Topic 28: The Shrinking Earth

Carol:

What On Earth Was She Thinking?

I really wanted to write about Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) this morning.  Of all the women writers I have studied, she is one who is most enigmatic to me. I love to read her poetry, hate to teach her work—like pulling a flower apart and trying to put it back together without killing it, impossible. I have created my own scientific theory of the incredible expanding and shrinking world of Emily Dickinson.

Emily ventured out into the world through education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847-48, a distance of eleven miles from her home. Mount Holyoke’s curriculum was rigorous with a strong emphasis on laboratory sciences; she wrote to her brother Austin  that she was “all engrossed in sulfuric acid” (source: Emily Dickinson Museum). But, the school also emphasized morality and religion, and Dickinson was not one to “profess” what she did not believe. She left Mount Holyoke after that first year, but so did most young women, higher education being superfluous for young ladies destined for marriage, mission work, or teaching. 

Dickinson’s  most extensive writing years were also those of the upheaval of the Civil War. Between 1855-1865, she wrote and revised hundreds of poems,   Although her physical world had narrowed significantly, she was not a recluse and enjoyed the companionship of her brother’s family, who lived next door, and countless visitors to the homes of both the senior and junior Dickinson families. Extended trips to Boston for the treatment of a painful eye condition would be her last travels before she narrowed her physical universe to the grounds of the family home.

During the later part of her life, she continued to write poetry, much of which were written on scraps of paper.  Significant people during this time were Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Helen Hunt Jackson, author of Ramona. Higginson, a frequent writer for Atlantic Monthly, carried on a lengthy correspondence with Dickinson and  would become the publisher of her posthumous collection of poems.  By the time she died in 1885, she had been in ill health for sometime and was confined to bed for the last 7 months of her life.

Theories have been put forward by Dickinson scholars to account for the increasing reclusivity of “The Belle of Amherst.” Was it her failing eyesight, thwarted love, family tradition (her sister was also a recluse)? My theory is one of light and space. Imagine looking down a hallway towards a window of incredible beauty, an inviting glow attracting you towards it. But, open doors along the hallway and the light emanating from those rooms creates a distracting glare. Wouldn’t it be quite natural to close those doors to concentrate on that one, lovely, intense light at the end? Imagine the infinity of that interior world of light and space that Emily Dickinson chose to explore.

I really wanted to write about Emily Dickinson.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Sources:
Emily Dickinson bio 

Emily Dickinson Museum

Megan:

A Shrinking World: the role of the ‘twitter-graph’

That this should be an essay topic in a book first published in 1917 seemed oddly out of place to me, out of time. After all, 80-90 years ago, there were no computers, no Internet, no social networking sites to collapse distance in the way we witness today. The first transcontinental phone call happened only two years before our useful little book of topics was published.
 

So, what was I forgetting? In 1837, Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph and changed everything. The telegraph was arguably the very first Twitter – transmitting short bursts of information without context: updates, gossip, and news headlines. Writing on the subject of a transatlantic cable, Thoreau wrote in Walden:  “We are eager to … bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news … will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough” (as quoted in Postman, 65).  In his  book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that the telegraph changed the way people processed information, which spawned
 

the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve… but may attach merely to it novelty, interest and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses and meaning (65).

According to Postman, the invention of the telegraph inundated people with information that had no direct impact on their daily lives; novelty and scandal became news, headlines scrolling past, quickly replaced with whatever was immediate and ‘up-to-date,’ allowing no time for assimilation or reflection. Does this sound familiar?

And Postman’s book was first published in 1985. 

There’s definitely an argument to be made about social responsibility and cultural awareness, that the “shrinking world” has brought nations together through trade and shared information. One might argue that international news has led to intervention in cases of genocide, led to generous donations in times of natural disasters – but is that really true? The money promised to Haiti from the US has not actually been released. How often has the US intervened except when it directly benefited our country? Can you believe that until I moved to England, I thought WWII had started in 1941?
 

The telegraph Internet may have made the country world  into ‘one neighborhood,’ but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other (67-- strike-though and ammendments mine).

What happens over there doesn’t actually have any impact on our daily lives. We watch the news, read the headlines, spend a moment expressing outrage or sympathy, but rarely take any action. We change the channel or click the next link. The world isn’t any smaller, it just seems that way.


Source: Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Penguin Books. New York, 1985.