Unlike Amherst Academy, with its constant turnover in staff, Williston Seminary had the resources to recruit and retain the best teachers and sustain a solid program from year to year. In other respects also, as Williston made clear in his unusual first-person “Constitution,” his school maintained a high degree of control. He gave large sums for laboratory equipment but demanded that the sciences be “taught in their proper relation to natural and Revealed Religion” and that all permanent teachers believe in the depravity of man, the need for an atonement, “everlasting punishment of the finally impenitent,” and so forth. There was also plenty of punishment here below: one boy “had 5 or 6 birch rods used up on his back” for “playing at meetings,” and another received “a smart ferruling” for using profane language. Not only were pupils “faithfully disciplined” and “thoroughly drilled,” but “bad orthography, bad penmanship or bad grammar” would not be endured. All in all, the institution posed an unbeatable challenge to Amherst Academy’s regional dominance. Austin’s friend Ned Hitchcock, son of Professor Edward Hitchcock, pronounced the new school “the best of any about here, for both boys and girls.” When another boy transferred from Amherst to Easthampton and dreamed he was back at his old academy, he “did not like [it] much but soon awoke.”
Austin roomed in the three-story Hampshire House, run by Luther Clapp and located across Easthampton Common from the seminary. After moving in, the boy got a paternal letter full of commands and permissions:
Obey all the laws of the school—be kind and pleasant to all the scholars . . . if you have the head-ache, as you do sometimes, you must ask Mr. Wright [the principal] to excuse you from study. Be careful of your eyes—if they are weak, you must not use them.
I think you had not better study more than one hour, in the evening, unless you wish to.
Austin was to concentrate on Caesar, improve his “writing” in some unspecified way, and be more distinct in his enunciation, giving “every little word its full sound.”
The letter concluded with “love” not only from the family but from Sabra Howe, the innkeeper’s twelve-year-old daughter. The touch was typical of the warm but laconic interest Edward expressed in his young children’s concerns. Two years later, when Emily was away, he let her know Lavinia and some friends had spent the day playing with their dolls at Mrs. Caroline D. Hunt’s (one of their recent teachers).
All of the other letters from home during Austin’s month-long absence seem utterly characteristic of their authors. Aunt Elizabeth the drillmaster, much given to needling her nephew, asked him to bring his diploma home—“diploma for correct behaviour if nothing more.” *28 Mother’s abbreviated note was full of regulation phrases (“only a moment,” “say a few words,” “in haste”) but still conveyed her fondness for her son and her eagerness to see him again and observe his performance in the public examination. “I anticipate much pleasure in visiting you,” she wrote. *29
Making a Hurrah with Pen and Ink
We read these letters, and then we turn to the two from Emily, and also the one she sent Jane Humphrey in the same four-week period. That we have nothing of hers from the next two and a half years shows how much has escaped us.
We hear her echoing her mother’s pet phrases and anxious humor when she tells her brother, “I have the privilege of looking under the bed every night which I improve as you may suppose.” We detect a lively interest in local gossip—the recent and well-publicized temperance dinner, the more “genteel” supper the college students are planning, and someone’s insurance policy for “8 thousand dollars instead of 6 which makes him feel a great deal better.” Her voice sounds an acerbic vernacular note as she tells how the Wilsons moved a house—“made out to get one of the Mt Pleasant Buildings to its place of distination which is a matter of great rejoicing to the public.”
Punctuation is minimal, there are no paragraphs, and the transitions are abrupt and breathtaking: “My Plants grow beautifully – you know that elegant old Rooster that Austin thought so much of – the others fight him and killed him – answer this letter as soon as you can.” Here and elsewhere, we hear the lively tones of an eleven-year-old immersed in childish things, or rather, immersed in the world in a childish way. We get a strong impression of an affectionate nature that does not feel the usual inhibitions. To Austin: “We miss you very much indeed you cannot think how odd it seems without you there was always such a Hurrah *30 wherever you was I miss My bedfellow very much.” To Jane, the absent bedfellow: “I miss you more and more every day, in my study in play at home indeed every where I miss my beloved Jane – I wish you would write to me – I should think more of it than of a mine of gold.” If one may judge by the writer’s attentiveness to her recipients’ concerns, the professed love was genuine: Jane was given news of an older sister teaching in Amherst; Austin was assured that Sabra had spurned another boy.
The report the girl sent her brother on his rooster’s troubles is a striking piece of storytelling, far more detailed and vivid than anything in her parents’ many surviving letters:
. . . brought your Rooster home and the other 2 went to fighting him while I was gone to School – mother happened to look out of the window and she saw him laying on the ground – he was most dead – but she and Aunt Elisabeth went right out and took him up and put him in a Coop and he is nearly well now – while he is shut up the other Roosters – will come around and insult him in Every possible way by Crowing right in his Ears – and then they will jump up on the Coop and Crow there as if they – wanted to show that he was Completely in their power and they could treat him as they chose . . .
