SOURCE: “Dickinson's Readers,” in New England Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1, March, 1984, pp. 106–10.

In the following excerpt, Porter discusses The Madwoman in the Attic in an essay reviewing feminist reading strategies used to interpret Emily Dickinson's poetry.

Seven recent studies of Emily Dickinson seek the crucial thing that is missing from her life and work: a center that will finally arrest the freeplay of inference about the poet's reclusive existence and her large aggregation of brief poems. All but two of these critical works approach Dickinson from an acute feminist angle. The remaining two attempt to find coherence in the manuscript books that the poet put together, systematically and then sporadically, over a period of twenty years, beginning when she was twenty-seven. The persistence of this itch to make sense of Dickinson inevitably raises a basic question about critical validation: how many myths and countermyths can the poet, who called...