My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  This uneasiness was caused in part by Emily’s sense of inadequacy as a writer. Dutiful and laborious, she was still far from having mastered the rules of standard written English. Miss Dutch, the Reverend Herrick, and Edward’s well-schooled sisters would have wondered at the misspellings, the opaque diction, the tangled syntax, and that unstable writing voice—its mix of vernacular elements and stilted propriety.

  Still, not only was Emily capable of expressing herself with decision and vigor, but her odd sense of humor was always coming out. Edward’s friend Solomon suddenly became “the wise man.” A string of accidents led her to speak of Edward as enrolled in “the unfortunate society.” Referring to the frequent trips from Belchertown of Maria Flynt’s ministerial fiancé, Emily joked, “We consider Mr Coleman as almost a resident. I imagine he thinks cousin Maria would make but little progress in her favourite study, divinity, without frequent lectures.” There is no prudery here, the language flows easily, and the speaker seems comfortably immersed in the local point of view (“we consider”). The passage shows how firmly the poet’s mother was rooted in her family and native village before being transplanted to Amherst.

  Edward’s proposal of marriage went out in early June. Then came silence. He rode to Monson on July 5 but came home without an answer. Trusting that Emily’s reasons for saying nothing were “good,” he manfully kept up his end of the correspondence, using her first name now. He hoped her father would sanction the match, and offered to write him. Finally, on August 8, addressing Edward by his first name, Emily admitted his last letter had made her happy and hoped he had not inferred a lack of interest from her “poor returns.” Her conflicted feelings are apparent in one of her hopelessly tongue-tied sentences: “Did I not rely with perfect confidence in what you have expressed to me I should not take the liberty to include your happiness with my own but at present I feal privileg to do it.” Following this, she assured him she had read the “pamphlets” he lent her and explained why they were not yet returned. Having cleared that up, she returned to the business at hand, finally giving her answer:

  I think you must be convinced ere this that your intercourse with me is mutual although I have not explained to you my views as I have wished but I will improve this opportunity to acknowledge my warm and increasing attachment to you and that your proposals are what I would wish to comply with, but without the advise and consent of my father I cannot consistantly do it. As I regard his fealings very much should I meet his approbation I will then assure you of my confidence and affection.

  Edward sent his formal request to Joel Norcross after he was out of law school and about to open an office in a new brick building in the center of Amherst (on the site of the present town hall). Deferential but emphatic, he covered all the main points: that Emily’s “virtues” had inspired a “partiality for her,” that his esteem was reciprocated “in a measure,” that the two had “conversed freely & familiarly on the subject,” and that he hoped to become “her legal guardian & protector.” Again, references were sent along with a request to “communicate your opinion to Emily, or me, in any manner you may deem proper.”

  The result: not only did Joel fail to answer but Emily also fell silent. Was her father sending out inquiries? Were there reservations about Edward’s uncertain prospects? The young man continued to send letter after letter, until, finally, taking silence for consent, he raised the delicate question “as to the time when it would be proper to consummate our union.” But he didn’t push, shrewdly allowing there was no hurry and that he must establish himself in his profession. “A few months! perhaps.” This was the right approach, and a week later Emily signaled her agreement: “you may rightly conclude that my feelings are in unison with yours I am happy to learn that you are not disposed to be in haste the reasons you have advanced correspond perfectly with my fathers views.”

  Although the couple was now engaged, the negotiations leading to this result had been far less open than Edward had imagined. Many things conspired to muffle Emily: the dynamics of courtship, the requirements of modesty, her lack of skill in letter-writing, her close attachment to home. Indeed (and this may explain her father’s silence as well as her own), she was so indispensable in the Norcross household that its members were probably unwilling to discuss her leaving. The following summer, when she spent a few weeks in New York City, her brother William noted that “her absence . . . produces quite a vacancy in our small family, and we look for her return with no small degree of pleasure.” Ominously, Betsey Norcross was not only “indisposed” but “quite low,” so that in February 1827 the best that could be said was that “we trust that she is gradually recovering.” If Mother was dying, would she be able to spare Emily? If so, could the family make do? One effect of Edward’s suit was to ask the Norcrosses to speak their own dreadful questions.

  The opacities of the poet’s mother’s life cannot be blamed solely on her husband. The trick is to balance what she brought from Monson with the pressures attributable to him. Still, the daunting effects of his directness and determination should not be underestimated. Nor should something else the young attorney brought to the relationship: his vigorous understanding of the complementarity of his male authority and her “female virtues.”

  After receiving Emily’s final consent, Edward published a forceful exposition of these sex-linked virtues. Even though this act took place three years before the poet’s birth, it would seem to be one of her life’s formative events—the framing of the constitution that would determine and govern her existence.

