Conceptualizing Dickinson’s Textual Variants
What, then, is a variant? Susan Cameron (1992) describes a variant in Dickinson’s work as a way of getting at what the text ‘is’, that is, the identity of the text. Therefore, the question is: “if this word … conventionally understood to be outside the poem is rather integral to the poem, how is the poem delimited? Variants are regarded as part of the poem outside of which they ostensibly lie.”(5) Furthermore, “variants extend the text’s identity in ways that make it seem potentially limitless”(6). In Dickinson’s poems, variants are often related in such different and multiple ways that no single characterization could adequately describe them.
We, then, attempt to describe Dickinson’s textual variants in two ways, namely, base-text and variant choices. The former is usually a word or group of words in the body of the poem often denoted by some bibliographical codes such as “+” or “x” marks. The latter is a word or group of words located at the bottom of the page, generally though not always separated from the text “proper” by an authorially-drawn boundary line, or, less frequently, interlined or in the margins of the text proper. While the terms we use here seem to suggest a hierarchy whereby base text supersedes variant text, this hierarchy is radically called into question in Dickinson’s poetics. Here, we must acknowledge the limits of bibliographical terms to accurately describe a textual situation.