After Emily

by Julie Dobrow

  Through her dozen published books, hundreds of published articles and enormous number of talks given across the country on a vast array of topics, Mabel Loomis Todd was well-known in her own day as someone to read, someone to listen to and someone to watch. She knew it and was not modest about her accomplishments. She wrote of them frequently in her journals, seemingly oblivious to how phrases like “my life is positively the most brilliant one I know of” might be interpreted years later by those who read her musings. She kept scrapbooks of articles that sang her praises. Some articles tried to contextualize her achievements as outside of traditionally gendered frames: “How does she find the time? This is Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd. Besides being the wife of an Amherst professor, she is an author, lecturer and society woman.” Mabel was very much aware of her unusual role, summed up in one article that noted, “She is unquestionably the dean of American women lecturers.”17

  Similarly, Millicent’s work as a geographer pushed up against the boundaries of what her generation of women did. It wasn’t just being the first woman to receive a doctorate in geography and geology from Harvard, but her work with Raoul Blanchard and on the work of Paul Vidal de la Blache, translating cutting-edge ideas about geography and helping to build contemporary theories of regional geography that must be recognized as important and as pioneering. Millicent defined herself first as someone trained in science; she always strove to be thorough and methodical, she believed that good decisions or worthwhile analyses could be made only in the context of looking at “all the data,” whether those data were about land use patterns, geological formations or Emily Dickinson’s letters or poems.

  Mabel’s and Millicent’s beliefs in the importance of conservation made them unusual among not only women of their day but among all people of their respective eras. They also pushed up against the edges of what historian Nancy Cott refers to as the “woman’s sphere” of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, through their travels and writings. Although by 1887, the year of the first eclipse expedition on which Mabel accompanied David, it was becoming more common for American women to travel abroad, it was still highly unusual to go to such places as Japan. Or Tripoli. Or the Dutch East Indies, Ceylon, Peru or China. Mabel made a name for herself writing about her unusual experiences and introducing American readers to the interesting cultures and people she observed. Though clearly no ethnographer and most certainly writing through the lens of her own ethnocentric and white middle-class perspective, Mabel’s descriptive travel writing portraits can be seen as a series of fascinating—if biased—still lifes of places few Westerners had experienced, and still fewer women.

  Finally, in evaluating the enduring legacies of Mabel’s and Millicent’s lives and the ways in which they pushed the professional envelope, we can look at some of the civic bequests they left behind, ranging from organizations they helped to found to land they helped to preserve. Neither Mabel nor Millicent was directly involved in any of the major progressive social movements of their respective eras. Mabel’s tendencies were more liberal than Millicent’s decidedly conservative politics, which only seemed to deepen in the last two decades of her life. Mabel was proud of her grandparents’ involvement in the abolitionist movement and mentioned it frequently. Millicent consistently evinced more narrow views about anyone coming from a racial, ethnic or religious group different from her own. Mabel was the one who rejoiced in collecting “curios” from around the world and saw them as pieces of art, not oddities; Millicent viewed them as embarrassing “heathenish” clutter in her childhood home. Neither of them could be assessed as social reformers, despite their progressive views on women’s professional roles and on civic and environmental issues.

  It was not only in their professional lives that Mabel and Millicent defied the standards of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century women; it was also in their personal ones.

  To the extent to which she is remembered today, Mabel is likely either known as Emily Dickinson’s first editor or as Austin’s lover, some kind of nineteenth-century sexual free spirit. Historian Peter Gay wrote of Mabel in his classic book Education of the Senses, “Cheerful, talented, sociable, popular enough to arouse jealous gossip, she was capable of sustaining affectionate and amorous ties.” Gay analyzed Mabel’s male attachments as “unfinished oedipal business,” since Eben was an astronomer by affinity and David one by training, and since Austin was, in fact, almost the same age as her own father. Mabel’s continuous justifications of the affair as more vaunted, holier and entirely different from the love of mere mortals were, Gay believed, manifestations of “the very firmness of her snobbery that permitted her to be flexible about her morality.”18

  Mabel wasn’t the only Victorian woman to be involved in a sexual relationship outside her marriage. Because divorce was so uncommon, writes historian Stephanie Coontz, relationships outside of American Victorian-era marriages actually were far more common than we might think. Mabel, herself, seemed to recognize that her relationship with Austin might have found more acceptance, if not other means for codifying it, in another era: “We should have been born later, that is all. One or two hundred years from now the world would rejoice with us.” And Mabel certainly was unusual to have written so explicitly of her passions.19

  Mabel also perhaps flouted the social conventions of nineteenth-century women in writing so openly about her ambivalent feelings on motherhood. As Nancy Cott has written, for “venturesome” women the traditionally female duties, such as being a mother, “had severe limits. For many women it utterly failed to ‘resolve’ the problem of inferiority, becoming instead a wellspring of strain.” Mabel was one such “venturesome” woman who keenly felt the strain. While one can see her outsourcing of Millicent’s care as a selfish gesture designed to free Mabel to paint, to write, to travel, to spend less-encumbered time with Austin, it’s clear from her private writings that Mabel did so with at least some degree of ambivalence. When she wrote honestly, “I have not the quality of motherhood sufficiently developed,” she was clearly articulating sentiments in a way that very few women of her era would have—even in their most private writings.20

