’s Use Of The Dash Essay, Research Paper
Kamilla Denman
Unlike the exclamation mark, the dash that dominates the prolific
period is a horizontal stroke, on the level of this world. It both reaches out and holds
at bay. Its origins in ellipsis connect it semantically to planets and cycles (rather than
linear time and sequential grammatical progression), as well as to silence and the
unexpressed. But to dash is also "to strike with violence so as to break into
fragments; to drive impetuously forth or out, cause to rush together; to affect or qualify
with an element of a different strain thrown into it; to destroy, ruin, confound, bring to
nothing, frustrate, spoil; to put down on paper, throw off, or sketch, with hasty and
unpremeditated vigour; to draw a pen vigorously through writing so as to erase it; [is]
used as a euphemism for ‘damn,’ or as a kind of verbal imprecation; [or is] one of the two
signals (the other being the dot) which in various combinations make up the letters of the
Morse alphabet." Dickinson uses the dash to fragment language and to cause unrelated
words to rush together; she qualifies conventional language with her own different
strains; and she confounds editorial attempts to reduce her "dashed off "
jottings to a "final" version. Not only does she draw lines through her own
drafts but also th
God are euphemistic imprecations against conventional religion. Even the allusion to the
Morse alphabet is not entirely irrelevant: through her unconventional use of punctuation,
particularly the dash, Dickinson creates a poetry whose interpretation becomes a process
of decoding the way each fragment signals meaning.
Dickinson’s transition from a dominant use of the exclamation mark to a preference for
the dash accompanied her shift from ejaculatory poems, which seem outcries aimed with
considerable dramatic effect at God or others, to poems where the energies exist more in
the relationships between words and between the poet and her words. In this intensely
prolific period, Dickinson’s excessive use of dashes has been interpreted variously as the
result of great stress and intense emotion, as the indication of a mental breakdown, and
as a mere idiosyncratic, female habit. Though these speculations are all subject to
debate, it is clear that in the early 1860s Dickinson conducted her most intense
exploration of language and used punctuation to disrupt conventional linguistic relations,
whether in an attempt to express inexpressible psychological states or purely to vivify
language.
From "Emily Dickinson’s Volcanic Punctuation." The Emily Dickinson
Journal (1993).