My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  Because Susan was only six when her consumptive mother died, her mother’s face faded from memory as the girl grew up. What didn’t fade was the sense of maternal piety—a “silent, though powerful influence,” in the words of the orphaned daughter, who cherished the conviction that Harriet Arms Gilbert had been “a christian” and that a “happy reunion in Heaven” awaited her converted offspring. All her life Susan sporadically insisted on certain orthodox prohibitions, her lips suddenly pursing at Sabbath letter-writing or visiting. After attending her first play in Baltimore in 1851, she felt “disgusted with the Theatre.” In 1878, seeing Risks, or, Insure Your Life, she found “the fun a little too coarse for my taste.” She could be quite indignant about low décolletages.

  Fully orphaned by her father’s death in 1841, she and her next older sister, Martha, were brought up by Sophia Van Vranken, a jovial maternal aunt living in Geneva, New York. Sophia’s husband, a graduate of Union College, evidently wanted Susan to develop her mind, as she was sent in 1846–1847 to Amherst Academy, where she took the Classical course (Emily, in her last year, was in the English course). In 1848–1849 and 1849–1850 Susan went on to the best girls’ school west of Troy, Utica Female Academy, which boasted a stately Ionic portico and offered instruction in everything from Latin and “Technology” to flower painting and guitar. Unlike Amherst’s shaky academy, Utica had a permanent and proven director, Miss Jane E. Kelly, who emphasized teacher training. A sentence Susan or her friend Kate Scott wrote in a textbook they shared—“Send your imagination out upon the wing”—may catch the tone of Kelly’s instruction. But Susan’s early letters are less distinguished for qualities of flight than for polish and self-possession. Her great subject was mathematics, she was always concerned with improving her mind, and when an important new book came out, like the translation of Jean Paul’s Titan in 1862, she would get hold of a copy and wade in. Emily rarely did this.

  In 1848, the year the first women’s rights convention was held at nearby Seneca Falls, Kelly presented Susan with a copy of Tennyson’s curious and often mocking poem about an imaginary university founded by and for women, The Princess. The passages the girl chose to mark show how much the position of women was on her mind: “You men have done it: how I hate you all!” and “play the slave to gain the tyranny” and “the woman is the better man.” Here and there she underlined key phrases, as in “tricks, which make us toys of men” or “unfurl the maiden banner of our rights.” In the end, however, after the university is wrecked by the combined love and guile of men, her marks suggest an acceptance of Tennyson’s obviously antifeminist summing-up: “The woman’s cause is man’s: they rise or sink/Together.”

  Susan was in her teens when she entered the household of an older married sister, Harriet Cutler, joining sisters Mary and Martha. William, Harriet’s husband, was a partner in Amherst’s leading mercantile outlet, Sweetser and Cutler, with annual sales of $30,000 in 1843. *70 By all accounts, he was a Bovary-like study in bourgeois respectability—stiff, deliberate, self-satisfied, utterly charmless. Ned Hitchcock never forgot a party at the Cutlers’ where the grown-ups sat in the parlor and the children served and William expressed his “impatience at the slowness of my getting the sugar & cream to him!” When the three Dickinson siblings called on the Cutlers on February 27, 1851, Vinnie summed the visit up in one word: “Dreadful!” Once, as Emily sent Austin a report on the Cutlers, she slipped into an imitation of the head of the house: “derive much satisfaction from contemplating my shrewdness – Hope ‘Self and wife’ will always be so ‘uniform’ – hope I give no offense.” Susan and Martha found it a great trial to be dependent on this man and endure his obsession with feeding fires and adjusting dampers. “I have actually suffocated for the last few days,” wrote Martha one spring; “Mr Cutler has the most intense enjoyment in stuffing the stoves and seeing us sweat.” Trapped in the furnace, Susan yearned all the more for a home of her own.

  In April 1849 the four Gilbert sisters wrote a collective letter to their rich faraway brothers that nicely conveys Susan’s exceptional qualities. The three older sisters wrote first, each taking a page or so. Mary said that Martha had once again begun “to crook” (slouch). Martha hoped the brothers were pleased with their lamp mat. Harriet talked about home improvements and a local robbery. Following these newsy items, the part composed by eighteen-year-old Susan betrays an obvious wish to stand out: “I can assure you . . . it is not without much agitation, that I attempt a line, after the brilliant effusions of my older sisters.” That, along with her name for the Cutler house, “Old Maid’s Retreat,” shows what sort of teenager she must have been—laceratingly self-conscious, desperate to distinguish herself.

