SHE WAS ALLOWED TO RETURN, and the rest is history—or, since history depends on a historical record, speculation.
During her first year at Holyoke, her father determined, for reasons unknown to us, that there would be no second, and if Dickinson went back to boarding school, which she thought she might, it would have to be somewhere else. There was nowhere else.
In the summer of 1848, she was seventeen, impassioned, smart, and increasingly strange. For years she had outwardly fulfilled all the ritual functions of girlhood: she sewed, learned to bake (her mother had a reputation for custards and crullers). She practiced the piano, went to parties, entertained the family’s guests, and exchanged breezy letters with friends; she attended lectures, sermons, and concerts, and she presumably walked out of the Shakespeare club when its young men threatened to censor the bard’s crudeness for the sake of the young ladies. In winter she tapped the maple trees for sap; in summer there were picnics. She gossiped, read German plays, and visited relatives in Worcester and Boston. Of all their social group, said Austin, she was the one always sought for her brilliance, originality, and wit.
But her friends were whispering. It wasn’t just her willfulness at Holyoke but her indifference to social duties, the Sewing Circle, for instance. “Sewing Society has commenced again—and held its first meeting last week—now all the poor will be helped—the cold warmed—the warm cooled—the hungry fed—the thirsty attended to—the ragged clothed—and this suffering—tumbled down world be helped to it’s feet again,” she jibed. “I don’t attend—notwithstanding my approbation—which must puzzle the public exceedingly. I am already set down as one of those brands almost consumed—and my hardheartedness gets me many prayers,” she coolly concluded, her condescension laced with hostility and a modicum of guilt.
She was firm. And firmly ensconced in her prodigious reading: Longfellow’s Kavanagh, Emerson’s essays, Dickens, the beloved Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontës, Shakespeare, Tennyson, George Herbert, Robert Burns, Keats, popular novels. Soon her father’s library would contain such items as Elisha Kent Kane’s bestselling Arctic Explorations, the work of the historians Motley, George Bancroft, and Prescott, alongside all of Addison’s writing and all of Washington Irving’s, and the poetry of Byron and William Cowper. She read and used what she learned. Inventive situations, whimsical and parodic, some nonsensical, all bright and effervescent, spill out of her early letters: “vain imaginations,” as she jested, “to lead astray foolish young women. They are flowers of speech, they both make, and tell deliberate falsehoods, avoid them as the snake.” Yet she also complained of an excruciating melancholy that refused to let go. “Pain—has an Element of Blank—/” she would later write; “It cannot recollect / When it begun—Or if there were / A time when it was not—.”
If we in the twenty-first century admire Emily Dickinson for her staunch individualism and her catlike ability, as James said of Hawthorne, to see in the dark, we need also consider the cost of originality in a sleepy village where comings, goings, and the least sign of deviance were of public note. “She was full of courage,” Austin recalled, “but always had a peculiar personal sensitiveness.” The price of nonconformity was loneliness. And yet one could manage nonconformity—and loneliness, too, in certain ways. Despite the pressures of convention, upper-class women were frequently permitted eccentricity. They might live alone or with one another, not marry, or achieve the acceptable status of a talented maiden sister or dotty old aunt. These women—Higginson’s Aunt Storrow, Emerson’s Aunt Mary—were moral touchstones who roamed without a pack.
One cannot know to what extent Dickinson chose her nonconformity or to what extent it chose her, but over time her commitment to independence, poetry, and a handful of soul mates comes into clearer focus. Early on there was one special person, the young man she called her “first” male friend, Benjamin Franklin Newton. They met in 1847, after he, at twenty-five, had come to Amherst to study law in her father’s office. Emily was sixteen and likely awed as well as flattered by his interest, for she considered his intellect as “far surpassing” her own (evidently she did not think many exceeded hers). He taught her what to read, she said, “and that sublimer lesson, a faith in things unseen, and in a life again, nobler, and much more blessed—.” He was her gentle, grave Preceptor, the title she would confer on Higginson.
