A Loaded Gun

by Jerome Charyn

  Meanwhile, Edward was now a major in the Massachusetts militia And he hadn’t come to Monson to study chemistry, but to preside over a military court. He had to pass judgment over a reckless lieutenant colonel who had vanished from camp. And we have to wonder if Edward was wearing his uniform, with it ceremonial sword and sash, at the lecture. Is that what caught Emily’s eye? And what did Edward see in this silent girl? He must have been bewitched by her. He wrote his first letter to her on February 8 and never stopped writing. But he realized soon enough that Emily Norcross wasn’t much of a correspondent. She didn’t answer him until March. He had made her aware that he was looking for a bride. He proposed marriage on June 4—marriage by mail. He received no reply. He wrote to her father, who was just as silent. Joel Norcross wasn’t that eager to relinquish a daughter who had become the workhorse of his family. This accumulation of silences couldn’t discourage Edward, who continued to press his case, like a lawyer and militiaman. But Emily wasn’t unmoved. She must have been fond of her suitor’s red hair and barrage of long letters. Finally, at the end of October, she agreed to marry him, more or less.

  That’s when the torture began. He couldn’t get much of a commitment out of Emily. He visited Monson, but she wouldn’t introduce him to any of her friends, as if his marriage plans were secret to everyone, including herself. Edward complained:

  . . . for, I think, if you intend to be seen with me at all, you can not have much delicacy in accompanying me to a neighbor’s house, after I have shewn myself publicly to the good people of Monson . . . with no particular business to make my visits so frequent, except what I have transacted with you. I begin to be plain, you see. Don’t you think it is time?—

  Often he rages like King Lear to prove his constancy and devotion, but it is a Lear made of tin, alas.

  I cannot tell when I shall visit you again—I will let your people know in season to prepare for a storm—Let the winds howl—let the storms beat—let my horses die!—let my sleighs break—let all the elements conspire against me. I can not, so long as my person is safe—I shall not be discouraged . . . Let us continue virtuous & we shall be happy.

  He sounds like a very odd suitor, his letters stuffed with bewildering banalities. “I know not what is in store for us—We may be happy—We may be the reverse—We may be fortunate. We may be unfortunate,” he writes to her on September 24, 1827. There isn’t much blood or fire in Edward’s remarks. He could be ordering a perfect bride out of a catalogue. He promises to be “the lawful promoter” of her “lasting enjoyment.” His letters grow longer and longer, while he also promises “not to send another of such an unmerciful prolixity.” But he cannot keep his promise. He wants to control her every move. He’s like an intelligence officer spying on his future wife.

  It gets him nowhere. Emily isn’t unkind. “Pleasant dreams to you dear Edward,” she writes in September of 1827, after a lapse of six weeks. She has her own wayward sense of grammar and punctuation. Her spelling is perverse, as her poet daughter’s would be. Her handwriting is beautiful and precise, almost sculpted; not a single line wavers. We can imagine the care that must have gone into every word. Vivian Pollak, who edited A Poet’s Parents: The Courtship Letters of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson, believes that Emily had the upper hand in this battle of words between Edward and his reluctant bride-to-be. She used silence as a strategy, as her armor against Edward’s maneuvers and warlike advances.

  I’m not so sure. I suspect her silences masked a kind of shame. She would be marrying a lawyer. “My education is my inheritance,” he wrote her at the beginning of their romance. He’d gone to Yale, and she was a farmer’s daughter who had mastered the art of penmanship, but that itself was a ruse; all the curlicues covered up a genuine hysteria about the deeper twists of language. Yet we’re always touched by what she writes, while Edward’s sentences have their own hard shellac. He just won’t understand that she may love him and still be afraid of marriage. “I have many friends call upon me as they say to make their farewell visit. How do you suppose this sounds in my ear But my dear it is to go and live with you.”

  She kept delaying the wedding date, wouldn’t even visit him in Amherst. “Have I not reason to fear that you will think it best to remain at Monson after we are married?” he writes. She still refused to visit him, and sent Lavinia as her surrogate. And poor Lavinia, now fifteen, was lonely from the instant she arrived in Amherst.

