I should have liked to see you, before you became improbable. . . .
I found you were gone, by accident, as I find Systems are, or Seasons of the year, and obtain no cause—but suppose it a treason of Progress—that dissolves as it goes. Carlo—still remained . . .
She continues to bark and bite—lets him know that Carlo is loyal to her, even if he is not. But she relents a bit and calls herself his Gnome. [Letter 280, February 1863]
She writes to him from Cambridge in early June of 1864; she’s staying with her Norcross cousins while having her eyes looked at by a noted Boston ophthalmologist, Dr. Henry Willard Williams—“The Physician has taken away my Pen.” Fanny and Loo read Shakespeare to her while she writes in secret with her pencil. Higginson had received a mysterious wound in July 1863 and had to leave his regiment.
Are you in danger—
I did not know that you were hurt . . .
I was ill since September, and since April, in Boston, for a Physician’s care—He does not let me go, yet I work in my Prison, and make Guests[poems] for myself—
Carlo did not come, because that he would die, in Jail . . .[Letter 290]
Her next letter to the colonel isn’t until late January 1866—it’s one line long, with a salutation and a postscript.
To T. W. Higginson
Carlo died—
E. Dickinson
Would you instruct me now?[Letter 314]
She never really recovered from Carlo’s death. “I wish for Carlo,” she would write to Higginson later that year. [Letter 319, June 9, 1866] “I explore but little since my mute Confederate [died].”
We know that her long explosion of creativity continued in 1865, when she worked on 229 poems, even while she was stranded in Cambridge for seven months, exiled from her home and her dog, and half-blind. But the explosion seemed to end in 1866, when her output plummeted to ten new poems. Some scholars believe that Dickinson’s creativity collided with the Civil War, that some inner drama was worked out in the war’s own drama and butchery, that she responded to the slaughter with a woman’s deeper emotions. But I’m not convinced. She was always ambivalent about the war.
I shall have no winter this year—on account of the soldiers—Since I cannot weave Blankets, or Boots—I thought it best to omit the season . . .[Letter 235, to Mrs. Sam Bowles, about August 1861]
She could cry over the “slaughter” of Lt. Frazer Stearns—“His big heart shot away by a ‘minie ball’” [Letter 255, late March 1862], but Frazer had been her brother’s friend, was the son of Amherst College’s president, and was part of her social class. Dickinson was hardly a democratic goddess; she’d always been an aristocrat and a snob. She didn’t cry much for any common soldiers. “A Soldier called—a Morning ago, and asked for a Nosegay, to take to Battle. I suppose he thought we kept an Aquarium,” she wrote to Sam Bowles. [Letter 272, about August 1862] She was putting on her feathers, trying to shock Bowles a bit. But cruelty was one of her measuring sticks and part of her mental apparatus. It’s not that she couldn’t write about the war, and sing off charnel steps about “Battle’s—horrid Bowl.”
It feels a shame to be Alive—
When Men so brave—are dead—
One envies the Distinguished Dust . . .[Fr524]
Or when she writes to Higginson: “I can’t stop to strut, in a world where bells toll.” [Letter 269, summer 1862?] Yet it’s hard to decipher where her sympathies lay. Her father was an old-fashioned Whig, who couldn’t have borne “Black Republicans,” those who wanted to end slavery at any cost. Her cousin Perez Dickinson Cowan was an Amherst College student from Tennessee. And Joseph Lyman, Vinnie’s “lost” suitor, would spend the war fighting on the Southern side.
She didn’t end her habit of stitching her poems into booklets on account of the Civil War; it was rather because of rheumatic iritis—her irritated eyes didn’t allow her to sew. And for her, the war ends in a kind of comedy—with the capture of Jefferson Davis, disguised as a woman, in “Skirt and Spurs” [Letter 308].
