My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Writing Abiah in early May, Emily told how a friend she “love[d] so dearly” implored her in the sink room, as she washed the noon dishes, to ride with him in “the sweet-still woods,” and how she overcame the “temptation,” apparently because of her domestic duties during Mother’s continuing illness. In the 1890s Vinnie confided to a few acquaintances that Gould had wanted to marry her sister, and that when Father refused to sanction the match, the couple had a passionate last interview in which she vowed to be faithful till death and wear nothing but white. Even though it would have been in character for Edward to discourage an impoverished suitor with no career as yet, the story has not been taken seriously, for two good reasons: it shows all the marks of a fevered and commonplace imagination, and Dickinson did not adopt perpetual white until the 1860s.

  Yet Emily’s hesitant refusal to ride with a friend she loved “so dearly” does point to a romantic interest, possibly in Gould. Further, her wish to tell Jane “what you only shall know” reveals that Austin and Vinnie were mostly in the dark and can’t be taken as inside sources in this matter. In school at Ipswich, Vinnie could have had no direct or firsthand knowledge, particularly of the episode in the sink room. Learning about the romance afterward, she would have been likely to give it a conventionally melodramatic cast. The notion of a grand once-in-a-lifetime passion may be dismissed—but not the veiled hints in Emily’s letters or the likelihood that the publication of her Valentine had unpleasant consequences for her. “Our father . . . never hindered our friendships after we were children” (italics added), Vinnie asserted in 1895, correcting a fictitious account of how Edward spiked Emily’s marriage. This interestingly qualified assertion is consistent with a scenario that feels right and reasonable but can’t be proven—that Edward took some sort of disciplinary step to arrest his nineteen-year-old daughter’s involvement with the impoverished editor who had connived at her exposure in print. *60

  There was definitely something, “an experience bitter, and sweet,” as Emily characterized it in April, leaving a dream of “one gold thread.” “Nobody thinks of the joy, nobody guesses it, to all appearance old things are engrossing,” she wrote Jane (again showing how little the family knew); “there now is nothing old, things are budding, and springing, and singing.” In May she was still “dreaming, dreaming a golden dream, with eyes all the while wide open,” though now it was “almost morning” and she was immersed in humdrum domestic work. The rapture, largely anticipatory, seems to involve the possibility of disappointment or even betrayal: “I hope belief is not wicked, and assurance, and perfect trust. . . . I hope human nature has truth in it.” One hears an anti-Calvinist note here, a denial of depravity and a hopeful declaration similar to what she later said she learned from Benjamin Newton—“a faith in things unseen, and in a life again, nobler, and much more blessed.” At the same time, her hope seems placed on something less abstract and more personal than that, perhaps on individual “human nature.”

  Some believe her visionary dream was literary; some think it was romantic. It may be that both guesses are correct, mixed in a recipe now lost. Finally, the riddle eludes us, and we are left with the tantalizing images sent to Jane and Abiah, pictures evoking a hope too rich and risky to be committed to paper—a bright future with one gold thread too faded for us to see.

  No Laughing or Loud Talking

  A first-person narrative poem from 1862 begins:

  It would never be Common – more – I said –

  Difference – had begun –

  Convinced that every “bitterness” has ended, the speaker feels her joy “publish” itself in her eye and on her cheek. With no chariness whatever, she deals “a word of Gold/To every Creature” she meets. Then, for no cause given, she undergoes a complete and instantaneous collapse into her old state of deprivation, and as her attention returns to her sackcloth hanging on its nail, she wonders what can have happened to her

  . . . moment of Brocade –

  My – drop – of India?

  Fr388

  The poem tells one of Dickinson’s most important stories: midnight at noon, the relapse into despair just when complete fulfillment seems imminent. Although we can’t assume the events of the first half of 1850 inspired this midnight-at-noon poem, they seem to fit it well. Going further than ever in her writing and friendships with men, Dickinson was swamped by the biggest evangelical wave yet, resulting in the conversion of her sister and father and terminating her first sustained expressive surge.