  Like mother, like daughter—at least in some ways. Millicent, too, pushed the boundaries for women of her time in her personal life. Millicent’s decision to put off marriage until age forty was certainly unusual, regardless of whether the heartbreak over Joe Thomas or the overall ambivalence she might have had about relationships with men, in general, accounted for it. From the written record Millicent left behind it’s not clear whether the relationships she had with several women were friendships that were emotionally intense and physically affectionate, or if they were romantic relationships with a sexual component. And her decision to seek private psychiatric help not once, but twice, in the late 1920s and then again in the late 1930s, was extremely rare, even among white and economically privileged women.

  In an unpublished master’s thesis Brooke Steinhauser writes that Mabel was

  relentlessly self-conscious of her own driving ambition. Throughout her lifetime, she privately referred to a “presentiment” that guided her actions—a sense of her deepest desires nearing their inevitable fulfillment. The candor of her private journals, diaries and correspondences, juxtaposed with her extraordinarily diverse public lifestyle and public works plainly illustrates a woman encountering and grappling with her own identity in an era of tremendous social change . . . simultaneously pushing the boundaries of accepted social mores.21

  And yet, despite Mabel’s prevailing optimism that she would fulfill her “deepest desires,” ultimately the things she most wanted from life were the things she did not achieve. Mabel’s fundamental professional aspiration was to be widely known as a great writer. Though she did enjoy some success, placed articles and essays in the leading newspapers and magazines of the time and published books with excellent presses, she regretted never having written the great American novel, as she once expressed to David, or anything that would endure and be reco
gnized as classic. Mabel wrote a lot about writing; she often expressed frustration in her journal that her writing wasn’t as “brilliant” as she thought it should be. Reflecting on her mother’s life, Millicent wrote of how Mabel never succeeded “in doing the one thing she most wanted to do.”22 Millicent seemed to understand the irony implicit in Mabel being remembered more for her achievement of editing and promoting the writing of Emily Dickinson than for her own. Ultimately, Mabel’s most important professional aspiration went unrealized.

  Nor, of course, did Mabel ever realize her most salient personal goal, to live with Austin as his legal and societally sanctioned wife. Even though Mabel wrote after his death of her periodic certainty that she felt Austin’s presence with her, in the end, she was buried in a plot of land next to David and near her parents, up the hill but out of sight from where Austin lies with Sue and their children at Wildwood Cemetery.

  And Millicent, similarly, despite all of her many and considerable accomplishments, never achieved the things to which she most aspired. Her lifelong fears of being a dilettante were perhaps unfounded, and yet she knew that switching her academic focus from geography to Emily Dickinson in the middle of her professional life would ultimately mean she would not gain much recognition as a geographer or be fully accepted by the academy as a literary scholar, where even her possession of a Harvard PhD carried neither relevance nor cachet. She harbored resentment toward Mabel for having convinced her to turn her life’s work to Emily Dickinson—even though Millicent, herself, found this work to be rewarding in many ways. Millicent never realized other professional goals she held: to be known as an inspirational teacher or to become a college president. Her anxiety about being “productive” never ceased; wrote Richard Sewall, “Like her mother before her she had the energy of six women, was never idle, and expected no one else to be . . . a day with her was a test.”23

  Millicent’s personal life was similarly unfulfilled: she never had a satisfactory and joyful romantic relationship with anyone, and she never had a child.

  The complex mixture of love, obligation, disappointment and disgust Millicent felt for both of her parents was something she tried to reconcile throughout her life. She never got over her unexpressed but keenly felt anger at Mabel for turning over the Emily Dickinson work to her, which “caused” her to be away from Walter when he died, and she was never able to resolve her guilt at institutionalizing her father. “So little did I understand because I never talked with him or with my mother, about anything that mattered,” she admitted to herself in 1963.24

  There’s one more enduring story within the narratives of Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, and that is the story of their relationship with each other. Anyone who is a mother or a daughter knows that even in the best of circumstances, mother/daughter relationships are complicated. And Mabel’s and Millicent’s circumstances were certainly not the best of circumstances.

  To a certain extent the differences between Mabel and Millicent represented what historian Thomas Schlereth has described as the “paradoxes that abounded in Victorian American life.” Mabel’s interest and beliefs in the occult didn’t necessarily square with her knowledge about science or astronomy, but it wasn’t contradictory for Victorian Americans to believe in both the supernatural and the natural worlds. Yet Mabel’s faith in things she couldn’t see or easily explain sharply contrasted with Millicent’s interest and beliefs in the rigor of science and her need to elucidate everything clearly and precisely. Millicent found her mother’s beliefs in the occult inane and privately ridiculed them.

