Der Affekt als Effekt in Emily Dickinsons Briefen an den Master

Emily Dickinson’s letters to an anonymous “Master” can be read with a new perspective if we understand the production of poetry and the communication of ideas as affective-corporeal processes. In her three letters to the “Master,” Dickinson intimately connects corporeality, the process of composition and writing, and the materiality of the text with the communicability of affective states and their credibility, and the possibility of feeling empathy and sympathy. Elspeth Probyn describes the act of writing as a corporeal activity that is aimed at leaving an impact with the readers. In Dickinson’s letters to the “Master,” the female body, wounded by the intensity of her love and the lover’s indifference to this love, delivers with its blood the ink for the text and simultaneously serves as proof of the existence of the injury and the truth of the described love. The speaker calls upon the addressee and the readers as eye witnesses, who, confronted with the immanent materiality of the body of the text, become participants and recipients of the affective display. The identity of the “Master” remains unknown until today, and Dickinson’s work is characterized by gaps and ambiguities that call for a plurality of interpretations. The many voids in the poems and open questions concerning the poet’s personal life allow for the application of preconceived ideological readings that, according to Sedgwick, can be termed paranoid readings which have to be uncovered.