My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  What Mount Holyoke then chiefly encouraged was not detached critical judgment but intense commitment: to religion, daily lessons, the rules. Reading the letters Dickinson sent from school—seven to Austin, three to Abiah Root—it is clear she found the institutional tone less and less congenial as the year passed. The enthusiasm she brought faded so completely she never named a teacher she admired or a new book she was glad she was exposed to. We know of no new friends she kept up with after leaving. In later years she hardly mentioned the place.

  Three weeks into the school year, a traveling menagerie staged a show in front of the college. Most of the army of girls stepped outside to see the monkeys and bears. Staying inside, Emily “enjoyed the solitude finely.”

  An Eager Student

  Mount Holyoke’s school year began with placement exams designed to weed out the unprepared and assign new students to one of three levels—Junior, Middle, or Senior. Although the exams were made harder than ever in 1847, Emily seems to have breezed through, writing afterward that she “found them about what I had anticipated.” Her first six weeks consisted of an accelerated review of Junior courses, following which she and several others entered the Middle level.

  The seminary did not yet grant the bachelor’s degree, instead awarding a certificate to those who completed their Senior year. Most students, having no need for this piece of paper, attended classes for one year only. Emily was no exception. By the middle of February it was settled—to her great relief—that she would not be coming back: “My good angel only waits to see the tears coming & then whispers, only this year!”

  Her roommate was Emily Lavinia Norcross, a first cousin and, like Dickinson’s old friend Jane Humphrey, a Senior. Cousin Emily had lost both her parents to consumption, her father in her infancy and her mother, Amanda, in 1836, following a brief second marriage to Charles Stearns, an enterprising Springfield builder. These deaths and remarriage left the girl financially well off under the successive guardianships of her grandfather Joel and her uncle Albert Norcross. At Mount Holyoke, developing a taste shared with other Norcrosses, *49 she “devoted considerable time to music.” Afterward, she taught in Ohio for about a year, though it seems neither she nor Mary Lyon, Mount Holyoke’s founder and principal, was quite sure she was “qualified to teach.”

  In character, Cousin Emily was built along very different lines from the poet. When the seminary was swept by religious fervor in 1846–1847, she sent Hannah Porter a detailed account of her dutiful travail: agonizing over whether to go to a religious meeting, then “burst[ing] into tears,” then finding herself able to “give up” and “trust in the Savior”—the act bringing “such a calm as I never before experienced.” It was probably because of this conversion as well as the cousinship that she was paired with the unsaved Miss Dickinson, the policy being to assign roommates on the basis of “congeniality of feeling, and a mutual salutary influence.” The two seem to have got on well, the poet pronouncing her cousin an “excellent room-mate,” one who did “all in her power to make me happy.” At the opening of the second term, Dickinson was relieved when Emily Norcross finally showed up, ten days late.

  This cousin’s presence alleviated but could not cure the terrible homesickness that oppressed Emily. At first, as she admitted to Abiah, “it seemed to me I could not live here. But I am now contented & quite happy, if I can be happy when absent from my dear home & friends.” In claiming to be contented, she was not so much voicing her actual feeling as stating her determination. Feeling voiced itself in a different fashion, as when, sitting at her window, she saw her parents approaching and “danced & clapped my hands, & flew to meet them.”

  Homesickness notwithstanding, Emily was eager and determined to make the best of her situation. Unlike Amherst Academy, Mount Holyoke was obviously on the rise, with a steady annual increase in the number and quality of students. Instead of complaining about meals, she sent Austin the bill of fare for November 2—roast veal, potatoes, squash, apple dumpling, salt, pepper, water—and then triumphantly declared, “Is’nt that a dinner fit to set before a King.” To Abiah she reported that the teachers (resident in the building) “call on us frequently & urge us to return their calls & when we do, we always receive a cordial welcome.” Emily’s kitchen duties could not have been easier: “carrying the Knives from the 1st tier of tables at morning & noon & at night washing & wiping the same quantity of Knives.” This “domestic work,” assigned to each student in order to lower fees, was derided by those who assumed a girls’ school should chiefly provide a genteel finishing.

