The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

by Jerome Charyn

  Valentine Season, 1850

  12.

  “I FELT IT A MISFORTUNE THAT I WAS SO LITTLE, SO PALE, and had features so irregular and so marked.” So said Jane Eyre, who was as plain and little as a certain Emily Dickinson. I wondered if she had a scalp as red as mine. No matter. There was a controversy that raged around the book. Was its author, Currer Bell, a woman or a man? Not a soul could say. The reading club at Austin’s fraternity had sponsored a debate on that subject up on College Hill. The debate happened to fall in the middle of Valentine Week, during the height of winter festivities, but the parlor at Johnson Chapel was still packed with Austin’s own brothers from Alpha Delta Phi, a few select Seniors from some other secret society, a couple of Tutors, two or three of Amherst’s most stunning belles, and plain little Emily, who might never have been invited to this elite and wicked soiree had she not been related to Austin and the Squire, who, as College treasurer, was chief of the Charity Fund that helped some of the Seniors pay their bills.

  Jane Eyre had hit Amherst by storm just as the first snow fell. Our ministers preached against the book, called its female narrator a slattern and a witch. The Amherst Sewing Circle claimed to have destroyed every single copy it could find, but its members could still recite half of Jane’s soliloquies by heart. No one seemed immune to the book save Father himself, who despised Madame de Staël and every other female novelist in creation. And, in order not to offend him, I hid my copy under the piano cover. It was safe there, since Mother rarely reads and Vinnie was away at the Ipswich Female Academy, Father having decided to keep her as far from Mt Holyoke as he could. And even if Mother had found the book perchance, she couldn’t have read a line in her afflicted state. She had another of her Neuralgia attacks, and could do little more than lie on the lounge. She couldn’t even go on one of her “rambles,” and deliver winterberry pies to the poor of the town. With Mother indisposed and a decent cook hard to hire, I was grand marshal of the kitchen—Lord, someone had to feed Father, and Austin, when he wasn’t with his fraternity brothers.

  But Currer Bell’s admirer had done all her chores on this winter night and could sit with Alpha Delta Phi in Johnson Chapel. The debate was run by George Gould, who was attached to Amherst’s monthly magazine, The Indicator. He was the proper person to rule over us, since he was near seven feet tall and towered over everyone at Johnson Chapel. Gould was Brother’s best friend, and I will not lie: he was one of my suitors. I had seven all told, seven in one season, but it was nothing to swagger about—a prettier girl might have had a dozen or two had she been blessed with the same conditions: the closest proximity as could be to Alpha Delta Phi and the treasurer of Amherst College. But my giant suitor had played a trick on me.

  I’d written him a mock Valentine, full of the wildest language, inviting him to a “tryst” that was more like a duel, suggesting swords, a pen, or a plough. And Gould published my “gewgaw” in The Indicator, advertising the author as an anonymous female who was as much of a witch as Jane Eyre. But half of Amherst knew that the witch in question was Squire Dickinson’s daughter. Father got wind of it soon enough, and I had my own little dressing-down. He’d praised Austin’s college compositions, considered publishing them in a book, likened Brother’s Prose to Shakespeare. And goodness, there was little left for me. He must have feared I would become another Madame de Staël. He did not want an Authoress in the family. I’d never seen his face so raw and red. I worried he might have an attack of apoplexy. Lavinia was away in Ipswich, and Mother was fast asleep, or the two of them might have felt the house shake in rhythm to Father’s wrath.

  “Emily, did you conspire in having that ‘epistle’ of yours published?”

  I was not so innocent a party. Gould had not injured me. I realized that my talented, tall nincompoop would run with Valentine in hand to Henry Shipley, Austin’s rival at Phi Upsilon and editor-in-chief of The Indicator, and that Shipley would indeed publish it as the “gewgaw” of the month. Shipley was a poisonous fellow, a provocateur who’d print anything that could bring attention to himself and his magazine. He was also an unenviable slurper of rum who drank so much Domingo in the morning he had to crawl up and down College Hill. Gould had to rescue him from one rum resort or another. And so I whispered right into the eye of Father’s hurricane, frightened as I was. “I did most certainly conspire.”

  “And what will the trustees think of my elder daughter?” he’d asked on that occasion. “You might just as well advertise all our linen on college grounds.”