  Vinnie’s change of heart took place during an “awakening” at Ipswich Female Seminary orchestrated by the principal, the Reverend John P. Cowles. His wife, the matron, had been an associate of Mary Lyon, and the drill at Ipswich resembled that at Mount Holyoke. According to Jane E. Hitchcock, Vinnie’s friend and fellow pupil, the teachers preached daily “about restraining our feelings,” exhorting the girls “to put on the screws” and threatening “that if we do it not ourselves, they shall do it for us.” Vinnie’s first letter to Austin was full of her customary flippancy, but by March resistance had collapsed: “At times, I desire religion above all things, & this world seems small indeed. . . . Does Emilie think of these things at all? Oh! that she might!”

  Before this surrender, Vinnie had wondered if Amherst’s winter gaieties would provoke “the good people” to “foresee certain destruction.” She was right: with February came a period of somber public reflection—in Reverend Colton’s phrase, “a season of anxious suspense.” Attention focused on the sale of liquor, some college students having been too free or public in their drinking. The question of prohibition was put on the agenda for the annual town meeting, and when March 4 arrived, a huge number of voters assembled. The words that carried the day, spoken by President Hitchcock, were delivered “with an emphasis that fairly choked his utterance”: “better that the college should go down, than that young men should come here to be ruined by drink places.” Only one or two voters dared oppose the motion. Next morning the “rum resorts” were closed.

  With that, a revival began at the college, with the same quiet but powerful scenes as at Yale in 1820 and Mount Holyoke in 1847–1848: heavy attendance at devotional meetings, “no sound of laughing or loud talking,” not even “heavy footsteps in the halls.” Several professors’ children were affected, including Emily’s friend Mary Warner. On the last day before spring break, profane Henry Shipley was “hopefully converted.” In most years no more than a handful of students joined the college church by profession of faith. This year there was a Sunday on which thirty-two previously unchurched young people, the highest number ever, crowded forward to become members, Shipley among them. *61

  By then the fervor had spread from college to town, with Emily’s only remaining unsaved friends, Abby Wood and Susan Gilbert, undergoing the great and mysterious transformation. “Christ is calling everyone here,” she wrote; “all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion.” The church held its evening meetings in the academy building instead of the dismal basement vestry, which Father might not have entered. Many who once stayed away attended night after night, “proud and hard hearts that had hitherto resisted every call.” The packed meetings were “pervaded by a death-stillness, except as broken by sobs that could not be wholly suppressed.” On Sunday, May 26, Mrs. Fanny H. Boltwood was told by Mrs. Abby Sweetser and Mrs. Phydelia Kellogg (whose house adjoined the Dickinsons’) that Edward Dickinson, no less, “had hopefully been converted. He has been long struggling with his feelings.” The rumor was true, *62 and in August he and Susan Gilbert and sixty-eight others joined the First Church, Vinnie following in November. We can assume Mother felt great relief and joy, and that Emily was drawn closer to Austin, the only other family member not in the fold.

  As was always the case in revivals, the unregenerate were besieged with concerned visitations and letters. After Emily was talked to by Abby and others, perhaps including Vinnie,
she confided to Jane that she didn’t know “what they have found, but they think it is something precious. I wonder if it is?” She noted how “the eyes of the disobedient look down, and become ashamed,” while the saved “seem so very tranquil, and their voices are kind, and gentle, and the tears fill their eyes so often.” She asked Jane and Abiah to pray for her conversion—but she also lingered on the “golden dream” and her bold strange acts and how thrilled she still felt.

  In thinking about this contradiction, we should note that Dickinson was speaking to the converted. How would she have sounded to an unorthodox friend—Newton, Austin? A recently discovered letter from her brother suggests an answer.

  In March or April, Emily Fowler addressed a message of Christian exhortation to Emily and Austin, to which the latter presently replied. The next day Fowler responded with a long letter pleading with him not to be “anxious about your feelings. God may not be working on you by . . . an agonizing conviction of your sinfulness. He may be drawing you by cords of love.” Fowler was emphatic: “Do not let this want of ‘a sense of sinfulness’ be a serious difficulty.”

