My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Was this easy propriety intimidating to a woman whose letters were generally awkward, incorrect, and late? The one and only time the bride-to-be appeared in Amherst was for Commencement on August 22, 1827—a public event that ruled out much close contact with Edward’s family. She was accompanied by brother William and sister Lavinia and may not have stayed overnight. Edward invited, urged, begged, ordered, but she remained so unresponsive that he finally asked—a bleak and desperate joke—whether she intended “to remain at Monson after we are married?” It would be good to know how his sisters explained her peculiar standoffishness, but all we have is Mary’s bland exculpatory statement of 1829: “I know Emily is not fond of travelling.”

  Finally, in January 1828, when the failure to visit had grown embarrassing, Emily sent her fifteen-year-old sister Lavinia to look at the remodeled house and be looked at by Edward’s family. More open and expressive than Emily, Lavinia seems to have been an acceptable delegate. Mary Dickinson, teaching in South Hadley, was sorry she could not go home to meet her during her week in Amherst. But Emily missed her sister so much that (in an appealingly weird joke) she “was almost inclined to be homesick.”

  In the courtship’s final months the couple became much more direct with each other, Edward in showing his annoyance and exerting his authority and Emily in speaking her mind and bridling at his control. Once, he scolded her for stepping out to so many evening meetings, which in his view served no purpose but to risk her health. When she advised him of a historical lecturer she planned to hear, he sent a long and earnest critique of the man. In reply, Emily issued a mild reproof and a plea for tolerance and freedom:

  Is it not singular that your feeling should have so commanding an influence over mine but it is to strong to overcome, but it is for us to be prudent and not to injure the reputation of others, but let their works prove them.

  She was saying that Edward was too “commanding” and “strong to overcome” her opinions, and too prejudicial in judging the lecturer. Although her syntax may be an unpruned thicket, her series of “buts” eloquently conveys her anxious and inarticulate resistance. We are reminded of what she told Edward when he advised her to check with his references: people must make up their own minds. One of the things the poet’s mother took to Amherst was a quietly persistent independence masked by outward obedience.

  In answering this letter, Edward ironically professed his gratitude for his fiancée’s advice and mocked her “decision of character”—the “air of authority & independence which you assumed.” Using his favorite word, he was “determined to bring you out, a little—you have refused & excused yourself long enough.” He, too, was becoming plainer and more sarcastic. “Don’t you think it rather queer that I should ‘find time’ to write to you, every day? and hear from you about once in a month?” begins his letter of January 31, 1828. Hers of February 9 opens with a short, flat (and exasperated?) sentence responding to his iterated requests to visit him: “One more invitation.” “Your true sincerity I never would presume to despute,” she went on, “yet there are, and have been reason, to prevent me from acting in compliance with your wishes. Perhaps you will say they are all trifling, I am sensible that my feelings are unlike many others at least those within the bounds of my observation, but it is not necessary for me to explain to you why.”

  These exchanges bring out one of the besetting lifelong tensions within the Dickinson marriage. When Edward asserted his manly right of command, Emily did as she must without effectively explaining herself. Aware that her silent resistance undermined his authority, Edward could not help getting angry and then both accommodating himself and continuing to insist. He had wanted a quiet wife with all the domestic female virtues, and now, maddeningly, that was what he was getting. And the poet was getting a mother whose wayward obliqueness afforded a useful model for her own orientation to the world.

  When Joel Norcross unexpectedly showed up in Amherst to inspect the Montague house, Edward was deeply gratified:

  Your father returns this morning, & while his horse is harnessing, I write a few words. We have been over all our house, and examined it, thoroughly—he has proposed some alterations, with which I am much pleased—he saw Wid. Montague, & will tell you all about her & the house, and what he thinks of our prospect of having a comfortable house.

  Emily’s father was a man of standing and judgment, and his presence, approval, and advice meant a great deal to Edward. The occasional progress reports he sent Joel still survive. One from early March announces “the family have left my house, & repairs are making as fast as possible.”