  Another paradox of the era that exemplified the gulf between this mother and daughter was the contrasting idea that women should be “paragons of moral virtue” with the knowledge and reality that many Victorian women, in fact, were not. Millicent firmly believed the former and forever held the latter against Mabel, failing to see that both ideas coexisted during the era. Ironically, both women believed they had been born in the wrong time period. Millicent, who lived well into the twentieth century, believed she belonged in the past and thought herself to be more Victorian than her mother, and Mabel, whose life encompassed more of the nineteenth century than the twentieth, always believed she and Austin should have lived in a future time. The contrasts between their belief systems exemplified not only the time in which they lived but also the push and pull of this difficult mother/daughter relationship.

  More recently, there has been further empirical work in child and human development, psychology and psychiatry studying mother/daughter relationships. Attachment theory may be particularly useful in examining the Mabel/Millicent relationship, because Millicent so clearly did not spend a significant amount of time as a very young child with her mother (social scientists suggest that this is the time when being with a parent is necessary for forming healthy bonds that will model mutually beneficial relationships), had in many ways a difficult if not dysfunctional relationship with Mabel, and as an adult, had a very difficult time forming primary attachments that were satisfying.25 Her marriage to Walter started without love or physical attraction; in the thirty-two years they were married Millicent learned to love him, or at least to love his devotion to her and to her parents under very trying circumstances. But here, too, Millicent’s reflections show that her attachment to Walter’s memory was perhaps stronger than her attachment to Walter.

  Mabel and Millicent’s relationship was close in some ways, and, therefore, complex. This started from the very beginning, and lasted throughout their respective lifetimes. After Mabel died and Millicent read Mabel’s thoughts in her diaries and journals, they alternately helped her to make sense of the world in which she’d grown up and left her feeling all the more ambivalent about it. Late in life, Millicent struggled with her antipathy, obsessed over her mother’s “squandering her talents,” “needless vanity” and “unwittingly pathetic soul.”

  An only child with two parents who were very needy in different ways, Millicent deeply felt the tug of her filial responsibility. In fact, she felt the weight of generations upon her. The Puritan inheritance of which she was so proud also limited her. She felt singularly responsible for dealing with the “accretions of the ages” that she had inherited.

  But in the end it was Mabel’s relationship with Austin Dickinson that weighed Millicent down the most. It was not only a defining feature of Mabel’s life, but one that defined Millicent’s, though she sought to suppress it for decades.

  When Millicent opened the camphorwood chest in 1929 she found Mabel’s and Austin’s letters, along with the trove of Emily Dickinson poems. She knew then what she had long suspected. But still, she chose to put aside this most personally painful part of the task. After Mabel died and Millicent inherited all of her private writings, she was forced to confront this relationship she had long known existed—and long repressed. But even then, she simply could not fully understand the long shadow that Mabel’s relationship with Austin cast over all their lives. Even well into her eighties, Millicent struggled to reconcile her complicated feelings for the mother whom she dutifully loved with her feelings of true ambivalence.

  MABEL IN 1930 (TOP) AND MILLICENT IN 1958 (BOTTOM), TOWARD THE ENDS OF THEIR RESPECTIVE LIVES.

  “In writing about my parents I want to know the truth about them, with their many faults and built-in tragedies,” mused Millicent in 1964. She cited a line from one of Emily’s poems: “I like a look of agony, Because I know it’s true.” And then she concluded, “I cannot remember a time when I did not recognize, almost at a glance, fraud and pretense. I despised it. I felt it instinctively and turned from it with revulsion. Emily’s remark, ‘I never consciously touch a paint mixed by another person,’ has been for me a life-long maxim.”26 Perhaps Millicent never encapsulated the essence of her relationship with Mabel better. It’s not surprising that she did so with a line from Emily Dickinson.

  Poet, feminist and essayist Adrienne Rich once wrote, “The cathexis between mother and daughter—essential,
distorted, misused—is the great unwritten story.”27 Mabel and Millicent left behind a massive system of largely unmarked yet intertwined paper trails that reveal much about the directions of their complicated relationship. And it is certain that without the complex push and pull between this mother and this daughter—the love tempered by other emotions, the enduring sense of filial responsibility despite the knowledge of flawed relationships, the entangled web in which their own interactions were so thoroughly enmeshed—the world might never have known all of the poetry of America’s greatest poet. Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham opened Emily’s door.

  AFTERWORD

  SORTING THROUGH THE CLUTTER

  People often ask me how I first encountered Mabel Loomis Todd. Not surprisingly, it was through Emily Dickinson. Her life—what was known about it as well as what was not—and her poems’ curious path to publication, always fascinated me. Fragments from some of her poetry stuck in my head ever since I first encountered them. I have a clear memory of a poster from my girlhood: fluttering birds and intertwining rainbows with the “Hope is the thing with feathers” line emblazoned across the top (from the poem Mabel titled “Hope” in the second volume of Poems).