  The newly found document, preserved in Emily Fowler Ford’s copy of Dickinson’s 1890 Poems, is the letter from Austin that elicited this advice. In it, he admits he has been a doubter, raising “objections upon almost every point.” But within the last few days religion has begun to seem “more real—more desirable,” mainly because he has been “struck with the lovely traits of character” in those who have been converted. Now he is giving the subject more thought “than all my life before—My great difficulty has been in getting a sense of my sinfulness.”

  The passage that concerns us comes near the end, where the young man divulges his sister’s reaction to Fowler’s well-meant interference. Nowhere in the record do we get a more telling glimpse of the poet’s immediate response to social pressure.

  Your letter is a great prize to me—I have read & reread it many times—Emily I presume, will not answer it—She is rather too wild at present—Vinnie is quite serious—and determined to be a christian—She sends her love to you—If you write another double letter—I think it had better be to Vinnie & I—rather than E. [Emily] & I.

  That there is a cordial message from Vinnie but nothing from Emily speaks volumes. Instead of exhibiting Austin’s compliant spirit, she is “rather too wild at present”—out of control, not amenable to persuasion, not “serious.” These disclosures, coming from the brother Emily thought of as her partner in mischief, represent a subtle act of betrayal, a whisper behind her back about how unruly and unreasonable she insists on being.

  Austin’s description of his sister is consistent with the violent language, mood swings, disguises, and contradictions apparent in her letters that spring, offering an outside take on the raw emotional states that drove that writing. It also offers a handle on her first known message to Fowler, thought to have been written in early 1850. Professing the warmest affection, the poet says she would pay a visit this morning if it weren’t for the “wicked snow-storm” (of which four were reported in March 1850). That this may be the letter Austin reported Emily as too wild to undertake is suggested by the odd confessions with which it opens: that she had an undisclosed dream about Fowler the previous night, and that “me, and my spirit were fighting this morning.” Her intent is evidently to appease and disarm, to keep this concerned friend at a distance: writing on a day when a visit is out of the question, she speaks of her turmoil and anger in such a way that Fowler is free to imagine a hopeful religious struggle, and leave her alone.

  Like the communications sent to Hannah Porter when Dickinson was at Mount Holyoke, Austin’s letter reveals how she was managed behind her back by trusted confederates. His recommendation that Fowler not write her raises a central question about her future seclusion: granting that it was self-chosen, was she also pushed in this direction by family pressure? Was she “handled with a Chain” (her phrase in a poem on the treatment of nonconformists, Fr620) just when everyone else was converting and getting serious and closing the rum places and she was tasting her first Domingo?

  In April, Emily wrote Jane, “How lonely this world is growing, something so desolate creeps over the spirit and we dont know its name, and it wont go away.” Several more years and she would be ready to name it: midnight at noon.

  Chapter 12

  1850–1852: Somebody’s Rev-e-ries

  As the product of a well-guarded nest, Dickinson had been shielded from many of the social expectations that tyrannize the young, and now took for granted her home’s undoubted superiority. Her sister and brother had the same mind-set, all three showing the varieties of independence and dependency, arrogance and narcissism, that such a home engenders. Predictably, they all felt grave misgivings about the onset of adulthood. Vinnie wished “we were all children again & lifes battle not begun,” and Austin declared he “would love to be a child always . . . to have a child’s pleasure, & a child’s freedom from care—a child’s father & mother . . . to depend upon.” But it was the extravagantly endowed sibling, the one slowly moving toward literary production through a thicket of prohibitions, who had the most trouble growing up. “I wish we were children now,” Emily confessed to Austin in 1853; “I wish we were always children, how to grow up I dont know.”

  Some of the Dickinson siblings’ least appealing traits resulted from the retention in adulthood of traits and habits characteristic of childhood. Yet the same tendency helps explain the poet’s creative freedom from the hidebound rules the adult world took seriously. For good and ill, a kind of retardation in growing up was a vital aspect of her poetic vocation.

