Emily’s view of the social rituals Vinnie loved was that “a constant interchange wastes tho’t and feeling, and we are then obliged to repair and renew – there is’nt the brimfull feeling”—cousin of the old “king feeling.” All the same, she loved seeing the chosen few and thinking about them in their absence; indeed, the point of staying home alone was partly to commune more intensely over a distance. A penciled note sent to Susan decades later sums up this imaginative intensity: “To the faithful Absence is condensed presence – To others, but there are no others – ” All the same, she was uneasy about her brother’s antisocial potential, and when he lived in a boardinghouse in Boston, she and Vinnie urged him to spend time with friends, fearing that isolation would “make an ascetic” of him.
Dickinson could not always count on the self-possession that carries one through embarrassments. One cold March evening, when Father was rheumatic and making a bear of himself in the sitting room, she found herself trapped between his command “not to stand at the door” (owing to drafts *66) and a male caller’s reluctance to step inside. When the contretemps was over, she returned to the kitchen, where Mother and Vinnie were “making most desperate efforts to control themselves.” Then two more young men called and she went back to the sitting room and struggled to keep the talk alive as Father stiffly presided. Her trite observation about the weather was greeted with nervous and “wonderful unanimity,” and then she came out with the absurd statement that last Sunday’s preacher bore a “strong resemblance” to evangelist George Whitefield—of the previous century. “Oh such a look as I got from my rheumatic sire,” she wrote her brother. Capping the incongruities, in walked Father’s unstylish cousin from Hadley, Thankful Smith, wrapped in “the furs and robes of her ancestors.” Emily wanted to “shrink away into primeval nothingness.” Not until Father and Thankful retired to the kitchen did she, Vinnie, and the young men enjoy themselves.
This account of her embarrassment is full of revelations about the inner workings of the Dickinson household and the domestic sources of Emily’s liveliest writing. The half-choked laughter in the kitchen makes audible the nervous accommodations Mother and Vinnie made to the stiff patriarchal back they lived with. This situation encouraged Emily to spin (and of course embroider) her own amusing narratives of such episodes, her writing being fed by the stifled glee of the household women who couldn’t write. The scene helps explain the poet’s fondness for grotesque fun, even at her own expense: for her, good jokes and good writing had to do with a certain absence of competent social dignity.
Such considerations shed light on her persistent uneasiness with Emily Fowler. Not only was this older friend said to be “the most beautiful woman who ever went out of Amherst,” but she had the public assurance Dickinson lacked. Coached from an early age by her able mother (Noah Webster’s daughter), she acquitted herself with aplomb at public exams. When her bosom friend, Olivia Coleman, lay dying in fall 1847, she traveled alone to Princeton to be with her—a mission that would have been beyond Dickinson. Indeed, Fowler rather imposed herself: in 1873, writing George Eliot no less, she let it be known she was a member “by birth and position . . . of what has been playfully called ‘the brahmin’ caste of New England.” One cannot imagine Dickinson making such a boast while approaching an admired eminence.
When Fowler’s life took a painful turn, Dickinson felt a deep but complicated pity, telling Austin in fall 1851 that their beautiful friend had never “seemed more sincere.” Her family home was breaking up as her brothers matured and left, and her unsympathetic father did not approve of her fiancé, Francis Andrew March, a brilliant Amherst graduate just starting out on Wall Street. That winter March’s lungs hemorrhaged and he had to sail south, abandoning his partnership and releasing Emily Fowler from their engagement. Dickinson followed the story with deep interest, informing Austin in February that the sick man had reached “Havana – and writes encouragingly . . . Emily [Fowler] has much to make her sad – I wonder how she endures all her numberless trials.” To Fowler, Dickinson overflowed with sympathy and solace, always on the assumption she would keep faith with her menaced lover. In May the poet wanted “very much to hear how Mr M is now . . . it’s a good many weeks since I hav[e] known anything of him. . . . I shall pray for him, and for you, and for your home on earth, which will be next the one in heaven.” *67 The home in heaven comes up in another letter as well: “dont weep, for you will both be so happy, where ‘sorrow cannot come.’”