To the author of “My life had stood a loaded gun,” killing was a natural habitat. She was the “blonde Assassin,” after all. The universe had become an “abattoir,” according to Camille Paglia. War was her own special landscape—she was also in rebellion, like the South, with Carlo as her “mute Confederate.” She’d been writing poems with a brutal intensity, the White Heat of “unanointed Blaze” [Fr401]. And suddenly some of that heat was gone.
“Magic, as it electrifies, also makes decrepit—” she would write to Higginson in 1879. [Letter 622] “A Spell cannot be tattered, and mended like a Coat—” [Letter 663, to Sue, about 1880] And she could not mend her own powers. She was in her mid-thirties the year Carlo died. And if we consider her language—her Witchcraft—as a kind of lyrical mathematics, then it shouldn’t startle us. A lot of mathematicians have lost their own siren’s call by the time they’re thirty-five. Dickinson had stopped dancing “like a Bomb, abroad” [Fr360], or perhaps she was dancing in a different way, and all the carnage had used her up. Carlo’s death had jolted her, and she would mourn him for the rest of her life. He was very old for a Newfoundland when he died—almost seventeen. Most Newfoundlands don’t live beyond the age of ten; they’re often born with defective heart valves; and so Dickinson had her big brown dog for a very long time.
She no longer wandered through the village and the countryside, without her Newfoundland. It would have been treasonous to have another dog—Carlo couldn’t be replaced. He’d been part of her thoughts and desires, had mirrored her own reticence, her shyness. Deprived of that walking mountain, she would turn inward, seldom leave her father’s house.
3
“HALF THE PLEASURE OF HAVING A DOG,” writes Adam Gopnik, “was storytelling about the dog: she was a screen on which we could project a private preoccupation.” In addition to a real dog, Gopnik “had a pretend version, a daemon dog,” who lived inside the real one. His own fictive dog was a companion who liked long walks and “listening to extended stretches of tentatively composed prose.” And Carlo was also a daemon dog, real and fictive at the same time. We can imagine Dickinson reciting the melody of her lines to Carlo on their long walks. And that daemon dog appears in one of her most disturbing poems, written long before Carlo died, a poem that summons up a strange, miraculous adventure in the middle of a walk.
I started Early—Took my Dog—
And visited the Sea—
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me—
And Frigates—in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands—
Presuming Me to be a Mouse—
Aground—opon the Sands—
But no Man moved Me—till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe—
And past my Apron—and my Belt
And past my Bodice—too—
And made as He would eat me up—
As wholly as a Dew
Opon a Dandelion’s Sleeve—
And then—I started—too—
And He—He followed—close behind—
I felt His Silver Heel
Opon my Ancle—Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl—
Until we met the Solid Town—
No One He seemed to know—
And bowing—with a Mighty look—
At me—The Sea withdrew—[Fr656]
How can we enter this journey, through which porthole or door? The poem is as difficult and daunting as “My life had stood a loaded gun.” The first two lines don’t indicate the peril of the poem, the fear of being swallowed up and ravished by some imagined male sea. Suddenly there are “Mermaids in the Basement,” as if the speaker had tumbled upon that perverse porthole of her own mind. But these mermaids aren’t threatening. They won’t seduce or bite. They’re curious about the poet, want to have a look. Mermaids are a crucial piece of property in Dickinson’s Lexicon. She herself is a mermaid astray on dry land. And the mermai
ds in the poem are like a welcoming mirror.
She would reveal the nature of her poetics to Higginson in her fourth letter to him: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.” [Letter 268, July 1862] Perhaps she wasn’t even conscious of her own lie. This “supposed person” is one more bit of camouflage. The speaker is always Emily Dickinson, the poet-wanderer, whether she appears as male or female, child, hummingbird or bee, or a ghost talking to us from the other side of the grave. It doesn’t really matter what persona she inhabits—it’s a reckless version of herself. But she can afford to be reckless in this poem—she has her dog.