  Reading and Fancying

  To follow what Dickinson read from 1850 to 1852 is to see her moving through a more subdued and inward phase than that of the previous two years, when books like Jane Eyre and men like Benjamin Newton, Elbridge Bowdoin, George Gould, and others helped provoke a wild coming-out. *63 For many reasons, ranging from the repressions of her religious and patriarchal culture to her own apparent constitutional frailness, the public world was closed to her, mandating a search for some alternative to open expression and publication. Inevitably, she was drawn to the life of fancy, which essayed the future through imaginative self-projection, not practical effort. Fancy, exquisitely cultivated with close female friends, now became the essential resource.

  In her reading, Dickinson tended more than ever to cut out the vivid bits and paste them into her unfolding life. In David Copperfield she seized on the famous marriage proposal, “Barkis is very willin’,” to characterize her mother’s wish for a bonnet resembling Aunt Lavinia’s. She applied Mrs. Micawber’s staunch fidelity (“I will never desert Micawber”) to her own faithfulness in writing Austin. Strangest of all was her use of Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, where poor old Hepzibah, pathetically loyal to her feeble-minded brother, goes wandering with him through the country until “kind angels took both of them home.” To Emily, it “seemed almost a lesson,” and when her brother left for Boston, she stood in the wind and pelting drops until he was out of sight, afraid he might “turn around for a last look at home and I should not be there.” One thing fancy did not promote was levelheaded judgment.

  The quantity of mediocre writing she took seriously can be alarming. From 1850 to 1853 she quoted no poem more often, six times, than Longfellow’s wet consolation lyric, “The Rainy Day”:

  The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;

  It rains, and the wind is never weary;

  My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past;

  But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast;

  And the days are dark and dreary;

  Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;

  Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;

  Thy fate is the common fate of all,

  Into each life some rain must fall,

  Some days must be dark and dreary.

  Dickinson’s citations of the poem suggest she valued
the drippy moral advice as much as the atmospheric melancholy. Of course, not only was Longfellow the quotable American poet of the day, but “Be still, sad heart” was one of her own self-exhortations following the events of spring 1850.

  But it is hard to understand why she bothered with Light in the Valley: A Memorial of Mary Elizabeth Stirling, Who Died at Haddonfield, N.J., Jan. 30, 1852, a long tract heavily overlaid with pious moralizing. Or with Matilda Anne MacKarness’s “Only,” shoddy hackwork that drives home the harmful effects of self-indulgence. In the other work of fiction by MacKarness that the poet read, The House on the Rock, the heroine learns how to give up “the wild excitement of . . . romantic love” with a man above her in station (the author was British) and settle for the “calm and peaceful” life of an unmarried schoolteacher. Naming these books in a letter to Susan Gilbert, Dickinson admitted “they dont bewitch me any. There are no walks in the wood – no low and earnest voices, no moonlight, nor stolen love, but pure little lives, loving God, and their parents, and obeying the laws of the land.” One would think that this fine summing up disposed of these severely didactic narratives once and for all, yet Dickinson also praised them as “sweet and true” and able to “do one good.” Eager to be bewitched, she also took for granted her appetite had no validity.

  Dickinson is not known to have met with the new and exciting novels by American women that dominated the market in the 1850s, many of them patterned after The Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner: perhaps they were screened out by Amherst’s tastemakers. Whatever the explanation, most of the women’s books that crossed Dickinson’s path at this time came from England and were pitched to the religious trade. In spring 1852 she, Austin, and Susan Gilbert read Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Ellen Middleton, a grim life history of a woman whose involvement in a child’s accidental drowning gives rise to false guilt and other complications. The author had the sort of Anglo-Catholic mentality that gravitated toward good county society, wise priests, and scenes of painful devotion. *64 Sensing the novel’s remoteness from her life, Emily looked forward to discussing it with Susan: “we must find out if some things contained therein are true, and if they are, what you and me are coming to!” The statement suggests she saw her reading as a kind of fieldwork, something experimental.