Cuteness and the Question of Anachronism

Emily Dickinson never used the word "cute," at least not in writing. The word was not common parlance--and when it was used, it implied sharpness or cleverness, rather than adorableness.  So does it even make sense to read her poetry as cute?  And to press the question, an even more extreme case can be found in the poetry of Edward Taylor, Dickinson's seventeenth-century precursor, who is also (to my mind) quite cute. If it's potentially anachronistic to call Dickinson's work cute, it seems almost willfully presumptuous to find cuteness in Taylor, even when he uses duck imagery: "Let Conscience Bibble in it with her Bill." And yet, I would argue that competent readers of Dickinson and Taylor can and should cultivate a strong cuteness response, to ducks and to poetry.  Indeed, perhaps precisely because the concept (with its low-culture kitschy connotations) was unavailable to them, both poets repeatedly express (in their poetry) and tap (in their readers) the cuteness response, using it in ways that are broader and more fluid than our current understanding of cuteness permits. To riff on the argument of Foucault's History of Sexuality: surely before there was cuteness, people could experience cute babies and (to generalize) cute objects and cute words, just as before there was homosexuality people could experience same-sex attraction.  After all, like sexual attraction, the cuteness response is not just a cultural category but a drive.  Moreover, perhaps the distaste that many elite scholars feel for cuteness is itself an historically-specific limitation, related to our experiences with the shameless manipulations of the advertising industry.  In other words, and again to draw on Foucault, maybe because Dickinson and Taylor were not embedded in our own hypercommodified culture--a culture that talks endlessly about cuteness in ways that are both repetitive and disciplinary--they were able to "play" more freely with the cuteness response in their poetry.