“I tried to match it – Seam by Seam – / But could not make them fit –”: Clothing, Sewing, and Self in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson

Amanda Licato, Stanford University

Working from the recent discovery of nearly two dozen trunks of garments from Dickinson’s brother and sister-in-law in the Evergreens home, “‘I tried to match it –Seam by Seam – / But could not make them fit –’: Clothing, Sewing, and Self in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson,” responds primarily to Daneen Wardrop’s Emily Dickinson and The Labor of Clothing (2009), the only criticism of its kind to engage with clothing and sewing in Dickinson’s verse. This paper examines the relationship between Dickinson’s work of art and her life as an artist through Dickinson’s peculiar attention to what I call “mis-seaming”— ill-fitting clothing and incorrectly sewn seams. How do the complexities of Dickinson’s life translate, with all the shifts common to any act of translation, into the complexities of her art? How is reading made anew when situating her poetry within the context of her quotidian life and daily activities, such as her amateur work as a seamstress?
As a graduate student looking toward revision, this paper hopes to connect — more concretely — the figure of sewing with Dickinson’s biography, both domestically and with regard to the manuscript books she secretly created to bind her poetry. The figure of sewing was, among other figures used by the poet such as the exploding volcano, a metaphor for expressing the extreme mental states: the fear that one may be coming apart; unraveling without control; altered anew. As Alfred Habegger points out in his biography of the female poet: “No other American writer of her time explored with equal sensitivity and mastery the experience of fragmentation…describing from varying angles the ego’s unraveling.” (477). Like Habegger, this paper seeks to expand the neglected territory of viewing Dickinson’s work as part of an evolutionary process of her experiences, becoming both woman and poet. Biographically, poems utilizing the figure of sewing and clothing paradoxically coincide not with periods of collapse in her life but of reconstruction, seemingly fitting into a category of retrospection. Memory and pain are thus intimately connected for Dickinson; for her, the figure of sewing communicated equal despair and embattled achievement over the painful episodes of life.