Of course it never happened, at least not in that way. But it’s fun to imagine Emily Dickinson, who at times liked to think of herself as a mermaid, coming out of her mother’s waters while Lafayette Stebbins was papering the walls. And it does reveal a stubborn streak in Mrs. Dickinson, who found her own way to defy Edward before and after their marriage. He was the invisible bridegroom at his own wedding, because the bride was so ambivalent about abandoning her family. And if she didn’t have the intellectual curiosity of the rest of the Dickinson clan—even Vinnie was a religious reader of The Atlantic Monthly—it’s partly because Edward managed to stifle whatever native rebellion she might have had. He couldn’t control her while she was still in Monson, though he tried to smother her in a constant barrage of instructions, telling her how she ought to behave and whom she ought to see. Once she was married and the mother of three small children, she had very little maneuverability. He stifled her and his children, insisting that they avoid the cold weather and dark streets of Amherst while he was away—and it seems he was away a good part of the time, either as a member of the legislature or on some urgent errand. And his wife did rebel, a little. “I attended church all day yesterday,” she wrote on March 13, 1838. “I felt quite like a widow.”
Little Emily Elizabeth also rebelled. In that same year, while Edward was politicking somewhere on Beacon Hill, his wife wrote:
And I do indeed truly rejoice that the time is so near at hand when I hope to embrace my husband. . . . [Emily] sais she is tired of living without a father . . .
Mrs. Dickinson may have suffered from bouts of melancholy, like her poet daughter, but we trivialize her and distort her life if we consider her a chronic invalid, or someone who spent half her days dusting the stairs. She was probably up and about by 4:00 A.M., as Aífe Murray suggests, dealing with stove ash, and firing up a stove that had come with her all the way from Monson; attending that stove was “primitive, complex, and continuous.” Murray also suggests that the kitchen was the most creative room in the house; it was her mother who taught the poet various household witcheries—baking, gardening, and sewing would become “key silent texts, a place for words to pour into and disappear from,” just as “needlework, brooms, and spider webs” would appear and reappear like witchcraft in Dickinson’s poems.
Dickinson was a redhead, and she didn’t have her mother’s gray eyes. But she might not have become a poet without her mother’s magical stove; she baked words with the same intensity that she baked her father’s bread.
In 1864, two years after she lured Higginson into her spiderweb with that first letter of hers—“Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”—she wrote a poem that could have been the autobiography of her mother:
She rose to His Requirement—dropt
The Playthings of Her Life
To take the honorable Work
Of Woman, and of Wife—
If ought She missed in Her new Day,
Of Amplitude, or Awe—
Or first Prospective—or the Gold
In using, wear away,
It lay unmentioned—as the Sea
Develope Pearl, and Weed,
But only to Himself—be known
The Fathoms they abide—[Fr857]
Of course it’s hazardous to interpret the poem in relation to a particular person, even her mother, but I still believe that her mother’s shadow is in every line. She wrote it between 1861 and 1865, when poems must have come to her with the speed of a comet or a fireball. It was during the Civil War. And critics have their own little wars over what all that butchery meant to her. She would write her Norcross cousins that “Sorrow seems more general . . . since the war began,” and that she herself “sang off charnel steps.” [Letter 298, 1864?] Such sorrow seeped into her poetry in some mysterious manner. “The subterranean stays—” she would write to Higginson in 1879. [Letter 593]
And “She rose to his requirement—dropt” is filled with a kind of subterranean remorse. The poet might have imagined herself wearing her mother’s clothes, giving up her “Playthings” for the honorable “Work” of wife. But the word honorable seems ominous here, as if it prefigures some cruel act of castration. “She rose to His Requirement” suggests both punishment and sexual play. The poet distances herself, speaks to us in the third person, as a dream wife watching her own dream—of diminishment. The wife has to survive without “Amplitude” and without “Awe,” has to live utterly in the mundane. Even the “Gold” of her wedding ring—her status as wife—will “wear away,” as Helen Vendler suggests.
