These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  As much as Mary Lyon inspired young women to be independent, she also made clear that one matter took precedence: Christianity. She believed that the purpose of life was a commitment to Christ. Yet she also understood the weight of the question Emily was confronting. While Miss Lyon thought a profession of faith was necessary to everlasting life, she recognized that making the decision was not a casual one. It was better to wrestle with the question seriously, she said, rather than mindlessly profess to believe. Besides she had not professed her own faith until she was twenty-five—older than Emily and most other students. Some might have argued that if religion were so important, Mount Holyoke should not have accepted conflicted students like Emily or asked them to leave after a term if they still had not professed. Yale, for example, threatened to expel students who did not believe the Bible was God’s word.39 But expelling students who did not profess to believe missed the point, Miss Lyon would have said. Young women should make up their own minds and come to the Church freely.

  Since Christmas in 1847, religious questioning at the seminary had intensified. Like Amherst College, Mount Holyoke decided to spend December 25 in voluntary fasting and prayer. Emily had expected changes in spending her first Christmas away from home, but the seminary’s decision to embrace such austerity was nothing she’d ever experienced. Holidays at home were filled with laughter and she enjoyed making a list of her Christmas bounty: a perfume bag, a sheet of music, a china mug with a Forget me not upon it, a watch case, an amaranthine stock of pincushions, candy.40 Nearly every Mount Holyoke student observed the fast. Emily spent the day in church, prayer meetings, and had more time than usual to be alone. After morning services, Miss Lyon invited all who felt a call to Christ to place a sealed note in her note box. Fifty attended. “The house has been very still,” one teacher observed. “I hardly heard one ‘Merry Christmas’ this morning.”41

  Around that time, Hannah Porter, a friend of Emily’s maternal grandfather, had been staying at the seminary. Deacon Porter, Hannah’s husband, was one of the seminary’s most valued trustees. Mrs. Porter was always interested in the spiritual health of students and kept an eye on Emily’s development, since she was well acquainted with her family. When she returned home to Monson, she received a letter from Cousin Emily Norcross. “Emily Dickinson appears no different,” the young woman reported. She “says she has no particular objection to becoming a Christian and she says she feels bad when she hears of one and another of her friends who are experiencing a hope but still she feels no more interest.”42 Emily Dickinson had known her roommate was writing and had asked her cousin to relay her best wishes to Mrs. Porter. She also promised to write herself and perhaps explain her views, but failed to do so. With the first term near its end, Emily was short on time, she said.43

  The Mount Holyoke term concluded in January 1848, and Emily enjoyed a two-week recess at home. On Sunday, February 6, she was back at school, and the seminary whirled into action. That evening before supper, young women again spread fresh white linen cloths over the long tables and Emily set the knives beside each plate. It may have been difficult to keep her mind on the task. The scheduled meeting with Miss Lyon was only an hour away: that is, her second meeting. Even though she appeared to have told no one, Emily had first met with Mary Lyon right before the recess. Back in January seventeen students who were considering a profession of faith met with Miss Lyon privately in her rooms—Emily among them. Miss Lyon led the young women through a discussion of Acts, then assigned homework. During the recess, she said, memorize John 6.35: the passage that begins “I am the bread of life.” When you return, she told them, we will hear where you stand.44 After that January meeting, Emily had written Abiah and alluded to what was going through her mind. “This term is the longest in the year,” she said. “I love this Seminary & all the teachers are bound strongly to my heart by ties of affection. There are many sweet girls here & dearly do I love some new faces, but I have not yet found the place of a few dear ones filled, nor would I wish it to be here.” Emily reported on her studies and how much she enjoyed chemistry and physiology. In a long postscript, she inquired of mutual friends and commented on the unseasonably warm weather. Between the two remarks, Emily had inserted an aside—brief and vague—hinting at what had transpired hours before. “There is a great deal of religious interest here and many are flocking to the ark of safety,” she wrote. “I have not yet given up to the claims of Christ, but trust I am not entirely thoughtless on so important & serious a subject.”45

  The recess between terms had given Emily time to think. As a girl, she once had joined a prayer group but had stopped attending. Prayer had become—as she put it—“irksome”—and did not sustain her interest.46 Recently Amherst had experienced a town revival and neighbors flocked to church meetings. Emily remembered the revival well—and uncharitably. She recalled watching those who had “sneered loudest” at religion suddenly professing their faith. “They were melted at once,” she said. The comment underscored her wariness: conversions often looked impulsive to her—the product of overexcitement rather than belief.47 When converts such as Abiah had spoken of their spiritual contentment, Emily was envious, but also skeptical. She thought accepting religious maxims meant abdicating independence and not personally struggling with profound questions. It was like learning chemistry by a book rather than an experiment.