The speaker here could be Little Alice, going through the looking glass, or down a rabbit hole—the poem has the same enchantment and menace as Alice in Wonderland, and the same sexual perversity. She can shrink or grow enormous, as Alice does, become both powerful and puny.
The Frigates on the Upper Floor of her mind presume her to be a Mouse adrift upon the Sands. But they don’t crush the poet. They extend Hempen Hands. She’s not as meek as they imagine. “But no Man moved Me”—until the Tide appears and almost submerges her in its own will. It rides past her “simple Shoe,” past her Apron, and her Belt, past her Bodice, too, with its own menacing and hypnotic caress. But she resists this tide—the male sea—and she emphasizes his maleness twice. “And He—He followed—close behind,” with his “Silver Heel” of seduction until her simple shoes “overflow with Pearl”—perhaps the secret tides of her own creation—and she manages to escape the sea, with the dog as her silent witness, and arrives at the “Solid Town,” the safer and more conscious perimeters of her mind, where the sea isn’t known and has little sway—and bowing to Dickinson, the sea departs, with a “Mighty look” at the poet.
Nothing is really stable in the poem—“nature is so sudden she makes us all antique,” Dickinson once jotted down in a fragment that may have been sent to Judge Lord. [PF 82] Perhaps the poem is about the entanglement and confusion of her sexual and creative force. “All power,” writes Susan Howe, “including the power of Love [and the power to create], all nature, including the nature of Time, is utterly unstable.” There are no truths to discover, “only mystery beyond mystery.”
She was frightened of her own powers, and her daemon dog must have soothed her a bit. She could saunter in and out of some treacherous dream with Carlo and still stay alive. Carlo was her mute Confederate—she and her dog were both rebels, who would weave bandages or blankets for no one. She wasn’t blind to the battle reports. And she was as warlike as the generals in both camps. Her most revealing glimpse of the carnage was written long after she had lost her mute Confederate.
’Tis Seasons since the Dimpled War
In which we each were Conqueror
And each of us were slain
And Centuries ’twill be and more
Another Massacre before
So modest and so vain—
Without a Formula we fought
Each was to each the Pink Redoubt—
[Fr1551, about 1881, in pencil, on a scrap of paper]
And there was no room for Emily or her daemon dog on that Pink Redoubt, where decoration dwelled—like some murderous jewel—rather than the rectitude of war.
NOTE: Rebecca Patterson, who was the first to describe Dickinson’s love for Kate Scott, believed that this poem charts the lost romance of two women—Dickinson and Kate—and their Pink Redoubt; Patterson could be right, but like most of Dickinson’s poems, meaning upon meaning abounds.
FOUR
Judith Shakespeare and Margaret Maher
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IN 1929, VIRGINIA WOOLF PUBLISHED a short book, A Room of One’s Own, that would become a war cry for all women writers. A Room of One’s Own rumbles on for forty pages, until Woolf decides “to draw the curtains” and describe how women lived in Elizabethan England. “For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song and sonnet.”
And Woolf comes to a rather somber conclusion about Elizabethan women. “Imaginatively she is of the highest importance: practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.”
She was, in Woolf’s own words, “a worm winged like an eagle.” She had no private income and a room of her own, the two essential ingredients for a female writer. She could only strut and prance about in some male poet’s mind. And to support her case, Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—Judith—with his extraordinary gifts. How could she have possibly thrived? Judith might have been “as agog to see the world” as Will. Her father wouldn’t have sent her to school—there were no schools for girls. She might have picked up one of her brother’s books, taught herself to read, considering she had some of his genius. If she were lucky, she could have written a page or two in her father’s apple loft, and that would have been the end of her career as a scribbler.
She still had her own secret ambition and wasn’t going to tie herself for life to some bony, half-witted boy. So she breaks her father’s heart, prepares a tiny bundle of her belongings, climbs down a rope from her window, and runs off to London—not yet seventeen, but with “a gift like her brother’s for the tune of words.”