  And there I was, like Jane herself, hovering between “absolute submission and determined revolt.”

  “Father, I assure you, I will never show our linen again.”

  I longed to ask him what kind of linen Austin’s compositions revealed, but I would not make sport of my own brother.

  And now I am at Johnson Chapel, surrounded by Seniors. There is an aura of panic on College Hill. Burglars have seized our town. They broke into the President’s mansion and took off with vases, paintings, and a priceless clock. Students and professors have formed their own vigilance committees and rush around with lanterns, but it’s not a burglar who surprises us. Shipley enters with the odor of rum upon him, his eyes shot with blood, his cravat covered in filth. A seat is found for him, and my erstwhile suitor rises on his long legs to begin the debate. I notice how large Gould’s ears are, how thin his face, and what a great big beak he has, like a peregrine.

  “Seniors and fair maidens, the topic tonight is Currer Bell. Once and for all, is the mysterious author of Jane Eyre a maiden or a man?”

  “A man,” shouts Shipley from his seat. “Currer Bell is most decidedly a man. I’ll wager my own teeth on that. The book has real style, and such style is a sure stamp of male authorship.”

  The members of Alpha Delta Phi and Phi Upsilon all agree. So do the Amherst maidens.

  “What does Miss Emily Dickinson think?” asks my tall suitor.

  I was terrified to utter a sound in front of College Seniors, who, at Austin’s urge, had invited me on sleigh rides, to Senior levees at the President’s house, and to candy pulls and sugaring parties in the woods; several of them had served almost as my Tutors. Their mastery of books was far greater than mine. And what could a former nun of Holyoke tell them about Jane Eyre?

  But I could not disappoint Brother, who loved to boast about his little literary sister.

  “No simple Authoress,” I say with a certain air, “could ever have endowed Jane with so beguiling a voice.”

  The Seniors clap their hands and shout “Bravo!” while the belles of Amherst look at me askew, wishing they had said what I said, but their fathers had not permitted them to read the book, I opine, so they had little opinion of their own.

  And then a voice roars out from the rear of the room. It belongs to Brainard Rowe, a Tutor visiting us from Yale. Unlike our Seniors, he wears a wide-brimmed velvet hat and a long winter cape rather than an overcoat. I had seen him on College Hill several times, but he had never joined our sleigh rides or our sugaring parties. Shipley had corrupted him, I was told, since he frequented our rum resorts. But he wasn’t gawky, with bulging eyes, like Gould. He was short, dark, with a barrel chest, like Mr. Edward Rochester, master of Thornfield Hall, he who wanted to marry Jane while he had a wild wife imprisoned in the attic.

  “I disagree with Miss Dickinson and the entire Senior class,” says Brainard Rowe. “The book would be an utter sham had it been written by a member of our own privileged sex, and Jane a mere paradigm of goodness and virtue without her own sharp tongue.”

  “Brainard,” says Mr. Shipley, “I cannot concur. Are you arguing that no man could possibly possess half of Jane’s spirit while he plays at being a woman in his own glass?”

  “Yes,” says Amherst’s visiting Tutor. “The book is not apery. It thrills us and tortures us because the voice of Currer Bell is new. We have not found its like in any earlier woman’s novel. She dares to become the Satan of her own sex.”

 
“That’s close to blasphemy,” says Gould, who hopes to become a minister, like so many of our Seniors. “You wound us, dear Brainard, saying that none of us—no male—could have written Jane Eyre. Jane may wear a sharp tongue, but she also has a female modesty. She spurns Rochester and will not become his mistress.”

  “Would that she had,” says Brainard Rowe. “She’d have spared Rochester and herself a lot of misery. He wouldn’t have ended up a wreck of a man, blind, with one arm.”

  “You toy with us,” says Shipley with a most bitter smile.

  “Perhaps,” says the Tutor. “But Jane’s not acquiescing to become Rochester’s mistress has nothing to do with female modesty.”

  “Then what is it?” asks a member of Phi Upsilon.

  “Sympathy,” says Brainard Rowe. “With whom?”

  “The first Mrs. Rochester.”

  “How can that be?” asks Gould. “She’s described as a dark and crouching monkey, a fiend.”