  Sister Martha, with her poor posture, was an easier person—gentler, more sympathetic and passive. Even though Susan was the younger of the two, Martha felt she stood “a poor chance following her—everyone seems to think she is the quintessence of perfection.” One difference between them was that, while Martha showed no anger, her younger sister was quick to take offense at real or imagined slights; as Dickinson put it years later, “Susan fronts on the Gulf Stream.” Ned Hitchcock spent so much time with her at the Cutlers’ in 1850 that she badly missed him when he began teaching at Williston Academy: he had been “a great comfort to her of late,” “her only true friend.” But when he casually addressed a letter to her as “Sue,” she was “indignant” at the liberty.

  The reason Sue was grateful to Ned was that she had been shattered by a death in the family. On Sunday, July 14, 1850, twenty-five days after giving birth to a daughter in Grand Haven, Michigan, her sister Mary died of “intermittent”—puerperal—fever. Martha had gone west to help nurse her, and since she didn’t return until February 1851, Susan had seven months in which to brood over the painful event without her sister’s consoling presence. Each Sunday, brutal images of the far-off unseen burial flashed on her “with a painful vividness and reality.”

  It was in this time of bereavement, with Martha absent, that Emily and Sue became friends. The poet’s earliest known message to her, the first of hundreds, dates from the end of February 1851, the day of Martha’s long-delayed return to the Cutler home on Amity Street. *71 The letter is affectionate, speaks of kisses, mentions “sainted Mary,” and in every way assumes a high degree of intimacy. “Dont forget all the little friends who have tried so hard to be sisters, when indeed you were alone!” writes Emily, obviously thinking of herself. She knows the reunited sisters must be left to themselves after their long separation (“how Sue and I will talk,” Martha had written) and that her presence would be an “intrusion.” But she still intrudes with pen and ink, possessively claiming a small share of the sisters’ intimacy and comparing their room to Alice Archer’s refuge in Longfellow’s Kavanagh—“that columbarium [dovecote] lined with warmth, and softness.” The comparison suited the writer’s home-nurtured fancies, but whether it appealed to the Gilbert sisters, trapped in their brother-in-law’s stovelike house, is open to question. And remembering that Sue singled out Ned Hitchcock as “the only one who called on her regularly,” we may wonder how she regarded Emily’s statement about trying to be a faithful sister.

  The sheltered Dickinson siblings did not know what it was to suffer bereavement in their family or to have an insecure footing in the world. Emily and Austin and Susan and Martha were closely involved now, and the entanglements were growing complicated. In December 1850, after a misunderstanding with Susan, Austin was struck by “that unapproachable dignity, that rigid formality,” she would abruptly assume. In fall 1851, she let him know how distrustful she was of those not connected “by ‘natural ties.’” Insensitive to the disparities in background and outlook, the Dickinsons couldn’t help wounding her, and provoking her latent ferocity. Her entry into the family would change it forever.

  A Quiet Romance

  Before Martha left for Michigan in summer 1850, Austin had not shown a preference for either sister, but once the kinder, gentler
one was out of the picture, out for two-thirds of a year, his friendship with the edgy one became transformed. Two weeks after Mary’s death, he wrote a note asking Sue to ride with him—ride privately, seeing that she was in mourning. That fall, as the young college graduate conducted a school at Sunderland, a few miles north of Amherst, for one term, the notes and letters multiplied. Presently, he and Sue agreed to signalize their growing closeness by separately and simultaneously eating a chestnut every evening “at the first stroke of the vesper bell.” No one knew of this humorous private ritual except, in Austin’s words, “the all seeing spirits.”

