on the listener, asserted herself uninvited and for
the moment controls the listener’s attention. And
where two conspire in mutual recognition and
social interaction, there is publicity on a small
scale, all the while the speaker is claiming the
contrary, a shared invisibility and masked or
camouflaged personhood. The uppity-ups on
the stage and at the podium and those seated in
the front rows are asserting their public impor-
tance by speaking out in loud voices to the entire
audience, but these lesser known individuals in
the back row or up in the balcony or out in the
hall or whispering behind the kitchen door, they
identify themselves, too.
‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’ explores the
psychological and social dialectic between pri-
vate and public aspects of identity, the dynamic
and contradictory ways in which people choose
to remain anonymous or venture to expose
themselves to others. Individuals can pronounce
their importance, assert their views, even pontif-
icate, and likewise they can inhibit that impulse
to disclose and appeal for audience. They can
seek the large audience or just the ear of the
person nearest to them. Each person is endlessly
engaged in negotiating this path between privacy
and exposure, between asserting the self and
effacing it, between being anonymous and single
and having identity and making connection with
others. The speaker in Dickinson’s poem seems
to be unaware of the irony, but readers can see it.
The poem seems to suggest that there are two
kinds of people, the somebodies and the nobod-
ies, and the difference between these two groups is
much determined by the way individuals talk.
Some people take the floor; they stand in higher
places, up on the stage, at the podium, in the
pulpit. They demand because of their literal or
moral high ground as teachers, ministers, or sen-
ators, the attention of the people within the range
of their voices, groups of others who have varying
levels of social, financial, or political importance
themselves, but who by their role as listeners seem
to confirm the importance of those are speaking.
Others seek privacy, want to interact within the
narrow circle of immediate family and servants
and would prefer to decline party invitations or
church meetings or other public hearings. They
have their need to identify themselves, too, to
pronounce their opinions and views to those
around them, but they hold back, selectivity
choosing their listeners, their friends, their con-
fidants. It would appear the difference between
these two groups is a matter of degree.
It is a dicey proposition this finding one’s
way to a comfortable balance between privacy
and publicity. If one speaks to just one other
person and is overheard by a more public person,
the speaker may be drawn out of the back row
and into public view. So one must be selective and
guarded, careful in how and when and with what
volume one speaks. Another risk is the seduction
of being somebody, of having influence over
others, of hearing one’s own voice booming
across large groups of admiring fans. The high
place of public admiration is greased by well-fed
ego and pride, vainglorious self-importance, van-
ity. And everyone knows what comes after pride
and its kin of self-delusions. In this, the poem
offers a warning, even to the nobody who speaks
its lines: ‘‘Watch yourself, even you may become
prideful and fall,’’ it seems to say. And there is
another irony: in the high places of social impor-
tance, social exposure, and social influence,
human frailty can trip one up and then there is
the fall into disgrace and possible obscurity, all
part of the dynamic of privacy and publicity.
Having stopped attending church many years
earlier, Emily Dickinson died without ever pro-
fessing faith in a given religion or joining a church.
Her funeral was held in the study of the family
home. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the poet’s
long-time literary friend and later one of her edi-
tors, read, ‘‘No Coward Soul Is Mine,’’ by Emily
Bronte ̈, a poem that explicitly states faith in deity
but criticizes dogma. After the service, Dickin-
son’s casket was carried by workmen out the back-
door of the house and across the grounds on foot
to the cemetery. There was no public procession to
the gravesite. Thus, Emily Dickinson was buried
with a seclusion in which she is said to have lived.
It took little time for the poet’s sister to
discover the cache of writing Dickinson left in
her bedroom upstairs. The often self-effacing
and private Emily Dickinson left thousands of
notes, letters, and poems. Ambivalent about
exposure and publicity as she was, her papers
sooner or later were edited, published repeatedly
and in various forms, often quoted, and gar-
nered worldwide attention, ranging from their
use in self-styled greeting cards to the scrutiny
of scholars that fitted them into theories she may
not have appreciated nor understood. It can
safely be said her writings were broadcasted
across the globe.
So there it is. In the poem studied here, in the
life of the poet herself, there is traced the dilemma
that in truth faces each person: the desire forI’m Nobody! Who are you?