by Julie Dobrow
But it is also possible that Millicent actually did encounter the poet. There is that famous line from one of Emily’s letters to Mabel: “I trust that you are well, and the quaint little girl with the deep eyes, every day more fathomless,” a letter that delighted Mabel so much she copied it over in her journal. Mabel certainly thought, and told Millicent, that Emily had been referring to her as the “quaint little girl.” In 1907, Millicent received a letter from her friend Carol Fleming, in which Fleming wrote she had just read The Letters of Emily Dickinson and “I love the reference in one to you as the ‘quaint child with the deep eyes.’” Years later Millicent repeated this story to Jean McClure Mudge, an author and teacher who in the 1960s lived in the Dickinson Homestead with her family and helped to rehabilitate the house when Amherst College purchased it. Mudge wrote in 2015, “She did confirm that she, Millicent, at age six, had seen her [Emily] at the Homestead. She did not say who had brought her there, but it could well have been Austin. . . . I remember thinking as I looked at Millicent that I was seeing the same eyes that ED had seen.” And in a 2016 interview, Douglass Morse, who, as a young man had worked for Millicent on Hog Island, commented on her unusually “deep and intense dark eyes”—a description similar to the one Mabel reported as having come from Emily.3
But having met Emily or not, both Mabel and Millicent were firmly convinced that they knew her through what Austin and Lavinia had told them, and from their collective immersion into her letters and poetry. The two were indignant about what they saw as flawed images of Emily projected by others. In the preface to the 1931 edition of Emily Dickinson’s Letters Mabel wrote, “the Emily legend has assumed a shape unrecognizable to one who knew her.”4
Mabel and Millicent both pointed to Mattie Dickinson Bianchi as the source of “the Emily legend.” This included portraying Emily as alternately otherworldly (“Taken from a distant sky . . . a creature as different as fallen meteor from pulsing star”) or a flesh-and-blood woman so wounded by love early in life she had withdrawn from the world. Mabel and Millicent rejected the idea that Emily was some kind of “star-dust”; they saw Emily as a complicated human being, whose retreat from the world was slow and deliberate, and came about for complex reasons.
Millicent went a step further. In Emily Dickinson: A Revelation she posited, “Those who cherish the legend of a lifelong renunciation because of a broken heart in youth may prefer not to entertain the thought that her fidelity was not confined to one person”—that in fact, Emily experienced love not only as a young woman, but later in life, too. Many Dickinson biographers have speculated about the people who might have been objects of Emily’s affection at different points in her life. The Emily Dickinson Museum website entry on “Emily Dickinson’s Love Life” concludes, “Whatever the reality of Dickinson’s personal experiences, her poetry explores the complexities and passions of human relationships with language that is as evocative and compelling as her writings on spirituality, death, and nature.” Upon reading her book author Jay Leyda wrote to Millicent that he knew some would feel “wronged” by it because it countered the legend of the loss-sequestered Emily, and “a totally unhappy Emily is so much easier to examine!”5
So strongly did Millicent reject Mattie’s image of Emily (and so indignant did she remain about it), that she even offered a posthumous rebuttal in her self-authored obituary: “She had little patience with the legends which made Emily Dickinson a recluse mooning in her chamber over her hopeless love. . . . Mrs. Bingham wrote that the poet’s ‘inch by inch withdrawal’ was a gradual thing, natural in an artist who needed time to read and write, and for a woman upon whom heavy domestic demands were made.”6
ONE OF EMILY DICKINSON’S ICONIC WHITE DRESSES.