But now the poet intercedes for her mother-wife. Lying “unmentioned” and alone, that pale, bitten “Gold” might “Develope Pearl” in the immense water of her own mind. “Pearl”—like “Snow” or “Diadem” or “Possibility”—is a trigger word, the secret signature of her craft. And here we have a curious conflation. As a dream wife, married to her own father, she cannot rise to “His Requirement,” can only protect herself with “Pearl.”
The poem suggests a sympathy for her mother that she seldom allowed herself to reveal—she was her father’s, the best little girl in town. But in an undated prose fragment she summons up her own past, a past in which her father doesn’t appear:
Two things I have lost with Childhood—the rapture of losing my shoe in the Mud and going Home barefoot, wading for Cardinal flowers and the mothers reproof which was[for] more for my sake than her weary own for she frowned with a smile . . .[PF 117]
This frowning with a smile would haunt Emily Dickinson and become her Haunted House. It also suggests another way of reading her poetry. We have to get rid of the idea of an Emily Dickinson “canon,” obliging her poems to move like an elongated ladder in some direction that coheres and has a logic all its own. We’ll never tame the cat that leapt at us speaking English; nor will we ever cure it. All we can do is listen harder to the cat’s moosic.
As noted earlier, Emily talked in her second letter to Higginson of a certain terror that came “since September,” when she sang like a boy in a boneyard, because she was afraid.
Afraid of what? Was it the terror of love? A romance that had ripped her apart? Was it about that unknown Master who had inspired those three lyrical, half-crazy, and suicidal letter-poems? We’ll never uncover who her Master was, or if he ever existed at all. But I think that terror had to do with something else. Was she performing for Higginson? Yes—and no. I suspect she was frightened of the Vesuvius inside her, the energy that took hold of her entire being, like some monster she craved and couldn’t get rid of.
It wasn’t about her “Scarlet prison” upstairs, or the booklets she was sewing together in her sanctuary. It was the sheer creative drive; she was writing one—two—poems a day. She’d moved with her family out of the mansion on Main Street when she was ten, had lived in a house on North Pleasant Street, a house whose rear windows bordered upon Amherst’s cemetery; Mrs. Dickinson had been much happier here, without the ghost of her mother-in-law, Lucretia Gunn. Austin had built a wall of pine trees—evergreens. Vinnie had fallen in love with Joseph Lyman, one of her brother’s former classmates, now at Yale. Emily had a “coven” of girlfriends, loved all her teachers, became her mother’s scribe, incorporating bits and scraps of her voice into letters to Austin.
And then, in 1855, Edward bought back his father’s house, the Homestead, had it refurbished, added a conservatory, so that Emily could have her own winter garden and winter flowers; and that November, the Dickinsons moved a quarter of a mile—to Main Street. Edward’s poet daughter felt like some pioneer coming from Kansas. Her father had bribed her a little, with that winter garden, and he gave her the best room in the mansion, on the southwest corner of the second floor. But Mrs. Dickinson was completely shattered by the move; the Homestead had been a haunted house for her, where she had to cope with a mother-in-law who made her feel like an intruder while her own children were very small; even after Samuel Fowler Dickinson moved to Ohio in 1836, and his own family
followed him there, Mrs. Dickinson was still uncomfortable; there were too many recollections of a divided family and a divided house. Samuel Fowler Dickinson died on April 22, 1838, in total disgrace—he’d bungled the account books at a college near Cleveland. Lucretia Gunn Dickinson wanted to move back in with Edward at the Homestead, but Edward wouldn’t have her. She “complained about boils, dizziness, and the ingratitude of children.”
Edward was now the new Squire of Amherst; he had a terrible temper, kept beating his horse. Townsmen would walk to the other side of the street whenever the Squire loped along. Elected to Congress in 1852 as a Whig, he was the town’s most famous citizen, and one of its wealthiest. But when the Dickinsons returned to Main Street, Emily Sr. sank into a deep melancholia that would last four years. Her poet daughter was one of the first to notice this decline.
They say that “home is where the heart is.” I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings. . . .
