Once, apparently in early 1861 when the Bowleses were out of town, Cooke opened an envelope from Amherst and found Dickinson’s “A feather from the whippowil” (Fr208A). She forwarded it to her boss with a note on the back: “Enclosed in this was a sprig of white pine, which I have carefully preserved.” Three inferences seem in order. The literary editor knew enough about Dickinson to assume the poem was a private communication, not a submission. Bowles would not have authorized her to open the poet’s notes if he had reason to think they might be embarrassing. And Cooke may have seen other and more personal messages in Bowles’s absence.
The most prolific and outspoken of the women writers he brought forward was Mary Clemmer Ames. In August 1859 the paper published her effusive poem about the Bowleses’ five-year-old daughter:
And Mamie comes to breakfast with morning glories crowned,
A band of purple bell-cups around her forehead bound . . .
A wondrous world of prophecy within our darling’s eyes.
Mediocre as this was, it was duly noted by Dickinson, perhaps because of the Bowles family’s nearly contemporaneous visit to Amherst. That winter she assured Mary Bowles that “traditions of ‘Memes’ [Mamie’s] eyes . . . are handed down,” and some two years later, in a passage that is hopelessly obscure if the allusion is missed, she promised to catch a butterfly if Mamie would “build him a House in her ‘Morning-Glory.’” Dickinson probably read the New England women poets who appeared in the Republican, but it seems unlikely she (or Bowles *107) had an exalted opinion of their merits, particularly as compared with Barrett Browning, the leading female Victorian poet, or the Brontë sisters, whose poems she at one point owned. The contemporary women writers who meant the most to her were, evidently, all British.
Dickinson’s copy of Aurora Leigh was issued the same year, 1859, that she and Bowles had their talk about Revelation’s “Gem chapter.” The topic was undoubtedly inspired by the incandescent conclusion of Barrett Browning’s poem, where the triumphant Aurora looks at the dawn for her blind lover and sees
The first foundations of that new, near Day
Which should be builded out of heaven to God.
(9:955–56)
She then enumerates the sequence of colors, which, identical with the Bible’s gems, herald the approaching millennium:
“Jasper first,” I said,
“And second, sapphire; third, chalcedony;
The rest in order, – last, an amethyst.”
(9:962–64)
Bowles knew these lines so well he could quote them from memory.
Once, in 1851, using a scratchy pen for her weekly letter to Austin, Emily had written, “I am in a hurry – this pen is too slow for me – ‘it hath done what it could.’” She was picking up the familiar tag from Mark 14:8, where Jesus, defending a woman who has anointed him, declares, “She hath done what she could.” The words had become proverbial, being regularly trotted out to exhort women to be satisfied with the subordinate services best suited to them. Emily gave the phrase a nicely ironic turn, of course, but she was still very far from seeing how a female pen could aspire to greatness. Her encounter a few years later with Barrett Browning’s ambitious statement, “A Vision of Poets,” may have been crucial and defining, but this work had nothing to say about female experience and artistic ambition. Not until 1859 were Dickinson’s eyes opened, owing in large part to Aurora Leigh, which was seen as making good a new set of claims for women’s imaginative powers. That was one of the thrilling messages in Aurora’s gemmed dawn.
The main reason Aurora Leigh made a lasting impression on Dickinson and so many other mid-century readers (though not on Holland) is that it was a new thing under the sun—a female epic tracing the growth of a woman writer and dealing with women’s special burdens and capacities. Brought up by an aunt who leads a “cage-bird life” (1:305)—the phrase was marked by Dickinson—Aurora, the heroine, attains a piercing understanding of women’s usual social function:
The works of women are symbolical.
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir,
To put on when you’re weary – or a stool
To tumble over and vex you . . .
(1:456–60)
This insight into women’s symbolic service (we recall the lamp mat Dickinson gave Elbridge Bowdoin) is also marked in her copy.
About 1863 Dickinson composed a poem that reconsidered her original reaction to Barrett Browning:
I think I was enchanted
When first a sombre Girl –
I read that Foreign Lady . . .
Describing her response as one of bewildered hilarity, the speaker sees Browning as the witch or magician whose writings effected a transformation in perception. Under her spell, the enchanted aspirant found that small things were now outsized:
The Bees – became as Butterflies –
The Butterflies – as Swans –
Approached – and spurned the narrow Grass –
And just the meanest Tunes
That Nature murmured to herself
To keep herself in Cheer –
I took for Giants – practising
Titanic Opera . . .
Fr627
Though the poem credits “that Foreign lady” for the release and expansion that came with Dickinson’s newly claimed poetic vocation, Barrett Browning was less the agent than the exemplar of the inspiring realization that a woman could be a power, a giant, in the world of thought. Greatness had become thinkable, especially with the Republican’s disclosure (also in August 1859) that George Eliot, the author of Adam Bede, was in fact a Miss Marian Evans of Coventry, England. In Aurora Leigh’s words,
And truly, I reiterate, nothing’s small!
