In a curious digression, the letter facetiously proposes that a murderer bears no responsibility for his crime. The passage points to a fundamental impetus behind the whole performance—a damaged sense of agency, a frustrating inability to reach the world of men that has been disclosing itself. Why does Dickinson’s father get a letter when she doesn’t? Fizzing with surplus vitality, she has little on which to discharge it except twin loaves of bread. Twelve years later, when Higginson accused her or her poems of being “uncontrolled” and she replied, “I have no Tribunal,” she was saying the same thing in a more self-conscious way: operating in a void and free of all rules, how could she not go over the top?
Twelve days after writing Joel, she again sounded a note of menace, this time to Jane Humphrey. Divulging how bored she was with her second cousins from Michigan (daughters of Nathan Dickinson), the poet threatened, “now do you ever tell of this – and I will certainly put you into a sleep which you cant wake up from!” Dramatizing her response to Jane’s departure, she issued a burst of punitive commands: “put her into States-prison – into the House of Correction – bring out the long lashed whip.”
On the whole, though, this confidential letter to a close female friend shows little of the studied violence Dickinson worked up for Joel. Instead, she achieved a rich, spur-of-the-moment self-disclosure surpassing anything she had previously written. At fifteen she had reported herself to Abiah as “gloomy” or “low spirited” or having “unpleasant reflections,” but now, going well beyond these normalized formulas, she offered a spot-on account of her moods. “I love to be surly – and muggy – and cross – then I remember you – and feel that I do a kind of justice to you – and myself – which eases my conscience wonderfully.” In addition to describing her improper states of mind, she freely indulged them as she wrote, though admonishing herself afterward. Expecting to see Jane before long, she pictured the intervening weeks “with their bony fingers still poking me away – how I hate them – and would love to do them harm!” “Oh ugly time – and space,” she exclaimed (the same phrase appearing in a letter to Emily Fowler). Aware that such talk was irreligious, she tried to sound contrite: “Is it wicked to talk so Jane – what can I say that isn’t? Out of a wicked heart cometh wicked words – let us sweep it out – and brush away the cob-webs – and garnish it – and make ready for the Master!” But that kind of housekeeping, literal or figurative, was not to the writer’s taste, and before long she was laughing up her sleeve at the Sewing Society’s winter program: “now all the poor will be helped – the cold warmed – the warm cooled . . .”
Nineteen-year-old Emily was in a state of eruption, throwing off the rules her elders had pounded into her. But she was not so much the overwhelming central volcano she became in the early 1860s as an irregular tract of geysers, letting off steam in every direction only to clap hand to mouth in feigned apology. The dazzling compositions of early 1850 are those of a young person trying out her voice, her voices, often generating each new statement out of what she has just heard herself say. She lets herself go in the extended and fanciful improvisations that have always amused her various audiences, but now she makes them the vehicle of newly insistent and complicated feelings.
To see the shape of Dickinson’s career, we must try to bring these crazy compositions from the winter and spring of 1850 into some sort of focus, and without smoothing away their contradictions and insincerities. A case in point is the letter she sent Abiah six days after writing Jane, and which begins with the solemn assertion “God is sitting here, looking into my very soul to see if I think right tho’ts.” The writer claims she isn’t oppressed by this unblinking surveillance, since “I try to be right and good, and he knows every one of my struggles.” But her spiritual effort seems forgotten as she devises an allegorical explanation of how she caught a cold: out for a walk, she met a “little creature” who attached itself to her and followed her home, and who, when she removed her bonnet and shawl, put its arms around her neck and “began to kiss me immoderately, and express so much love, it completely bewildered me.” Now it sleeps in her bed and eats out of her plate—meaning, she can’t shake her cold.
