Illness in Isolation: Katie Farris's A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving in Conversation with Emily Dickinson

Abstract

Abstract:

Katie Farris’s chapbook, A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving, chronicles the author’s diagnosis and subsequent treatment of breast cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic. Farris directly invokes Dickinson on several occasions and employs some of her stylistic idiosyncrasies, such as the em dash. Farris taps into a connection between the societal fears of tuberculosis during Dickinson’s lifetime and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as between the two poets’ personal challenges: the fact that both Dickinson and Farris experienced health issues that hindered their ability to create. Speaking directly to these parallels, other scholars have noted the ways in which tuberculosis informs Dickinson’s writing and have suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic will influence contemporary authors in many of those same ways. This article describes how Farris turns to Dickinson during her diagnosis, especially in the sense that Dickinson’s preoccupation with death and illness presents a conduit through which Farris can process her own mortality. I argue that Farris finds companionship and camaraderie in Dickinson’s work specifically because, in both instances, the women face potentially fatal illness largely in isolation. Farris’s invocations of Dickinson and of Dickinson’s poems help shed light on the earlier poet’s attempts to process the impact that tuberculosis had on her family, her social circle, and the nation at large.