My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  As the twenty-fourth approached, Lyon had more meetings with “the impenitent,” warning that there had never been a fast day at the seminary “when some soul had not been born again.” Tension grew, the moment was ripening, and on the evening of the twenty-third Hannah Porter arrived and settled in.

  On Christmas Eve, the tightly packed building was “very still” all day. Hours were appointed for group and solitary prayer, a church service, and devotions, and then Lyon had another session “with all the impenitent.” Again, she pressed the great truths home, asking all those who wished “to give up their hearts to the influences of the Holy Spirit” to place “a sealed note” in her box. Over fifty notes came in. There was “feeling manifested.” One girl “expressed a hope.” More meetings ensued, at one of which Porter “made some very excellent remarks.” But twenty-five girls in the Middle class were still without hope (indicating that Dickinson was not the only holdout).

  During Porter’s first four days at the seminary, she did so much praying, preaching, and exhorting that by the twenty-seventh she had “lost her voice.” Some of her time had been spent with Dickinson’s roommate and with Sarah Jane Anderson, daughter of the head of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Afterward, Sarah recalled the comforting presence of the older woman, “sitting in the rocking chair by my side, and listening to hear what I may have to communicate.” In all likelihood, Emily Dickinson came in for similar attentions.

  After returning to Monson, Porter was sent reports on her by Cousin Emily and Sarah, and also by the teacher Mary C. Whitman. These letters, still extant, disclose the well-coordinated campaign of which the future poet was the focus.

  The first to report was Cousin Emily. Writing on January 11, when the temperature fell to ten below zero and the two roommates “suffered very much” in their cold room, she noted that almost forty impenitents at Lyon’s last Sunday meeting felt they had been saved this term. But

  Emily Dickinson appears no different. I hoped I might have good news to write, with regard to her. She says she has no particular objection to becoming a Christian and . . . feels bad when she hears of one and another of her friends who are expressing a hope but still she feels no more interest.

  “Feels no interest,” a technical phrase, means the young woman had no emotional evidence that could justify a claim of grace. The problem was not one of belief, doubt, or interpretation, since she had the right views and admitted the necessity of regeneration. It was something else, something she didn’t or couldn’t articulate (at least to her cousin), that was holding her back.

  At the end of her letter, Cousin Emily assured Porter that her roommate “intended to write you a note to send in this but did not have time. She wishes me to say that she will do it the next opportunity she has.” The message tells us Dickinson was in direct communication with Porter, or at least felt she ought to be. Whether the promised letter was written is not known.

  Six days later Sarah sent an update on Amherst’s stubborn holdout: “I believe Emilie [L. Norcross] wrote you last week, and probably she told you about her room-mate. She still appears unconcerned.” Again, the future poet was seen as remote and unreadable, a contrast to the scores of new converts testifying “feeling” and “hope” in standard phrases. How were they seen by her? One answer is implicit in her 1865 poem on self-brandishing feelings: “Aloud/Is nothing that is chief” (Fr1057). Another appears in her 1870 statement to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: “Women talk: men are silent: that is why I dread women.”

  The previous school year, when Dickinson’s cousin was assigned an unsaved roommate, she accepted the responsibility with the utmost seriousness: “Perhaps she is to room with me that I may have an opportunity of doing her good. I hope I may not be an injury to her by setting her a bad example.” Now that she had another impenitent on her hands, her own gifted cousin, she was once again, in Sarah’s words, “anxious lest she . . . bring reproach upon the cause of Christ” as the revival climaxed. Sarah Anderson was even more tightly wound, and as the February exams approached, her “nervous system [was] in such a state” she had to skip them and return home—a repeat performance from 1846–1847. Such was the tense, scrupulous zeal that lapped the future poet on all sides.

  On the same day as Sarah’s update, the overworked Mary C. Whitman, Lyon’s second-in-command, sent Porter a letter making private arrangements for a visit to Monson and offering the latest news on Dickinson. The previous morning, a Sunday, had seen a special meeting of recently converted students, numbering forty-seven in all. “Is it not wonderful, and so silent,” exclaimed Whitman. In the evening a solemn meeting was held with seventeen unsaved girls who “felt unusually anxious to choose the service of God that night.” This time “Emily Dickinson was among the number.” And then the really big news: “I have heard to day of one of those who attended, who thinks she [that is, Dickinson] found the Savior after the meeting.” But the rumor was untrue, being sufficiently refuted by her letter to Abiah a few months later regretting she had not “give[n] up and become a Christian.”

  One wonders whether Dickinson realized the extent to which she was the target of a devout and determined group of women—her roommate and cousin, her friends, her teachers, with Mrs. Porter coordinating the effort and Monson’s efficient Female Praying Circle probably doing its part. All this intimate and extremely well-organized pressure shows what was at issue when the poet sat down, also on January 17, and composed the letter restaging her Thanksgiving escape two months earlier. Especially touching is the delicacy with which she admits her disillusionment:

  This term is the longest in the year & I would not wish to live it over again, I can assure you. I love this Seminary & all the teachers are bound strongly to my heart by ties of affection. There are many sweet girls here & dearly do I love some new faces, but I have not yet found the place of a few dear ones filled, nor would I wish it to be here.

