My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  The Comparative Intellectual Powers of the Sexes

  The opinions about women that Edward brought to his wooing of the poet’s mother are made clear by his part in a memorized dialogue at the end of his junior year. The subject of the “colloquy” was a comparison of “the Intellectual Powers of the Sexes.” It appears on the program of Amherst College’s first commencement exercises, with the two participants identified as E. Dickinson and T. Packard. The script, in Edward’s hand, has been preserved with his college papers.

  The debate opens with speaker A (“unexpectedly detained by indisposition”) asking speaker B how a question that recently “engrossed the attention of our fellow students” has been resolved. B replies that he will prove “the abilities of females” have been undervalued and that the two sexes have “equal” mental powers. A is surprised and asks how something so improbable can be demonstrated. The answer, B says, is that “the advantages which the sexes enjoy for improving their minds are very unequal.” Before a young woman has a chance “to acquire a taste for the pursuits of literature and science,” she finds herself “engaged in the affairs of domestic life.” Would not a young man, no matter how enterprising, have his ambition “damped by the continued admonitions of his friends, that his abilities would not justify him in spending the time and money necessary?” Still, some females—Hannah More, Madame de Staël—have overcome such discouragements and “risen to distinction.”

  Speaker A answers that the Scriptures clearly make man “lord of the creation” and woman “subject to the man,” and that everyone has always known that these are their relative positions. Since it is woman’s nature “to depend on men for protection,” “there is a dignity in the obedience of a female to her partner in life.” Does it not follow that, just as women have less muscular strength than men, so “in literature and science, they are naturally inferior to us?” Why aren’t women heads of state? Why don’t they lead armies? Look what happens when they neglect their duties for their minds: they become “pedantic and masculine,” as “intolerably loquacious and unyieldingly obstinate” as the Madame de Staël you claim to admire.

  When B retorts that A has wandered from the subject and failed to show that women would not rival men if given a chance, A returns to the difference in the nature of the sexes: females may have “a more lively imagination . . . but in those branches of knowledge which require labour and perseverance and depth of thought . . . they have never yet shown themselves worthy of . . . equality with us.” Seeing that no agreement is likely, B brings the debate to an end, but not before dedicating his life to correcting the low estimate of women’s mental powers.

  Although student presentations had to get higher approval, it was understood that they represented their authors’ views. At the end of the manuscript, in Edward’s hand, stand the participants’ names, E. Dickinson and T. (for Theophilus) Packard, with an “A.” under the former and a “B.” under the latter. There is no doubt who speaker A was.

  Edward’s idea of women’s subjection to men was standard in his time, but the stridency and fixity with which he defended it were his own. The young man’s effort to cope with his father’s failure left him holding the unyielding conviction that any females of his were going to get the most vigilant protection a man could offer. This was what he would bring to courtship, marriage, and paternity.

  Chapter 2

  Emily Norcross of Monson

  Voted That Brother Joel Be a Committee

  By the time Edward Dickinson sat next to Emily Norcross at the chemical lectures, the town of Monson had become a classic hegemony, with a small, stable, closely related clique pretty much running its manufacturing, mercantile, educational, and religious institutions. The fastest way to identify the man who chiefly ran them is to study the local property tax list, which shows that in 1834, in the central district, the highest-taxed person, at $80, was Joel Norcross—Emily’s father and Emily Dickinson’s grandfather-to-be. The next biggest property owners were Joel’s storekeeping brother-in-law Rufus Flynt, at $75; Joel’s tavern-keeping brother, Amos Norcross, at $37; and another of Joel’s brothers-in-law, Timothy Packard, at $36.

