To enter into the experience of reading a Dickinson manuscript is to relinquish previous notions about the effect of her poetry. The manuscripts of Emily Dickinson provide a playground for this singular poet who wished to experiment with word variants, framing of stanzas, idiosyncratic enjambment, and dashes that ascend, descend, shorten and lengthen. Studying any one Emily Dickinson fascicle, the reader begins to notice the dialogues that the poems carry on with each other. They carom off each other, and the movement doesn't stop, so that when the reader returns and reopens the book, the voices still vibrate. This is the case for Fascicle 16, a grouping of poems that demonstrates a skillful interplay of Gothicism and the problems inherent in identity formation. The fascicle supplies all the accouterments of Gothic effects - apparitions, mirrors, windows, smoke, ghosts, things that wink in the gloaming, lightning, a funeral, repetitious beating sounds, and eerie depths - but it also widens out in other poems to encompass larger questions of the unity of identity.