Coming from a child only eleven years old, the letters are altogether extraordinary. The headlong energy of her self-expression; the directness with which she says what is on her mind; the lavishness with which she bestows her attention on the world around her; the innocence of that gaze; the warmth; the constant flicker of humor, of irony; the already well-stocked mind; the colloquialisms and odd mistakes: these varied elements show that the young writer already commands a very great range.
Significantly, this amplitude is accompanied by an alert interest in compositional effect. “This Afternoon is Wednesday,” Emily informs Jane,
and so of course there was Speaking and Composition – there was one young man who read a Composition the Subject was think twice before you speak – he was describing the reasons why any one should do so – one was – if a young gentleman – offered a young lady his arm and he had a dog who had no tail and he boarded at the tavern think twice before you speak. Another is if a young gentleman knows a young lady who he thinks nature has formed to perfection let him remember that roses conceal thorns he is the sillyest creature that ever lived I think. I told him that I thought he had better think twice before he spoke – what good times we used to have . . .
This exuberant riff is the earliest surviving example of a kind of writing at which the girl would excel in her teens and early twenties and for which she attracted much local admiration and envy: the extravagant spoof. It is a gifted performance, worked out in her head in response to the young man’s probably inept composition and his insulting remark on young ladies, and offered now for her girlfriend’s pleasure. Then, informing Jane how she paid him back, Emily reminds her with no transition of the fun they used to have jumping into bed . . .
While she wrote, Father was elsewhere in the West Street house nursing his “Rheumatism” and Mother was away in Easthampton watching Austin perform at the school examination. The fun of solitary mental play and the fun of human intimacy: for Emily Dickinson, the fun of writing was the thing that seemed to bring these two together, and that brought out the best in her. Was she imagining and inventing as much as she was remembering, busily devising an intimacy that didn’t quite exist? Was it all mostly unreciprocated, leaving her out there pretty much by herself? Possibly. All we know is that by age eleven she was fully engaged in composing her transparent seductions.
Simultaneously,
she was taking her first steps toward a new kind of freehand action poetry, playing with life as she knew it without tinkering for a final frozen printed result.
Legal Witness
About this time, the girl began leaving another kind of written trace. On September 1, 1843, her father sold eighty acres of Michigan farmland to Levi D. Cowls of Amherst. After the deed was signed, it was carried out west and an official copy made by the register of deeds in Lapeer County, Michigan. This copy attests to the surprising fact that twelve-year-old “Emily E. Dickinson” had signed as a legal witness.
This is the earliest of nineteen legal signatures Emily is known to have left on documents prepared by her father (listed in an appendix). One guesses that most of them were signed at home, not in his downtown office. Austin and Lavinia also acted as witnesses, but neither did so at so young an age as she: her brother’s earliest known legal signature dates from May 12, 1843, when he was fourteen; her sister’s, from December 8, 1851, age eighteen. She witnessed much less often than Emily, whose many signatures suggest she was more dependably available than Lavinia—more often at home. Still, that Emily began performing this occasional service at an early age is further evidence her father regarded her as signally responsible and grown-up.
Although it is unlikely that Emily paid close attention to the documents she signed, her signatures do show how much she lived on the periphery of her father’s legal business and real estate investments. Again and again she was asked to take notice of transactions in which commitments were made at that moment. Such events helped constitute the world as she knew it.
If we take that fact seriously, and also remind ourselves that Loring Norcross and Joseph A. Sweetser, the uncles she was closest to, were high-volume dry-goods jobbers with strong Whig views on politics and the economy, we won’t be surprised that this reclusive writer used the technical vocabulary of law and business far more extensively than other English or American poets of her time. Only a writer who was keenly aware of the legally binding and the commercially risky—of bonds, lawsuits, judgments, insolvencies, failures—could have written about love in the ways she did:
I gave Myself to Him –
And took Himself, for Pay –
The solemn contract of a Life
Was ratified, this way –
The Wealth might disappoint –
Myself a poorer prove
Than this great Purchaser suspect,
The Daily Own – of Love
Depreciate the Vision –
But till the Merchant buy –
Still Fable – in the Isles of spice –
The subtle Cargoes – lie –
At least – ’tis Mutual – Risk –
Some – found it – Mutual Gain –
Sweet Debt of Life – Each Night to owe –
Insolvent – every Noon –
Fr426
Imagining the exchange of mutual love as a legally irreversible transaction, the speaker anticipates the two possible and opposite results. In the first, mundane love turns out to be more disappointing than had been envisioned. In the second, there is the rapture of fulfillment, in which one expends one’s whole estate in repeated nights of love (with a man rather than a woman, incidentally).
Few poets have been so caught up in high-risk plunges and binding exchanges. A poem of 1859, “I had some things that I called mine” (Fr101), plays with the idea of suing God for frost-killing her garden annuals. In “What would I give to see his face?” (Fr266), from 1861, she offers to sign a bond with Shylock pledging everything she values in nature for “One hour – of her Sovreign’s face.”