  This sounds like the voice of an outsider who doesn’t quite grasp her status, and fails to understand that the manipulative love coming at her from all sides may not be equivalent to the eager human affection she seeks.

  In May, after the revival subsided and it was safe to sing another tune, Dickinson excoriated her own hardheartedness: “I have neglected the one thing needful when all were obtaining it, & I may never, never again pass through such a season as was granted us last winter. Abiah, you may be surprised to hear me speak as I do . . . but I am not happy.” The underlined phrase comes from Jesus’ reproach in Luke 10:41–42: “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part.” With the pressure off, the stiff resistance that had preserved the girl’s independence could relax. But now there was an interior problem: opaque in the view of others, she saw herself as insincere and double-minded. She admired Abby Wood’s apparent simplicity, her stated desire “only . . . to be good,” even as she realized this transparency was not for her: “How I wish I could say that with sincerity, but I fear I never can.”

  How does someone who goes in for essentials and ultimates continue living with herself if she feels she is neglecting the one thing needful? Dickinson was becoming a dark storm cloud, with a rising electric potential that would have to declare itself.

  A Confidential Rebel

  When the long first term, lasting sixteen weeks, finally came to an end on January 20, Emily returned to Amherst for the two-week break. Never before had home and friends felt “so dear,” or had her happiness been so marred by an impending departure, now “constantly in my dreams, by night & day.” Back in school, she tried to console herself with memories of meals and household fires, “the cheerful voices & the merry laugh,” but these vivid images only deepened the present desolation.

  She missed the fun of Valentine week, she missed Vinnie, but most of all, judging from her letters to her brother, she missed Austin’s free and easy companionship. Now more than ever, she needed him as confidant and enc
ourager and fellow connoisseur of exaggerated stories. Vinnie, a sister reprobate and a sparkling mime, was unfortunately a poor correspondent, like Mother taking little interest in expressing herself on the page; her letters are rife with blots and misspellings and the sketchiest of social notes. Inevitably, it was to Austin that Emily defined her new relationship to Mount Holyoke once the revival cooled.

  In February she received a “welcome letter” from him while “engrossed in the history of, Sulphuric Acid!!!!!” Her reply smokes with corrosive sarcasm directed at the institutional tone:

  I deliberated for a few moments . . . on the propriety of carrying [his letter] to Miss. Whitman, your friend. The result of my deliberation was a conclusion to open it with moderation, peruse its contents with sobriety becoming my station, & if after a close investigation of its contents I found nothing which savored of rebellion or an unsubdued will, I would lay it away in my folio & forget I had ever received it. Are you not gratified that I am so rapidly gaining correct ideas of female propriety & sedate deportment?

  Dickinson’s irony shows the same orientation to feminine gentility as three years earlier, when she urged Abiah not to let her “free spirit be chained” by “starched up young ladys,” but now she writes with real animosity. With Austin, she feels free to sound ungodly, to “savor of” rebellion and an unsubdued will and in the process get off some high-spirited, sulfuric prose. But as her performance ends, she begs him (writing in the margin) “not to show this letter for it is strictly confidential.”

  All we have of Dickinson’s letters to Abby Wood, some of which must have been sent from Mount Holyoke, is Abby’s son’s response after reading them in 1913: “I see that ‘Emily’ was very early a rebel!” Judging from extant letters, however, her subversive energies were confined to matters of style, language, attitude: an open and direct challenge was not to be thought of. Referring to those girls who broke the rules by writing Valentine notes, she pointedly declared, “I have not written one nor do I now intend to.”

  Her caution is evident in her remarks on a question of great interest to her and her brother: whether the imagination should be “governed.” When she learned early in the school year that he was reading the Arabian Nights, she counseled him in her best starched-up prose to “cultivate your other powers in proportion as you allow Imagination to captivate you.” But then she undid her sage advice with a self-conscious pirouette, demanding, “Am not I a very wise young lady?” As Austin came out more openly for the imagination, Emily felt more and more disposed to trust her stylistic and projective gifts. Chances are, being home at the time, she heard him read a translated excerpt from Longinus’ essay on the sublime at the Amherst College exhibition of April 18. In May she sent him some tongue-in-cheek praise: “I was highly edified with your imaginative note to me & think your flights of fancy indeed wonderful at your age!!” The stern advice Lyon issued the day after this letter was written—“of all the leading strings . . . in the world, the last to follow should be fancy”—probably fell on skeptical ears. *51

  Austin’s one surviving “imaginative” composition is thought to date from his sister’s year at Mount Holyoke. Although the piece is too labored to be of interest in itself, embedded in it are two sentences from a vanished letter—one of Emily’s?—that make us instantly sit up. The scene is West Street. Vinnie, Mother, and Austin are spending a quiet evening at home. Outside, a man is heard shouting and dancing, drawing the attention of a crowd. Holding an opened letter, he can read only a brief passage before laughing wildly and stamping his foot, an act producing such a “concussion that the whole firmiment was shaken, the whole planetary system was deranged, the stars twinkled, and the clouds fell from the heavens strewing the earth with a white feathery substance.” The sentences that provoke this studied climax are the ones worth paying attention to. The pronouns hold the key to their meaning. “I” seems to be Emily, “you” Edward, and “she” someone in authority at Mount Holyoke, possibly Whitman or Lyon:

  “I told her you were not afraid of her being too strict with me, and she replied, Tell him I am much obliged to him . . . and when I told her how gratified you were at our early rising she said Tell him that is the only way to make vigorous children.”