  The figure for Joel only hints at the extent of his investments and activities. He was one of the major stockholders in the Hampden Cotton Manufacturing Company, whose factory and millpond were a short distance from the large family home. He had a large and prosperous home-farm and numerous additional fields, meadows, pastures, and woodlots. He was both a partner of his brother-in-law Flynt in the main general store and an active “County Trader,” constantly buying, selling, and bartering large quantities of cordwood, lumber, beef, rye seed, barrels of cider, and so forth. The daybooks in which he recorded credits and debits have been deposited at the Monson Historical Society, and as one flips through them one gets an oppressive sense of the man’s unflagging orderliness—the steady forward tread of a keen mercantile judgment. These documentary traces tell a very different story from what we read in Samuel Fowler Dickinson’s desperate mortgages.

  Joel was also a pillar of Monson’s First Congregational Church, a more stable, active, and, as was said, “efficient” society than Amherst’s feuding First Church. Working closely with the Reverend Alfred Ely, he helped organize and finance the Union Charitable Society, which supported missions and “feeble churches” and helped “poor and pious youth” prepare for the ministry. As the voluminous records show, he regularly served as vice president and on the onerous solicitation committee, though mostly leaving the mundane administration to others. His basic role is suggested by the minutes of an 1828 church meeting at which it was decided to build a chapel in Monson’s satellite town in Maine. To get the job done, it was moved “that brother Joel Norcross be a committee to procure a plan,” and also transmit the plan “together with the money”—as simple as that, and leaving it all up to him. The motion passed.

  But Joel’s most generous philanthropies were educational. Monson Academy, incorporated in 1804 and thus predating Amherst Academy, was one of western Massachusetts’ outstanding academies prior to its decline in the 1830s. Although it got substantial state aid, the institution was kept afloat by local benefactors, chief among whom was Joel, his gifts amounting to $7,250. (The next biggest donor was Andrew Porter, owner of Monson’s North Factory, at $3,200.) In today’s money, Joel’s benefactions would come to roughly $200,000. One of the most important things to keep in mind about Emily Dickinson is that both her grandfathers dug deep in their pockets for education.

  That Joel Norcross was basically in charge in Monson did not make him some sort of New England Godfather. Regardless of the sources of his public influence, it was articulated in public meetings, legitimized by votes, and recorded in minutes, and thus a very different thing from the secret power of nondemocratic village regimes. Still, we can take for granted that this shrewd and public-spirited man frequently stepped on others’ toes. At his death at age sixty-nine, the principal of the academy he helped create and sustain grudgingly observed that it was “pretty generally conceded that Monson has lost a benefactor in Mr Norcross though many hated him heartily while he lived.”

  Sister Betsey and the First Female Praying Circle

  Betsey Fay Norcross, Joel’s wife and the poet’s maternal grandmother, was chiefly occupied with household affairs, as her daughter Emily, the poet’s mother, would be. When Betsey died in 1829, the dignified obituary written by her minister, Alfred Ely, emphasized her attachment to home: “Humble and retiring in her disposition, it was in the bosom of her family, and among those who observed her in domestic life, that her prudence and affectionate regard to the happiness of all around her appeared most conspicuous.” The passage could easily be applied to Dickinson’s mother and, with qualifications, to Dickinson herself. Although many have questioned the strength and value of the poet’s maternal legacy, *8 one writer going so far as to call Emily Norcross Dickinson a mere “carrier of Dickinson traits,” there were vital continuities between Betse
y, her daughter Emily, and her gifted granddaughter. Prominent among them was a strong and exclusive adhesiveness to house and family. The poet’s love of home derived in part from her mother’s and grandmother’s unusually “retiring” domesticity.

  But Dickinson’s maternal inheritance remains complicated, ambiguous, and hard to discern. There are hints of ambivalent feelings about her mother and a lack of solid information about the relationship. Happily, an unusual document dating from the last two years of Betsey’s life, the sixty-page journal of the “First Female Praying Circle” in which she and other Norcrosses were active, opens up the tightly structured pieties of the mother’s world. This journal helps us appreciate the pressures and expectations the poet had to deal with.