  “Ah, but does not our own society acquiesce to the notion of wild women in the attic? Do we not consider all females half mad?”

  “Now that is going too far,” says another Senior.

  “Much too far,” say the Amherst belles, but I am trembling. Brainard Rowe was like a visitor not from Connecticut, but from Mars, who could look at males and females with his own peculiar slant.

  The reading club disperses as most of the Seniors march out of Johnson Chapel. They’ve turned their backs on the visiting Tutor. Austin and Gould are much more civilized. They’d invited Brainard Rowe to the reading club of Alpha Delta Phi and would not leave without him. He discovers my Newfoundland sitting with that ferocious loyalty of his near the door of Johnson Chapel. “Who’s that?”

  “Carlo, my dog.”

  Brainard laughs as I knew he would. Rochester had a Newfoundland like mine, a huge blur of black and white hair, but his name was Pilot. Carlo was a pointer in Jane Eyre; he belonged to that monkish minister, St. John Rivers, who rescued Jane from starvation and wanted her to accompany him to India as his missionary wife in a loveless marriage.

  And Brainard addresses me in a language that went way beyond Brother and Gould.

  “Miss Emily Eyre,” says he. “Why didn’t you name your dog Pilot, after Rochester’s faithful Newfoundland?”

  “Because Rivers is much closer to my own temperament, Sir, willing to sacrifice himself to some abstract religion that could be about God or the Devil disguised as art.”

  “Are you a sacrificer too?”

  “Much more so than St. John Rivers.”

  And thus we tramp down College Hill in the snow, with Gould clutching a lantern and Carlo as our leader, as he always is. He’s taller than his mistress, with his head and tail held high. I had never asked for a dog, could not have imagined owning one. But with Vinnie at school and Mother at the fag end of some private tether, the Squire did not want me to be all alone in the house when he was away on business. And so he found me Carlo as my companion. It was lonely without Lavinia, but Carlo rules me now. I fly with him across the village in wind or snow as Carlo chases whatever rodents are around. Amherst and College Hill have both been besieged by housebreakers, but who would dare disturb me while Carlo prowls?

  And so we return to West Street, with its burial ground, its blacksmith, and its white manor-houses, but neither Austin, nor Gould, nor Brainard Rowe went inside with me. They abandon Miss Emily Eyre and race to a rum resort near the College. And I recollect what Jane herself had said—that men would shove us into a box where we make puddings and knit stockings, while I long to taste Domingo in a rum resort, with Carlo at my side.

  13.

  WHAT CAN I REVEAL ABOUT MR. GEORGE HENRY GOULD? HE wanted to make me his missionary wife. He’d cart me to another town (or continent) where he would deliver his sermons, with much fire I suppose, and I would have to feed him pudding and raise up a family of little Goulds. But I found it hard to fit myself into George Henry’s picture of matrimonial bliss. I wasn’t a Gould and could never be one. I was a Dickinson who communed with Carlo, talked to him night and day. But even the grandest belle in Amherst was considered an old maid at twenty, and I was only nine or ten months from that perilous age.

  The future reverend wore me down with his persistence. I have a difficult time looking up into his eyes, since I’m no higher than his navel. He keeps asking if he might talk to Father about his intentions. And finally I tell myself: let Father decide.

  Gould arrives in frock coat and silk cravat, looking like a minister or a baron with one frayed cuff. Mother is asleep on the lounge, and Father escorts Gould into the library. Father’s face is as stern as Rochester’s, and I wonder if I had invited poor Gould to his own suicide. I expect to hear sparks slap against the door—I heard nothing but the constant tick of Father’s clock, like a dead man’s toll. I did not want Father to annihilate Gould, just to scare him off from marrying me. But the world was much larger than Emily Dickinson’s dreams. Laughter broke through the door, not Gould’s, but the laugh of a lion.

  Then Father strode out of the library with my suitor. Mr. Gould was smiling from ear to ear, like one of Lavinia’s well-fed cats. Had Father sold me to him for silver? I panic until I recall that Gould had no silver. He didn’t even have a sou. Then what kind of unholy bargain could he have struck with my father? Gould’s long, spindly face swoops down and he pecks me on my brow, just like a man might kiss his intended bride. I can feel my own cheeks tremble, as if a case of Neuralgia were coming on.