  What Coelebs Required in a Wife

  Edward had always been an affectionate older brother, with a strong sense of responsibility for his four sisters. Judging from early letters, such as the one in which Lucretia thanked him for his advice on education, it was assumed on both sides that it was his part to counsel and protect and theirs to listen and defer. Mary, his favorite, may have had reservations about his high-handed views on women, but she still complimented his “elegance of style” and deprecated her own “diffuseness.” After Mary’s death many years later, Edward was made guardian of her four girls, one of whom always treasured the memory of his loving support: “His bearing was almost stern in its dignity & nobility, but his nature was as beautiful, & sympathetic, & tender as a mother’s. . . . As a child I feared him, until I found him out when trouble & difficulty came, & my Guardian became my strong, & tender, & lovingly-revered Friend.” The tenderness was loyal and true—but it had to be understood who was boss. When sister Catharine failed to consult him before engaging herself to a man not yet established in business, her nervous anticipation of his response to the news—“You need not stare, or lift up your hands”—speaks volumes. When they next met, she found Edward silent, remote, and “very sober” and before long had to admit they didn’t “seem to make up quite.” He and most of the family didn’t attend her wedding in Andover. Authority was taken seriously in the Dickinson family.

  Edward’s assumption that women were to be guarded by men was the conventional view in his time, but he was unusual in making a special study of female education. In the six years since his junior-year colloquy, the young man’s interest in how to foster and protect the “female virtues” had grown intense and obsessive. Neither his fiancée nor his daughters would be able to ignore his fixed and vehement opinions on the subject, which go a long way toward explaining the poet’s extreme sense of privacy and why publication was such an issue for her.

  One of several ironies is that the person Edward was most indebted to for his formulations was a woman, the learned and prolific Hannah More. *11 A protégée of Samuel Johnson, More exemplified both the urbane culture of the eighteenth century and the evangelicalism of the early nineteenth. Her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education assailed the emphasis on conventional accomplishments and the failure to prepare women of rank for the duties of marriage and motherhood. In America her most influential book was probably Coelebs in Search of a Wife, of which
the Dickinsons owned an edition published in 1820. This plotless novel tells how Coelebs (Latin for “bachelor”) sifts English society for the perfect spouse until his encounters with a series of foolish and vicious wives and daughters persuade him that “the women who bless, dignify, and truly adorn society” are in general “little known, because to be known is not their object. . . . If they occasion little sensation abroad, they produce much happiness at home.” Not only did this become one of Edward’s root ideas but he became determined to disseminate it.

  His forum was Amherst’s first newspaper, The New-England Inquirer, a four-page weekly he helped found in late 1826 and whose initial editor was his friend Osmyn Baker. On December 22, not long after Emily Norcross agreed to marry him, Edward’s five papers on “Female Education” began appearing. Signing himself “Coelebs,” he set out his intentions for the series in a bland and urbane manner. With the second paper, however, things veered out of control with the declaration that he would say “just what I think, and just as I think,” unmoved by either the smiles or frowns of “fair readers.” As he developed the familiar view that the good of society requires women to be wives and mothers, a note of sarcastic defiance not present in More’s equable novel began to be heard. How are we benefited, Coelebs asked, if women annoy men “with endless cant upon subjects of controversy”? Why should women attend college to prepare themselves for “a life of ‘single blessedness’”? It would be preferable for young women to take the veil and spend their lives in nunneries than for men “to sit under the showers of wise reasonings, and learned arguments, which their consciousness of superiority would continually prompt them to pour out upon us.” Summing matters up, Coelebs sketched a scene in which a pushy literary female takes the reins of polite conversation from her husband: “She will introduce your guests to the contents of the last ‘Quarterly’ . . . She will tell them of the beauty of one passage, or the defects of another . . . She knows the character of all our public men, and never hesitates to pronounce an opinion upon the policy of their measures.” Such will be the baneful results of too much female education.

  Even in 1827, these belligerent opinions struck many as extreme and ill-tempered, including the Inquirer’s editor, who called Coelebs “a little ‘notional’” and printed the criticisms of two readers who signed themselves “A Lady” and “Tabitha.” (A later editor would quote a minister who doubted that women were “constitutionally incapacitated for intellectual eminence” or that “there was a sex in the soul.”) Stung, Edward dashed off an invective insinuating that “Tabitha” was not really a woman: “How long since she put off the garb of a man & appeared [in] female dress?” Rather than print this, Baker issued a stern public rebuke: “Coelebs is utterly inadmissible. He will see at a glance the impolicy and injustice of publishing articles intended only to expose” other pseudonymous authors.

  In his third paper, Edward conceded that works of literature might legitimately be read by women. All he wanted was “to guard them against that pedantic, positive, dogmatical & obstinate manner . . . which delights in argument.” The charms of female character are modesty and forbearance, a “willingness to yield to the opinions of persons of superior wisdom.”

  The ferocity implicit in such views came out in full force in what was to have been the fourth paper. In this sarcastic tirade against fashion, Edward described a young woman who has been “ruffled & flounced & furbelowed” and then pictured the shocking consequence—her abandonment of home and duties for “parties of pleasure.” Nothing was quite so sickening as to pass such a creature on the street and “see her turn around to look at you.” There was only one remedy: mothers must teach daughters that it is no hardship to “rise early, & attend to the duties of the house during the whole of the day,” and that it is only by “constantly remaining at home” that they will find husbands.