  Meanwhile, Vinnie and Emily, feeling neglected, chastised their brother for failing to visit or write. “Come home Naughty Boy!” Emily scolded in a postscript to Vinnie’s note, and in a letter of her own reprimanded his neglect and arrogance. After acting like Jupiter, sitting on Mount Olympus and “whittling the lightnings out, and hurling at your relations,” *72 it was time for “Topknot” to lay down his schoolmaster’s crown and scepter “and once more a patient child receive reproof.” He should also come to the East Hampshire Agricultural Society’s first annual Cattle Show—“School masters and Monkeys half price.” She ended with a jocular message from Sue, who had apparently just been calling on the Dickinsons: “‘Serve God, and fear the King’! Exit Sue!!!” Vaguely echoing Emily’s tart advice, Sue’s message gave nothing away, least of all the couple’s odd digestive celebration of the harvest season.

  In November the fall term closed at Sunderland, and Austin returned to Amherst. Continuing to see Sue, he felt a secret and “inward satisfaction” on Thanksgiving when his sisters asked her “family into the circle which had for two or three years been gradually forming.” Father fetched her, Austin bided his time as she joined the annual after-dinner gathering at the Sweetsers’, and then there was a moment together in the dark—“you know the rest,” he wrote her.

  The romance was conducted very quietly on both sides. From Geneva, Martha complained about her sister’s silence and the lack of news. Since Sue had been seeing Ned Hitchcock when Martha was last in Amherst, Martha naturally connected their names when writing Ned in November. There is no solid evidence that Martha fancied Austin, yet, when the time came for her to return in February, he felt a certain “dread of her,” as if some tall explaining, a possible disillusioning, lay ahead. And Emily was also in the dark, not realizing her closest confidants, Sue and Austin, were growing much closer to one another than either could be to her.

  In good weather Emily liked to talk with Sue on the “broad stone step” where she and Jane Humphrey used to sit. But the developing friendship produced no written traces until June, when Austin left for Boston for another teaching stint. Emily’s first letter (composed the day after he left) assured him Sue and Martha were both sorry he had gone. The next communication also failed to distinguish between the sisters: “They miss you very much – they send their ‘united loves.’” It looks as if the poet had not been taken into Sue or Austin’s confidence, even though she saw “more of Susie than of any other girl.”

  Suddenly restless, Sue went by herself to New York to visit a friend and attend a Jenny Lind concert. She also began looking for a temporary teaching position, contrary to William Cutler’s advice. Her Utica alma mater had a stated policy of providing “suitable testimonials” for former pupils, and presently she landed an appointment at a girls’ school in Baltimore. The explanations she offered for this surprising and enterprising move show a typical vagueness and lack of candor (she never explained her choices with any fullness). The job appealed to her “fancy.” She supposed she would be “improving [her]self, as well as doing a little good.” She was “tired of being so quiet in Amherst.” And she wanted the money, mentioned more than once. The chief motives were probably an eagerness to have a go at the larger world and a need to draw back from the entangling Dickinsons.

  Mr. and Mrs. Archer’s Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies, at 40 Lexington Street and with an enrollment of one hundred thirty, was one of the South’s leading female academies. The principal had graduated from West Point; the matron, his wife, was a daughter of Maryland’s chief justice; the catalog’s two-page list of references was headed by Winfield Scott (the Whig presidential candidate in 1852); and the teaching corps included the harpist Madame Mayre and a “Professor of Dancing.” The school’s clientele and drawing power are apparent from the 1850 federal census schedule, which lists a Barnard from Mississippi, Poindexters from Louisiana and South Carolina, and two Pennsylvania Sharplesses. After the annual public examination, the local press reported with bland approval that “the analysis of Paradise Lost, and the exercises of the class in Botany, were especially the subject of remark.” But there was no Classical course, catalogs said nothing about teacher training, and the science professor also taught penmanship. Compared with the workaday academies of New York and Massachusetts, the school had a conspicuously aristocratic tone. On Sue, the effect was probably to accent her taste for rank and display.

  The public institution where Austin was employed could not have been more different. Occupying the second and third stories of a plain brick building, Boston’s Endicott School was crammed with nearly four hundred boys and girls, mostly Irish. The young man’s job as “usher” (a lower pedagogical rank) seems to have gone unfilled the previous year. Word of the opening must have come from Uncle Loring, who in 1851 was in his first year of service on the Boston School Committee, with an assignment to the Endicott subcommittee. A few months before Austin went to work, the teachers in all six rooms complained that the air was “unsatisfactory to the demands of respiration,” being “filled with black dust.” A new furnace was approved, but then (after Austin finished his year) it was decided to close the school.

