There was more Emily could have said about Helen Fiske, but she chose not to—at least not in her letter that Sunday. As much as Emily appeared to tell Abiah everything she thought or did, there were emotions that touched her so deeply she told no one—or waited until the force of the blow had been absorbed to put words to her grief. The previous year had been difficult. Amherst experienced one death after another, with each person closer to Emily than the last. That winter Helen’s mother, suffering from consumption, appeared to be doing better. One morning she sat up in bed, dipped toast into her milk, and called for her husband and sister to join her. But before Professor Fiske could reach the bedroom, his wife was gone: one last gasp, neighbors said, and her eyes fixed in death. “The loss cannot be repaired,” Amherst College president Heman Humphrey said at her funeral.56 For Emily, who already wondered how her rambunctious childhood friend could endure being away from home, she now imagined what it would be like to lose a mother. The thought terrified her. In March, Emily Fowler’s mother began failing. Everyone knew Harriet Fowler. She was Professor Fowler’s wife, the daughter of Noah Webster whose new dictionary Emily treasured, and a woman known for lively conversation and cultivated ways. On the day of Mrs. Fiske’s funeral, Harriet Fowler returned home from the service, complaining of exhaustion and chills. Within five weeks, she, too, was dead, and another Amherst girl was motherless. “Death is doing his work thoroughly in this place,” Principal Jeremiah Taylor said, and dismissed the academy early so that students could attend Mrs. Fowler’s service.57
But of all the anguish the year before, Cousin Sophia’s illness was especially hard for Emily to bear. Sophia was in nearly every class with Emily, her home was down the street from the academy, and her father sold the Dickinsons dry goods and paint. That awful spring of 1844, Sophia began having chills, a fever, and complained of a headache. Then her fever soared and she became so weak, she could not get out of bed. All the signs pointed to typhus, a disease that hit children with ferocity. An epidemic had been raging in Washington, DC, and was creeping north to New England. When she heard of her cousin’s illness, Emily asked to see Sophia, and the physician permitted her a few moments to sit by the young girl’s bed. Emily visited often, studying Sophia’s face for signs of pain, recognition, submission, or perhaps faith. Then a fearful delirium set in. Sophia tossed, uttering scrambled words that only she could fathom. The scene was frightening for a child to witness and the doctor forbade Emily from entering the room. But when it looked as though Sophia’s death was imminent, he gave in, and allowed Emily one last look. She peered through an open door, took off her shoes, and stole into the room. Emily did not know exactly what to expect, but what she found surprised her. Sophia lay peacefully, mild and beautiful. Her pale features lit up, and on her lips an unearthly smile. There was no delirium, no difficult breathing: only motionless peace with eyes half-closed. Emily stared. It was not that looking at Sophia held some ghoulish attraction. Rather, she wanted to understand—to witness that skip of a moment between life and death. Friends outside the door worried; they thought she had been with Sophia long enough, and finally led Emily away. Days later when mourners laid Sophia in her coffin, Emily was overwhelmed with grief. Reverend Colton’s sermons gave no solace. Mourners’ promise of the afterlife offered little comfort. When she looked out the north window toward West Cemetery, only one thought entered Emily’s mind—Sophia was not coming back.58
Edward and Emily Dickinson were alarmed by their daughter’s melancholy. When she was younger they had seen her through the gloom of colds and respiratory ailments, and a severe canker rash, but she had never been as somber as this. They wrote sturdy Aunt Lavinia in Boston for help. More than any other relative, Lavinia Norcross seemed to know what to do when someone was down-spirited. Not only was she forthright, as she had been to Edward about taking in boarders, she also was practical and believed meaningful activity was an antidote to sorrow. Within weeks Emily was in Boston staying with her aunt and uncle and their two-year-old daughter, Fanny. “We hope you are enjoying yourself,” Mrs. Dickinson wrote, “and that it will be a benefit to you to be away from home a little while.”59 Aunt Lavinia knew what had sustained her: family, beauty, and art. She delighted in the city’s theatre, concerts, and horticultural shows, and music at the Bowdoin Street Church—she told the Dickinsons—simply melted her down. Emily stayed for more than a month, helping her aunt when even more relatives descended on her welcoming household. “Aunt Lavinia will really have quite a family,” Emily’s mother wrote. “I trust you will lend a helping hand.”60 While Emily was away, her classmates stopped by the West Street house and asked Mrs. Dickinson how their friend was doing. She relayed their greetings. Edward, as usual, fretted. “Be careful about wetting your feet,” he told his elder daughter, “or taking cold—& not get lost.”61 With Austin back at school, young Vinnie appeared to be the only one at home not worried about her sister. She “gets along better without you, than I thought she would,” Mrs. Dickinson noted. Vinnie means to brave it out, her father added.62 After regaining her moorings, Emily returned to Amherst. Aunt Lavinia’s disposition had made an impression. She vowed to plunge into a year of improvement, made resolutions, and then berated herself for breaking some.63 For a young girl, Emily keenly felt the passage of days, and was at turns philosophical and restless. She was determined to be more productive and use her time wisely.