  The Praying Circle was begun in 1827 by Hannah Porter, the dynamic wife of the man whose gifts to Monson Academy were second only to Joel’s. A female version of the male organizations that ran the town, the Circle had a written constitution, a set procedure for each meeting, and a rotating secretary. It enjoyed the support of Reverend Ely and drew its members from the town’s most influential families: its single largest contingent consisted of women belonging to the Norcross clan by birth or marriage. Its purpose was to promote the full evangelical agenda through prayer and devotion, discreetly administered pressure, and money-raising. What distinguished it from the town’s other religious organizations was an explicit rule of secrecy, the constitution stipulating that “no member shall be at liberty to make any remarks respecting the meeting before others who are not members.”

  The journal shows how effective the Circle must have been in coordinating its members’ hearts and minds. At each session they agreed on a shared “resolve” for the next two weeks—to pray for “our Literary Institutions,” for example, or to raise $50 for a missionary society. Meeting in Betsey’s home in April 1829, their second anniversary (she was hostess six times in all), they solemnly discussed their “union of sentiment & design” and how “greatly endeared” they had become to each other. Certain they had been gathered for great purposes, they decided to pray for a revival, and more, to adopt no other resolve until the revival came. It was their boldest move yet, a decision to take heaven by storm, as it were.

  At the time Betsey had only several months to live and the First Church was at a low point, having reaped only five new professions of faith in 1827 and not a single one in 1828. Like other orthodox churches, this one relied on intermittent revivals to bring in a harvest of new members from the younger generation. For six months Monson’s women kept their resolve, praying and encouraging one another and working behind the scenes, and finally a revival began. As was mostly the case in New England, it lacked the ranting and emotional display seen in the West or among Methodists, but it still proved terribly solemn, intense, disturbing. The Reverend Asahel Nettleton (whose labors at Yale in 1820 had left Edward Dickinson unsaved) was called in to assist at the daily prayer meetings, and when the excitement ended there were about seventy new converts, including Betsey’s younger daughter Lavinia. Revivals were often credited to the quiet efforts of devout women. The Praying Circle’s journal for 1827–1829, a unique document of its kind, clarifies what that meant, and what the poet would be holding out against at key junctures.

  One of the Circle’s seven charter members was Phoebe H. Brown, the best-known woman hymnist in New England. Earlier in her life, before moving to Monson, Brown had experienced severe poverty. Once, taking an evening walk to a rich neighbor’s estate—her one daily break from the care of her children—she was reproached for trespassing. In response she composed her most famous hymn:

  I love to steal awhile away

  From little ones and care,

  And spend the hours of setting day,

  In humble, grateful prayer.

  In succeeding stanzas, the speaker tells how she loves to shed a “penitential tear,” reflect on God’s mercies, and picture the “brighter scenes in heav’n,” and in all these ways renew her strength. The hymn concludes:

  Thus, when life’s toilsome day is o’er,

  May its departing ray

  Be calm as this impressive hour,

  And lead to endless day.

  Shifting the scene from earth to heaven in this way was a fairly standard program. In working it out, Mrs. Brown attained the bland, competent, and uplifting lyricism of her time, which, unlike ours, wanted poetry to serve public ends.

  Her lyric was published in the mid-1820s in Village Hymns for Social Worship, a popular evangelical collection edited by (once again) Asahel Nettleton. According to a Connecticut Valley woman born the same year as Dickinson, this hymnal was one “we all carried.” “I Love to Steal Awhile Away” appeared in many other hymnbooks and eventually became one of those songs everyone knew. The humble praying woman had achieved something (and this was not her only hymn) that would always elude the pious and popular Josiah Gilbert Holland, none of whose lyrics became hymns. Even Samuel Bowles, whose Sundays were about as pious as Mark Twain’s, would find Brown’s words on his tongue as he began a letter to Dickinson’s brother: “‘I steal awhile away’ from my Sunday devotions to pass to you and yours the compliments of the season.” Bowles was not being reverent, and neither was Dickinson when she offered to send Village Hymns to her brother “by earliest opportunity.” That was in 1853, *9 when she and Austin were the family’s only unconverted members. Well aware that this now old-fashioned compilation was the last thing he wanted, she mockingly added, “I was just this moment thinking of a favorite stanza of yours, ‘where congregations ne’er break up, and Sabbaths have no end.’” The hymn describing heaven in this ominous way was also in Nettleton’s collection.

