Inferring from “Duplicates”: Fascicle 8’s Magic

Borrowing from Dickinson’s method of reading “backward” Riffaterre’s of “reviewing, revising, comparing backwards,” I move to a discussion of another of Dickinson’s books, Fascicle 8. The two fascicles (8 and 21) share more than a duplicate poem (“At last—to be identified”). Both encircle the complementarity between the “business” and the power the poet. Business and power might have been strange words to use in mid-nineteenth-century America, when, as Vivian Pollak reminds us, “an antipublication cult ... was part of a larger pattern of cultural unrest about departure of women from their proper sphere of influence and home” (1984, 233).¹