  “Miss Emily,” he asks, “will I see you at the next candy pull?”

  I fake a smile. “I hope you will, Mr. Gould.” But I am burning with venom against Pa-pa. He waits until Gould leaves and then returns to the library.

  “Emily,” he sings like a man satisfied with himself, “where’s my supper?”

  “There is none. I’m much too busy. I have to prepare my trousseau.”

  “What the dickens are you talking about?”

  “Well, didn’t you marry me off? Am I not destined to be Mrs. Emily Elizabeth Gould, lately of Hindustan and Illinois?”

  And I have a dose of Father’s new artillery—that lion’s roar of his. “There will be no brides or bridesmaids. I cannot believe you are in love with Mr. Gould.”

  The poison is mounting deep within my well. “And what if I were?”

  “He’s a pauper. The boy cannot pay his bills.”

  “And if I fell in love with another just like Gould?”

  I have pulled his sudden joy right out from under him. He is Rochester again, with a frozen face.

  “Then I would sit you down with your intended and convince you not to marry until his circumstances improved.”

  “And if his circumstances should remain bleak?”

  Suddenly my voice is a notch or two above my usual whisper in Father’s house. I baffle him with this strange battering ram, she who seldom spoke more than a sentence to him in a single day.

  “Emily, must I be quizzed like a counselor-at-law?”

  “But you are a counselor-at-law. What did you do with my Mr. Gould?”

  “What I always do. I negotiated.”

  “My marriage?” I ask.

  “Not at all. A new loan. He could not meet his bills even with what he got from the Charity Fund.”

  “And that is why he pecked me on the forehead? Because you made him fat with silver?”

  “No,” says Father, startled by my ferocity. “I gave your Gould a reprieve. I told him to ask for your hand again in six months. But it was a sinister move, I admit. You will have other suitors in six months.”

  “And none fine enough for you.”

  “Dolly,” he says, hoping to vanquish me by appealing to my pet name. “I haven’t enough force in me to prevent you from marrying the man you love. Now will you feed me, for God’s sake?”

  I have prepared his supper, of course. There was no one else to do it. Father could not seem to hire a dependable household drudge. All our former mai
ds took to drink and would tipple in the midst of serving a meal, and Father would find his soup in his lap. The more he raged, the faster these women ran from West Street, and Father’s reputation fell—he was considered a curmudgeon in the little Irish warrens behind the hat factory, where most of the women hail from. No one in Belchertown or Amherst seemed inclined to work for “Master Edward,” as he was called. He was a hard master, and hardest on his own horse. I might happen upon him at the barn, beating Horse Henry for having the boldness to steer him into a snowbank or cause his best pantaloons to be covered in slush. But Horse Henry isn’t at the table. I am with Pa-pa. I serve him a casserole from the sideboard, cut him two thick slices of my rye and Indian bread. Mother is still on the lounge. Neuralgia has left her without an appetite.

  Suppers on West Street are usually simple affairs, but Father is ravenous tonight. Mother comes to the table with her sewing basket in the middle of the meal. She darns Father’s winter stockings as if she were in a dream. I’m in too much of a tempest to taste a morsel. I haven’t relinquished all the poison in my well. The venom courses through my veins.

  I serve Pa-pa his pudding. I have to mouth “Lord Jesus” over and over to prevent myself from pouring a dollop upon his crown of unruly red hair.

  “What are you muttering?”

  “Nothing, Father.”

  He is Bluebeard with red side-whiskers, serving up daughters instead of wives. I will never leave this castle. He will decline whatever suitor I bring to West Street. Father might let Lavinia escape, but not me. It’s not my Indian bread per se. He could find another baker. But Father seems to count on the little storms I create. Perhaps he imagines my face in his own mirror—the hobgoblin with red hair whom he cannot live without. Such an imp can shatter his isolation. I am his Dolly, sentenced to serve him puddings for the rest of his natural life and most of mine.

  I would not marry Mr. Gould even if he could wrench me away from this castle. But I cannot get that Tutor from Mars out of my mind. I do not believe that Father could ever bribe Mr. Brainard Rowe, who must have a thousand and ten sweethearts in New Haven and would have small use for some modest belle from Amherst with a squirrel’s mouth.