The Queer Case of Emily Dickinson
What right do you have to take another person’s life and completely remake it?
Perhaps that question is moot. Perhaps I should be asking: if a person is dead, and especially if she is long dead, what is there to stop you?
There is certainly no legal impediment. The reputations of the dead have no legal defense, and we Americans have a bad habit of thinking anything that is legal is permissible, and anything permissible ought to be sanctioned. Lord Moulton’s “obedience to the unenforceable”—the idea that behavior should be governed by social mores of honor, civility, and temperance beyond what the law can impose—is a concept almost as long-buried as the lord himself.
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Katherine Dalton has worked as an editor at Harper’s and Chronicles magazines, written for publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the University Bookman, and contributed to Wendell Berry: Life and Work and Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto. She lives in her native Kentucky.
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