  After that first dinner of the new term, Mary Lyon retired to her rooms to prepare for the meeting with Emily and the others. Before the break, she had asked the young women if they felt lost—adrift without a profession of faith. She hoped the time away from the seminary would make their answers clear. Lately Mary Lyon had also been reading about Noah and his search for a rare place where he could hear God. She wanted her students to find their own singular place.48 Miss Lyon took up the notes that students had dropped into her box and read through them. Of the seventeen who had attended the meeting before vacation, a few said they would not be attending tonight’s gathering. She made note of the numbers and checked off who would and who would not be joining her.

  As the minutes ticked down, Emily finished her chores in the dining hall. She plunged her hands into hot water and drew a towel across each thin knife blade. Then she went upstairs to the main floor and walked past the mineral cabinet with its shelves of rocks and fossils. Miss Lyon’s rooms were behind the double parlors and across from Seminary Hall. Emily could remember the many words Mary Lyon had spoken there. “Don’t be a hypocrite,” she had told them, “be honest.” “Distinguish between what is very difficult and what is impossible. Do what is difficult.” “The difference between great and small minds is the power of classification. Little minds dwell on particular things. Great minds take in a great deal.” “If you have as much intelligence, energy, and enterprise as you ought to have, you are making much of yourself. Do something. Have a plan. Live for a purpose.”49 Emily looked around her. No one else had a private room on the main floor. Miss Lyon’s was there because she wanted to answer if someone knocked at the big seminary door. Last month, when Emily had walked into Mary Lyon’s rooms, her keen eye took in everything: a worn copy of Gorham’s Chemistry, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Miss Lyon’s Bible—the pages smooth and bare without a single mark from her hand.50 On her desk were sheets of writing Lyon had composed deep into the night: lists, letters, drafts, appeals, journals, catalogs, lesson plans, recipes. The shuffled surface of her desk was like a map of her mind: a searching intellect, insatiable, and alive with ideas. Mary Lyon and Emily were alike in so many ways, and in so many ways they were not. While Miss Lyon wanted to wrestle down the unknown and tame it with lists and order and systems, Emily wanted to stare it down and walk straight into the abyss. Emily did not want to live by anyone else’s rules, not even the rules of the Church, and the questions for her never stopped. “Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you,” she once asked Abiah. “I often get thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think th
at we must forever live and never cease to be. It seems as if Death which all so dread because it launches us upon an unknown world would be a releif to so endless a state of existence.”51

  That evening Emily did not pause outside Mary Lyon’s door, and she did not leave a note. She kept on walking. Darkness flooded her student room. She could barely make out George Smith’s Hotel and Livery Stable across the road, and she could not see the town cemetery at all. Cousin Emily was late in returning for the term, and the room felt empty and lonely. It had been a blustery day. Low, dense clouds spread across the sky and snowflakes flew past her window on their way to the ground. A few days before, a storm had dumped eight inches of snow and tree trunks were still lined in white. Miss Lyon had asked Emily Dickinson if she felt lost. She did not. Emily knew where she was. She was as rooted to the soil beneath her feet as was one of her wildflower specimens. In church services the minister asked Christianity’s central question: Are you willing to give up the world for everlasting life? Emily knew her answer. No, she thought. Amherst, her family, and the deep mud of March were more sacred to her than any religious doctrine. She would not trade the friends she had, the natural world she loved, or the verses that were beginning to thread through her mind for anything, including the promise of everlasting life. It was here and now that she lived for, not the possibility of eternal salvation—if that even existed. It is hard for me to give up the world, she thought.52

  For months, Emily had tried to reconcile Mary Lyon’s great teachings about independence and ambition with the call to faith. She could not seem to square Miss Lyon’s injunction to use one’s own mind with her appeal to join the flock. The two precepts seemed at odds with each other: incompatible and dissonant. But then she understood. Emily realized that categories of faith did not fit her: “professors of religion,” “those who have a hope,” “no-hopers.” They were too neat. Her mind told her to reject classifications and shun categories. She made her decision: she had discovered a way to take religion seriously while also remaining independent. She neither accepted faith nor rejected it. Emily decided to continue questioning.§§ “I am standing alone in rebellion,” Emily would write a few years later. Four years before her death, she remained unchanged. I “both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour,” she said.53

  Mary Lyon’s meeting was still going on downstairs as the young women on Emily’s hallway made preparations for the next day. The morning bell would rouse everyone especially early. When the sun came up, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary would begin new classes for the spring term. Deacon Porter would soon arrive to collect tuition, and later on Professor Snell would travel down from Amherst College to deliver a lecture on electricity. Already Margaret Robertson from Canada was thinking about a new composition, trying to imagine life in 1948. In a few days, Mr. Judd, a friend of Miss Lyon’s, would appear with his sleigh and take students for a ride. Miss Lyon loved racing along the frozen river and disappearing into a whirling squall.54 Everyone would soon settle into the old track with recitations, reviews of ancient history, algebra problems, chemistry experiments, and more letters in Seminary Hall from the intrepid Fidelia Fiske. Emily knew she would never set out for Persia or teach Choctaw Indians. She now realized her travel would take her elsewhere. Whether she knew it then or not, she would bore into her own interior, confronting an unknown as wild and uncertain as any new world a missionary had seen. A place as rare as Noah’s. Right now, if she squinted and looked far to the northwest, she could almost see that volcanic summit—Mount Holyoke—sitting dreamlike against the night sky.