  Just as Lavinia was a kind of substitute for her older sister, so Joel stood in for Emily on questions of remodeling and furnishing. Among his valuable gifts to the young couple was a new cast-iron kitchen stove. When the four- or five-hundred-pound appliance was transported from Springfield and installed, Edward could not contain his delight: “It is not the rusty thing which your father, in his peculiar way of producing an agreeable surprise in having things prove much better than he represents, would have us believe—but one of the neatest, & best looking stoves that I ever saw.” Smoothing the transition to married life, Joel had already become a second father to Edward, a much more efficient and reliable one than Samuel.

  Last came the scrubbing. Well aware of Emily’s insistence on order and cleanliness, Edward assured her a week before the wedding that “the house has been cleaned by a black woman, but I suppose it will have to pass thro’ other hands again, under your own inspection—I told her, that if there was one speck left on the windows, they would be all taken out & washed anew!—So you see, I have done my duty.” The relaxed tone shows that, among other things, the couple had achieved a degree of companionable freedom.

  Emily made it clear the ceremony was to be as simple as possible: no groomsman, no bridesmaid. No longer straining for genteel effects, she expressed herself with blunt decision in her last two letters. *13 On the question of domestic help: “You speak of haveing a girl. I shall not consent to it at all.” On her feelings at leaving Monson for Amherst: “I have many friends call upon me as they say to make their farewell visit. How do you suppose this sounds in my ear But my dear it is to go and live with you.” Her plainness, lack of inflation, and slight distance from conventional formulas (“as they say”) reveal the difference between her and her fiancé’s well-educated sisters. They also remind us once again of her unemphatic obliquity and insistence on the right of private judgment. Such were the things that little bright eyes (and ears) would soon be picking up, leaving Helen Hunt Jackson to wonder fifty years later at the “curiously direct phrase” with which Emily Dickinson designated Mr. Jackson—“the man you live with.”

  On May 6, 1828, the marriage was solemnized and the couple moved into the rooms the groom had so anxiously and meticulously prepared, on the assumption they were in his father’s “control.” A week later friend Solomon complimented him on his “thoroughly repaired” house. Coelebs was at home with his unliterary wife.

  What She Didn’t Mention

  One of Dickinson’s most haunting poems concerns the unreckoned costs of wifehood:

  She rose to His Requirement – dropt

  The Playthings of Her Life

  To take the honorable Work

  Of Woman, and of Wife –

  If ought She missed in Her new Day,

  Of Amplitude, or Awe –

  Or first Prospective – Or the Gold

  In using, wear away,

  It lay unmentioned – as the Sea

  Develope Pearl, and Weed,

  But only to Himself – be known

  The Fathoms they abide –

  Fr857

  For the unnamed woman of this poem, marrying means dropping into a deep and masculine sea and drowning her individuality once and for all. Since the sea can “Develope” both “Pearl, and Weed,” it is too soon to say whether her sacrifice was a mistake. Instead, what the poem dwells on is the transaction’s silenci
ng effect—the disturbing fact that the wife has nothing more to say about the promising things she has given up. Is she unwilling to voice the inner truth about her union, or is she unable? The poem’s final claim is that only her husband can know the “Fathoms,” depths, in which she now lives.

  These lines, composed by early 1864, may be a response to the marriage of someone known to Dickinson, possibly her friend Eliza Coleman, who in 1861 married a dynamic and dominating minister during a heavy rainstorm. Does the poem also give Dickinson’s sense of her parents’ union? There is no doubt she saw her father as a figure of great power and her mother as small and pinched and overbusy, without that sense of questioning “Amplitude, or Awe” that she herself valued. Comparing her parents with the couple in the poem, we see in both an extreme asymmetry between the man’s requirements and the woman’s inarticulate compliance. Still, if the poem makes us think of Mrs. Dickinson, it is not quite her story: she probably did as much hard work before her wedding as after, there are few hints of amplitude or awe at any point in her life, and she was capable of ignoring her spouse’s orders and obeying her own sweet will.