She arrives at the stage door with that bundle on her back. She wants to act, she says. The stage manager and all his cronies laugh in her face. There are no females on the London stage; boys have all the women’s parts. And what is Judith Shakespeare to do? She can’t learn her craft, can’t even have dinner at the local tavern—she would be considered a slut. Yet she has Will’s gray eyes and beautiful brows. But the manager, Nick Greene, pities her in his own way, knocks her up, and with all “the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when tangled in a woman’s body,” she kills herself one winter’s night, and now her bones lie buried beneath some London crossroad. And, says Virginia Woolf, any woman born with Judith Shakespeare’s gifts in the sixteenth century “would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.” And she would not only have been harmed by the people around her but would have been ripped to pieces by her own contrary instincts.
Suppose by some miracle Judith Shakespeare had survived, had written plays, like her brother; she could never have signed them. “That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the nineteenth century.” And so we have George Eliot, George Sand, and Currer Bell, aka Charlotte Brontë, all beloved by Emily Dickinson. George Eliot’s picture hung on her bedroom wall, together with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whom she loved and admired all her life. When Sam Bowles visited Europe in 1862, Dickinson wrote:
Should anybody where you go, talk of Mrs. Browning, you must hear for us—and if you touch her Grave[in Venice], put one hand on the Head, for me—her unmentioned Mourner—[Letter 266, early summer 1862]
Elizabeth Barrett was born in 1806, near a tiny village in northeast England, and grew up at Hope End, an enormous estate of woodlands near Wales that would become her own Deserted Garden. She couldn’t go to boarding school, unlike her brothers, but read Paradise Lost before she was ten, studied Latin and Greek on her own, translated Aeschylus, began to publish her poems, without ever signing her name—proper young ladies didn’t become poets. But she wasn’t Judith Shakespeare, forlorn and alone in London. She managed to educate herself. She’d had a troubled adolescence, with terrible backaches, and would soon become an invalid. She may have suffered from scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of t
he spine, though doctors couldn’t really diagnose her condition. For months she had to lie still in a “spine crib,” a hammock that seemed to float in the air four feet above the ground. But that didn’t prevent her from writing. Pampered by her father, who was strict with his other children but proud of his “Poet Laureate,” she was soon encouraged to publish under her own name. He wasn’t quite as sanguine when she eloped with Robert Browning; he’d forbidden his favorite daughter—and all his other children—to marry.
It isn’t hard to imagine what hold that secret marriage must have had on Emily Dickinson, who was fifteen at the time. She was mesmerized by “that Foreign Lady” with her long eyelashes and long dark curls, while she, the Belle of Amherst, with her freckles and weak chin, morphed into “the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.” [Letter 268, to Higginson, July 1862]
I think I was enchanted
When first a sombre Girl—
I read that Foreign Lady—
The Dark—felt beautiful—[Fr627]
And Dickinson crept into that magic spot—“noon at night”—where creativity began. Barrett Browning never betrayed her. At her first meeting with Higginson, nine years after Mrs. Browning’s death, she wouldn’t let him leave without one of her prize possessions, a photo of the Foreign Lady’s tomb.
She modeled herself on Mrs. Browning, not in her poetry—that electric leap from line to line is all her own—but in the way she lived. The Foreign Lady hid herself, ran from strangers, and saw only a few friends. This would become Dickinson’s own style and battle plan as a poet. Someone who was truly agoraphobic couldn’t have warded off Professor Joseph Chickering the way she did—with such humor and élan. Chickering was a graduate of Amherst College and taught English there for thirteen years. He was also Dickinson’s neighbor and had befriended her and Vinnie several times. He knew about her poetry, and when he wanted to visit, she wrote:
I had hoped to see you, but have no grace to talk, and my own Words so chill and burn me, that the temperature of other Minds is too new an Awe—[Letter 798, early 1883]
A Loaded Gun Page 8