On that warm August day, Emily peered at what she had written in her letter to Abiah and moved into her final sentences. There was barely an inch of space left on the page so she made her script smaller and more compact. “Why cant you pass Commencement here. I do wish you would.”64 The rush of activity that came with the end of summer was about to descend. Days before, nearby Mount Holyoke Female Seminary celebrated its commencement. Amherst Academy would be next. The college would follow soon after. As Emily surveyed the words before her, she was dissatisfied. “I have looked my letter over and find I have written nothing worth reading. . . . Dont look at the writing and dont let any one see the letter.”65 Her standards were high, and it was not by accident that she ended the letter with what was on her mind: her own writing. Emily indeed was changing, even if Charles Temple’s silhouette had traced only the edges. She heard anthems in the grass. She wanted weird and beautiful melodies to spring from her pen as well as from her piano. She wanted to break the rules like Helen Fiske. She wanted to understand the particles of moments that others could not see or grasped with a faith she found too easy. There were forces at work spinning Emily into a world her family and friends could not fully understand. I am the same old sixpence, she would tell Abiah—but she was not.66 Possibility circled her young life like Professor Snell’s parhelion—a luminous circumference around a brilliant center. “I have no flowers before me as you had to inspire you,” she wrote Abiah.67 Emily did not need them. Everything she required for inspiration already was taking root in her mind. It was confidence, independence, and self-awareness that were growing in her—qualities that would sustain her for the rest of her life. Emily dipped her pen into the dark well and began a sentence she had never written before. “All things are ready,” she wrote, and she knew it.68
* Ebenezer Snell has the distinction of being the first student in the first class (1822) to graduate Amherst College. He also was the first college graduate to teach at Amherst Academy and the first alumnus to return to the college as a professor. His young Amherst Academy students initially gave him the nickname “Miss Snell.” [Frederick Tuckerman, Amherst Academy: A New England School of the Past, 1841–1861 (Amherst: Printed for the Trustees, 1929), 208–9.]
† Snell’s cloudiness scale ran from 1 to 10, with 10 being a cloud-covered day.
‡ Original spellings, misspellings, and errors in grammar—Dickinson’s and those of others as well—have been maintained throughout this text, and will not be called out as such.
§ Before Amherst Academy accepted females, most young girls attended Hannah White’s Amherst
Female Seminary. A fire destroyed the seminary in 1838 and the institution closed. No doubt the closing of Amherst Female Seminary prompted academy trustees to open the door to girls as well as boys.
¶ Elizabeth Dickinson Currier (1823–1886) was the youngest sister of Edward Dickinson and a few years older than Emily. The poet often misspelled her aunt’s name with an s. Known for her strong personality, Elizabeth once earned Dickinson’s assessment as “the only male relative on the female side.” [L473.] Aunt Elizabeth also wrote poetry and contributed a verse history of the family for its 1883 reunion, praising Dickinson ancestors for being full of muscle and mind.
# Emily’s behavior as a young girl demonstrated this attitude. She would dutifully entertain guests, but then spend hours in her room after company had departed. Her frequent absence from church also underscored her desire for privacy.