  Like the reply to “Tabitha,” this essay also proved unpublishable. Returning to the subject of women’s education, Edward used his fifth and final paper to list the intellectual pursuits proper for women. Departing from the strict orthodox view, he allowed that they could read the better kind of novels. Chemistry had a practical value in housekeeping. Botany, as his preliminary outline puts it, “refines & chastens” females. Painting and drawing serve “to make them neat.” To form their taste as letter-writers, they should study Addison and Steele’s Spectator papers. The key point, emerging in Edward’s concluding notation, was “Stay at home.”

  After the essay appeared, Edward reflected on his motives in a letter to his fiancée: “I know not why it is, but I have long . . . felt much interest in having [women] correctly instructed, & their tastes and judgments properly formed.” Wishing “some disinterested person” would furnish a sensible account of women’s duties and seeing no volunteers, he simply stepped forward. Judging from this statement, the young man had little understanding how snarled his feelings were regarding literary women. After meeting Catharine Sedgwick, New England’s best-known woman novelist, he informed Emily she had “an interesting countenance—an appearance of much thought, & rather masculine features.” To be sure, he would regret “to see another Madame de Stael—especially if any one wished to make a partner of her for life. Different qualities are more desirable in a female who enters into domestic relations—and you have already had my opinions on that Subject—More when we meet.” No doubt there was more when they met. *12 Yet Edward had been glad to meet Sedgwick and felt “a conscious pride that women of our own country & our own State, too, are emulating not only the females, but the men of England & France & Germany & Italy in works of literature.” When he read her latest historical novel, Hope Leslie, he admired the two heroines—one English, the other Pequod—and made a point of sending the book to Emily.

  In fact, Edward repeatedly urged his fiancée to look at books by women. It is true he sent her the Spectator papers to refine her deplorable style and often quoted Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, a great favorite, but the fiction he pressed on her consisted of dignified historical novels by women: Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs and Thaddeus of Warsaw and Lydia Maria Child’s The Rebels, or Boston before the Revolution. Edward’s approval of this American novel by a woman who promoted numerous reforms reveals his early liberalism. But the liberalism seems to have wilted: years later his daughter gave a political activist the impression she had grown up without having “heard of Mrs. Child.”

  Unlike the original Coelebs, whose chosen bride is literate and cultivated as well as home-loving, Edward chose a signally unliterary woman. Indeed, one of his papers asks the question some might like to put to him: “How does it affect us . . . to receive an epistle from a valued friend, with half the words mis-spelled—in which capitals & small letters have changed positions—where a plural noun is followed by a singular verb?” To be sure, a similar question confronts admirers of the often ungrammatical poems written by the couple’s daughter.

  Far from abating, Edward’s heated opinions about literary females and staying at home exerted an immensely complicating effect on his daughter’s position as a writer of genius. To publish her poems or proclaim her ambition would have been extremely risky acts. Of the many things that conspired to both energize and silence Dickinson, her father’s emphatic views were not the least salient.

  The ironies could hardly be more extreme or punishing. Assuming a mask invented by a gifted woman, the poet’s father set out to explain why women should not develop and deploy their minds. He chose to marry a (mostly) obedient and inexpressive woman who would not usurp his talking rights, and then he became a remote and often silent paterfamilias. He fathered one of the greatest of poets but probably never realized it.

  It misses the point to think of Edward as a tyrant. Given his admiration of selected women writers, it would seem that in some tacit or subterranean way he invited his daughter to write. She herself drew attention to his conflicting messages when she told Higginson in 1862 that Father “buys me many Books—but begs me not to
read them—because he fears they joggle the Mind.” If by “the Mind” we understand “the female mind,” this remark looks like a critical summation of Edward’s Coelebs papers, which say, essentially, that, though women should be taught the alphabet, this is a risky operation that too often results in a crazy feminine rattle. If the paternal text was You must not be a public author, the subtext may have been Write in private.

  Coelebs Gets His Wife

  Just east of the building in which Edward had his office was the spacious home of Jemima Montague, an aging widow with family ties to both his parents. Although her husband’s will gave her a secure lifetime tenancy, Samuel Fowler Dickinson had acquired the title to both the house and the seventeen acres that went with it. Not imagining any hitches, Edward informed his fiancée that he could have the place “any time I please, as my father has the control of it.” He could either “hire, or buy, as shall be thought best.”

  A carpenter was found, and by early 1828 improvements were under way in the part of the house not occupied by the widow. It would soon be a fitting residence for an up-and-coming attorney and his respectable bride, and Edward pressed Emily Norcross to come and inspect the premises, so as to “have a voice in the style of making the repairs & improvements.”

  There was also the question of Emily’s prenuptial visit to her future in-laws, about which one of Edward’s sisters, Lucretia, was polite but pressing:

  We have Miss Norcross, been anticipating the pleasure of a visit from you this season, & much regret that it is inconvenient for you to come. I have only to add, that it would be very gratifying to all of us, & should you make it convenient at any time this winter, to spend a week or two with us; we should be happy to see you.