Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women Book

Caveat: I read only the introduction, the Dickinson chapter, and the conclusion.

An established scholar who can, at this point, do pretty much whatever the hell she wants, Fuss describes this slim book in the acknowledgments as "pure wish fulfillment," a "guilty pleasure." Initially, I picked it up thinking it would be just that'an indulgent, hagiographic work that plays to our voyeuristic desires to know what the stars are really like but that contains little substance.

However, I was pleasantly surprised to see not only a substantive argument here but a fascinating and generative one. Fuss defines "interior" capaciously, arguing that "interiors shape imagination" and showing how the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of the home as a private instead of a public space facilitated the emergence of the interior subject. Using the human sensorium as the "bridge between the architectural and the psychological interior," she investigates authors' relationships to the spaces in which they wrote. She looks, for instance, at the views from Dickinson's windows and the doors she stepped through, at what she saw and heard and what she withdrew from, and argues that Dickinsons' relationship to the Homestead was not phobic but poetic.

If sometimes the argument is too neat--e.g., her repeated use of antimetabole; her ending affirmation of the centrality of the Homestead that states that Dickinson's occupation was listed on her death certificate as "At home" but that declines, even in a note, to explain that this was the pervasive descriptor for unemployed women of the leisure class--it is also impressively artful and impeccably articulated. The verbal gymnastics and the intellectual leaps they allow for--Fuss goes from interiors to interiority, visual technology to conceptions of vision--are seductive and thrilling to follow even if they sometimes privilege provocation and spectacle over believability.