What would Edward have thought of these poems involving such extravagant hypothetical exchanges? To ask the question is to see, instantly, how remote his daughter was from the staid Whig mentality she loved impersonating and exploding.
Chapter 8
Amherst Academy
Afterward You May Rejoice
By today’s standards, the school Emily attended off and on for seven years looks austere and forbidding. Prayer began and ended the day; teachers were authorized to administer “private or public admonition or degradation”; students were given long poems in blank verse that met the test of orthodoxy—Milton’s Paradise Lost, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, William Cowper’s The Task. Yet Amherst Academy was a more loosely run affair than tightly buttoned Williston Seminary. Since there was no endowment (all the fund-raising having gone into the college), the academy had to rely on tuition payments to meet expenses, and the teaching staff had every incentive to be indulgent—and seek a career elsewhere. Three of Emily’s instructors were classroom veterans, but most of them (among the men) were fresh college graduates giving a year to education before continuing their professional study. One thinks of such teachers, the rising scholars and ministers of their time, as more apt to encourage talent than resentfully strangle it. On balance, the academy seems to have been a good place for a prodigiously gifted girl who needed the freedom to be herself as well as competent instruction.
Emily was fortunate in another way as well. Until shortly before she enrolled, Amherst Academy had been closed to girls, who were thus compelled to choose between traveling elsewhere for their education or attending Hannah White’s Amherst Female Seminary. Students at this institution were allowed to sit on either side of a lecture hall at Amherst College and listen to Professor Edward Hitchcock lecture on geology, but it seems unlikely that Mrs. White offered Latin instruction comparable to what academy boys were given. Then came the disastrous 1838 fire, resulting in the closing of the Female Seminary and the admission of girls to Amherst Academy, including its prestigious “Classical Course.”
Latin was taught by the principal, whose first-floor station between a large study hall and a small recitation room facilitated maximum surveillance. Girls were instructed in other subjects by a preceptress in a second-floor room, often in company with smaller boys. For Wednesday afternoon “Speaking and Composition” (Emily’s phrase), everyone tramped up to the third floor, where, as Ned Hitchcock recalled, a “real nice hall” filled the entire space, with arched roof and abundant windows.
The catalog for 1840–1841 has the Dickinson sisters enrolled in the English Course, as was customary for entering students. *31 Emily was still in English in fall 1841, as a $4 tuition receipt attests, but by the following spring she was able to tell Jane Humphrey she had entered “the class that you used to be in in Latin.” The catalog for her third year, 1842–1843, shows her continuing in Classical, with Lavinia, never much of a student, dropping back to English for the time being. The poet kept on with Latin until at least May 1845, according to a letter of that month, suggesting that in all (ignoring the terms spent at home) she had three and possibly four years of the language. In her last year at the academy, 1846–1847, she returned to English.
A surviving school edition of Virgil bearing the written names of “Miss Emily E. Dickinson” and Abby Maria Wood shows just how substantial a foothold the poet acquired in the Aeneid. Abby had lost her father at an early age and from about 1838 resided in the household of Luke Sweetser, an uncle residing on the hill just north of the Dickinsons. By the time the young poet moved to West Street in 1840, she and Abby were in all likelihood “particular” friends, as Emily phrased the relationship in 1845. That year they spent their free time with each other during a term both passed at home; at school they shared the same table. Although they may not have translated the Aeneid side by side, Emily’s comment that the two were “plodding over our books pretty much as ever” suggests they did work together. The edition of Virgil, recently acquired by Amherst College from Abby’s descendants, is of interest for its penciled marginalia. Among these is a line from The Task that evokes the schoolgirls’ occasional ennui: “Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness.” On the flyleaf, in Emily’s hand, we read this penciled inscription:
Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit Aeneid 1 – 203.
Afterwards you may r
ejoice at the remembrance of these (our school days)
When I am far away then think of me – E. Dickinson.
The textbook seems to have been presented to Abby in 1855, when she married the Reverend Daniel Bliss and sailed for Beirut as a missionary wife. Such a gift would have been in character for Dickinson, always exceptionally generous in bestowing valued books.
For boys, Latin was a prerequisite for college and entry into the professions. A girl had no such incentive, nor did Emily share the taste for the witty application of Latin tags. But she would have been a very different poet if she hadn’t studied the language, which, as Lois A. Cuddy has argued, helps explain her extreme dislocations of standard English word order and her use of such grammatical terms as “ablative.” When she pictured Epigaea repens, trailing arbutus or mayflower, drowsing through the winter along with other plants that bloom in early spring, she used the scientific name with no sense of strain:
Hush! Epigea wakens!
The Crocus stirs her lids –
Rhodora’s cheek is crimson –
She’s dreaming of the woods!
Fr85
Few English-language poets have been equally comfortable with our abstract Latin-rooted vocabulary, or as skillful in combining it with vigorous Anglo-Saxon. One of Dickinson’s poems exalting anticipatory over possessive pleasure ends in this way:
Inquire of the closing Rose
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