** Sophia Holland was Dickinson’s second cousin on her father’s side. Perez Dickinson was Sophia’s maternal grandfather and Samuel Fowler Dickinson’s brother.
†† Smyrna is present-day Turkey.
‡‡ The executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, Jane Wald, says it is her understanding that when Dickinson as a girl refers to receiving or sending “papers,” she is talking about essays she had written for school or wrote on her own. [Email to author, September 30, 2015.]
§§ Emily Fowler Ford later remembered that the last copy she ever saw of Forest Leaves turned up at the Maplewood Institute in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. According to her, students in Pittsfield started a similar paper. For years, scholars have searched unsuccessfully for Forest Leaves. A small archives of the former Maplewood Institute is housed at the Berkshire County Historical Society. A search in those archives did not turn up the publication. [Will Garrison, email to the author, November 2, 2015.]
Two
IT IS HARD FOR ME TO GIVE UP THE WORLD
Sunday February 6, 1848 6 pm Barometer 29.12. Attached Therm. 64 degrees. Extern Therm. 26 degrees. Cloudiness 10. Winds NW 1 mph. Clouds Nimb. Snowfall 0 Remarks Some blustering. Snowing a little in pm.
—Ebenezer Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College
Emily dreamed vivid dreams. She dreamed of planting a rye field with her mother, of the Amherst postmaster seizing her family’s property, of bees fighting for pond-lily stems, of a friend meeting Tennyson at a Boston publishing house, of standing before an audience and unveiling a statue. Once a sip of something before bedtime gave her what she called a sherbet dream. She noticed when she dreamed the same dream twice, three times, or night after night, and often told friends and family when they made an apparitional appearance. Sometimes her dreams were so insistent, Emily woke herself up, thinking she had to put on a shawl and hood to meet someone. She dreamed of growing old, her young face staring at her old face with a crown of silver hair—a grandame. “Dreams are couriers,” she once said. “Sometimes I wonder if I ever dreamed – then if I’m dreaming now, then if I always dreamed, and there is not a world.”1
For months before beginning classes, Emily dreamed of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. “It has been in my thought by day, and my dreams by night,” she told her friend Abiah. “You cannot imagine how much I am anticipating in entering there.”2 The idea of furthering her education after Amherst Academy excited Emily and the new seminary—then in its eleventh year—already was known for attracting ambitious young women from as far away as Montreal and St. Louis. The four-story building rose out of the center of South Hadley, Massachusetts, like a monolith, dwarfing everything around it, including the church next door. When founder Mary Lyon drew up plans for the school, supporters urged her to name it Mary Lyon’s School, but she found the idea boastful. The seminary should be named for something as vital and enduring as education itself, she argued. She studied maps of the surrounding landscape, of the rugged Metacomet Ridge that ran like a spine down the Connecticut River valley. One prominent point, Mount Holyoke, rose 935 feet above farmland. While not the highest peak, its formidable foundation appealed to her. The mountain was carved from seismic shifts that ripped North America from Africa and Eurasia. Its rock—the product of molten lava—was among the most ancient on the planet. Mary Lyon liked the association: a seminary forged by volcanoes.3
“I fear I am anticipating too much, and that some freak of fortune may overturn all my airy schemes,” Emily told her friend Abiah. Disappointment was in her nature, she said, acknowledging her dreams might be capsized by something unexpected or her own change of heart.4 As cautious as she told herself to be, Emily was ready for the next step toward adulthood, and looked forward to time away from Amherst—even if “away” meant only eleven miles down the road. When she thought about what she would find at Mount Holyoke, she could tick off predictions with the certainty of someone who was well prepared. She expected hard work and an energetic community of young women. She expected teachers more experienced than the academy’s young staff—seasoned educators devoted to a lifetime of learning and serious scholars themselves. She also expected rules. With hundreds of young women living under one roof with their teachers, orderliness had to be maintained. The seminary’s list of regulations was long: do not throw anything out the windows, do not close doors, do not delay in the hallway, do not leave lamps burning upon retiring, use pumps properly, devote time to compositions, do not be absent from church. She would follow the rules—mostly—and knew that the formidable Miss Lyon was in charge of the whole teeming enterprise.* Emily also understood she would be on her own—away from home for the longest period of her young life. In February now—six months since entering the seminary—she had come to two important decisions. She realized she did not want to become a teacher. As much as she loved learning, instructing others held no interest. At Amherst Academy when teachers had asked her to rise and read her compositions, she felt uncomfortable in front of others. She also recognized she could never be a missionary. Many Mount Holyoke graduates set out on their own as missionaries to Salonica, Ceylon, and Ningpo. But Emily did not feel the call, and the idea of travel far away from Amherst was unthinkable. She was focused on one more decision, too, a far more serious resolution than those about teaching and missionary work. That decision was not yet clear to Emily and would not be until later in the day, when she was scheduled to meet with Miss Lyon herself.5 She knew why Mary Lyon wanted to see her. She wanted to talk about God. No one would ever confront Emily so emphatically about the state of her soul.