  In December, having passed the exam in Euclid “without a failure at any time,” Emily began the more appealing courses in chemistry and physiology. Calisthenics, singing, and the piano she practiced daily. In May she took astronomy from Sophia D. Hazen and rhetoric from Mary W. Chapin, briskly informing Abiah that these courses “take me through to the senior studies.” That she took no Latin suggests she had already translated at least four books of the Aeneid, one of the requirements for becoming a Senior.

  Two conclusions to be drawn about the poet’s studies at Mount Holyoke are that the offerings in science were richer than those in the humanities, and that the curriculum was on the whole not well differentiated from that of academies. Most textbooks listed in the seminary catalog—Newman’s Rhetoric, Hitchcock’s Geology, Upham’s Mental Philosophy—Emily had already met with in Amherst. By the late 1840s, Mount Holyoke was still very much a college in the making. A letter she wrote in her third and last term refers to it as a “boarding school.” She probably didn’t think of it as the pioneering institution it was.

  As at Amherst Academy, Emily had to write a composition every two weeks. Clara Newman Turner, a first cousin thirteen years younger, had the impression she was “the idol of the school & its Preceptress, & her appointment for a composition marked a ‘Red Letter Day.’” This picture, probably exaggerated, certainly unconfirmed elsewhere, may have originated with Vinnie, who often boasted about her sister’s powers. There was no preceptress at Mount Holyoke, and the teacher in charge of the Middle class, Mary C. Whitman, regarded the future poet in a way that fell far short of idolatry.

  As the mid-year exams approached, Emily felt a rising dread of failure but hoped, in Father’s words, she would “not disgrace” herself. Her attention had been arrested by the spectacle of another daughter’s shameful performance:

  A young lady by the name of Beach. left here for home this morning. She could not get through her examinations & was very wild beside. Miss Lyon. said she should write her father, if she did not change her course & as she did not, her father came for her last night. He was an interesting man & seemed to feel very badly that his daughter should be obliged to leave, on account of bad conduct. Perhaps you saw an account some time since, of a carriage. being presented to Henry Clay. by a Mr. Beach. It was the self same.

  Henry Clay was a Whig, Edward Dickinson had been a Clay man, and young Emily’s Whig feelings were clearly in the ascendant. The striking thing about this, her fullest account of a “wild” girl, is its emphasis on the worthy father’s disappointment.

  As Emily accustomed herself to the “army of girls,” she kept her tie to her independent and fabulously upright and dignified male parent, orthodox in belief though still unsaved, and with a reactionary ideal of “female excellence.” The previous year, after Sarah Tracy proved more loyal to her father than to her friends, Emily wrote Abiah, “You know Sarah is an obedient daughter! & she preferred to gratify her father rather than to spend the summer with her friends in Amherst.”

  One of the questions to be decided was: how would the father Emily took with her, the father in her mind, shape her adjustment to the close-knit female world she had entered?

  Hannah Porter and Mount Holyoke’s Revivals

  As had been the case with Amherst College two decades earlier, the vision that gave birth to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837 was both religious and educational. Mary Lyon, the original v
isionary and for eleven years the forceful head of the school, had come from a devout but poorly schooled family. Her great intellectual powers had been stimulated by a few terms at Amherst Academy and other schools, and by friendship with Edward and Orra White Hitchcock. She shared this couple’s evangelicalism, and as she taught at or directed various academies, most notably Ipswich Female Seminary, she felt a growing need for an endowed institution that would develop women’s minds and turn out an influential corps of wives, teachers, missionaries.

  Her dream was conservative and revolutionary alike. When Rufus Anderson, head of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, spoke at Mount Holyoke’s second anniversary, he assumed the school would carry on the fight to wrest spiritual control from the forces of liberal infidelity. At the same time, believing that women were as responsible as men for converting the world, he decried the “ancient prejudice” that “learning has a tendency to unfit” women for their proper work.