Is the neutered intimate a version of Emily’s own perverse adherence to friends like Abiah? Maybe, but it seems less important to worry out the psychological symbolism than to see that her tale, belonging to the same genre as her brother’s concoctions, was meant to amuse, puzzle, scandalize. She was engaging in a defiant and self-conscious play of “imagination,” and when she was finished, she impersonated her finger-wagging elders with a hyped-up self-denunciation: “Now my dear friend, let me tell you that these last thoughts are fictions – vain imaginations to lead astray foolish young women. They are flowers of speech, they both make, and tell deliberate falsehoods, avoid them as the snake.” Protesting her complete candor (“Honestly tho’”), she admonishes Abiah to look out for snakes—but only to reverse direction yet again and declare her fondness for “those little green ones that slide around by your shoes in the grass – and make it rustle with their elbows – they are rather my favorites on the whole, but I would’nt influence you for the world!”
On the whole, Emily would seem to be the real snake in this, her most serpentine production. Even though this was supposed to be the letter that reestablished a lapsed correspondence, she openly admitted at one point that she couldn’t find a suitable topic to write about. Surely there was
[s]omething besides severe colds, and serpents, and we will try to find that something. It cant be a garden [in winter], can it, or a strawberry bed, which rather belongs to a garden – nor it cant be a school-house, nor an Attorney at Law [referring to Newton?]. Oh dear I dont know what it is! Love for the absent dont sound like it, but try it, and see how it goes.
Following which, on order, she whips up a declaration of love for the absent Abiah: “I miss you very much indeed, think of you at night . . . think of you in the daytime when the cares of the world . . . choke up the love for friends in some of our hearts.”
It is easy to be misled by this ironic and artificial declaration of undying love. The letter is a kind of snakebite in words, both professing affection and making a winding and wounding display of unconcern. At the end the writer tried to mend matters by explaining that “I have been introducing you to me in this letter.” Conceding its “want of friendly affection,” she signed as “Your very sincere, and wicked friend.” The effect on Abiah’s feelings may be inferred from what she said of a later letter from Emily, which seemed to be written “more affectionately than wont.”
Emily was using Abiah’s attention as a kind of mirror, trying on a series of deliberately fascinating and bewildering masks. Fittingly enough, the young poet was most in her element during Valentine season, when the Connecticut Valley enjoyed its bland substitute for carnival, and expressions of true and pretended love flew out of every corner. In 1852 the women of Belchertown hosted a Valentine festival that featured oysters and ice cream, and the all-important exchange of messages at a “post office.” Emily loved the sport, which stimulated her first known poem and her first and only prose publication. Addressed to a man, each composition was a comic tour de force that seemed to leave the author’s real feelings out of the question.
The poem, sent to Bowdoin, her father’s thirty-year-old law partner, twitted him for showing no interest in courtship and marriage. *57
all things do go a courting, in earth, or sea, or air,
God hath made nothing single but thee in his world so fair!
The bride, and then the bridegroom, the two, and then the one,
Adam, and Eve, his consort, the moon, and then the sun.
Wherever one looks, there is wooing and mating: the bee courts the flower, the wind the branches, the storm the seashore. Even “the worm doth woo the mortal.” Bowdoin being the solitary holdout against the universal law, the speaker advises him that six “comely maidens” are sitting in a tree waiting to be plucked. Five of these are nam
ed—Sarah, Eliza, Emeline, Harriet, and Susan. The sixth, unnamed, “with curling hair,” can only be Emily:
approach that tree with caution, then up it boldly climb,
and seize the one thou lovest, nor care for space, or time!
Then bear her to the greenwood, and build for her a bower,
and give her what she asketh, jewel, or bird, or flower;
and bring the fife, and trumpet, and beat opon the drum –
and bid the world Goodmorrow, and go to glory home!
