These Fevered Days

by Martha Ackmann

  Mary Lyon’s belief that women’s minds deserved to be as active as their hands taught her students there was more to life than housework. In place of spinning flax, a young woman might take up words or metaphor. For Emily, the demands of an active family made housekeeping impossible to escape. Home is a holy thing, she wrote Austin, but her days were far from pleasing.41 She disliked the drudgery, and begrudged the time it snatched from her writing. There were pies to make and clothing to mend; floors to sweep and seeds to plant; and all those chickens that needed tending. An especially difficult time for Emily had occurred when Vinnie was away at school. Vinnie, like Helen Fiske, attended Ipswich for a short time—the seminary Helen’s father thought was less intellectually taxing than Mount Holyoke. Emily complained to a friend that many of the chores had fallen on her shoulders. “Vinnie away,” she had written, “and my two hands but two – not four, or five as they ought to be – and so many wants – and me so very handy – and my time of so little account – and my writing so very needless.” Emily said that if she took so much as “an inch on time” to write, she would be castigated – not so much by her family as the world and her own guilt.42 Housekeeping, to her, was a way to cultivate a woman’s submission and steal time, and she wanted nothing of it. “God keep me from what they call households,” she said.43

  The labor around the house was coupled with social calls that annoyed Emily all the more. As much as she often felt regimented by the rigorous schedule at Mount Holyoke, at least then her mind had been occupied. But social convention dictated that when she didn’t have her hands busy with domestic chores, she should be paying calls on the local citizenry or they on her. One Saturday evening after tea, Emily had fallen prey to a steady stream of callers that nearly killed her, she said. Along with their mother in the kitchen, she was cleaning up when there was a knock at the door. Two gentlemen were standing on the stone step asking for Emily. Surprised by the summons, she hurried across the room as her father shouted to the young men not to keep the door wide open. Emily joined the gentlemen outside on the step only to have them—no doubt jolted by Mr. Dickinson’s bark—excuse themselves hastily in the name of pressing business. Then the bell rang again. This time a cousin and another gentleman walked in. Emily sat in the sitting room—more dead than alive, she admitted—and struggled to make conversation. “The weather was rather cold today,” she said, trying to encourage conversation. The gentlemen nodded in obliging unanimity. Frantically, she searched her mind for another topic, and pulled up a stray thought about a recent sermon. As soon as she ventured into the subject, the bell rang again and in trooped another cousin—Thankful Smith “in the furs and robes of her ancestors,” Emily later reported. Trying her best to disappear into what she called a “primeval nothingness,” Emily knew the evening had gotten beyond her control.44 It wasn’t every evening that the Dickinson home saw a parade of callers and strained conversation. But when it happened—Emily felt depleted. A “constant interchange wastes tho’t and feeling,” she said, “and we are then obliged to repair and renew.”45

  The expectation that Emily spend time dusting or calling on neighbors grated on her, and her irritation began to show. That winter when the Sewing Society began its meetings, Emily declined to attend. She knew “the public” would be puzzled by her absence and make her the object of prayers, and she let loose with a torrent of sarcasm. “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 will be helped to it’s feet again,” she wrote her friend Jane.46 It was an ungenerous and judgmental remark that betrayed her blindness to the misfortune of others, and underscored her own unhappiness. Emily said she loved “to be surly – and muggy – and cross.”47 When she didn’t receive replies to her letters fast enough, she became what she called “crusty.”48 She slammed doors, called herself one of the lingering bad ones, and disappeared whenever she felt like it. Even Austin said she could be wild. “Savage,” Vinnie said.49 Emily admitted people probably saw her as hardhearted, but she had no idea friends gossiped behind her back. Emily is wholly misinterpreted, they said.50 She was not the only young woman who felt out of sorts. Her old friend Helen Fiske confessed that her only diversions were reading, writing letters, and practicing piano. With no career and few activities besides housework, she felt adrift. Occasionally Helen went for a walk or varied the routine by “the breaking of a few lamp shades,” she said.51 Emily knew even unruffled Abiah could be peeved. “Not in one of your breaking dish moods I take it,” she joked.52 Sometimes Emily was so overwhelmed with unhappiness, she cried. There were tears over canceled plans, tending her mother when Mrs. Dickinson was ill, and when friends moved away. As she looked ahead, the future looked grim, lonely, and aimless. She was not exactly angry, she said. She was bitter and sad.53 “Duty,” she said, “is black and brown.”54