No lily-muffled hum of a summer-bee,
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;
No pebble at your foot, but proves a sphere.
(7:813–16)
In Sue’s copy, there are two kinds of marks beside the first couplet: the long wavy line Sue typically made in the 1850s, and a pair of short, neat parallel lines. In these tiny strokes (but nothing’s small!) we have a trace of that heady “Conversion of the Mind” in the poet’s tribute to Barrett Browning.
For anyone growing up in the Dickinson family, the idea of female greatness defied the basic order of things. Emily’s earliest surviving letter appropriating this idea (the letter has been carelessly misdated by editors) was sent about December 1859 to Loring and Lavinia Norcross’s daughter Louisa, then nearly eighteen. It recalls a conversation in which
you and I in the dining room decided to be distinguished. It’s a great thing to be “great” Loo, and you and I might tug for a life, and never accomplish it, but no one can stop our looking on, and you know some cannot sing, but the orchard is full of birds and we all can listen. What if we learn ourselves some day!
This conversation took place on an “October morning” when their families were out driving. That was two months after the talk with Bowles about the gem chapter.
After making this warily hedged confession of poetic ambition, Dickinson wrote, “Do you still attend Fanny Kemble.” This was the actress who had left her southern slaveholding husband and was making a career reading Shakespeare’s plays, first in the United States and eventually in England, where she became a friend of Henry James. The previous winter Kemble had performed in New York, where her reading of Othello earned a rave notice in Mary Clemmer Ames’s New York letter to the Republican: “the genius of the tragedy was revealed, and glorified by the genius of the reader. Fanny Kemble is unreservedly great. And when a woman stands before the world as an artist, with what delight . . . I say, ‘She is great.’” Was this trenchant opinion noted in Amherst? Kemble opened in Boston’s Tremont Temple the next winter, offering a “course” of twelve plays from December 9, 1859, to January 7, 1860. These are the boundary dates for the letter to Louisa, which, significantly, records
Dickinson’s dissent from the Homestead’s reigning authority: “Aaron Burr and father think [Kemble] an ‘animal’ but I fear zoölogy has few such instances. I have heard many notedly bad readers, and a fine one would be almost a fairy surprise.” (“Aaron Burr” was probably Aaron Warner, Amherst College’s retired professor of rhetoric.)
“Fairy” was not the word Kemble’s admirers used to describe her powerful readings, yet the passage shows how Dickinson, moving from her great distance with the times, was beginning to take a stand, however privately and delicately (“I fear”). Her growing courage came in part from a sense of solidarity with champions like Barrett Browning and Kemble. But though she felt the stirrings of ambition, stepping out before the public was another matter entirely.
Nothing would have been easier for Dickinson than to find a publishing outlet. Given Bowles’s friendship and encouragement of women writers, the Republican would have been open to her, especially with Cooke as literary editor. The paper’s tastes were far from hidebound: Bowles was always confronting barriers and crossing boundaries and seeking a vital new woman’s voice. In spite of Dickinson’s “Druid” nature, her work was eminently publishable—subject to the usual editorial adjustments, of course. Nothing of hers showed up in the paper after she met the Hollands in 1853, but on August 2, 1858, one month after Bowles’s trip to Amherst for the mowing machine contest, “Nobody knows this little rose” (Fr11) appeared in print, with the explanatory heading: “To Mrs. , with a Rose. [Surreptitiously communicated to The Republican.]” Clearly, someone other than the author had submitted it. *108
It is not the case that Dickinson was denied an outlet, or that her work was deemed too “modern” or “incorrect” or “daring” to be published in her time. As Karen Dandurand and Joanne Dobson have shown, many conservative nineteenth-century Americans continued to hold the old idea that the best sort of writing circulates in private. Recognizing how special Dickinson’s work was, those who received her poems often shared them with equally fascinated friends. This seems to be how Dickinson wanted to be read. Certainly, it was in line with her father’s views on feminine decorum, her brother’s uneasiness about her “wild” side, and her own profound shrinking from the public gaze. It would have been unthinkable for her to give up the protection and privacy she required. To that extent, her very being was at odds with Bowles’s enlightened advocacy of a greater public role for women. And yet she was, emphatically, staking everything on a bold claim to greatness.
Not surprisingly, Bowles was the one who, whether on purpose or not, called this contradiction to her attention. In fall 1860 he was given an advance copy of Holland’s latest attack on literary women, Miss Gilbert’s Career. The novel’s heroine, a young woman from western New England who is determined to “have a career,” writes two novels that capture the public’s attention. Acquiring the fame she has dreamed of, Miss Gilbert finds herself more and more dissatisfied. No acceptable marriage proposals arrive, and when curious strangers stare at her she feels violated. It isn’t long before her “woman’s nature, kept so long in abeyance, asserts itself! How ambition fades away, and love of freedom dies in the desire for bondage!” In the end, rightly choosing servitude and renouncing writing, the heroine “gladly laid down her proud self-reliance, and found her womanhood.”
