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.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
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.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on literature from the online archives
30.5—Sept/Oct 2017
on Costly Grace in Breece D'J Pancake's Flyover Country by Casey Chalk
30.2—March/April 2017
on Reading Don Quixote in Its Original Christian Context by Luis Cortest
20.6—July/August 2007
The Beowulf Poet Was a Shrewd Christian Apologist by Douglas Wilson
more from the online archives
32.2—March/April 2019
on Properly Rendering Things to Caesar & to God by Peter J. Leithart
28.1—January/February 2015
on State Impositions & Church Acquiescence by Stephen Baskerville
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
