Milli mála - 2019, Qupperneq 89

Milli mála 11/2019 89
GREGORY ALAN PHIPPS
edgy contrast between purity and eroticism to strengthen the piquant
appeal of their shows. Dickinson’s engagement with and use of the
term “blonde” reflect facets of these contrasts, even though she gener-
ally does not use the word to refer to hair colour. For instance,
Daneen Wardrop ties the use of “blonde” in “Banish Air from Air -”
to fabrics and clothing, arguing that in nineteenth-century fashion
magazines “blonde” was “probably used more readily as an adjective
for lace than it was for hair” (Labor 184). However, Dickinson’s po-
etry does capture shifting connotations of blondness as a marker of
identity through select portrayals of the reciprocal movements be-
tween clothing, physical appearance, and cultural associations. The
colour itself emerges in her poetry as a polysemic and changeable
trope for feminine performances that unfold through competing ten-
sions of ethereality and physicality.
Discussing a single colour in relation to Dickinson’s poetry inevi-
tably calls to mind the roles of whiteness in her work and life.
Dickinson’s ambivalent and far-ranging representations of whiteness
form a useful point of comparison for thinking about blondness. As
critics like Wesley King (44), Vivian Pollak (85), Judith Pascoe (9),
and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have noted, whiteness takes on
multiple meanings in Dickinson’s poetry, signifying alternatively
ethereality, purity, self-sacrifice, racial hierarchies, death, blankness,
universality, and other subjects. Moreover, even when whiteness is
tied to particular symbolic associations, its meaning often evolves
through unstable tensions and paradoxes. For instance, Pollak argues
that Dickinson invokes traditional links between whiteness and
“feminine self-denial and self-sacrifice” primarily in order to associate
herself with a contrary “transgressive and androgynous public style”
(89). In a related vein, Gilbert and Gubar argue that whiteness func-
tions for Dickinson as a symbol of purity and a talisman for male
fantasies of defilement while also operating simultaneously as a
tropological “self-enclosing armor” that buttresses women’s autonomy
and independence (616-17). Viewed collectively, these critical observa-
tions suggest that Dickinson’s poetry approaches whiteness not as a
totalizing sign that produces repetitious meanings but as a variable
marker of competing and even contradictory associations.