DICKINSON
The Map of Olivia Best, Sam Gustafson, and Levi Sierra,
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This project is a map of want, desire, and eros through the late fascicles and letters of Emily Dickinson. These themes permeate the late fascicles, and the poems that we have identified in this project aren’t the only places that they are present in her work. We chose to structure our map as though each poem or letter is its own room of Dickinson’s house. We found an image of a cross-section of her house through the MCWB archives, and that is the image that you saw on the first slide (with some added embellishments). We chose this structure because we imagined the home as the center of Emily Dickinson’s life. Her desires, as expressed in her poetry, often revolved around this feeling of home: longing for companionship, love, knowledge, god etc. We imagined our project as a representation of Dickinson passing through the different rooms of her home where she spent so much of her time. We moved through the poems chronologically, beginning with fascicle 34 and moving to 39, 40, and finally ending with a letter to Louise Norcross in the turret at the top of the house. We moved upwards through the house to try to signify the influence of spirituality on Dickinson’s desires, having her move upwards towards heaven at the end of her life.