'Ballet knowledge': Emily Dickinson and the ballet 'Giselle, ou Les Wilis'.

摘要

When Emily Dickinson's poem "I cannot dance opon[sic] my Toes - "(Fr381) (hereafter, "I cannot dance.") is read with an understanding well-versed in the Romantic ballet, what becomes apparent is that this poem is not just generically about the ballet, but that it specifically mimics the story, choreography, characters, and costumes of the famous Romantic ballet Giselle, ou Les Wilis. This discovery, which no scholar to date has acknowledged in print, is explained through a detailed new explication of "I cannot dance..." which illustrates exactly how this ballet occurs in the poem. This intersection of poet, poem, ballet Giselle and Myth of the Wilis, upon which the ballet is based, is important because it alters and enhances all previously held interpretations of this poem and reinforms aspects of Dickinson's biography, adds new significance to correspondence both by Dickinson and about her, and creates a new context for reexamining Dickinson's other dance poems.With her poem "I cannot dance...," Dickinson audaciously appropriated the then shocking new art form that was the Romantic ballet. Dickinson usurped for her own artistic purposes the power and the potential that was epitomized in the Romantic ballerina and replicated the ballet Giselle in her own unique idiom, in order to proclaim that her creative poetic imagination and her poetry were, to the pedantic and conventional forms of traditional verse that anyone could imitate, as the Romantic ballet was to the common, mundane social dances of the ballroom, which anyone who could read a dancing manual could execute.Thus, in 1862 when Emily Dickinson sent "I cannot dance..." to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, after he had called her poetic "gait 'spasmodic'" and "uncontrolled," she gave him more than just another one of her poems to adjudicate, she provided him with a manifesto of her ars poetica and proved that, like the line from Virgil's Aeneid--- Vera incessu patuit dea! (By her gait she was revealed as a true goddess).