  The poem says less about Emily and Edward Dickinson than about the way their daughter imagined the risks a woman takes in marrying. What the poem presents is the visionary insight the Norcross-Dickinson union stimulated in one of its products.

  Chapter 4

  1828–1830: Shifting Foundations

  When Emily Dickinson was born, her parents were enjoying a calm interval between the insecurities of their first two years of marriage and the economic trials her father was to face in the 1830s. Edward would eventually prosper, yet his early financial stresses deposited a kind of Depression mentality in the poet—an uneasy sense of the fragility of foundations. As a teenager, she once dreamed that “Father had failed & mother said that ‘our rye field which she & I planted, was mortgaged to Seth Nims.’” As reported, the dream gives the main speaking role to the hardworking mother, who announces that the crop she and her daughter have grown is in jeopardy thanks to Father. If the dream is to be trusted (always a question), it suggests the daughter picked up her parents’ anxiety about financial insolvency. Curiously, the vision was real enough to the girl that she asked her brother to reassure her that Father hadn’t failed.

  Wiped Out

  When Emily Norcross left her home in Monson on May 6, 1828, she moved into a house supposedly controlled by a powerful father-in-law. May 1 was the day property was officially valued by the town of Amherst. The assessment rolls for that date in 1828 show that Samuel Fowler Dickinson was held liable for the taxes on a number of pieces of real estate. Another indication of his public standing is his election that month by the Massachusetts legislature to fill a vacancy in the state Senate. May 30 was the day he swore his oath and took his seat.

  Then, on June 11, one day before the Senate adjourned, Squire Dickinson “obtained leave of absence for the remainder of the session.” A week later, having decided to open a new school “in the science and practice of The Law,” he placed a tortured notice in the New-England Inquirer:

  This Prospectus is issued with extreme diffidence; in as much as it promises only the efforts of an humble individual . . . whose attention, for some time past, has been partially withdrawn from the Profession. Yet, believing that perseverance, united with untiring application, and exclusive devotedness to the object of pursuit, always possesses a redeeming spirit, as well as an overcoming power, the undersigned is determined to omit no exertion, and avoid no sacrifice, to deserve, what he humbly hopes he may receive, a portion of the public patronage.

  Everything in this notice seems characteristic of the man: the bloodied tenacity, the prompt and public way in which he played his last desperate card, and the religious phrases derived from the Exercise Scheme the Reverend Nathanael Emmons had taught him long ago (“redeeming spirit,” “overcoming power,” “omit no exertion . . . to deserve”). All in all, the prospectus is so unrealistic and self-flagellating it seems fairly unhinged (and in fact, the school never got off the ground). But the most important implication here is not psychological but economic.

  That the Squire was officially bankrupt is confirmed by the Inquirer’s editorial endorsements of July 17 and August 28, which stated that the “pursuits and embarrassments” that had distracted him for several years “are so far disposed of and removed, that he is enabled to redeem the pledge already given, of devoting exclusive and persevering attention from this time, to the profession.” In plain language, the hammer had fallen and Samuel was wiped out, with no more debts, projects, or properties and with only his knowledge of the law to sustain him. Edward was one of the paper’s proprietors and apparently headed the prudential committee that managed its business side. There seems little doubt the editorial support of Samuel’s unlikely new venture had inside authority and was meant to put the best possible face on his failure. That November the Squire was slaughtered in his run for the national House of Representatives, getting less than 10 percent of the vote.

  What all this meant for the poet’s parents is that in summer 1828, several weeks after marrying, they discovered they did not have secure possession of their half of Jemima Montague’s house after all. Given the attention Edward had lavished on the place, and the high standards of domestic order Emily brought to it, the discovery must have been a shock. They were more alone in the world than they had realized.

  The inexorable legal ramifications quickly worked themselves out. On October 29, Samuel’s coadjutant, Oliver Smith, in deep trouble now, sold a long list of mortgaged properties, including the Jemima Montague place and the Dickinson Homestead. The purchasers were John Leland, the treasurer of Amherst College, and Nathan Dickinson, a goldsmith and a first cousin of Edward. Neither apparently wished to be harsh, but given the deal’s huge face amount ($20,000), they had to turn the Montague place to the best possible account.