  As practical and tireless as she was far-seeing, Mary Lyon was the preeminent force in creating the school, yet it could not have come to life if, like Amherst College, it had not been supported by organized and dedicated evangelicals. Among these was Hannah Porter, founder of the secretive 1827 group that counted several Norcross women among its members, Monson’s First Female Praying Circle. This group had fomented the 1829 revival that brought about the conversion of Hannah’s husband, Andrew W. Porter. In 1836, under pressure from his wife, Andrew assumed direction of the committee in charge of Mount Holyoke’s first building. The following spring, when construction was threatened by the Panic, Hannah sent some confidential information about his finances to Lyon, disclosing that if a certain $5,000 came in, her husband would “advance it for the building.” “This information,” she added, “you will not let him know you possess.” The same sort of tactics would target Emily Dickinson in winter 1848.

  On the surface the Porters and Dickinsons had the same Whig and orthodox orientation, but underneath were sharp oppositions. Where Edward insisted that females stay home and that children’s health be protected at all costs, Hannah was a total activist, giving more of her time to societies and meetings than to house and family. After her first three children were dead, the one survivor, weakened by scarlet fever and a “heart difficulty,” had to work in the Porters’ kitchen in the intervals of school. The girl died at age thirteen.

  It was never quite clear whether Porter was working with men in common benevolent causes or trying to circumvent and perhaps turn them out of office. According to a disgruntled male observer, a certain candidate became the new minister of Monson’s First Church chiefly because his wife was “Mrs. Dea. Porter’s woman.” One reason Porter was so committed to Mount Holyoke was her outrage at misrule by male Jacksonian Democrats:

  I want two or three hundred [added later: “thousand”] Mothers & Teachers educated there [at Mount Holyoke] now training the rising generation—for destruction seems near at hand unless there is more moral principle in the great men of our nation—Can it be our members of Congress would descend to such . . . wickedness as has been the case this session if they had had proper culture in early life.

  For Porter as for Lyon, the key step in preparing the next generation’s mothers and teachers was to convert them in their youth. In 1849, speaking at Lyon’s funeral, Heman Humphrey was amazed the college had had “eleven revivals in twelve years” and that so few students had remained unsaved. One year “not one individual was left without hope, and in another, only three.” No one at Amherst College, certainly not Humphrey during his years as president, ever approached such results. Elizabeth Alden Green’s excellent life of Lyon offers some vivid accounts of the collective mood during Mount Holyoke’s annual awakenings—the silence, the students’ and teachers’ taut earnestness, the spur-of-the-moment prayers of small groups, the girls so overcome they couldn’t eat. “Such a room full I never saw,” wrote one student after an inquiry meeting, “not a dry eye could be seen.”

  Such rooms were Porter’s element. “I should be most happy to come & stop long enough with you to become personally acquainted with the young converts,” she wrote Lyon; “I find it impossible to feel that deep interest in the present work of grace, as when formerly I knew the individuals, had been in your meetings, conversed with enquirers & witnessed the first evidence of sanctified affection.”

  This passage suggests the nature of Porter’s activities during the twelve-day period in 1847–1848 when she moved into Lyon’s rooms and assisted with the revival then just beginning. For twelve days she and the seventeen-year-old Dickinson were fellow occupants of the building the older woman had helped finance ten years earlier and in which the younger one now ate, slept, studied, and attended painful collective inquiry sessions.

  Without Hope

  Mount Holyoke’s teachers kept an institutional journal that was reproduced by student copyists and sent around the world to missionary alumnae. According to Susan L. Tolman, the journal keeper for the first two terms of 1847–1848, the school year opened with a ceremony that had become customary. Students were asked to rise, it was ascertained whether they were saved or not, and they were then placed in the appropriate “class” (a word that already resonated for the poet): “I cannot tell you how solemn it was, as one after another class arose. I saw more than one weep as her name was put down ‘no hope.’ There is a large class of this character will it be so at the end of the year?” Those who had reason to believe they were saved and could thus profess their faith were “professors.” Those who had “a hope” had some basis for thinking they were in preparation for grace. The third group consisted of students who did not yet “have a hope” and were thus “impenitent.” This was Dickinson’s “class.”