Millicent’s refutations of Mattie’s image of Emily were endless: “As the last of her family, Mrs. Bianchi’s invention of the legend of a white-robed figure, ‘a little white moth,’ retiring from the world because of a broken heart, was accepted as authentic. It was a story she felt would take hold. And it did,” she wrote in 1964. Of course what Mattie actually wrote in Emily Dickinson Face to Face offered a somewhat different explanation for Emily’s proclivity for white dresses: “It puzzled women who wore sensible stuff dresses why Emily wore white the year round. Various fantastic tales were circulated about her . . . the only person who never thought of it as a mystery was Emily herself, as she moved about her father’s house and garden. They could no more approach her than they could make the moon come down and sit on their parlor sofas!”7 And in truth, Mattie wasn’t the only one to profit from discussing Emily’s attire and the image it projected: Mabel, too, often included phrases such as “the recluse garbed in white” in her many talks about Emily, likely understanding that this vision and its symbolism would help to build intrigue—and to promote sales.
Some of the debate over Emily Dickinson’s image focuses on what her relationship with Sue Dickinson truly was. If, as some have argued, Emily loved Sue as more than a friend or sister-in-law, it raises several issues. Were the “Master” love letters meant for Sue? Did Mabel (or Mabel and Austin) conceal any indications of Emily’s love for Sue in the editing of her poems? Did the editing tone down or minimize the poet’s true intent? Was this why Sue demurred or declined Lavinia’s request that she edit Emily’s poetry?
Dickinson scholars Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith suggest that the relationship between Sue and Emily is “a story left untold.” They point out that while much scholarship has been devoted to trying to understand and contextualize the Master letters, relatively little has focused on the extensive correspondence between Sue and Emily—correspondence which, they argue, is “passionately literary” and provides evidence of “romantic and erotic” expressions between the sisters-in-law. Hart and Smith posit that the relationship between the two women was suppressed by Mabel and Austin’s desire to deter anyone from noting the intimate exchanges between Sue and Emily, and by Mabel’s ambitions to market Emily’s writing (including Mabel’s role in crafting an image of Emily as a reclusive “spinster poetess” clad in virginal white, and the exclusion of Emily’s letters to Sue in Mabel’s original and subsequent edited volumes of letters). Hart and Smith conclude, “There was simply no place in the official Dickinson biography for the revelation of an immediate confidante and audience for her poetry—particularly not one who lived next door.”8
Martha Nell Smith writes elsewhere that while Emily’s expressions of love for Sue “might comfortably fit under the umbrella of [the] nineteenth-century female world,” in fact “Dickinson’s own words suggest that her participation in the female world of love and ritual is not so innocuous” and contained clear expressions of Emily’s carnal desires and “powerful sexuality.” Smith, along with several other scholars, suggests Mabel’s Emily Dickinson was denuded because all references to Sue were scissored out, stripped or altered. “That the adulterous editor would want to deemphasize the importance of her lover’s wife to the poet whom Loomis Todd commodified but never met face to face is not at all surprising.” Smith also proposes “Austin” might be the culprit, but notes, “in referring to the mutilator as ‘Austin,’ all I have is Mabel Loomis Todd’s word that Dickinson’s brother, Austin, was indeed the perpetrator.”9
While there is no doubt that Mabel had and harbored significant animosity toward Sue, there isn’t any direct evidence in her correspondence, diaries or journals that she deliberately “mutilated” any of the Dickinson manuscripts. In fact, she took great pains to preserve them. While she did not print the letters between Sue and Emily (only a few of Sue’s letters to Emily still exist), she probably did not have access to them, at least not in their entirety. And with regard to the development of “the Emily myth,” while Mabel certainly did help to craft and popularize an image of the poet as someone removed from society, dressed in white, she did not think that Emily was someone who chose to remove herself from society entirely, or that Emily lived a life without love. Nor did Millicent, who sp
ent years of her life trying to search for more direct evidence of a love relationship between Emily and Judge Lord.