  For Austin, classroom teaching was only a temporary job before he committed himself to studying the law. His motives for taking on the children of Massachusetts’ often illiterate Irish Catholic population—“the darkened Laddy,” as Emily put it, perhaps echoing her brother—are not hard to guess. College graduates often spent a year or two teaching, Austin thought of himself as “fond” of such work, and he saw a public need and felt a sense of duty. But with fifty restless boys in his charge, he found the work more “laborious” than expected, indeed “almost irksome,” as he wrote Sue, who taught older girls and was off duty from two in the afternoon.

  Writing home, the young man evidently sent an exaggerated account of the disciplinary whippings he administered. His sister’s response to these humorously described scenes of punishment was utterly unlike her infuriated protest at Father’s “basteing” of a horse. Distinguishing between herself and Mother, who was afraid her son might go too far and injure a boy, Emily wrote Austin she rather hoped he would “kill some – there are so many now, there is no room for the Americans.” It was a joke, of course, yet the joke had a serious vein: the Irish were “bad enough in darkness” and she didn’t want them to “come to the light,” especially through “such a darling medium” as Austin.

  This callous nativism seems in line with the program of the American or Know-Nothing Party, which wanted a twenty-one-year waiting period before immigrants could become citizens. Yet we should bear in mind that Emily’s father detested this party, *73 and that she herself was already a noncitizen for life. What her violent anti-Irish humor expressed was not a coherent politics but a profound helplessness. As in her harrowing 1850 letter to Joel W. Norcross, she was assuming that nothing she could say or do would take effect. There was a feeling that as long as her brother was away from home, her life and his were at a standstill. She wrote him about the dust falling in his empty room, and how she avoided going there after dark. She wanted to cry at the thought of his missing autumn’s grapes. After Father waked her from a dream in which she was about to open a letter from Austin, she spent the day imagining how she would break the seal if one did arrive. She feared her brother would suffer from loneliness, or strain his eyes, or that his f
acial “neuralgia” *74 would worsen. Longing for “this Boston year . . . to perish and flee away, and be forever gone,” she sent him the yearning invitation of the Bible’s last verse: “the spirit and the bride say come.”

  When she learned he was coming for the 1851 Cattle Show, she “put away [her] sewing and [went] out in the yard to think.” She may have been cogitating the poem into which her answering letter suddenly bursts, filling the page’s remaining free space: “here is a little forest whose leaf is ever green, here is a brighter garden, where not a frost has been, in its unfading flowers I hear the bright bee hum, prithee, my Brother, into my garden come!” One reason she wrote this as prose was that she had no room left for space-eating lines of verse. There was an uncanny and exquisite precision in her act, inviting her brother into her closed space as she neatly filled her paper’s boundaries.

  To focus on her invitation’s innocent eroticism is to miss the larger picture: her life’s growing emptiness, her dependence on her tall, superior, active older brother. The more isolated she was, the more she needed him, and vice versa. And the longer he was absent, the more she forgot the impediments between them, particularly his impatience with her play of sentiment. Her first letters after his departure spoke of this, recalling how he “would ‘poke fun’ at my feelings.” Lugubriously evoking their conversations in the barn, she also recalled how scornful he could be: “I suppose I am a fool – you always said I was one.” Vinnie seems to have been more tolerant of the sentimentalizing: “every thing goes on at home as usual. Emilie is pensive just now recollections of ‘by gones’ you know, ‘Old un’ &c.” “Old un” was a pet term for Austin.

  This captive fixation was a distinctly Victorian bond, best illustrated by Maggie Tulliver’s eager desire to serve her older brother in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. And just as Maggie’s best efforts backfire with the stolid Tom, Emily often overstepped the line. When she sent Austin a flattering report of Father’s response to a letter—“applause deafened applause . . . the sun went down in clouds – the moon arose in glory – Alpha Delta, All Hail!”—he said he didn’t understand and preferred a “simpler style.” *75