White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

  And Dickinsons participated in civic events such as the annual cattle show, an agricultural fair of community importance, where Emily was celebrated for her Indian and rye bread, her father for his fine horses, her mother for her manners. That was not all: still striving, in 1855, when the poet was twenty-four, Edward was finally able to buy back the celebrated Homestead, victorious at last over the indigence of his father.

  That site was the home of Dickinsons until there were none. Neither Emily nor Vinnie left the old Mansion for places of their own; Emily ventured no farther than the Dickinson meadow, and when her brother, Austin, married, he moved right next door, into the Italianate villa that Edward had built for him.

  As for Edward Dickinson, attorney, he would never again countenance the loss of the Homestead. He did not even countenance the loss of his own life. When he died, he died intestate.

  THE DICKINSON FIRSTBORN, William Austin (known as Austin) was the apple of his father’s eye, and his sister Emily adored him. Close in age—just a year apart—and in temperament, Austin and Emily considered themselves unlike everyone else and particularly their parents, those “ancient people,” as they laughingly called them, whom at least in the case of their father, they loved, obeyed, sidestepped, and indulged.

  His hair a coppery red, like his sister’s, his deep-set blue eyes lighting an angular, almost anguished face, the handsome Austin liked a high-stepping horse, and, adventurous, he went so far as to sample dangerous Unitarian services while he was a law student. But moody and reflective, he was the self-dramatizing incarnation of the inhibited Edward, a doomed romantic hero in search of the ideal. Like his father and doubtless like his sister Emily, he craved attention though it left him queasy with guilt. At times he considered leaving Amherst. He stayed, however, frequently assailed by doubt and the desperate sense that all things come to naught. “I look around me, to see what others are doing,” he wailed, “whether they too are suffering in the same anxious suspense, or whether it is to me alone Life is a sealed book.”

  For his peers, religion promised to open that book. Not for Austin. “I ask myself, Is it possible that God, all powerful, all wise, all benevolent, as I must believe him, could have created all these millions upon millions of human souls, only to destroy them?” he agonized, all the while veering, insofar as he could, away from the orthodoxies of his cloistered world. He did not wander far. Graduating from Amherst College in 1850, he taught near Amherst and in Boston and read law in his father’s office in the intervals between jobs. In 1854 he received his degree from the Harvard Law School and, after passing the bar, entered his father’s practice but avoided trials. Professing his faith in Christ (a stipulation imposed by his fiancée), he then married, sired three children, buried one of them, moderated at town meetings, organized the Wildwood Cemetery, took over his father’s position as treasurer of Amherst College, supervised the draining of the town common, monitored the landscaping of the college grounds, and was a very unhappy man.

  Besides Austin, there was Vinnie, the youngest, less literary than her siblings and not as pressed as they by religious doubts or angst. Or if she was, she resolved them in more traditional ways than did sister Emily. Neither introspective nor inhibited, with large wide eyes and a soft, brooding mouth, Vinnie was pretty, plump, warm, and cheeky. She entertained a number of suitors, among them Austin’s roommate at Williston Seminary, Joseph Lyman, whose affection waned after he moved to New Orleans—and when Vinnie’s parents stiffly rejected him, apparently because of his Southern sympathies. There were other men, other interdictions; she received at least one offer of marriage. Edward, though he liked the young man, seems to have disapproved. A dutiful daughter, Vinnie trembled before her father even after he died and resented him a very long time. In later years, after Emily’s death, she eagerly recounted tales of their father’s tyrannies, unbottling years of pent-up rage.

  William Austin Dickinson, 27 years old, 1856. “We’re all unlike most everyone.”

  Lavinia Dickinson at 19, in 1852. “The tie is quite vital.”

  Mostly, and like all Dickinsons, she did not publicize regret. Instead she grew tarter, meaner, slyer. Born sickly, Vinnie was the Dickinson child closest to Mrs. Dickinson, the one most spoiled by her. Emily, in the middle, knocked against the sainted Austin on one side and her babied sister on the other. Yet her bond with Vinnie was, as she would say, “early, earnest, indissoluble. Without her Life were fear, and Paradise a cowardice, except for her inciting voice.” Vinnie bucked up her siblings. “I, you must know,” a friend recalled her saying, “am the family inflator. One by one the members of my household go down, and I must inflate them.” Her loyalties were ferocious. “Vinnie is full of Wrath,” Emily would remark, “and vicious as Saul—toward the Holy Ghost, in whatever form.”

  Their being unlike each other kept the sisters close. “The tie is quite vital,” Emily acknowledged. “Yet if we had come up for the first time from two wells where we had hitherto been bred her astonishment would not be greater at some things I say.”

  “A dire person!” an acquaintance of Vinnie’s declared. “Perhaps she partly explains her sister.”

  ALTHOUGH THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON’S father helped organize the Harvard Divinity School, his religious upbringing was tolerant and mild. True, the pretty Mrs. Higginson allowed only sacred music played on the Sabbath, but she considered all good music holy, and despite his family’s regular attendance at Sunday church, Higginson claimed that as a boy he never heard of hell, never read the Old Testament, never professed his faith, and, most remarkable in a man headed to the ministry, never experienced religion.