When his apprenticeship to Edward Dickinson ended two years later, Newton corresponded with Emily from Worcester—unfortunately these letters do not survive—where he had likely heard of Wentworth Higginson, soon to take over the city’s Free Church, a congregation far more radical than that of Newburyport. Higginson’s flaming abolitionism and his incendiary preaching were by now matters of public record and, in the Free-Soil city of Worcester, approbation; his home was a well-known stop on the Underground Railroad. But whether or not Newton mentioned Higginson to Emily, she herself probably made the connection, for in her second letter to Higginson, plausibly referring to Newton, she mentioned the “friend who taught me Immortality—but venturing too near himself—he never returned—.” She was alluding to his untimely death, in 1853, not long after he was appointed Worcester’s district attorney, a position in which he was bound to encounter, or prosecute, Higginson.
Like Higginson, who was a year younger, Preceptor Newton was a freethinker, though a milder one, who had grown up in the brave new world of transcendentalism, where there were no sinners, everyone was saved, and God was neither angry nor intemperate. Like Higginson, too, he seemed to contemplate perfectibility, goodness, and the indwelling divinity of all living things. And he loved poetry. Shortly after leaving Amherst, he sent Emily a volume of Emerson’s verse, which taught her, as she said, what was “most grand or beautiful in nature.”
This was her conversion: beauty, its own excuse for being. “When half-gods go, / the gods arrive,” wrote Emerson in “Give All to Love,” a poem close to Higginson’s heart. “My dying Tutor,” she would tell Higginson, “told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet.” Higginson should know that Newton believed in her. “My earliest friend wrote me the week before he died,” she added. “‘If I live, I will go to Amherst—if I die, I certainly will.’”
THERE WERE OTHER FRIENDS of course, chiefly Susan Gilbert, the temperamental beauty who married Austin and dwelled next to the Dickinsons for the rest of her life, outliving them all save her own daughter. Just nine days younger than Emily, Sue was dark haired, discontented, clever, and complex. Time and tragedy would harden her into the distant, stately woman swathed in black whom Vinnie, among others, hated and feared.
That would be much later. Born in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the youngest of seven children, she was orphaned by the age of eleven and taken in, along with a sister, by an aunt in Geneva, New York. Educated at the Utica Female Academy and for a term at the Amherst Academy, she went to live in Amherst with another sister and, resentful, never felt she had a permanent home or stable toehold in the social world. But she believed that in her marriage to Austin she had found security and position. She was wrong, but that realization would come later.
Sue was intelligent, self-possessed, and volatile, just the sort of woman to impress both Austin and Emily. Emily showed or gave Sue over two hundred poems, sharing more, it seems, of her private life with her than with any other relative. “We are the only poets,” she would exclaim, “and everyone else is prose.”
Susan Gilbert. “Everyone else is prose.”
For a time Sue Gilbert might well have been the center of Emily Dickinson’s erotic imaginings. “Oh Susie, I would nestle close to your warm heart, and never hear the wind blow, or the storm beat, again,” Dickinson wrote to her in 1852.
Is there any room there for me, darling, and will you “love me more if ever you come home”?—it is enough, dear Susie, I know I shall be satisfied. But what can I do towards you?—dearer you cannot be, for I love you so already, that it almost breaks my heart—perhaps I can love you anew, every day o
f my life, every morning and evening—Oh if you will let me, how happy I shall be!
Certainly Dickinson loved a number of her female friends—Abiah Root, Jane Humphrey, Emily Fowler—with a passion so startling it may have pushed some of them away. For, as a child wedged between Austin and Lavinia, Emily demanded of her friends that which she could never have from her family: unqualified approval.
Sue seemed to provide it, if temporarily. And Sue had earned the family’s endorsement, for Edward liked her, perhaps or particularly because she professed herself, and was admitted, to the First Church of Amherst on the same day as he. Soon Sue was occupying a place of honor in the exclusive Dickinson household. And there was Austin, too, the most eligible bachelor in the village, asking her to ride with him, if she thought it proper, the same summer one of her sisters died in childbirth. She dressed in mourning for the next three years—but the Dickinsons beckoned, and Austin was fervently tender. Soon she and he were vowing to think of each other at the first strike of the vesper bell when they would both eat a commemorative chestnut.