Some Amherst townspeople may have questioned the decision to send Emily to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. After all, when she’d joined the incoming class that previous September, she was only sixteen—young by seminary standards. Mary Lyon had raised entrance requirements every year and she did not want immature students unable to handle the work. The seminary was bursting, larger than Amherst College by nearly 100 students. Miss Lyon had rejected more pupils than she accepted, and was forced to hire additional teachers. Emily’s academic training at Amherst Academy—while enriching—had been sporadic. Like many students, girls in particular, she sat out school terms when her parents worried about her health: a cough that lingered for weeks; complaints of a raw throat, a bout with what her father called influenzy. It irritated Emily to be absent from the academy as she had the year before she entered Mount Holyoke. “It cost me many a severe struggle to leave my studies & to be considered an invalid,” she complained.6 For months, she had sulked around the house and helped her mother, learning to bake bread—her sleeves rolled up, mixing flour and milk. She grew to enjoy baking, but housekeeping was a plague to her. Occasionally she sought escape from her imposed “exile”—as she called it—in carriage rides and roaming the fields alone.7 During the time she was absent from the academy, there had been another restorative trip to Boston to visit her aunt and uncle. Aunt Lavinia had trooped Emily around the city with her usual enthusiasm. They took in Bunker Hill, Mount Auburn Cemetery, a horticultural exhibition, two concerts, and climbed to the top of the Massachuset
ts State House for a view of the city. Emily especially enjoyed the Chinese Museum, where two scholars—one a professor of music and another a teacher of writing—practiced their art for curious onlookers. “There is something peculiarly interesting to me in their self denial,” she said.8
Not all parents were like the Dickinsons, who believed their daughters deserved an education. Many families thought educating young women was a waste of time. Why educate girls beyond the age of fifteen, they argued. Certainly a cultivated mother needed to provide a proper learning environment for her children, but academy schooling was sufficient. When daughters ended up marrying and staying at home, it was unnecessary for them to proceed with an advanced curriculum. Besides, an education was expensive; a year at Mount Holyoke cost $60—much more than Edward had paid for Emily at the academy. Even Emily’s aunt, Mary Dickinson, thought women’s higher education was foolish. “They have so little business to do in this town,” she once huffed, “they are undertaking to build a Female Seminary.”† 9 However, while no one ever would call Edward Dickinson a champion of women’s education, he did want the best for his daughters, and a commitment to learning ran deep on both the Dickinson and Norcross sides of the family. Emily’s maternal grandfather, Joel Norcross, was one of the founders of Monson Academy at the same time Samuel Fowler Dickinson was getting Amherst Academy off the ground. Emily’s mother and Aunt Lavinia had attended Monson, and later Mr. Herrick’s School for Girls in New Haven, Connecticut, where young women regularly attended lectures at Yale. A woman’s life should have a serious purpose, young Emily Norcross long ago wrote in a Monson Academy composition. There is satisfaction in contemplation and retirement, she had written, seclusion based not on what is lost but what is gained.10
These Fevered Days Page 4