  When Dickinson attended Mount Holyoke College in 1847–1848 and a revival swept the student body, Hannah Porter, the Praying Circle’s founder, seems to have organized an informal circle of concern around the future poet. It is probable that the Circle, still very much alive, made the stubbornly unconverted young woman a focus of prayer and pressure.

  If there was much that Dickinson took from the Norcross side, there was much she had to resist and reject, to define herself against. A part of this large maternal heritage was Phoebe H. Brown, public poet, the voice of congregations. To grow up with her as the accepted standard could spur a fresh mind into thinking about a more private form of authorship.

  A Narrow Girlhood

  Each of Dickinson’s grandmothers gave birth to nine children and was kept busy by a vast array of pressing domestic labors. But “crazy” as Lucretia Dickinson’s situation at home may have been, at least none of her children died before her. Betsey Norcross had to bury four of hers, including her two oldest, Hiram and Austin, who both died in their twenties. Hiram is thought to have been killed by the mysterious wasting disease known as consumption (tuberculosis). These tragic events had deep and long-lasting effects on the family. When Betsey died, attention was paid to the “severe afflictions, which she was called repeatedly to endure in the sickness and death of children.” And when her oldest daughter, Emily, the poet’s mother, gave birth to her first child, his middle name, the one he went by, was taken from the lamented Austin.

  Another feature of the grandmothers’ generation that had a discernible effect on the poet’s life is that, where Lucretia had four healthy girls to help her, Betsey had only two who reached adulthood—Emily, born in 1804, and Lavinia, born in 1812. These hard facts suggest the poet’s mother did not enjoy the easy girlhood her father Joel’s wealth and standing might otherwise imply. Years later the younger sister recalled “how much care” the huge Norcross house (a converted tavern) entailed. Not only were there boarders to be looked after, but there was generally no more than one hired “girl.” Much of the work had to be done by Emily, who served as Betsey’s mainstay until Lavinia grew old enough to shoulder her part of the load. When Austin and five-year-old Nancy died in 1824, nineteen-year-old Emily must have joined in the hard bedside labor we can only imagine—“watching,” wipin
g a sweaty forehead, holding a basin for spitting blood, helping an emaciated figure out of bed. The traces of this exceptionally responsible girlhood are to be read in Emily Norcross Dickinson’s mature character: a fanatical insistence on household order; a melancholy, inexpressive, relatively inelastic spirit.

  The poet’s mother went to Monson Academy, but for how long or how regularly we cannot say: the early catalogs are gone. In her time it was not assumed that students must be in continual attendance from one term to the next, keeping up with their age-mates. Because there were only two basic levels of instruction, junior and senior, with none of the rigid grade levels we take for granted, pupils often dropped out for one or more terms. Those whose help was required at home would simply interrupt their education.

  The earliest trace of Emily Norcross’s schooling dates from October 1819, when she was fifteen and participated in a Monson Academy “exhibition,” a public display of students’ achievements. A printed program, unearthed eighty years later and reproduced in a newspaper of 1902, shows “E. Norcross” taking the part of Rosamond opposite Queen Eleanor. The girl also played Susan, daughter of a missionary to the Cherokees, and Sylva, daughter of an “ancient Shepherdess” in a pastoral drama called “Search after Happiness.” These performances were succeeded by a ball held in Uncle Amos’s tavern, with Uncle Erasmus Norcross serving as one of four managers. An invitation signed by Erasmus was printed on the back of a playing card, as was customary. The evening seems to have had a surprisingly secular tone.