  Helen Fiske rarely allowed herself to be downcast, but she had reason to feel unmoored. After her mother’s death, her father died on a visit to the Holy Land. His body was not returned to Amherst, and he had been buried on Mount Zion. For several years, Helen shuttled among relatives and boarding schools. She referred to her wanderings with her usual tart tongue. It was like surviving massacres, she said.55 But recently, things had changed for the better. Helen was in Albany and staying with a guardian who discussed Coleridge and Tennyson with her and encouraged literary interests. He suggested she might translate a French essay, and she had tried—setting herself down to write in her mother’s favorite rocking chair.§ But soon social invitations pulled Helen away and she lost her urge to write. She castigated herself for being easily distracted and vowed to do something useful. “I will not let myself be turned into a young lady ‘in society’ who sleeps, goes to parties, receives and returns calls!”56 But she did just that. The French translation was never finished, the character book she pledged to keep lay unopened, and she was off to a Christmas ball at the state capitol. There she met the governor’s youngest brother, a recent West Point graduate working for the Army Corps of Engineers. Edward Hunt, she said, “is very tall, very large, very dignified, rather cold in his manner at first, but thaws.”57

  After Valentine’s Day, a thin layer of February snow covered the ground in Amherst. It had snowed only two inches all month—but since it had been so cold, nothing had melted.58 When Emily looked at the barren garden, summer’s abundance seemed beyond imaging—the whorls of blooms, ripe peaches, the Baldwin apples Vinnie loved.59 She thought about her father’s contentment when the Dickinson lot was flush with green and in order. He loved the sense of dominion he felt when his trees were trimmed, firewood piled high, potatoes planted, and manure evenly spread.60 That winter Edward Dickinson had reason to feel in command. He was poised to become a delegate to the National Whig Convention and would travel to Baltimore to join others in nominating Daniel Webster for president.61 Then there was the railroad. Edward’s long work bringing the train to Amherst finally was paying off. When news came that all the railroad stock had been sold, there was a ten-gun salute in his honor. He had recently joined the church, too, along with Vinnie and Sue Gilbert.¶ Like his father, Austin also was taking decisive steps. He had already decided to leave his teaching job and return home in a matter of months to prepare for law school. Harvard Law would be next. As much as Emily loved Austin’s company, it was dreary to think of spending her days washing her brother’s collars, mending his socks, and making sure he had his favorite breakfast: meat and potatoes and that brown bread he asked for.62 Emily must have found it hard to believe that anything much would be new for her. When she looked at herself, all she saw was a woman with a soiled dress, a worn apron, and unkempt hair.63

  In spite of Vinnie’s occasional ambivalence toward him, William Howland was at it again. He and Vinnie had gone for a ride in the bracing February cold. Emily hoped William had enjoyed her valentine, silly as it was. The poem began with a rush of Latin bombas
t and some showing off:

  “Sic transit gloria mundi,”

  “How doth the busy bee,”

  “Dum vivimus vivamus,”

  I stay mine enemy!

  Oh “veni, vidi, vici!”

  Oh caput cap-a-pie!

  And oh “memento mori”

  When I am far from thee!

  Hurrah for Peter Parley!

  Hurrah for Daniel Boon!