Fr1
The poem shows why Dickinson’s friends of this period saw her as “full of ‘fun’ and ‘tease,’” and also why this burst of creativity did not lead to sustained production: the fun was premised on the writer’s complete and uncanny absence. Unlike the archaic damsels, who perch in the tree and wait to be seized and mated, the poet offers bold advice in a series of vigorous imperatives: “approach,” “climb,” “seize,” and so forth. “She with curling hair,” in other words, has nothing in common with Emily-the-writer. The first is defined in terms of appearance, is sexually available, and has no voice, while the second, a witty expert on universal courtship, seems as “solo” as Bowdoin. She can be a poet, in other words, because she is out of the marriage system, thus incidentally obeying the law for literary females as laid down two decades earlier by Father writing as Coelebs.
At some point in the late 1840s or early 1850s, Dickinson asked Emily Fowler if the way people talked, taking “all the clothes off their souls,” did not make her “shiver.” Although that kind of candor, typical of the recently converted, made her uneasy, she, too, liked to zero in on what she elsewhere called “the timid soul, the blushing, shrinking soul.” In order to become the extremely personal, passionate, and complex poet of the 1860s, Dickinson had to cease being the brilliant entertainer and somehow empower that hidden female subject. Yet she never became “confessional,” straight autobiographical detail remaining essentially out of place in her verse. In more than one way, she continued to hide.
Her other Valentine composition of 1850 took fun and tease—and female boldness—to a new level. Here, the speaker tells a young man that she seeks a private meeting with him: “I propose, sir, to see you,” it doesn’t matter where, “at sunrise, or sunset, or the new moon.” And not just see: she wants
a chat sir, or a tete-a-tete, a confab, a mingling of opposite minds . . . I feel sir that we shall agree. We will be David and Jonathan, or Damon and Pythias . . . We will talk over what we have learned in our geographies, and listened to from the pulpit, the press and the Sabbath School.
This is strong language sir, but none the less true. So hurrah for North Carolina, since we are on this point.
The concluding paragraph brings in something the Dickinsons mostly ignored, the radical reform movements of the 1840s: *58
But the world is sleeping in ignorance and error, sir, and we must be crowing-cocks, and singing-larks, and a rising sun to awake her; or else we’ll pull society up to the roots, and plant it in a different place. We’ll build Alms-houses, and transcendental State prisons, and scaffolds – we will blow out the sun, and the moon, and encourage invention. Alpha shall kiss Omega – we will ride up the hill of glory – Hallelujah, all hail!
In scripting this wild fandango, Emily assumed the manic voice of a woman whose head has been turned by her stimulating teachers, and now takes a frenzied interest in the political questions that are for men alone to decide. *59 Instead of waiting to be seized, this woman masculinizes herself, not only making overtures to a man but likening the two of them to classic male pairs. The one female role she takes is that of “Judith the heroine,” relegating the man to the part of orator. As if to reassure him (Judith had cut off the head of Holofernes), she condescendingly says, “That’s what they call a metaphor in our country. Don’t be afraid of it, sir, it wont bite.” This last word leads to the mention of her dog, Carlo, thus cleverly hinting at her identity.
All in all, if the composition lampoons the energetic female activists of the day, its huge comic energies take it well beyond satire and any imaginable conservatism. Dickinson was finding an outlet, a voice, for her wildness. “Approach that tree with caution,” her Valentine poem had advised, “then up it boldly climb.” Cautious, she proposed no union other than a mingling of minds. Bold, she ended the prose Valentine with the same rosily dramatic finale as the love poem: “ride up the hill of glory” and “go to glory home!”
Two months later Emily sent Jane Humphrey a teasing confession: “since you left . . . I have dared to do strange things – bold things, and have asked no advice from any – I have heeded beautiful tempters, yet do not think I am wrong.” Given the seething letters she had been scribbling and the many blanks in her record, we cannot be certain she was referring only or primarily to her Valentine compositions. Still, the Valentines do meet all specifications, being strange, bold, beautiful, and not at all “wrong.” Chances are, Dickinson’s veiled confession refers not only to these extravagant overtures to men but to the most daring thing of all—the publication of one of them in Amherst College’s literary monthly, The Indicator.