What Dickinson didn’t know was that Fowler’s father preferred a rival, and that Fowler was not averse. On March 12 this parent sent a warm invitation to Gordon L. Ford, her ex-fiancé’s former—and wealthy—partner: “We should all of us be glad to see you” (italics added). At month’s end the poet innocently noted that Ford was in town and had come calling with Emily. The next year Vinnie could hardly believe it when Fowler chose to forget her recovering ex-fiancé *68 and marry the new man. Dickinson was respectful and congratulatory, but privately she called him “a popinjay.”
Beautiful, cultured, poised, saved—one of Mark Twain’s Christians holding four aces—Emily Fowler Ford was not the kind of person one would expect Dickinson to warm to. But before the pretense of intimacy ended, no one brought out the poet’s precious and unreal side more than she. According to Vinnie’s diary, she called on the family at least eighteen times in 1851. Of the poet’s ten notes or letters sent locally to her, all but three explain why it is not possible to make a reciprocal visit. Once, presenting her latest excuse, she used a piece of paper only two and a half inches wide to announce her resolve to pay many visits and “stay a long while.” The real message would seem to be: anxious avoidance.
The most interesting of these notes must be reproduced in its entirety:
Thursday morn
Dear Emily,
I cant come in this morning, because I am so cold, but you will know I am here – ringing the big front door bell, and leaving a note for you.
Oh I want to come in, I have a great mind now to follow little Jane into your warm sitting room; are you there, dear Emily?
No, I resist temptation, and run away from the door just as fast as my feet will carry me, lest if I once come in, I shall grow so happy, happy, that I shall stay there always, and never go home at all! You will have read this quite, by the time I reach the office, and you cant think how fast I run!
Aff[ectionately] Emily
P.S. I have just shot past the corner, and now all the wayside houses, and the little gate flies open to see me coming home!
In this fantastically ingenious concoction, Dickinson describes herself as present within the message, and then as running home while the recipient reads it, finally entering the gate as the postscript is read. Fleet-footed Emily professes a wish to stay, but the speed with which she heads north past the intersection of Main and West Streets reveals her true desire. And then her gate flies open of its own accord to welcome her.
The note was written in ink on a minuscule piece of paper that had been scissored and torn down to size, then folded to make four sides or pages, one of which was reserved for the recipient’s name. That the postscript neatly fills the last bit of open space on the third written page shows how perfectly the apparent spontaneity had been worked out in advance.
One guesses what Emily Fowler made of this note from her observation that the poet “was exquisitely neat and careful in her dress.” The lesson for biographers is that its deviser was as well defended as the home her parents had created, and that we are going to need all our wits—and more—to get inside that automatic gate.
Glycerine Taken Internally
Vinnie’s diary and Emily’s letters for 1851 often speak of ailing health and consultations with Dr. John Milton Brewster, who “fussed” over the sisters to no avail. “We work and go out and have company,” Emily wrote about the time she and Vinnie were taken to Greenfield for a second professional opinion, “but neither of us are well.” Beneath her self-deprecatin
g humor, as when she likened herself to small summer apples or mere “skin and bones,” was a detectable anxiety about her thinness. It was decided to seek advice in Boston, and a trip was planned for July. When it was mysteriously canceled at the last minute, she let her brother know how “discouraged” the sisters were about their health and how much they had counted on seeing Aunt Lavinia’s homeopath, Dr. William Wesselhoeft.