  Three cheers, sir, for the gentleman

  Who first observed the moon!#

  While the poem was typical of valentine nonsense, Emily was proud of it—at least proud enough to send it. She stuffed the seventeen stanzas with images of the Garden of Eden, her father’s apples, legislatures, muskets, Bunker Hill, even India rubbers. She included one scientific metaphor, writing about the Earth on its axis turning around the sun “By way of a gymnastic.” The poem closed with three stanzas of exalted farewell:

  Good bye, Sir, I am going;

  My country calleth me;

  Allow me, Sir, at parting,

  To wipe my weeping e’e.

  In token of our friendship

  Accept this “Bonnie Doon,”

  And when the hand that plucked it

  Hath passed beyond the moon,

  The memory of my ashes

  Will consolation be;

  Then, farewell, Tuscarora,

  And farewell, Sir, to thee!64

  How could William not appreciate the poem’s absurdity? He knew Emily Dickinson was not headed off to battle.

  Emily couldn’t help looking at the sky that day. It had been dazzling lately. The day before, an aurora borealis illuminated the heavens. When he went out for his noon weather readings, Professor Snell saw faint streamers traveling through the sun’s corona. Emily recalled what she had learned in school about the aurora borealis. Some people said an aurora borealis reminded them of a biblical passage from Acts. “And I will show wonders in heaven above and signs on the earth beneath.” **65 Northern lights were harbingers, they said, of a future people could not see. Earlier, Emily had confessed to her friend Jane that she had been uncharacteristically bold. “I know you would be surprised,” she had written. “I have dared to do strange things – bold things, and have asked no advice from any.” The winter had been like one long dream, she said. Then she mentioned the gold thread. “What do you weave from all these threads,” Emily asked her friend. “Bring it nearer the window, and I will see, it’s all wrong unless it has one gold thread in it, a long, big shining fibre which hides the others.”66 Weeks later Emily shared a similar thought with Abiah. This time it was a golden dream that wouldn’t let her go. “I have been dreaming, dreaming, a golden dream,” she had written, “with eyes all the while wide open.”67

  By afternoon on February 20, Friday’s Springfield Daily Republican arrived in Amherst and someone from the Dickinson household retrieved it from the post office.68 Much to Emily and Vinnie’s disappointment, there were no sensational stories in the newspaper—no heads cut off, no yards of snake in a cow’s intestine. The four pages were filled with advertisements, transportation schedules, news summaries, and claims of medical miracles. On page one there was a poem entitled “The Wretch” by one Meister Karl. It was about a bickering husband and wife who quarreled over the husband’s smoking.

  I hope you don’t regret, love,

  The times when you were free

  To puff those vile segars, love,

  Which you’ve resigned for me!

  Page two featured a story about the recent celestial wonder. “The exhibition of the Aurora Borealis, last evening, was the most splendid that we have seen for many a night. The King of the North shook out shimmering folds of all his banners, red, argentine, and golden, and from the way in which his threatening scimeters attached the zenith, we judge that it will be found full of holes when seen again. In fact, we saw light shining through in a number of places.”69

  Situated next to the aurora borealis account in a column to the left was another poem. This one entitled “A Valentine.” Unlike the segar poem, this one was anonymous. The poem began with playful Latin lines. It was Emily’s poem to William Howland: the one for his eyes only. Atop the poem was an editor’s note: “The hand that wrote the following amusing medley to a gentleman friend of ours, as ‘a valentine,’ is capable of very fine things, and there is certainly no presumption in entertaining a private wish that a correspondence, more direct than this, may be established between it and the Republican.”70 William must have shared her poem with the editors. Without her consent. Emily knew Vinnie’s beau had lived in Springfield and probably was acquainted with the newspaper’s editors Samuel Bowles and Josiah Holland. A poem in the Springfield newspaper was not like having a prose valentine in a college students’ magazine, she realized. The Republican was more visible, read by people all over New England, and thousands more across the country.†† Some readers even clipped poems out of the newspaper and pasted them in personal journals. No one needed to tell Emily she could write; she already sensed that. But with her valentine in the Republican, she understood—for the first time—professional editors thought so too.‡‡