Looking back from the 1880s, a Latin professor praised this periodical as unsurpassed “by any generation of students since.” Dickinson’s prose Valentine appeared in the issue for February 1850, which, by accident or design, was mainly about women in literature. One young male essayist spoke up for Madame de Staël in spite of her “opinions too bitter, and theories too bold, to become a woman’s pen.” A second argued that Shakespeare’s women “trust at once and entirely” and never speculate about fundamentals, there being “no female Hamlets.” A third defended the unidentified author, assumed to be a man, of Jane Eyre and Shirley. Dickinson’s piece is found on the last two pages in the small type of the “Editors’ Corner,” where it is framed by an editorial discussion of how to fill up the issue. An editor whose pseudonym is Van Twiller pronounces her lavish composition the obvious standout among the many “chary” epistles prompted by Valentine’s Day. Speculating on her identity, he imagines her fun-loving mouth has no corners and that she is too effervescent to tell “the half of her feelings,” and then he appends the standard mathematical initials, Q.E.D., followed by a line of verse explaining how to read them: “Which is the last and most edifying of all.” To those who had eyes to see, the anonymous Valentine writer had been exposed.
Van Twiller was Henry Shipley, a senior like Austin and a gifted reprobate who played whist, got drunk on occasion, and did so well in rhetorical exercises the discriminating Hammond judged him to be “a first-prize man.” Son of a Democratic activist, he went on to edit a series of western newspapers, including the Sacramento Democratic State Journal. The professor of Greek characterized him as “one of the most hardened & hopeless & at the same time one of the most talented men of the Senior Class.”
Although Emily Fowler called the editor “roguish” and the Valentine “stolen,” we cannot rule out the possibility that Shipley or a fellow editor had Dickinson’s consent (“I have heeded beautiful tempters”). A more pressing question, in view of her later refusal to publish, concerns the consequences the printing of her gorgeously addlepated piece had for her. Father admired Austin’s compositions but literary females were another story, and Madame de Staël was an old bête noire, and if there was one thing he couldn’t stand it was a hectoring woman. What business did a daughter of his have putting out such stuff in public when she should be using her time more wisely, especially with Vinnie absent and her mother ill? We may surmise that the poet’s first publication earned a paternal reprimand, and that the lesson she drew was that all future writing would have to be conducted more discreetly.
In the April letter to Jane that speaks of strange, bold deeds, Emily wishes she could “confess what you only shall know, an experience bitter, and sweet, but the sweet did so beguile me – and life has had an aim – and the world has been too precious for your poor – and striving sister! The wi
nter was all one dream, and the spring has not yet waked me.” Was she referring to the consequences of her literary efforts? Her vagueness was deliberate and intended to waken Jane’s suspicions:
What do you weave from all these threads – for I know you hav’nt been idle the while I’ve been speaking to you, bring it nearer the window, and I will see, it’s all wrong unless it has one gold thread in it, a long, big shining fibre which hides the others – and which will fade away into Heaven while you hold it, and from there come back to me.
We are up against one of the world’s great riddle-makers here, one who surely understood that her reader would suspect a romance first of all.
Who was the Valentine’s recipient? The universal assumption is that it went to George Henry Gould, a member of The Indicator’s editorial staff who was so poor he had to rely on the Charity Fund for college bills. Gould stood six feet eight inches high, had a fine beak of a nose, was a witty writer and public speaker, and became a highly respected minister, though dogged by chronic malaria. He was Alpha Delta Phi (Shipley being Psi Upsilon); he had asked Dickinson to the candy pulling; he is known to have corresponded with her; and unlike Shipley, he shows up in her siblings’ social life, appearing in Vinnie’s 1851 diary and Austin’s 1853 letter drafts. If Gould was the one, as seems likely, we must wonder whether the privacy-loving writer felt betrayed when he let his fellow editor print her communication. Even if she gave her consent, wouldn’t she feel exposed by that bold, unblushing Q.E.D.?
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