  Emily was determined about one thing: She wanted a wedding “with as little noise as possible.” There would be no bridesmaid or bridesman. They were married in Monson on May 6, 1828, in her father’s house, while her mother was mortally ill.

  Edward had established himself as a lawyer in Amherst; and he moved his bride into half the widow Jemima Montague’s house, near his office. We know almost nothing about the widow Montague or her house. All we know is that she wouldn’t provide Edward with any milk, and he had to keep a cow. Emily didn’t have a single male or female friend—Amherst might as well have been Antarctica. She had to take in student boarders, or they could never have afforded to live in Jemima Montague’s house. Edward’s parents and siblings were very little solace. His mother, Lucretia Gunn Dickinson, was a cold, bitter woman with a sharp tongue. His father was sinking into bankruptcy. Emily was all alone. Edward couldn’t even take her to Monson to see her mother—he was much too busy with his career.

  No one but Lavinia understood her pain, her loneliness, and grief. A few years later, she would write:

  Sister! Why that burning tear

  Stealing slowly down thy cheek

  To my friendly listening ear

  All thy little sorrows speak.

  Meanwhile, Austin Dickinson, named after one of her dead brothers, was born on April 16, 1829. Emily hadn’t seen her mother once. And she wouldn’t visit Monson until a few days before Betsy Fay Norcross died that September. She had to grieve alone. She didn’t even have the security of her new home. A year after Austin’s birth, Edward moved out of the widow Montague’s and into his father’s house, the Homestead; built by Samuel Fowler Dickinson in 1813, it was the first brick mansion in Amherst. But the Squire was swimming in mortgages and had to sell the Homestead to one of his cousins; he remained in the eastern half as a tenant, while Edward purchased the western half of the house.

  Emily had almost nothing to do with Edward’s siblings, and she was like a sibling herself. She didn’t get along with Lucretia Gunn Dickinson; no one did. And on December 10, 1830, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Squire Dickinson’s former house, presumably at five o’clock in the morning. Whatever gifts she had or developed with such tenacity didn’t come from that stilted language revealed in her father’s courtship letters. She inherited his red hair, not his writing voice.

  “Language is first made in the mother’s body,” writes Aífe Murray in Maid as Muse. For Emily Dickinson, it may have been a very sad song. Her mother was plaintive most of her life. And, says Murray, “No language acquisition will ever be so sensate as the learning of our mother tongue.” But that mother tongue was shaped by the sounds and movements of a young wife in a house that must have sometimes felt like half a prison—and a morgue. Her melancholy didn’t come out of nowhere. Less than a month after she gave birth to Emily Elizabeth, her father, Joel Norcross, married again, to Sarah Vaill, a much younger woman. Lavinia was perturbed by her father’s decision to remarry so soon after her mother’s death. She would write to her sister on December 6, 1830:

  I know of no one that I should prefer to her[Sarah Vaill] from what I have heard of her character & I hope it will be for Father’s happiness & the happiness of his family—but we can not tell—what shall I call her? Can I say Mother.

  We have no written record or reaction of how Emily Sr. felt. But she must have continued to grieve for her mother, and locked that grief inside herself. That hardly means she abandoned Austin and little Emily. Yet Dickinson’s psychoanalytic biographer, John Cody, makes this wildly reductive remark.
“A warmer relationship with her mother would probably have made her a housewife,” as if Cody had found the dynamics of Dickinson’s art. But I suspect another dynamic was at play here, that Dickinson absorbed her mother’s pain, and was her own little mourner—that mourner would become Vesuvius at Home, a poet filled with a crackling rage.

