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locates the conflation of nineteenth-century property law within the functioning of the law of the symbolic. Both regulate the desire of the speakers, which in turn, according to Lacan, creates the desire to transgress (The Seminar. Book VII 83–84). Symbolic law therefore reveals its function at least in part as it affects the New England landscape in the nineteenth century. Dickinson’s speakers express a New England vision in part by inhabiting the tension between previous conceptions of ownership and radically new definitions of property rights. For example, the rise of eminent domain, accommodating the rapid growth of industry as it laid claim to entrenched protections of privately held undeveloped land, accounts for the significant desire for space among speakers who attempt to reposition themselves in the verse. As speakers try to imaginatively reconcile the threat of separation from the region, the poetry shows the effects of definitive rulings (decided within the highly influential Massachusetts State Supreme Court) that served the burgeoning industrial development of the New England landscape.
True to the nature of Dickinson’s aesthetic, speakers vary as to how they figure into their historically developing surroundings. In certain contexts, they benefit from changes in the law that serve economic interests, while in other situations, they find themselves displaced in the region. Regardless of whether they suffer or thrive in their reaction to the transformed region, the poetry manages to derive prodigious imaginative strength from the conflict between past and current legal conceptions of space. As the speakers articulate the effects of legal decisions affecting riparian water rights, the expansion of the railroad, and so forth, they orient themselves around a béance between nature and a radically transformed landscape. A psychoanalytic consideration of their subjective positioning in New England reveals the effects of such symbolic transformations, and the effects of such symbolic transformations in turn reveal the tension underpinning the speakers’ subjective positioning. The original voices of Dickinson’s speakers are defined at the site of these rhetorical and thematic crossings.
Chapter 2, “Farming the Symbolic: Agricultural Origins in the Poetry of Robert Frost,” examines speakers in Frost’s poetry who inhabit the