My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  This passage hints at the general assumptions about work in the Dickinson household: Austin and Emily were not to be brought up as menials, the work they performed was defined by gender, they were given simple household chores, and they were not given too many of them. In their early years, the children undoubtedly did less hard work and had fewer responsibilities than their mother had taken on. In a way, she was the family menial—which seems to be what she wanted.

  As Edward’s letters home indicate, he was always looking out for “the best methods of instruction & government” of his children. The family’s child-raising manual, The Mother at Home; or the Principles of Maternal Duty, by the Reverend John S. C. Abbott, was full of sensible advice, which the Dickinson parents seem to have taken: “Guard against too much severity.” “Do not be continually finding fault.” “Do not deceive children.” “Never punish by exciting imaginary fears.” And yet there was so much guarding, so many precautions, that even as the parents tried to create the perfect shelter they instilled a great anxiety in its very heart. For the Dickinson children, it was both official truth and heartfelt conviction that home was paradise. Yet home also oppressed; and as time passed, the children, Emily most of all, perfected the art of living separately in close proximity.

  What happened was that, beginning with the close attachment to her mother that expressed itself during the thunderstorm, the child absorbed much of her language, and a certain humor and toughness and sense of privacy, and many other things. But before long, because of Mother’s illnesses and narrow ways and self-exhausting tendencies, and partly because of the family enterprise of sparing her, the older daughter had to develop a precocious independence.

  This two-phase sequence helps us construe a statement that has given rise to some grim readings of the poet’s life: “I never had a mother.” In August 1870 she apparently spoke these words to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who soon after jotted them down along with some of her other statements; he may have got them right. The inevitable inference is that she was never much attached to her mother, that the mother failed her emotionally, and that the result was a profound deformation.

  In fact, the forty-year-old poet was undoubtedly referring, not to her early attachment to her mother, but to the second and more easily remembered phase. She was also probably reacting to Higginson’s reverential article on mother love in the previous month’s Atlantic Monthly and demonstrating her ability to think about this loaded topic more candidly than he. Having declared she never had a mother, she at once added, “I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” As the clarification suggests, what she was talking about was not so much her filial bond as her independence of mind, which had struck Higginson as one of her most remarkable qualities. Where had that come from? The poet’s answer: from not running to Mother with her troubles, from learning how to deal in private with doubt, dread, awe. “There are depths in every Consciousness,” she wrote in the 1870s, “to which none can go with us.” When oppressed with fears and worries, the girl had done as Father ordered (“not disturb mother”) and kept them to herself. One of the ways Emily Dickinson became herself was by not making a confidante of her burdened mother.

  We have a very revealing report from the mid-1830s of the Dickinson children’s sensitivity to their mother’s anxious states. One of the things that worried her when traveling alone was that her luggage would be lost en route. This fear, possibly exaggerated, was by no means unfounded: others shared it, public conveyances were rough and primitive, and it was widely assumed that women had better be escorted. Women of Emily’s class put a great deal of time and effort into their public outfits, the loss of which condemned them to not stepping out—enjoying the evening air. After Mother left for Boston in 1835, Austin woke up in the night and was told a letter had just come from her. The first thing the six-year-old boy did was to ask “very anxiously . . . whether she said anything about losing her luggage.” We could not ask for better anecdotal evidence of the children’s early love and concern for their mother.

  Although most of Dickinson’s recorded memories of girlhood probably date from after the 1830s, there is one that should be mentioned here because of what it says about her early feelings for and perceptions of her mother. “Two things I have lost with Childhood,” the poet jotted down some time after Mrs. Dickinson’s death in 1882: “the rapture of losing my shoe in the mud and going Home barefoot, grasp wading for Cardinal flowers and the mothers reproof which was for more for my sake than her weary own for she frowned with a smile.” The passage captures many aspects of the writer’s girlhood: the interest in flowers (learned in part from Mother); the questing, pleasure-seeking spirit; the accidental nature of her transgression; her sense that her mother was always weary; and her perception that the reproof did not come from the heart. There is both an implicit filial sympathy here and an unbridgeable chasm. We see how the daughter who later said she “was always attached to Mud” had begun to define herself against her housekeeping mother.

  But underneath everything were Edward’s protective anxieties, far more forceful than his wife’s and always projected outward. “When I was a baby,” the poet wrote in her fifties, “father used to take me to mill for my health. I was then in consumption! While he obtained the ‘grist,’ the horse looked round at me, as if to say ‘“eye hath not seen or ear heard the things that” *20 I would do to you if I weren’t tied!’” Like most early memories, this one stands in inexplicable isolation. The family record mentions no trips to the flour mill and has no overt references to the daughter’s being “in consumption.” It seems out of character that Edward of all people would expose a child with bad lungs to a mill’s fine floating dust. Indeed, the writer seems struck with amazement that Father could have done that. Still, the sense of not being well and of being at risk from the horse’s large, placid, backward-staring eye gives us the exact stamp of Edward’s dire admonitions. “Do not get out and go near the horse, or you will be trampled,” one almost hears him saying. Then, going about his business, he leaves the child sitting there and looking at that eye, her mind taking shape under the pressure of fears real and imaginary.