  Downstairs, the prayer meeting had ended. With all the young women in their rooms for silent study hours, Miss Lyon sat alone with her books and her lists and the pulsing exhaustion of her own vision. She drew out a pen to record which students had joined her that night. Five new ones attended, she wrote. One was not there who had been before, she added. She left no note, however.55

  * Emily’s infractions included reading and working after the retiring bell, writing letters during silent study hours, and asking to visit her Amherst home on the Sabbath—a violation of seminary rules, which Mount Holyoke’s assistant principal, Mary Whitman, sternly pointed out to her.

  † Mary Dickinson probably was speaking of Hannah White’s Amherst Female Seminary, which opened in 1832 and closed after a fire in 1838.

  ‡ Among Mary Lyon’s papers from the early years of the seminary is a note from Daniel Safford clearing up an order of crockery from Joel Norcross: “Mr. Norcross understood that you were to write for more crockery or glass on your return,” Safford wrote in 1844, “consequently he had not sent what you ordered.” Norcross quickly made good on the request, as Safford informed Lyon: “Crockery with the article from Mr. Whiteman, the tongue in a half barrel, the dryed Beef in a bag, a two gallon jug of temperance Wine for Mr. Condit (which you will please inform him of) all go to the depot today.” [Daniel Safford to Mary Lyon, July 16, 1844, Mary Lyon Collection, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.]

  § “Professors” of faith in the nineteenth-century Congregational Church declared a personal testament of belief and commitment to Jesus Christ. Their profession of faith indicated that they had evidence of a personal experience that changed and deepened their relationship with Christ. Men made a public statement of belief. It is unclear if women, such as Emily’s mother, who professed her faith at First Church, made a similar public statement. [Jane Eberwein, email to the author, March 12, 2016.]

  ¶ Members who were professed Christians made up the church’s inner group. Parish members who had not professed were permitted to make decisions about finances and secular business such as hiring ministers. [Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 80, 81, 125.]

  # Congregationalism was the largest denomination in Massachusetts, and the faith embraced by the Dickinson family, Amherst College, and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Jane Eberwein states that First Church of Amherst, which the Dickinsons attended, endorsed a Congregational faith with recognizable roots in the New England Puritan tradition, but could no longer be considered Puritan. Theology, she states, had been softened by the Antinomianism that made Emily Dickinson’s situation more difficult. It posited that a person could choose a commitment to Christ rather than needing to wait for Christ to choose who would be saved. [Jane Eberwein, email to the author, April 12, 2016.]

  ** Emily Norcross’s parents were Amanda Brown and Hiram Norcross, Emily Norcross Dickinson’s eldest brother. Hiram died when his daughter was an infant. Her mother remarried and moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. Emily and her brother were shuttled among relatives, living for a while with their Norcross grandparents, with Aunt Lavinia in Boston, and spent holidays with the Dickinsons in Amherst.

  †† In 1851 Cherokee chief William P. Ross toured Mount Holyoke and spoke with Worcester and fellow student Ellen Whitmore about working with him. The Cherokee National Female Seminary opened on May 7, 1851, with Whitmore as principal and Worcester as assistant teacher. Robinson became a novelist, most notably of Christie Redfern’s Troubles. [Carrie MacMillan, Lorraine McMuller, and Elizabeth Waterson, Silenced Sextet: Six Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Novelists (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1992), 89.] Louisa Plimpton became a missionary in Foochow, China. [Sarah D. (Locke) Stow, History of Mount Holyoke Seminary, South Hadley, Mass. During Its First Half Century, 1837–1887 (Springfield, Mass: Mount Holyoke Seminary, 1887), 322.]

  ‡‡ Erysipelas is a bacterial infection brought on by an insect bite or a cut. It is now easily treated with antibiotics.

  §§ Jane Eberwein argues that Dickinson “withdrew increasingly from communal religious ritual—not because she ceased questing for God . . . but because she was probably the only person she knew who felt impelled to continue the quest . . . she never felt that assurance of salvation for which she yearned even as it evaded her intensely inquiring ironic mind.” [Jane Eberwein, Dic
kinson: Strategies of Limitation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 182.] Eberwein also notes that the phrase “give up the world” did not appear in Amherst’s First Church’s 1834 Articles of Faith & Government. That document asserts on page 7 that professed Christians should not attend balls, races, theatre, engage in gambling, travel on a Sunday for business or pleasure, or “make use of ardent spirits, except as medicine.” Eberwein suggests that Dickinson would have understood those edicts and other precepts as abstaining from worldly distractions and pleasures. [Jane Eberwein, email to the author, February 19, 2019.]

  Three

  I’VE BEEN IN THE HABIT MYSELF OF WRITING SOME FEW THINGS