  The soul has moments of escape—

  When bursting all the doors—

  She dances like a Bomb, abroad . . .[Fr360]

  3

  EMILY SR. SUFFERED THE WAY most other women suffered in nineteenth-century New England, however rich or poor. If she wanted to marry, she had to leave her parents’ home like a vagabond in a bridal gown, shelve herself inside her husband’s surname, learn to live with this man who was little more than a stranger, no matter what courtship rites were followed, and become subservient to this stranger’s kin and to all his sexual needs and desires. Women were trained by their mothers and older sisters to give in to “a man’s requirements” and “the low practices” of sexual intercourse. They were told to lie still and to seek no pleasure for themselves. There was no pleasure to be had in this kind of ritualized rape. They were harlots if they ever moved or groaned with delight. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule—women who were a bit more adventurous, and husbands who were gentler and more feminized. Women and men were both trapped within the same Calvinist culture, and were often victims of an identical patriarchy. If they didn’t profess their faith, they would rot in hell—husbands might be separated forever from their wives and children. And so there were constant religious revivals, mass professions of faith. But there were no female pastors. Men ruled the church, just as they ruled the banks and the law courts, and ruled Amherst College. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary wasn’t founded until 1837; even if Emily Norcross had been a better student, she would have had nowhere else to go after she returned from her boarding school in New Haven. And Susan’s daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, who was an unreliable narrator in anything to do with her aunt, still understood the merciless repertoire of every single Amherst belle: “between the abrupt ending of school routine and the fatal hour of marriage there was for every girl a chasm to be filled in.”

  Emily Norcross was a farm girl, not the daughter of an Amherst squire; she must have cleaned and scrubbed from the age of ten. And she had to grow up with all the fears and mystery that surrounded childbirth; so few children survived that they often weren’t given a proper name until they reached the age of one. Austin and Susan’s firstborn wasn’t given a name at birth; soon he was called “Jacky,” until he survived six months and now had an official name, Edward, or Ned.

  There was no anesthetic; childbirth was not only dangerous, it was also filled with shame; a male doctor, rather than a midwife, poked around in your waters. He delivered your child with medieval instruments and his own bloody hands. Women often went from pregnancy to pregnancy, with little time to recover; but being pregnant didn’t deliver them from their chores. We have to imagine Emily Sr. in her isolation at the widow Montague’s, or at the mansion on Main Street, with Lucretia Gunn Dickinson as the real mistress of the house. Edward was seldom there; he was part of the fire brigade and would soon be running for public office. Little Emily must have felt her mother’s loneliness; she was like a primitive Geiger counter, “a Goblin with a Guage” [Fr425]; that was her particular genius. Soon she had a little sister; Vinnie, named after her own aunt Lavinia, was born on February 28, 1833, at nine o’clock in the morning. But Mrs. Dickinson couldn’t seem quite to recover, and she would never have another child. Vinnie herself was ill for a while. Perhaps it’s why Mrs. Dickinson seemed to favor her.

  When Emily was two and a half, she was sent to stay in Monson with her aunt Lavinia while her own mother and little sister continued to convalesce. We have a remarkable record of the trip in Jay Leyda’s The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, as Lavinia wrote her sister about the various stages of this voyage to Monson. Scholars have picked Lavinia’s letters apart to look for signs of Mrs. Dickinson’s abandonment of her little daughter. But the letters are poignant and funny, and offer our first glimpse of “Elizabeth,” as Aunt Lavinia called Emily Dickinson. She and her little niece left Amherst sometime in the spring of 1833 and found themselves in the middle of a thunderstorm.

  Just after we passed Mr Clapps—it thundered more & the thunder and lightning increased—Elizabeth called it the fire—the time the rain wind and darkness came we were along in those pine woods—the thunder echoed—I will confess that I felt rather bad. . . . We tho’t if we stopped we should not get home[to Monson] that night—Elizabeth felt inclined to be frightened some—she said “Do take me to my mother” But I covered her face all under my cloack to protect her & took care that she did not get wet much . . .

  On May 9, she wrote to Edward, her brother-in-law, that little Elizabeth had learned to play the piano—“she calls it the moosic.” Later that month, she wrote that Elizabeth was now a perfect little member of the family. Joel Norcross was “much amused” by the little girl. And Lavinia now played the perfect aunt. She groomed the little girl, got her “a little gingham apron [and] some new hose.”

