inscribing on scraps. Dickinson works self-consciously with ideas of inscription, elegy, and epitaph, dwelling in the tension between an abstract general statement and the specificity of the site and its associations.