Emily Dickinson’s withdrawal from public and social life could be interpreted as a scrupulous adherence to nineteenth-century conventions of feminine domesticity, but critics now tend to agree that she unsettled traditional gender conventions. The extent and orientation of her subversion remain open to debate. Dickinson’s inveterate white attire and circumscribed life of domesticity served as explicit markers of femininity, but in retrospect they form a somewhat ironic persona when set against the dynamic fluidity of gender in her poetry.1 On the other hand, her veneer of conventionality also worked against representations of women as performers in nineteenth-century popular culture. Examining Dickinson’s engagement with American popular culture has emerged as a strategy in itself for revising the assumption that she rejected her surrounding society in favour of poetic seclusion.
