Concentrating on Dickinson's exchanges with childhood friends, as well as with Susan Gilbert Dickinson, Elizabeth Holland, Austin Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and the mysterious "Master," Marietta Messmer explores the poet's gradual shift from writing confessional letters to developing her unique "vice for voices" by creating fictionalized epistolary personae. While radically challenging nineteenth-century letter-writing conventions, these personae also subvert the narrowly circumscribed roles available to women at that time. Messmer shows how Dickinson used this double-voiced mode of correspondence to manipulate and interrogate a variety of male-dominated, "authorized" literary, religious, and sociocultural discourses.
Buy A Vice for Voices by Marietta Messmer from Australia's Online Independent Bookstore, BooksDirect.