Mother has been an invalid since we came home, and Vinnie and I “regulated,” and Vinnie and I “got settled,” and still we keep our father’s house, and mother lies upon the lounge, or sits in her easy chair. I don’t know what her sickness is, for I am but a simple child, and frightened at myself. [Letter 182, about January 20, 1856]
Emily was more than a bit disingenuous in this letter-poem to Mrs. Holland about the consequences of the move. She was putting on her feathers again, playing the innocent child. But there was a good deal of anger underlying the chatty, quicksilver narrative. She knew what her mother’s sickness was all about—her inability to rebel, to express her own rage against her husband about the return to this homeless home. There were too many phantoms, even with a new cupola. But she sat in her own silent rage. Emily wasn’t her father’s only daughter—and here Mrs. Dickinson might be considered just another “simple child,” who couldn’t openly rebel against her husband-father.
In an 1852 letter to Austin, Vinnie described one of Edward’s whippings:
Oh! Dear! Father is killing the horse . . . whipping him because he didn’t look quite ‘umble’ enough . . . Emilie is screaming to the top of her voice. She’s so vexed about it.
And once, after visiting Sue and another friend, Emily returned at 9:00 P.M. and “found Father is great agitation at my protracted stay—and mother and Vinnie in tears, for fear that he would kill me.” [Letter 42, to Austin, June 8, 1851]
Edward had barely changed since his courtship ritual—he couldn’t control Emily Norcross while she was still in Monson, but he could smother her once she arrived in Amherst with her magical stove. And he would smother his children in much the same way, watchful of their every move.
“I do not go out at all, lest father will come and miss me,” Emily wrote in the midst of her mother’s crisis, “or miss some little act, which I might forget, should I run away—Mother is much as usual. I know not what to hope of her.” [Letter 191, to Mrs. Joseph Haven, early summer, 1858]
One might imagine the turmoil she was in—an invalid mother and tyrannical father whom she also loved. She must have had a deep sympathy for her mother—we can sense this in a dream she had right after she arrived at Mount Holyoke; it was her first extended period away from “head-quarters,” as Austin liked to call their father’s house.
Well, I dreamed a dream & Lo!!! Father had failed & mother said “our rye field which she & I planted, was mortgaged to Seth Nims.” I hope it is not true but do write soon & tell me for you know “I should expire with mortification” to have our rye field mortgaged . . .[Letter 16, to Austin, October 21, 1847]
Father may be commander in chief, but Emily and her mother planted the rye field and are in danger of losing it. And for once, Emily Dickinson decided to become her own commander in chief in that Pearl Jail her father had assigned to her at “headquarters.” She couldn’t leave her father’s house, or rise to any man’s “Requirements” and take on another name. She would write her poems as a Dickinson, poems lashed with anger and pain. She was far from a model prisoner in her Pearl Jail—she assumed the sounds of her mother’s sadness as she rebelled against her father in the best way she could. She pitied him, and loved him, and feared him, but she was her mother’s child in her letters and poems. Her conservatory, her bedroom, the pantry, and her mother’s kitchen became “boundaries within boundaries,” where she could dance with a kind of invisible precision in her father’s house, but removed from his gaze—and his control.
In her very best writing, “she explored the implications of breaking the law just short of breaking off communication with a reader,” Susan Howe reminds us. And the law she broke was the patriarchal rules of punctuation and grammar, the very language passed down from her beloved Lexicon. Dickinson’s private Lexicon grew out of her mother’s tangled, chaotic grammar. One can read her very act of writing as a willful war with her father—Edward Dickinson was both God and the Devil, both her enemy and ideal reader, who never even read her poems. “We don’t have many jokes tho’ now, it is pretty much all sobriety,” she wrote to Austin in 1851, “and we do not have much poetry, father having made up his mind that its pretty much all real life.”[Letter 65]
Her real life was inside that Pearl Jail, where her secret songs remained locked in a drawer. She could have recited her poems at some women’s club, charmed Sam Bowles, met Ralph Waldo Emerson in Sue’s parlor, or performed the “surgery” that Higginson requested, if she wanted to publish her poems. And the one certain letter we have of hers to her father is a letter never sent! It appears in pencil, on a piece of stationery, and on the back of a poem:
Knock with tremor—
These are Caesars—
Should they be at Home
Flee as if you trod unthinking
On the Foot of Doom . . .[Fr1333]
And what did Dickinson’s undelivered letter say?