The trip finally came off in September. There was a brief stop in Worcester to see Uncle William (whose wife, Eliza, had died July 11), followed by two weeks with Loring and Lavinia Norcross. The last time Emily had gone to Boston to shake off a cough and “bad feelings,” 1846, she had visited Bunker Hill, the State House, and Mount Auburn Cemetery, where she got her first sight of a modern parklike burial ground. She had taken in concerts, a horticultural exhibition, and a “Chinese Museum”’s thrilling spectacle of two reformed opium addicts (“There is something peculiarly interesting to me in their self denial,” the fifteen-year-old had noted). Now, showing much less interest in the urban scene, she urged Austin not to make “so many plans for our pleasure and happiness.” There were calls paid and received and trips to an ice-cream saloon and a visit to the school where her brother taught, but there is no evidence she accompanied Vinnie to some concerts or a performance of Othello. After returning to Amherst, Emily claimed the two of them were “rich in disdain for Bostonians and Boston,” but this was a half-truth, as Austin noted: Vinnie had “enjoyed herself, as she always does among strangers,” whereas “Emily became confirmed in her opinion of the hollowness & awfulness of the world.” The one detail she recalled years later was a tree near the Norcross home on McLean Street “whose leaves went topsy-turvy . . . and showed an ashen side,” symbolic of “fright.”
Wesselhoeft was consulted and his remedy faithfully taken back home, but to no avail. Fortunately, the day before leaving Boston, Vinnie felt sufficiently “indisposed” she sought a second opinion from a regular doctor—“called at Dr Jackson’s”—and he prescribed glycerine. This physician has been identified as Dr. James Jackson (1777–1867), a professor of medicine at Harvard and long recognized as far away as Amherst as an expert in “pulmonary difficulties.” His basic advice for sufferers from phthisis (tuberculosis) in Letters to a Young Physician was to eat well and exercise in the open air; “working in a garden would suit some persons.”
As for glycerine, in 1849 the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal informed physicians that “this new and elegant article” was “beginning to have a reputation” for treating various skin complaints, and that a Mr. Burnett on Tremont Row carried an especially pure stock. Then a second use for glycerine was found when taken internally: it soothed or suppressed the dry cough caused by consumption. However, the medical journals did not report this use until four years after Vinnie’s session with Jackson. One of two inferences is in order: either both sisters had a skin problem or the doctor was prescribing for coughs ahead of standard protocols. The first hypothesis may be dismissed: not only is there no positive evidence, but admiring comments on the poet’s fine, unwrinkled skin suggest it wasn’t unduly dry. Norbert Hirschhorn is surely right in arguing that, like her Mount Holyoke roommate and so many others (see Appendix 3), Dickinson had pulmonary tuberculosis, two of her symptoms being weight loss and a cough.
That fall, Edward informed Austin that Emily was “better than for years, since she returned from Boston,” and Vinnie agreed, describing her as “very much improved. She has really grown fat, if youll believe it. I am very strict with her & I shouldn’t wonder if she should come out bright some time after all.” Emily herself found the glycerine so helpful she had her brother refill the prescription again and again over the next two and a half years, often sending him the old “vial” or “bottle.” The druggist who filled it was the one recommended by the medical journal.
Although the disease evidently went into remission, Vinnie’s prediction proved too rosy. In January 1852, after Abiah left town without a farewell, Emily offered a pathetic inducement for next time by promising to “try to get stout and well before you come again.” That she continued to get her vial filled during the next few years suggests that her cough persisted and she remained less than “stout.” It would appear that the mysterious wasting disease that killed so many was a constant thorn in her side, and in her mind as well.
Insolvency
Another pressing question is how much the poet knew about Uncle Loring’s bankruptcy, a disaster so well covered up it is not mentioned in any extant family letter. We have many reasons for wanting to know: she was closer to Loring’s family than to all her other relatives, the proceedings apparently thwarted her summer 1851 trip to Boston, and the vocabulary of insolvency would be unusually salient in her poetry.