On October 10, three days before this book went on sale, Bowles’s full-page unsigned review appeared in the Tri-Weekly Republican. Devoting most of his space to praise of Holland’s realistic local color, illustrated with long extracts, Bowles reserved the meat of his remarks for the final paragraph, which took direct issue with the novel’s “mission or moral.” Noting that “a mere career” also leaves men unfulfilled, he squarely attacked the prevailing idea that woman’s work was distinct from man’s work: “we shall never get on to the millennium by parcelling out the labor of life in this way.”
Dickinson had never shown the slightest interest in any available career, in spite of mild encouragement from Sarah Vaill Norcross, her stepgrandmother, who bequeathed two books to her by or about pioneering women educators. Years later, when the editor Thomas Niles solicited her work, she attached to her refusal a poem contrasting humble independence with professional life:
How happy is the little Stone
That rambles in the Road alone
And does’nt care about Careers . . .
Fr1570E
In the last half of 1860, probably in August or October, Bowles and Dickinson had a disagreement on an issue involving “women.” Afterward, she was so disturbed she sent an apology that stands as one of her most revealing performances.
Sunday night
Dear Mr Bowles.
I am much ashamed. I misbehaved tonight. I would like to sit in the dust. I fear I am your little friend no more, but Mrs Jim Crow.
I am sorry I smiled at women.
Indeed, I revere holy ones, like Mrs Fry and Miss Nightingale. I will never be giddy again. Pray forgive me now: Respect little Bob o’ Lincoln again!
My friends are a very few. I can count them opon my fingers, and besides, have fingers to spare.
I am gay to see you – because you come so scarcely, else I had been graver.
Good night, God will forgive me – Will you please to try?
Emily.
It looks as if Samuel had brought out his belief that women should become more prominent in public life and Emily had scoffed at the notion. Now, backpedaling, she insists on her reverence for devoted philanthropists like Florence Nightingale and prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, who could be seen as selfless, “holy.” It isn’t known how Samuel reacted to her explanation. Clearly, the views her letter implies were more old-fashioned than his.
But the letter’s most striking quality is its humble and needy self-denigration—its literal self-blackening. Afraid she has forfeited her friend’s respect, Emily pretends he sees her as the female version of the stock blackface role many whites found comic. Exaggerating her unacceptableness in this fashion, she tries to simultaneously appeal to his humor and appease his disdain, basing her case not on justice but a strategy of conciliation that stresses her unworthiness and smallness. Just as God will forgive, so Bowles must condescend to overlook her naughtiness, mainly because she has so few friends and cannot do without him. And so she puts on blackface, presenting herself as a pariah and scapegrace in order to get back into master’s good graces.
In substance, rhetoric, and style, this letter seems light-years removed from the bold self-assertion implicit in Aurora Leigh and in Kemble’s readings of Shakespeare. Bowles had brought to the surface the profound contradictions in Dickinson’s history and character. The episode stands as a portent of what lay ahead for the tortured writer: a deeper isolation, a more ferocious and even masochistic self-abasement, a terror of coming apart. It also affords a glimpse of what lay beneath her superb poem written about this time:
A wounded Deer – leaps highest –
I’ve heard the Hunter tell –
’Tis but the extasy of death –
And then the Brake is still!
The smitten Rock that gushes!
The trampled Steel that springs!
A Cheek is always redder
Just where the Hectic stings!
Mirth is the mail of Anguish –
In which it cautious Arm,
Lest Anybody spy the blood
And “you’re hurt” exclaim!
Fr181B
These are among the few lines in English whose compressed and pulsating energies bear comparison with William Blake’s “The Tyger.” Agonized and unconfessional (the very point), the poem is infinitely suggestive as to what that ungainly mirth of Mrs. Jim Crow was all about. “The trampled Steel that springs!”
“The smitten Rock that gushes!” According to Exodus 17:6, Moses brought forth water for the Israelites in Sinai by striking a rock with his rod. That rod was on Dickinson now, and the one pressing question was whether blood or literature would flow.
Edward Dickinson
Emily Norcross Dickinson
Emily, age nine; Austin, ten; Lavinia, nearly seven.
All known mechanically reproduced images of the poet.
The silhouette from age fourteen shows the bulge below her lower lip, evident in other members of her family on both sides.
Taken soon after her sixteenth birthday, following an extended period of illness, by William C. North.
The newly discovered albumen print of an earlier daguerreotype. Acquired by Philip F. Gura in 2000 and believed by him and the author to represent Dickinson. See pp. 419–21 and Appendix 1.
Parents, brother, and sister.
Mother, undoubtedly taken at the same time as the image to the left.
Father
Austin. “I think of that ‘pinnacle’ on which you always mount, when anybody insults you.” ED
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 41