Running the "Double Risk": Emily Dickinson Fleeing the Worm's Secretions (1996)

Running the "Double Risk":Emily Dickinson Fleeing the Worm's Secretions David Sullivan (bio) I wanted to be touched and didn't want to want it.1 The speaker in Dickinson's poems often imagines sensual touching and sex itself as an intrusion: an eradication of the boundary between self and other that is both tempting and frightening and therefore must be removed to some other place or time. Jean-Luc Nancy describes this fear, and the recoiling from such a fear, as a "double risk": "Bodies run the risk of resisting one another in an impenetrable fashion, but they also run the risk of meeting and dissolving into one another" (206). In either case, whether a person becomes impenetrable and resists all contact, or dissolvable and embraces all contact, he or she is avoiding the anxiety of being a separate individual who desires the touch of someone else. Nancy phrases this desire as inherent in the material fact of being incarnate: "as long as there is something, there is also something else, other bodies whose limits expose them to each other's touch, between repulsion and dissolution" (206). It is between the totalities of "repulsion and dissolution" that Dickinson must negotiate her life with other persons, yet the speaker in the poems continually project these disparate choices as the only possibilities. The more sensual contact is imagined as a metaphor for union in another world, the more attractive it becomes, but the more it is imagined as a sexual encounter in this world, the more it is deemed a potential annihilation of the possibility of interview.2 For Dickinson's speakers either pole appears better than the contingent world of touches one cannot fully master, though the trace of the desire for corporeal contact often indicts her own arguments. Though the [End Page 190] poems frequently argue that desiring desire is enough, their unfolding logic often confronts the failure of such reasoning. If Dickinson's speakers often idealize sensual contact as a spiritually sanctioned co-presence to be accomplished in Heaven, sex itself is a problematic mortal coupling. What may be frightening is that the ability to control the situation by manipulating one's words and gestures becomes more difficult in situations of greater physical intimacy.3 I do not want to suggest that sexual contact is outside of societal and inter-personal constraints—somehow immune from role playing—but I do want to suggest that such contact is less malleable in these situations. It will be useful to my argument to examine the ideas of the sociologist Erving Goffman, who sees the individual as created by the narratives one tells one's self and the narratives one is told about one's self. For Goffman, there is no private self in social interactions; one is always facing others. The self becomes a socially necessary myth which each of us is compelled to perform for the good of the social organization, but this same social organization requires us to perform different selves in different interactive situations. So the same system that demands consistency invites inconsistency. The self, then, "is real only as a symbol, a linguistic concept that we use to account for what we and other people do," as Randall Collins writes in his critique of Goffman's work (50). Goffman examines the stratagems by which we create our selves in what he calls the "interaction order." In situations of co-presence, when two or more people can see and be seen, we are constantly reading "sign-vehicles" that are intentionally and unintentionally given off by other persons. Because of this we are always, to some extent, performing to regulate the impression others receive of us. We are forced, therefore, to expend some of our energy in regulating the impression we give of ourselves, but ultimately, the impression we give off will be determined by the audience and can only be partially modified by us. We are always exposed, therefore, and seek to master such situations through manipulating what will be communicated as best we can. In such a situation each person is at a disadvantage the minute he or she attempts to phrase a response, whether through...