As the assessed valuation of Norcross and Wood slowly rose to a modest $10,000, the firm’s indebtedness shot up to $67,000, finally persuading the partners to call it quits in 1846. The state’s insolvency statute provided for three creditors’ meetings followed by a proportional distribution and a discharge from debt. At Norcross and Wood’s third meeting, however, some of the biggest creditors opposed settlement, and the partnership muddled on for four years. Then, in early July 1851, it was announced in the Boston Daily Advertiser that the fourth meeting would take place on the twenty-second. As Loring readied a petition for the allowance “which the law allows” ($3 per family member) and in other ways prepared for his ordeal, his nieces’ visit had to be called off. The first official notice of the meeting was published July 8. Vinnie’s diary for July 10 says, “Heavy disappointment this morning can not go to Boston cried some.” The obscure letter Emily wrote Austin July 13 doesn’t make clear whether she was given the reason for the abrupt cancellation.
Because of the trust established by Joel Norcross, Loring’s wife’s inheritance could not be seized and the family probably lived in comfort, in spite of having to sell their furniture. As a precaution, two weeks before the final creditors’ meeting, held January 22, 1852, Lavinia drew up a will leaving her paternal estate in trust for her two daughters. That she made Loring the sole trustee, empowering him to manage the estate and appropriate the income, tells us she wished to stand by her besieged husband as well as protect her daughters. It causes a twinge, though, to note that the will is in his hand.
Did anyone talk about Loring’s still unsettled bankruptcy during Emily and Vinnie’s September visit? Perhaps not, seeing that money problems were not the province of young ladies. After Austin paid the sisters’ bills in Boston, Emily followed up her assurance that he would be reimbursed with an apology, knowing he didn’t “like to have us ever speak of such things.” Even Aunt Lavinia, once so outspoken and indiscreet, had apparently learned not to “speak.” Three times in 1852 and 1853 Vinnie complained about her silence to Austin: “What does it mean?” “Tell her I’m quite impatient.” “I think its very strange indeed.” No answers are forthcoming, but we may surmise the Norcross family was undergoing severe strains and that much was not explained to the Dickinson sisters.
And yet, if Loring’s financial mire was kept from the poet, she was obviously too keen and intuitive not to catch wind of it, the result probably being what is usual in such cases—a mystified version of events. Is it only coincidence that, soon after Loring’s last session with his creditors in January 1852, Dickinson composed the ebullient line “Insolvency, sublime!” (Fr2[B]), which, one can’t help noticing, denies the obvious?
With her unparalleled gifts of language and impassioned reverie, Dickinson was mapping out the private domains of the imagination. This was her choice, based in part on an aversion to what Austin called “the hollowness & awfulness of the world.” But also, she had little choice, the world having been closed to her in dozens of ways.
Susan Gilbert
After her death, when the poet’s sister-in-law jotted down some notes for a possible essay on her, the second topic on the list was “Affection her strength” (the first being “Flowe
rs love of”). The phrase was exactly right, affection being a source of tremendous personal strength for the poet, a partial solution of the problem of life. Her love was generous, but it was also exacting and uncompromising, the expression of a powerful ego demanding that friendship live up to a high standard. Her sister-in-law understood this well, having been for thirty-five years one of the poet’s select intimates. The great irony is that this special lifelong friend—a motherless orphan who grew up to be an exceptionally able, informed, and socially ambitious woman—had much in common with Emily Fowler.
Susan Gilbert was born December 19, 1830, nine days after the poet. The youngest of seven children, she, too, came from established Connecticut Valley forebears: her father’s father, Colonel Eliel Gilbert, had owned a tavern (meaning a hotel), was elected six times to the General Court, and was said to have had the first piano in Greenfield. His son Thomas, Susan’s father, a lesser version of the Colonel, went for one term to the state legislature and kept a series of taverns in Greenfield, Deerfield, and Amherst. In later years he was remembered as a drunkard and his daughter’s social aspirations were sometimes explained as compensating for a sense of family disgrace. One reason not to accept this pat explanation is that Susan had several well-educated and prosperous aunts, uncles, and older brothers to admire and emulate. *69 The poet’s sister-in-law may have been arrogant and snobbish, but she was no arriviste.
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