  Chapter 6

  1836–1840: The Fire-Stealer’s Girlhood

  In a poem dating from the early 1860s, one of Dickinson’s first-person speakers begins with a complaint about being shut up in a prosaic or literal reality, then turns her attention to a scene from childhood. Remembering how she was put in a closet as punishment for her loudness or volubility, she revels in her triumphant escape:

  They shut me up in Prose –

  As when a little Girl

  They put me in the Closet –

  Because they liked me “still” –

  Still! Could themself have peeped –

  And seen my Brain – go round –

  They might as wise have lodged a Bird

  For Treason – in the Pound –

  Himself has but to will

  And easy as a Star

  Look down opon Captivity –

  And laugh – No more have I –

  Fr445

  The last four words mark a return to the present. What they apparently say is that now, as in the past, she has “but to will”—has to do no more than that—in order to escape prison and achieve flight or song.

  Dickinson’s poems often lay claim to a kind of sovereignty traditionally identified with deity itself. What is striking about this one is that the consciousness of power seems to originate in childhood within a cage.

  Early Schooling

  One Sunday in 1839, during Edward Dickinson’s second term in the state legislature, he visited the state prison near Boston in order to observe brother-in-law Loring teach a Sabbath School lesson. Afterward, he sent his children a report of an inmate’s pitiable illiteracy: “The poor ignorant fellow took a [pin?] & pointed to each letter, & called it by name, but could not pronounce words. I instructed him how to pronounce several little words, such as ‘and,
in, to, the, of &c’—& he seemed much interested—said he wished he could have me teach him, every Sabbath.” The father wanted to make sure his children understood the inestimable value of literacy.

  Before Emily Dickinson went to Amherst Academy in the 1840s, she learned to read, write, spell, and do simple arithmetic in a common school, which she began attending by age five. Although the surviving family record doesn’t identify the particular institution, it was probably the West Center District School, located at what is now 220 North Pleasant Street, a half-mile or so from the Dickinson Homestead. One of eight district schools, the two-story edifice was built of brick and dated from the late 1820s. Outside were a woodshed, a so-called necessary, and a stink rising from Colonel Horace Smith’s adjacent sewer. The scholars were divided into two groups, age seven being the dividing line. Instruction would have been based on chants, drills, a standard speller, and so forth. The New England Primer and Westminster Catechism may have been reserved for home.

  The reason for thinking Emily went to the West Center District School instead of a private one is that her father’s election to the town’s General School Committee in 1832 implies a commitment to public education. In 1841 he presided at a county school convention featuring Horace Mann, secretary of the state board of education, whose long address developed the proposition that our innate passions must be corrected and supplemented by learned knowledge. One of Mann’s negative examples was the loving “but ignorant mother” who unknowingly exposes her darlings to the risk of consumption by tucking them into a tightly closed bedchamber in winter.

  Curiously, the one point in Emily’s early schooling on which we are well informed is that she was rigorously kept at home during spells of sloppy weather and sickness. Her father’s first mention of her and her siblings’ attendance makes it sound like an adventure well over: “the children went to school to-day—and are now all snug in bed.” Health and safety were the overriding concerns, and not just for Edward: when Aunt Lavinia inquired whether Emily and Austin had started school, she at once added, “it is too bad to send them in the cold weather.” Of course, the weather did not threaten the children equally: the same letter in which Edward instructed Austin to “be a nice boy—go to school—mind your mother” had these orders for Emily: “You must not go to school, when it is cold, or bad going—You must be very careful, & not get sick.” When Lavinia was nearly five and probably a scholar, Edward identified the older sister as the one who needed protection. “Take good care of Emily, when you go to school,” he commanded Austin, “& not let her get hurt.”

  Because of the sickness and “bad going” (“I never knew the mud so deep,” wrote Mrs. Dickinson), Emily spent no more than two or three days at school during the first three weeks of January 1838. In February, writing home from Boston during a violent snowstorm, her father sent the following orders: “Don’t let Austin be out too much in cold, stormy weather. Emily must not go to school, at all. Keep Lavinia from croup & fits.” Even in mid-March, judging from one of Edward’s letters—“I suppose Austin goes to school—let him be careful about getting cold”—Emily was not being let out.

  Other parents seem to have been less fixated on their girls’ liability to sickness. Among the children of Amherst professors, Helen Fiske was a rough-and-tumble tomboy and Rebecca Snell is known to have enjoyed “a good sledding day.” For Emily more than for most girls, winter meant confinement. It isn’t clear she ever played in the snow.