Dear Father—
[blank space]
Emily—[A 265]
Edward often appeared in Emily’s poems as the unnamed “Earl.” She would dream of him every night after he died and couldn’t walk past his room without feeling his ghostly presence. Perhaps she wasn’t even aware of her anger against him, or what fueled her poems. Dickinson saw her father in the grandest terms, as a giant who could terrorize an entire town, as he terrorized his horse. But Higginson recalls a very different man. “I saw Mr. Dickinson this morning a little—thin dry & speechless. I saw what her life has been.” [Letter 342b, August 1870]
Edward wasn’t much of a squire—or an earl. He was a backwoods politician who couldn’t hold on to his seat in Congress and never really understood the rumblings that led to the Civil War. He didn’t have a clue of what his poet daughter’s life was like, might never even have wandered into her Pearl Jail, nor did he have a pinch of poetry in his own life; he was a stern, humorless man who read the Bible every morning to his children and his wife. Emily was able to catch at least a glimpse of his hollow, frozen core. In a letter to Joseph Lyman, sometime during the 1860s, she writes:
Father says in fugitive moments when he forgets the barrister & lapses into the man, says that his life has been passed in a wilderness or on an island—of late he says on an island.
But Father’s island wasn’t her “Blue Peninsula,” where one could “perish—of Delight.” [Fr535] It was much starker and mundane. She never judged that Earl. And we have to be cautious when we judge Emily Dickinson, much more cautious than R. P. Blackmur, who wrote with blind bravura in 1956: “We cannot say of this woman in white that she ever mastered life.” She was born and died a Dickinson, and the white wrappers she began to wear were the costume of a gardener, a baker, and a poet who had little time for corsets and fanciful clothes. She was always the mistress of her own life, and the agoraphobia we prescribe to her is our own facile way to deal with the mystery of creation. She was the “blonde Assassin” who turned her mother’s silent pain into her own “noiseless noise” [Letter 271], a language that stuns and mutilates, even while it soothes. The
re’s nothing else remotely like it. Dickinson sings to us from another time, yet her Yellow Eye seems much more modern than our own baffling and bewildered image in the mirror—we are its steady target.
THREE
Daemon Dog
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NONE OF US CAN REALLY SAY how reclusive Dickinson was, but one thing is certain: She had a companion for sixteen years—a big, slobbering brown dog named Carlo, a Newfoundland as tall as she was, Dickinson loved to boast, and who must have weighed a 150 pounds. Soon after her poems were published and Higginson deified her as the virgin recluse, a note appeared in the Commercial Advertiser, dated August 23, 1893. Dickinson had acquired her own sudden fame, like a thunderclap across New England, and a certain Grace Smith, now Mrs. Luther W. Bodman of Chicago, summoned up the walks she once took with the poet when she was a little girl, while Dickinson’s “huge dog stalked solemnly beside them. ‘Gracie,’ said Miss Dickinson, ‘do you know that I believe that the first to come and greet me when I go to heaven will be this dear, faithful old friend Carlo?’”
This was one of the first bits of apocrypha about the poet, half her fire already swallowed up by Mabel Todd, who was deeply bothered by Dickinson’s “carelessness of form. . . . I admired her strange words and ways of using them, but the simplest laws of verse-making were ignored, and what she called rhymes grated on me.”
It would take more than half a century to undo the damage Mabel had done; and in all this time, Dickinson remained the virgin recluse, who talked about eternity to little girls while she “bribed” them with baskets of gingerbread hanging down from her window. But her letters reveal another picture of the poet. She was never fond of yapping about eternity. As she told Higginson on June 9, 1866:
You mention Immortality.
A Loaded Gun Page 6