Alter Egos

Abstract

The draft gave rise to a booming economy of substitute brokers. While the so-called principal and his “alter ego” could, in theory, enter into an economic relationship that affirmed novelistic structures of character and personification, the insertion of middlemen brokers disrupted that possibility and posed the threat of turning substitutes into commodities. Tracking the development of this draft economy, the chapter traces its theorizations in diaries, letters, and poems, as well as in the iconography of the new paper currency, the greenback dollar bill. The chapter focuses in particular on the work of Emily Dickinson, whose career-defining interest in economics, embodiment, and split subjectivity took on additional urgency when her brother Austin procured the services of a substitute who was most likely a formerly enslaved black man. Concerned about the ability of poetic substitution to be representative, Dickinson developed an affirmation of substitution that rejected its monetization.