Contemporaneous critics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries largely praised both Mabel’s and Millicent’s editing of the poems, especially when contrasted with Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s efforts. Though they credit Mabel with the considerable work she did to get the poems published, more recent analysts have failed to recognize Millicent’s significant contributions. Millicent published Bolts of Melody, a volume that encompassed not only complete poems but also what she referred to as “scraps.” Millicent believed these incomplete poems contained some of Emily’s most powerful work, and also wanted to bring out the complete contents of the camphorwood chest so that “all possible data” would be available for interpretation and analysis. She probably would have been delighted to see Marta Werner and Jen Bervin’s 2013 book Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings, which artistically reproduces Emily’s “scraps” and matches shapes, scale and types of paper on which these unfinished poems were written, and the 2017 exhibition of Emily’s manuscripts and “scraps” at the Morgan Library in New York, depicting the poet’s careful craft and creativity. Mabel and Millicent should be credited for their prescience in recognizing that Emily’s “scraps” were well worth saving.
Mabel’s and Millicent’s work in bringing out four volumes of Emily’s poems and two editions of her letters positioned them squarely in the debates over the intentionality in Emily’s work and the explanations for what inspired it. Mabel’s Emily Dickinson was largely influenced by Austin: she was the brilliant and loving sister who had a special relationship with her brother, a relationship that was compromised by Susan. Mabel’s Emily was playful but her words could carry “sting”; she was “mysterious,” her heart was “unfathomable.” Like her own sensibility, Mabel’s Emily was influenced and inspired by the beauty and mystery of nature. Mabel initially thought the poetry was “odd” but “full of power.” She later came to believe that the poetry was “brilliant” and “opens the door into a wider universe.”
With her ear for music, Mabel could appreciate the nontraditional tonalities and rhythms of Emily’s verse. Though she acceded to Higginson’s plan to normalize some of Emily’s word choices to make the poems more palatable and marketable to the nineteenth-century audience, in doing so she was betraying her own ideas about Emily’s intentions. In Richard Sewall’s classic biography of Emily Dickinson he concludes Mabel’s greatest distinction “was being among the first to ‘hear’ Emily Dickinson and far from being put off by her irregular form, to sense its creative power.”10
Mabel probably thought Judge Lord had been the love of Emily’s life (she had instructed Millicent to find out all she could about him), but also that he was a love her family sought to suppress. Mabel no doubt saw parallels between her own relationship with a much older married man and what she imagined Emily’s situation had been. All of this would have strongly influenced how Mabel interpreted Emily’s poetic intent.
Millicent’s Emily was largely influenced by Mabel’s. But she was convinced that Emily’s poetic intent could be gleaned by the poet’s word choice. So Millicent bent over backward to “discover Emily’s own preference” for word choice and punctuation. Millicent thought that despite offering many alternatives, Emily left behind clear clues about her preference. Millicent’s Emily was someone ensconced in the small universe of her own family and her own small town in ways that influenced her worldview and her art. But not surprisingly, given Millicent’s own ambivalent feelings about Austin, her Emily was not as beholden to her brother as Mabel’s Emily was; Millicent’s Emily was capable of thinking and acting independently, despite what her austere older brother might have thought. Ultimately, wrote Millicent, “when all is said, explanations do not explain. Mystery remains, but it is the mystery of genius.”11
But the debates go on. Among “ED” followers there are “the Mabel people” and “the anti-Mabel people.” There’s hardly anyone who feels neutral. In literary criticism, biography and fiction, Emily Dickinson’s story is often filtered through the lens of those who believe Mabel Loomis Todd’s role was central and inspired by her love for Austin, and those who feel Mabel’s role was not as fundamental and too dominated by her love for Austin. Critics say this relationship negatively colored how she edited the poems, what she did and did not include in the letters and how she contextualized the story because of her jealousy and hatred for Sue and Mattie. Mabel is alternately portrayed as a hopeless romantic and martyr to her undying love for Austin, which led her to do what she did “for Emily,” or an overly ambitious, manipulative, self-centered vamp, far more interested in what Mabel wanted than anything she would do “for Emily.” Some texts are more neutral, but many, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, “tell it slant.”