The Dickinsons would have approved of Austin’s clandestine engagement had they known of it, but Austin kept mum, and anyway Sue was dragging her heels. She was teaching school in Baltimore, he in Boston, and in the fall of 1852, when Austin went to Harvard to study law, he barraged her with letters much as Edward had Emily Norcross, but Austin’s were overwrought, clamorous, more plainly needy. His gnawing uncertainty caused him to worry that Sue did not love him as he loved her or misunderstood him or mistook him or regarded him amiss, particularly when he confided—he could not help himself—that though he had prayed and prayed, he could not ignore his physical desire for her. “Is there anything debasing in human love—does it rather not exalt & refine & purify our nature above all else,” he desperately asked in one of the many drafts he made of his letters to her. “Has not God planted it in us—” [Crossed out: “Did not Christ teach that the love of a man for his wife should be paramount.”]
As ardent and insatiable as Emily, Sue frequently fortified herself against the demands of others. Nor was she a woman to be trifled with. Over the years she would prove a mercurial friend, lover, and wife: unpredictable, hurtful, arrogant. Austin sensed as much early on. “It seems strange to me, too…,” he unburdened himself to Sue’s sister Martha, “that just such characters should have chosen each other to love, that two so tall, proud, stiff people, so easily miffed,—so apt to be pert…—that two who could love so well, or hate so well—that two just such could not choose but love each other!—but we could not.” Later these two would just as ineluctably choose hate.
But the Dickinsons loved with greedy ardor, each in his or her own individual way, each an absolute monarch overseeing an intensely private kingdom, as Vinnie would one day remark. Together they were unified against the hoi polloi, with whom they believed they shared little. It was a matter of class, intellect, and rampant insecurity. “We’re all unlike most everyone,” Emily remarked to Austin, “and are therefore more dependent on each other for delight.” That would remain more or less true even when, as in the case of Austin and Sue, they were indissolubly bound by antipathy, disappointment, and self-loathing.
When Sue devised a clandestine visit to Boston to meet Austin, Emily, learning of the assignation, offered to help out. And when Austin disappointed his fiancée, she consoled him: “I guess we both love Sue just as well as we can.” Soon she was putting a bit of distance between herself and Sue, “a dear child to us all,” she observed with defensive condescension or self-protection. For Emily’s passion—for physical love, for spiritual connectedness—palpably suffused her body and her imagination. “I feel as if love sat upon my heart, and flapped it with his wings”: she marked those lines in her father’s copy of the novel Thaddeus of Warsaw. In Austin’s copy of Lalla Rookh, by Thomas Moore, she noted these: “I knew, I knew it could not last—/ ’Twas bright, ’twas heavenly, but ’tis past! / O! ever thus, from childhood’s hour, / I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay.”
Pining for Sue, she yearned, albeit with ambivalence, for the same physical love, vehement and consuming, that her brother longed for.
Those unions, my dear Susie, by which two lives are one, this sweet and strange adoption wherein we can but look, and are not yet admitted, how it can fill the heart, and make it gang wildly beating, how it will take us one day, and make us all it’s own, and we shall not run away from it, but lie still and be happy!
She continued:
How dull our lives must seem to the bride, and the plighted maiden, whose days are fed with gold, and who gathers pearls every evening; but to the wife, Susie, sometimes the wife forgotten, our lives perhaps seem dearer than all the others in the world; you have seen flowers at morning, satisfied with the dew, and those same sweet flowers at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun; think you these thirsty blossoms will now need naught but—dew? No, they will cry for sunlight, and pine for the burning noon, tho’ it scorches them, scathes them; they have got through with peace—they know that the man of noon, is mightier than the morning and their life is henceforth to him. Oh, Susie, it is dangerous, and it is all too dear, these simple trusting spirits, and the spirits mightier, which we cannot resist! It does so rend me, Susie, the thought of it when it comes, that I tremble lest at sometime I, too, am yielded up.