  This passage, first printed in 1955, has not been recognized as composed by Dickinson. If this attribution is correct, what we have here is one of only two extant communications addressed to her father. *52 Judging from Austin’s hyperbolic account, Edward opened his daughter’s letter as he walked home from the post office, was amused by her account of a frosty exchange with a teacher, and broke into laughter while reading it to his family. The piece records something nowhere else documented—the father’s enjoyment of his daughter’s point-perfect accuracy in quoting her elders’ solemn catch-phrases, his own included.

  If the teacher was Lyon, we should note that she was ill, in her last year of life, and more driven and depressed than ever. Before the revival she had begun to ask “of what use” the college was. In April, when the excitement ended and thirty girls were still without hope, her discouragement returned: in no previous school year had the Spirit “tarried so long.” Then, in late May, after a Junior passed away saying “she would gladly die, if she might be the means of saving one,” another strenuous effort was made. Lyon explained that Jesus was speaking through the girl and that heaven’s gates, having opened, “were now scarcely shut.” Everyone was encouraged to “look at the corpse.” A meeting was convened for the impenitent. This was their last chance.

  The letter Emily sent Austin four days after this scary episode makes no mention of it, voicing instead her hardening opposition toward the seminary. Father had written her of his wish to have her and her roommate spend the first Sunday in June in Amherst. When Emily sought Whitman’s permission,

  she seemed stunned by my request & could not find utterance to an answer for some time. At length, she said “did you not know it was contrary to the rules of the Seminary to ask to be absent on the Sabbath”? *53 I told her I did not. She then took a Catalogue. from her table & showed me the law in full at the last part of it.

  She closed by saying that we could not go & I returned to my room, without farther ado. So you see I shall be deprived of the pleasure of a visit home & you that of seeing me, if I may have the presumption to call it a pleasure!! . . . we had better be contented to obey the commands.

  In her defense, Dickinson could have said that when the catalog was issued in late April, she had been recuperating at home. As it is, two things stand out in her response—her snapping resentment, and her determined acceptance of “the law.”

  Another onerous rule involved male visitors. In young Ned Hitchcock’s view, the college “was a terribly tabooed place.” Boys and men were required to “send our names in to Miss Lyon & then if she thot best we could see the girl, but it must be only in the parlor, & in the presence of a teacher who must be a watch over us both in deed & word.” When a family friend arrived with letters for Emily, he found it quite a challenge to get past the female dragons. Amused, she merely reported home that “Bowdoin. had quite an adventure about seeing me, which he will tell you.”

  That a number of other girls remained unconverted in 1847–1848 shows that Dickinson was not the only one resisting the college’s invasive spiritual practices. In her case, resistance was not a sign of unbelief, since she was intellectually convinced she ought to “give up.” Rather, her withholding of herself grew out of her experience with revivals, her ability to trust her feelings and wishes, and her deep attachment to home and to her tall, unsaved, and independent father and brother. As the patriarchal ruler of his household, Edward obviously oppressed his brilliant daughter, especially in his dismissive attitudes toward women’s minds. But he also and in spite of everything contrived to place his authority at her disposal. That someone so opaque and powerful should (in Austin’s flight of fancy) approve of, laugh at, and enjoy her toughness was simply immense. Indeed, that was the subjec
t of the conversation at the center of Austin’s piece: how to “make vigorous children.”

  In the Porter family, the wife’s tenacity and matchless organizational zeal brought about a husband’s conversion, helped build the first female college, was saving the world. In the Dickinson family the wife’s ineffectual spiritual powers were on display each Communion Sunday as her unredeemed husband had to rise and walk out. The lesson for Emily was the advantage of becoming one’s father rather than one’s mother. She, too, could hold herself aloof, apart, keeping her feelings to herself instead of “manifesting hope.” Thus, following the example and influence of her hard, old-fashioned sire, she stood off the invasive community of devout women led by Lyon and Porter.

  The disquieting irony is that on July 19–20, when the poet was in her last term at Mount Holyoke, a small convention at Seneca Falls, New York, initiated the women’s rights movement. More than one scholar has wanted to see a connection between this epochal meeting and the great female lyric poet. In the present writer’s view, such efforts ignore the bedrock facts of Emily Dickinson’s life. Not only was her family extremely conservative on women’s issues, but she herself, having resisted the religious brainwashing at Mount Holyoke, was not disposed to see women as an oppressed class or to feel that they must organize themselves in order to free themselves. Dickinson had had enough for one lifetime of “classes” and “circles.” Nothing would interest her less than political reform or social activism. Her work in life would be to attempt and achieve an unprecedented imaginative freedom while dwelling in what looks like privileged captivity.