house

By the end of the week Emily began to be sighted outside her room, a mysterious and elusive figure fleeting as a woodland creature no sooner glimpsed than it has vanished.

“EDickionson RepliLuxe” by Joyce Carol Oates, from Wild Nights!

In “EDickinsonRepliLuxe”, Joyce Carol Oates offers a science fiction fable about Emily Dickinson–or, rather, a stunted facsimile of the Belle of Amherst–come to live with a modern suburban couple. Sold by RepliLuxe, Inc., the “child-sized Emily . . . wearing tiny buckled shoes” was supposed to “enrich, enhance, ‘double in value’ one’s life,” but instead becomes a disturbing and disruptive presence in their house. Both husband and wife seek to “own” Dickinson–the wife through an appeal to sisterly and poetic urges, the husband through brute force–but in the end, it is the Dickinson automaton who possesses herself.

I’ll admit that I’m not always an Oates fan; while I recognize that she has made an interesting marriage of realism and the Gothic, I find that her stories are often overwrought and predictable. But this story, though not terribly surprising in plot, is more subdued than I had expected; perhaps the gnomic Dickinson has a calming effect. The story is told in the broad strokes of a fairy tale, with the Dickinson mannequin a more deeply realized character than the husband and wife, but the sketchiness works where a more detailed treatment would not, hinting and suggesting with an economy of language much like Dickinson’s poems.

“EDickinsonRepliLuxe” is on of five stories in Oates’ new collection, Wild Nights! Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway. The subtitle is a bit misleading: the Dickinson story takes place more than a century after her “last days,” and the Poe story is a Gothic fantasia on Poe’s life-after-death, or perhaps an alternate history in which he lives on; though the other stories do imagine their subjects’ last hours in intriguing ways. This is certainly a collection that will appeal to the English (or American Studies) major, full of allusion and pastiche. Indeed, it may be a bit much of that, a little too flattering to the students who paid attention in that survey of American literature class. But sometimes it’s nice to be flattered for knowing about Poe, Dickinson, et al, when one is out of touch with “Survivor” and “American Idol.”