  Some of the general assumptions behind Emily’s schooling can be seen in Edward’s advice to his girls (not his boy) during mild winter weather and “bad going.” They were to “keep school, & not disturb Mother,” or, again, to “keep school and learn, so as to tell me, when I come home, how many new things you have learned.” To “learn” was to memorize discrete bits that could be exhibited orally, in a mimicry of classroom recitations or end-of-term examinations. To “keep school” was to do the lessons at home. Massachusetts led the nation in public education, yet the only mention of attendance in the Revised Statutes of 1835 asks ministers, selectmen, and school committees to use “their best endeavors” to encourage it. This was not laxity but a function of the times: as long as schooling was defined as memorization and recitation, the ritualized objectivity had the surprising effect of preserving children from subtler and more invasive classroom tyrannies. Later, as grade levels and lesson plans were invented and the teaching corps was professionalized, schools became a place where children were subjected to a process of elaborately stepped socialization. Because these graduated rigors came after Emily’s time, she was free to set her own pace in ways we find hard to imagine.

  Although it is impossible to quantify her school attendance, it appears she acquired much of her early learning at home, in the presence of a mother who spelled “feeling” with an “a.” Does that help explain why Dickinson began “upon” with an “o” for most of her life, or why she and her sister and brother never learned, or bothered with, standard punctuation? In Emily’s first letter, from age eleven, there are no periods or paragraphs and the “ou” combination in “would” and “you” looks like an “a.” Yet the script is tiny, neat, and perfectly even, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the composition is so fresh and fluent it is obvious the writer felt wholly at ease with a pen in her hand.

  So it looks as if one result of the poet’s early schooling was that she took to the air before quite mastering the ground. It is what we have just seen in “They shut me up in prose”: the escape from ordinariness into freedom and fantasy.

  Literature for Children

  During courtship, Edward saw that his fiancée had access to a current magazine of light and decorous literature. Now he arranged for his offspring to get a leading New England monthly for genteel juveniles: “My Dear little Children—I send you some of Parley’s Magazine—They have some interesting stories for you to read. I want to have you remember some of them to tell me when I get home.” Parley’s contents are summed up in the six departments named on its cover: travel, biography, history, poetry, moral tales, and puzzles. Every issue had rhymed conundrums at the foot of the page and a sprinkling of curious reports from around the world. One of the issues Edward probably sent had an article on the Roman carnival that described the cross-dressing carmen “fanning themselves with a pretended delicacy” and their mistresses “strutting in breeches,” but only to caution all good little readers that this sort of thing was “not to be tolerated in regular society.”

  Edward’s purpose in bringing Parley’s Magazine into his home was obviously to provide his offspring with an approved source of entertainment and stimulation. A tract the Dickinsons seem to have owned, Mistakes of Parents, warned that “sufficient pains are not generally taken to make home interesting and pleasant.” “A happy home, is a heaven on earth” was part of Father’s creed, and he was always taking “pains” to make his own a center of relaxed (not too relaxed) social pleasure. “All be pleasant to each other & try to make it pleasant & happy at home”: this odd imperative shows up in his letters at least as often as the more standard commands such as “don’t deceive” and “obey your mother.”

  There was not a great deal of pleasant juvenile literature in the 1830s. Inevitably, one of the works that figured in Emily’s experience was Isaac Watts’s eighteenth-century Divine and Moral Songs for Children. Song number 18, “Against Scoffing and Calling Names,” was a versification of II Kings 2:23–24, where forty-two bad children mock the prophet Elisha and receive their just recompense from two she-bears:

  When children, in their wanton play,

  Serv’d old Elisha so;

  And bid the prophet go his way,

  “Go up, thou bald-head, go:”

  God quickly stopp’d their wicked breath,

  And sent two raging bears,

  That tore them limb from limb to death,

  With blood, and groans, and tears.

  The girl may have learned the song at her church’s Sa
bbath School, which met between morning and afternoon services and was in a flourishing condition in the early 1830s. Decades later, when cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross joined a rather more liberal religious study group, Dickinson recalled the ursine mayhem as epitomizing her childhood’s harsh faith: “I believe the love of God may be taught not to seem like bears.”

  Another of Watts’s moral songs that Dickinson may have learned was number 15, “Against Lying,” of which one stanza goes:

  The Lord delights in them that speak

  The words of truth; but every liar

  Must have his portion in the lake

  That burns with brimstone and with fire.

  In the 1880s a note Dickinson sent a small boy drew this contrast between the terrors of the moral law and Jesus’ message:

  “All Liars shall have their part” – Jonathan Edwards –“And let him that is athirst come” – Jesus –

  Like others, Dickinson came to see Edwards as the ultimate purveyor of Calvinist terror. But it was Asa Bullard, her uncle by marriage, who was the key agent in spreading the fear of death and damnation among children of her generation. *21 Smooth and narrow, Bullard was a different kind of believer from the Dickinsons. In the early thirties he became editor of the Sabbath School Visiter, a leading children’s evangelical monthly. This magazine offered a variety of brief homilies, moral tales, reports from the mission field, exhortations aimed at parents and Sunday School teachers, and conversion statistics. Two features stand out for the modern reader: the drive to convert young children and the emphasis on illness, physical dismemberment, and early death. In Bullard’s magazine, there was an insidious link between God and bears.