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the function of signifiers relative to their position to each other, begins to constitute a region—seen as New England throughout the poetry—that both connects and separates speakers from their surroundings. As Lacan explains, the law of the symbolic marks the human subject’s division from nature through the regulation of sexual relations such as the incest taboo, ultimately constituting human communication (Écrits 66). By looking closely at the speakers in the verse of four major poets associated with New England, rhetoric surfaces in the context of the historically formed landscape, following such a division between human beings and nature. The symbolic law exposing the effects of the split subject in nature thus becomes informed by certain attributes of the speakers as well as the regional developments transforming the place they inhabit.
Like individual incidents in a given analysand’s story that prove instrumental in making sense of his or her conscious and unconscious behavior, trends in local history lead to insights as to how a particular landscape developed over time and how, given the spirit of the particular period, such developments affected the way residents responded to their surroundings. This study offers varied historical trends unique to speakers associated with each poet’s verse as both necessary correctives to previous readings as well as demonstrations of the extent to which certain recurring forces shape a given landscape and thereby form an individual New England voice. History provides a necessary background to the speaker’s surroundings, wherein their exposure to the béance in the region derives from their interactions, such as the industrialization of the rural landscape through legal decisions and the development of farming as well as from an engagement with the perception of the landscape based on changes within the New England literary tradition. The speakers in this poetry provide an invaluable example of how actual environmental changes altered the collective imagination of people’s everyday lives over time by voicing their views on shifts in the practice of law, industry, farming, family, and even perception itself. Dickinson and the poets after her have much to teach history and literary scholars alike about how to “see—New Englandly.”1