  Frequent meetings were convened, particularly for those without hope. On October 11 they heard a solemn talk by Lyon, whose purpose was “to help them in seeking the salvation of their souls” and whose strategy was “to describe the different thoughts and feelings of each heart.” “You all know,” the journal keeper reminded the scattered missionaries, “how strikingly she can do this.” On the fourteenth, a teacher met with the impenitent and spent the hour looking up Bible passages bearing upon Human Depravity; “nearly all seemed attentive.” On October 18 Lyon spoke to them about “the exceeding hardness of the human heart,” pointedly reminding her listeners that even though they knew the great Christian truths, they still refused to feel them: “Do not you all know, that as sinners, you are condemned, already, do not you know that you are now exposed to God’s wrath, that a miserable eternity is before you.”

  The seminary had scores of rules, such as not “speaking loud in a spaceway,” and students were required to submit “notes of Criticism” reporting others’ delinquencies. On November 4 Lyon told the assembled students and teachers she

  knew there had been some in past years, and perhaps there were some this year, who would object to this method of correcting many things. If there was any [such dissenter] among the new scholars, she wished her to go home now. . . . She considered it mean for any one to come back here, knowing our regulations small & great and then talk about them and be unwilling to conform to them.

  Every student was required to be in cordial agreement with the rules, expunging all private reservations.

  Judging from the comprehensive account of life at Mount Holyoke that Emily sent Abiah two days after Lyon’s talk, this particular new scholar was bent on full compliance. “Everything is pleasant & happy here.” “One thing is certain & that is, that Miss. Lyon & all the teachers, seem to consult our comfort & happiness in everything they do.” “Things seem much more like home than I anticipated.” But as Emily anticipated her return to Amherst for Thanksgiving, her true feelings declared themselves: “Only to think Abiah, that in 21⁄2 weeks I shall be at my own dear home again.”

  A third of Emily’s next long letter to Abiah recalls the Thanksgiving break: her long and anxious wait at a window, the sig
ht of a promising carriage in the distance, how it proved to be Austin, and how she “dashed down stairs.” She vividly recalled the rain-filled streamlets running beside the road, the sight of the familiar meetinghouse spire, and “Mother with tears in her eyes.” The striking fact is that Emily wrote this narrative almost two months after her short trip home, virtually ignoring recent events. A partial explanation lies in two sentences squeezed in after the letter had been finished and there was no room to elaborate: “There is a great deal of religious interest here and many are flocking to the ark of safety. I have not yet given up to the claims of Christ, but trust I am not entirely thoughtless on so important & serious a subject.” The revival was on, in other words, and this time she could not seek refuge at home, except in memory and imagination.

  The ordeal began December 19, when the Reverend Pomeroy Belden of Amherst’s East Parish, preaching in South Hadley, announced that his church would celebrate Christmas Eve with fasting and prayer. This announcement not only gave Lyon a solution for the problem of Christmas, which the seminary regarded as a pagan or Romish survival and tried to ignore; *50 it presented her with an opportunity to awaken the hardhearted impenitents. Proposing that the seminary follow Belden’s lead by making the twenty-fourth a day of prayer and fasting, she inspired the teachers to float the idea in their respective sections and then bring back a general “desire” for the observance.

  In 1924 Martha Dickinson Bianchi, the poet’s unveracious niece, made the dramatic claim that when Lyon (supposedly) asked the assembled students whether anyone was “so lost” to the meaning of Christmas that she opposed the fast, the one person who rose to her feet was defiant Emily Dickinson. Bianchi’s anecdote has some impossible details and was largely discredited ten years later by Sydney R. McLean, who investigated the matter by going back to the Mount Holyoke journal letter. There the question rested until 1960, when Jay Leyda printed a telling excerpt from Clara Newman Turner’s unpublished reminiscence, to the effect that Dickinson alone kept her seat when Lyon “asked all those who wanted to be Christians to rise.” We can’t say what the occasion was or whether the young woman rose to her feet or stayed seated, but she evidently signaled her dissent in some conspicuous way from the coercive proceedings. And meanwhile, as her own letters make clear, she had a painful conviction that she ought to “give up & become a Christian.”