Rival Italies

57 | 2023

“…Therefore, Dickinson's indirect knowledge of Italy relies on a variety of sources, testifying to her intense reading activity. For instance, she pored over commentaries on Italy (and on Anglo-American artists to some extent related to it, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller) published on national leading literary periodicals like The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, or Scribner's Monthly, as well as non-fictional accounts on Italian art and architecture (like the works by John Ruskin, as an 1862 letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalls) (Capps 1966, 128-43;Finnerty 2009) direct, Dickinson's personal treatment of Italy makes a case for her own way of domestication, deploying a literary fantasy which leads to the interiorization of Italy and its geography. Shaped into the form of literary objects as poems and letters, Dickinson's Italian space gets represented as an aesthetic object since, "in order to gain cultural meaning, physical space has to become mental space or, more precisely, imaginary space" (Fluck 2005, 25).…”