Yet she could resist and she could yield, both simultaneously and, more and more, in her own way. She would not be caught or confined. “Captivity is Consciousness—/ ,” she wrote, “So’s Liberty—.”
FOUR
Emily Dickinson: Write! Comrade, Write!
Although undergraduates from Amherst still came to call and she still rode out with them or chattered sociably, although the family still fed guests and coddled dignitaries as before, Emily Dickinson was gradually, imperceptibly, absenting herself from all forms of public life. She did not welcome strangers. They inhabited a marketplace of vanity and grime: the endless clack of the dirty horsecars, the slop on the cobblestones, the poverty, the crime, the pain, the jockeying and the mealymouthed palaver of Boston that, as Austin reported after Emily’s visit, confirmed his sister’s “opinion of the hollowness & awfulness of the world.”
Home was different. “As the great world goes on and one another forsake, in whom you place your trust,” Emily told Austin, “here seems indeed to be a bit of Eden which not the sin of any can utterly destroy.” Neither gritty streets nor smutty gardens spoiled the view of the meadow from her bedroom window. No skies streaked with a mouse-colored gray, no rattling carts, no hollow, spinning world. Here was quiet, even if it was, some days, the quiet of emptiness: “And I, and Silence, some strange Race / Wrecked, solitary, here—.”
Her retirement—what else to call it, even if the word is harsh—mingled passion with conviction and impudence with dread. She possessed an originality that pleased. It made her special. Yet withdrawal also springs from fear—the fear of losing or having lost. “I’m afraid I’m growing selfish in my dear home, but I do love it so,” tellingly she warned her old school chum Jane Humphrey, “and when some pleasant friend invites me to pass a week with her, I look at my father and mother and Vinnie, and all my friends, and I say no—no, cant leave them, what if they die when I’m gone.” Dickinson clung to their physical presence; proximity was her defense against disruption, change, calamity, loss and the threat of it. When invited to visit her friend Abiah in Springfield in 1854, she again declined, carefully explaining, “I don’t go from home, unless emergency leads me by the hand, and then I do it obstinately, and draw back if I can. Should I ever leave home, which is improbable, I will with much delight, accept your invitation;…but don’t expect me. I’m so old fashioned, Darling, that all your friends would stare.”
Deliberate, gracious, and self-deprecating, Dickinson filed her renunciatory rhetoric to a razor’s edge, her weapon, words, charming and implacable. Otherwise, she darkly hinted, there were consequences. Going to church by herself,
she had to rush to her seat and, terrified, wondered why she trembled so, why the aisle seemed so wide and broad, why it took almost half an hour afterward to catch her breath. Yet knowing when and how to protect herself, she managed her fear, and evidently her family cosseted her. When her father suggested they come to Washington in 1853, he did not insist that Emily join them. Instead, she stayed at home with Sue and a cousin, John Graves, who later remembered Emily improvising on the piano late at night: he was invited to sit in the next room while she mesmerizingly played.
In 1855, when Edward Dickinson was a lame-duck congressman, Emily agreed to visit him in Washington. She and Vinnie stayed at the smart new Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just two blocks from the White House. The sisters threaded their way through the crowded streets, wandering in new ways, as Emily put it, greeting silken ladies and high-hatted gentlemen and by all indications enjoying themselves in a city where, as a future friend would quip, “everybody knows everybody and the nobodies are the most clamorous of all.” She took it in stride, confounding a Supreme Court justice, according to family legend. When a flambé was served for dessert, she turned to him sweetly and asked, “Oh Sir, may one eat of hell fire with impunity, here?”
True to form, she refused a number of social engagements, pleading illness. Washington, Boston—it made little difference. Even Amherst grew too wide. Home was best. “I fear I grow incongruous,” she said with a shrug.
THE TIME HAD COME for the Dickinsons to reoccupy the Homestead. Measured against the grandeur, the psychological satisfaction, and the conspicuous prominence of the family mansion, the comforts of West Street—where Austin would say he had spent the best years of his life—meant nothing to Edward. Until he could regain the Homestead, it would stand—just blocks away—a souvenir of his misfortune.
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