  On December 8, with Emily about five months pregnant, Edward turned to her father for advice. Explaining that “the assignees” of Samuel’s property were obliged to dispose of it, the young husband admitted his father’s “misfortunes place me in rather a difficult situation respecting my house, [more so] than was anticipated when I made the repairs.” He had to decide between two undesirable alternatives—renting what might at any time be sold from under him or buying what he could scarcely afford. The stoical young husband did not complain or accuse, but his dignified statement makes clear which of his two fathers he valued for judgment and counsel.

  Edward’s relations with his in-laws were to be unusually close and confidential. After hearing from Joel, he struck a new deal with Leland and cousin Nathan that gave him some sort of interest in his part of the house. Not only was the deal a “great bargain,” but he believed he could sell out “for more than the amount of my purchase money.” Eventually, this second agreement proved as fragile as the original one, but for now Edward was confident his tenancy had a solid footing.

  The Work, You Know, Comes upon You

  Among the congratulatory notes Emily Norcross Dickinson received after the wedding was one from Loring Norcross, her first cousin. Loring sent polite wishes for her and her spouse’s “prosperity,” then added a curious remark: “I think that the People in Monson rather Imagine that you both have ran a wild goose Chase, but time must determine.”

  Nothing reveals Emily’s unfolding situation quite so vividly as the many letters she received from her younger sister. Breezy and indiscreet, Lavinia was both more sociable than the poet’s mother and more inclined to express her opinions and her wide range of feelings. Judging from the First Church of Monson’s Sabbath School records, she was also something of a whiz: at age thirteen she committed to memory no less than 1,343 Bible verses, 600 more than the top male memorizers. Lavinia took so much pleasure in communicating, that not only did she become the Norcrosses’ delegated intermediary with Amherst but also the Dickinson children would feel closer to her than to their other older rela
tives. It is no accident that the poet’s most relaxed and newsy letters went to the daughters of this lively, friendly, and expressive aunt.

  The second of Lavinia’s extant letters to her married sister went out over Joel’s opinion that it is “foolish for me to write you so often.” Dated two weeks after the wedding, it made clear how much Emily was missed in Monson and how “homesick” she was assumed to be. As time passed without a reply, however, Lavinia began to feel abandoned. Wishing to send “some intelligence from home,” she couldn’t help suspecting “it is of but little consequence to you tho ‘there was once’ no place like home.” When a letter finally came, Lavinia “did not know as you would ever find time to write me but I am much encouraged.” It was now her turn to perform the chore Edward had previously carried out—making the most of Emily’s infrequent and meager replies.

  What chiefly worried the Norcrosses was Emily’s insistence on doing all the housework. She had been married three months when Lavinia transmitted some forceful advice from home:

  I hope you will give up your work in some measure for Mother worries a great deal about you if you do not favour your-self I think you will be very ungrateful to your husband and friends if you cannot do every thing you wish about your house you must consider you are out of health & let all the needless work go—your health depends on your own prudence remember.

  Two months later Lavinia wrote, “I understand your health has not been as good I hope you will soon have some assistence in your domestic avocations.”

  After the laborious wife was finally coerced into hiring a servant, Lavinia found a woman willing to leave Monson for Amherst, then begged Emily to “favour yourself when she comes.” But Emily found it as difficult to retain her help as others found it to keep her from working too hard, and within several weeks, judging from Lavinia’s query—“has your girl returned?”—the servant was gone. When a new one was found, the Norcrosses breathed easier: “Now Miss Green is with you we feel that you will have good care—Mother sends love.” But before long Miss Green was also out of the picture, prompting Lavinia to confide that “Mother has had much anxiety about your help which you will need before long.” Finally, when Emily was seven months pregnant, her parents took matters into their hands by arranging to send their own girl, Mary. The next month Lavinia nervously summed matters up: “happy to hear you was in good health—hope you will be prudent—soon you will have Mary’s assistence.”