  She speaks of her father & mother occasionally & little Austin but does not express a wish to see you—Hope this wont make you feel bad—She is very affectionate & we all love her very much—She don’t appear at all as she does at home & she does not make but very little trouble—When I wish you come for her I will let you know . . .

  John Cody and other Dickinson sleuths read this as a clear sign of the little girl’s deprivation and distance from her mother. But Aunt Lavinia’s remarks reveal more about herself than about the two Emilys. She had a new stepmother and was never comfortable around her. She was in love with her own first cousin, Loring Norcross, and would marry him the following year, but alliances between first cousins were practically forbidden, and her own alliance was frowned upon by all her relatives in Monson. She wrote to her sister about Loring:

  Emily—no wonder you are astonished to hear—of the attachment between cousin Loring & myself—You expressed your surprise when I was at A[mherst] you recollect—One year ago I thought of no such thing but I know that now my heart is devoted to him. . . . I have had many sorrowful hours—for we are connected & we have been brought up together . . . If I love him, It is sufficient—& I have banished those doubts & fears—Whether it be right for cousins to marry or no—

  And so it was important for Lavinia to have Elizabeth around; the little girl distracted her from her dilemma over Loring, and allowed her to become a kind of mother, or at least a motherly aunt. And she writes on June 11, just after her Elizabeth had been returned to the Homestead.

  I cant tell you how lonely I was—it seemed so different & I wanted to weep all the time—the next Morning after Emily was gone I saw a little apron that she left & you cant think how I felt . . .

  Aunt Lavinia was the deprived one, who suffered the loss of not having Elizabeth —note how she calls her Emily again once the little girl is gone. Emily Dickinson was much too young to understand Lavinia’s predicament and stubborn will. She would love Aunt Lavinia all her life, and love Lavinia and Loring’s children, Frances and Louisa—Fanny and Loo—and would board with them in Cambridge when her eyes bothered her. She wrote some of her warmest letters to Fanny and Loo, called them her “little brothers,” and no matter how landlocked she was in her “Pearl Jail” at the Homestead, she never denied them anything on their visits to Amherst.

  But Aunt Lavinia also provided a kind of symbolic key for the future poet. By marrying her first cousin, Lavinia would guard her maiden name—she remained a Norcross. It must have been a magical quotient for Emily Dickinson. Of course, she never found a first cousin of her own. And there wasn’t one to marry. But it had to give her some delight.

  When Aunt Lavinia died of the Norcross disease—consumption—in 1860, Emily wrote the following to Loo:

  “Mama” never forgets her birds—

>   Though in another tree.

  She looks down just as often

  And just as tenderly,

  As when her little mortal nest

  With cunning care she wove—

  If either of her “sparrows fall”,

  She “notices” above.[Fr130]

  Dickinson could just as well have been writing about her own mother—I’m sure the two sisters were “entangled” in her mind. And we have to rid ourselves of the negative notions that have fallen upon Emily Sr. and threaten to wipe out whatever little traces we have of her, as if the poet’s father had such significance in her life and Emily Sr. had none. Habegger calls her a woman with a “relatively inelastic spirit.” Sewall speaks of “this fluttery, timid woman.” Lyndall Gordon, in Lives Like Loaded Guns, pretends she didn’t exist at all: “the mother, the usual provider of emotional nourishment, is strangely absent.”

  Sewall himself relented a bit in a letter to Jay Leyda:

  Even Mrs. Dickinson’s distaste for writing letters is blown up to account (in part) for Emily Dickinson’s scorn of her mother, her taking over the mother’s role with Austin and writing the letters for her, etc. Whereas she seems to me to be much like many people I know (including my wife) who express themselves in non-literary ways. They hate to write letters (Til would rather be hanged by the thumbs). Mrs. Dickinson sent flowers & fruit & food to her friends and made pies for her family.

  But she was a little more fiery and independent than that. There’s an apocryphal tale about Emily Sr., who, having hired a paperhanger, Lafayette Stebbins, against her husband’s wishes, “went secretly to the paper hanger and asked him to come and paper her bedroom. This he did, while Emily was being born.”