  Emily did not say a word to Jane or Abiah about the poem. When she wrote to Sue she did not mention it either, saying only that she hoped her letter would travel through hills and dales, across rivers, and “make a poem such as can ne’er be written.”71 A few days after her verse was published, Emily wrote Austin, rattling on about the memorable evening when all the callers arrived, and Thankful Smith in furs brought up the rear. She let her brother know she hadn’t finished his laundry. The family would send a bundle of clean clothes by the next person traveling to Boston. There was not much news, she said. Father’s rheumatism was acting up. The old cat had not returned, and Vinnie had a new kitten who slept in a basket under the kitchen table.72 “How much I have said about nothing,” she wrote, never mentioning the poem.73 Emily was eager for Austin to come home, although she would miss his letters. Her brother’s writing had entertained everyone, especially their father. It didn’t matter to whom Austin’s letters were addressed. Mr. Dickinson opened them all, and read them at the post office, again over supper, and once more by the fire in the evening. In fact, Edward Dickinson was so impressed with Austin’s prose, he wanted to preserve his letters permanently. “Father says your letters are altogether before Shakespeare, and he will have them published to put in our library,” Emily told her brother.74

  Later that spring, Vinnie and Emily assessed their looks. Vinnie had her picture taken and sent Austin a copy. “I dont like it at all,” she said, “& should be sorry to have you or any one else think I look just like it. I dont think my real face is quite so stupid.”75 Emily decided it was time for a change. When the barber came, she asked him to cut her long hair. Vinnie couldn’t believe it. Emily cut her hair, she exclaimed to her brother.§§76 With a fashionable new look and a poem in the Republican, Emily shot one of her humorous volleys to Austin. “Now Brother Pegasus, I’ll tell you what it is – I’ve been in the habit myself of writing some few things. . . . you’d better be somewhat careful, or I’ll call the police!” She was teasing, but barely. When it came to having a talent for words, Emily knew she was the writer in the family.77

  * Candy pulls were common in the nineteenth century and a way for young men and women to get acquainted. After boiling sugar or molasses, couples would face each other and pull apart a sticky ball of candy. They would lengthen the gooey sweet, double it back up, and stretch it again until the candy became the consistency of taffy. It was a messy exercise, but one New Englanders especially enjoyed.

  † The letter prefigures Dickinson’s 1863 poem “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –.” [F764.]

  ‡ Fidelia Fiske continued directing her school in Persia (present-day Iran) until ill health forced her return to Massachusetts. She taught at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary from 1859 to 1864. When trustees offered her the position of principal in 1863, she declined. She wan
ted to return to her school in Persia when her health improved—but she never did. Fiske died in 1864 at age forty-eight. Her book, The Recollections of Mary Lyon with Selections from Her Instruction to the Pupils of Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, was published posthumously in 1866.

  § Helen had no idea her mother had literary ambitions. In 1839 Deborah Vinal Fiske wrote five stories for a children’s Sunday-school reader: Youth’s Companion. The stories were published anonymously. [Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 63.] Like her daughter, Deborah Fiske felt domestic life did not sustain her. “My life is slipping away and I am doing nothing but taking care of my family,” she wrote. “I know it is my proper business, but some do so much good besides.” [Phillips, 63.]

  ¶ Edward Dickinson and Susan Gilbert joined Amherst’s First Church on August 11, 1850. Vinnie joined November 3, 1850. Austin would join the church on January 6, 1856. Emily never joined, the only member of her immediate family not to become a member of Amherst’s First Church. [Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 178, 182, 339.]

  # Dickinson’s Latin roughly translates to “Thus passes the glory of the world. Remember that we live to die.” Peter Parley refers to a series of nineteenth-century elementary readers. [“Lydia Maria Child and the Development of Children’s Literature,” Boston Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts, bostonliteraryhistory.com.]