And the “war between the houses,” as Richard Sewall so evocatively titled it, went on for decades. Quite apart from its dramatic effects on the lives of the people involved, it inspired the 1897 lawsuit Lavinia brought against the Todds, it set up the “battles against Harvard,” as Millicent later termed them and it was ultimately responsible for Emily’s papers ending up in two different repositories. Noting that “writing about Emily Dickinson, one cannot possibly hope to please every reader,” Martha Nell Smith alludes to the contradictory images of the poet promulgated by divisive parties with deep-seated convictions based on issues emanating from long ago.12 Millicent tended to refer to the rift in dramatic terms—“freeing the work of Emily Dickinson,” “the ancient feud,” “the Greek tragedy.” Toward the end of her life Millicent wrote of “the expression of ‘fiery indignation,’ . . . the bubbling stream of venom generated eighty-two years ago and still active. In this connection, I have sometimes thought of the course of certain diseases which gain in virulence as they pass from host to host.”13
Neither Mabel nor Millicent would be surprised to know this caldera established so long ago has uneasily continued to cover hidden primal heat. Occasionally it even erupts. In 2013, Harvard University announced the launch of its online Emily Dickinson Archive. The open-access website was designed, Harvard said, to bring together thousands of Dickinson manuscripts held not only at Harvard but also those held at Amherst College and six other institutions. Ostensibly, for the first time ever, researchers, fans and poetry aficionados would be able to turn to one place and find all of Emily Dickinson.
As Dickinson scholar and Mount Holyoke College professor Christopher Benfey said in a New York Times article: “With Dickinson, the truly bizarre thing is the quarrel has been handed to generation after generation.” The old rivalries that caused the papers to end up in two main libraries seemed revived by this effort at digitization. A representative of Amherst College was quoted in the Boston Globe and the New York Times as being upset that Amherst had little input into decisions about the online archive, that the project didn’t mention Amherst more prominently, that Harvard decided to limit the poetry it posted to those poems published in Ralph Franklin’s three-volume version of Poems of Emily Dickinson—not coincidentally published by Harvard University Press. “What this site does is reaffirm that Franklin’s text is the ultimate authority,” said Amherst’s Mike Kelly in the New York Times article. “It’s a missed opportunity. I’m disappointed to be pulled back to a situation from the past, where ownership is the most important thing,” countered Harvard’s Leslie Morris in the same article.14
Undoubtedly, both Mabel and Millicent would have smiled wryly. The embers of the long-ago feud that caused Emily’s papers to end up in archives across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts were still burning. Millicent would have approved of the Harvard Emily Dickinson Archive project in principle because digitization provides the access she believed was needed for true scholarship. But if she could, Millicent would also have been quick to point out that Amherst College, in fact, began its own Emily Dickinson digitization project years earlier—before Harvard. Their open-access website, which contai
ned all of the Dickinson materials they owned, went live in August 2012. Amherst has also digitized all of the Todd/Bingham materials related to the Dickinson collection; the project to make them widely available is well under way. Millicent surely would have been delighted to know her desire to have all of Emily’s papers freely available for researchers and poetry lovers around the world is becoming realized. Millicent’s most ardent wish was to have “all the data” available to the public. As she wrote in Ancestors’ Brocades, “The feuds are now dissolved in death. But the task remains unfinished.”15
Another way of understanding the enduring legacies of Mabel and Millicent is to see them as women who were pushing up against the edges of conventional roles of their time. Each of them did so in both her professional and personal lives. These qualities made them unusual among women of their respective generations, but their activities and proclivities in many realms also influenced their interpretations of Emily’s persona and poetry.
Mabel was a rare female public intellectual. Some contemporary historians see nineteenth-century ideas surrounding “modern intellectualism” as a progression from the evangelism emanating from the religious revivalist movements in the early part of the century to the advent of mass democracy and the ensuing growth of social movements like abolitionism, and the transcendentalist influence on literature, philosophy and social activism. Political theorist and author Jeremy Jennings points out that women, however, were “largely denied a public voice and scarcely existed as intellectuals.”16 But Mabel carved out a niche for herself as one of them, giving her some of the fame and credibility she so desired, and a platform for promoting not only herself but also the life and works of Emily Dickinson.