  If Higginson slipped free from the cold clutches of New England Calvinism, Emily Dickinson decidedly did not. Sin, death, and the frailty of humankind were kith and kin to Amherst, where the old orthodoxy had not lost its grip. And Dickinsons were good evangelical Christians. Grandmother Lucretia Gunn Dickinson never tired of warning her children to improve the hour by declaring publicly their love of their Savior, and the younger Mrs. Dickinson professed her allegiance to Jesus Christ in 1831, when daughter Emily was but a year old.

  Evangelical Christians, then as now, demand a conscious experience of conversion in order to receive God’s love. Frequently inspecting their souls for sin—in England the evangelical Protestant William Wilberforce, member of Parliament, presumably kept a pebble in his shoe to remind himself of his imperfections—they also commit themselves to preaching the Gospel with the hope of enlisting more converts. Mrs. Dickinson, however, confined her vocation to her husband, a worldly man who desired worldly things, albeit with a measure of guilt. Not by nature a believer though plagued by the demon of doubt, Edward hewed to the orthodox theology of his rigorous parents, his rigorous community, his father’s college, and his resolute and religious wife. “Were I a christian, my dear,” he told her early on with deep regret, “it would give me great pleasure in anticipating the happy times, when you and I should be spending that eternal sabbath of enjoyment, in company, which is possible to all who are redeemed.”

  He would try. He launched each Dickinson day with group prayer, led by him—“with a militant Accent,” observed daughter Emily—along with a reading from the King James Bible. Still, he tarried two more decades before he embraced his Savior in an act of contrition and love. The year was 1850, the same year Vinnie, too, converted and the year that the revivalist Protestantism known as the Second Great Awakening, in its last phase, blazed through Amherst, setting souls afire. Edward, then forty-seven, said that at last he felt “the working of God’s spirit among us.” Others, however, remembered his conversion as typical of his parched character: the pastor had to remind him to come to Christ as a humble sinner, not as an attorney arguing a case.

  But in 1850, Edward’s nineteen-year-old daughter Emily was resisting the imprecations of the saved. “Christ is calling everyone here,” she cried; “all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves.” Not she.


  She had been resisting for a while, though she was not at all indifferent to the spiritual thirst her elders and friends slaked in conventional ways. As early as her fifteenth year, when the eminent scientist-theologian Edward Hitchcock, recently installed as college president, held weekly prayer meetings at his home, Emily avoided them lest she be “deceived” by the passions of the moment. The excuse sounds flimsy until one remembers how seriously she regarded the apostasy. “I feel that I am sailing upon the brink of an awful precipice, from which I cannot escape & over which I fear my tiny boat will soon glide if I do not receive help from above,” she told her friend Abiah Root. “I feel sad that one should be taken and the others left.”

  Faith came hard. “I was almost persuaded to be a christian…,” she again confided to Abiah, “and I can say that I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior.” But too honest to mistake a mere mood for a conversion, she admitted that she soon forgot her morning prayer, “or else it was irksome to me. One by one my old habits returned and I cared less for religion than ever.”

  And so she stood alone, tentative, jittery, unable to find grace. That she considered herself one of the “lingering bad ones” did not change her mind. “The shore is safer, Abiah, but I love to buffet the sea—I can count the bitter wrecks here in these pleasant waters, and hear the murmuring winds, but oh, I love the danger!” Higginson would seek danger on the plains of Kansas, she in the confines of her room.

  Later, to Higginson, she explained her recalcitrance by noting that as a child “I was taken to a Funeral which I now know was of peculiar distress, and the Clergyman asked ‘Is the Arm of the Lord shortened that it cannot save?’

  “He italicized the ‘cannot,’” she continued. “I mistook the accent for a doubt of Immortality and not daring to ask, it besets me still.” Her temperament nuancing, interrogative, unshuttered, she strove for the spiritual certitudes that her agile mind discounted. “Sermons on unbelief ever did attract me,” she said. Paradox was her forte. “‘We thank thee Oh Father,’ for these strange Minds, that enamor us against thee,” she would tell Higginson, grateful to whatever higher power produced a consciousness capable of doubting it.

  Birds, flowers, the shifting quality of light and of mind thus constitute her faith. Personal, pantheistic, and paradoxical, it was seldom tranquil: “Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly” as Melville explained, “this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.”

  FROM THE AGE OF NINE until the age of sixteen, Emily Dickinson attended Amherst Academy. Her attendance was sporadic; coughs, influenza, or “general debility” often kept her at home. One teacher remembered the girl as slight and diffident but intelligent. “Her compositions were strikingly original,” he reminisced, “and in both thought and style seemed beyond her years, and always attracted much attention in the school and, I am afraid, excited not a little envy.”

  Operating in theological concert with the college, the academy offered first-rate teaching and, despite its pietism, a humanistic smorgasbord of courses: foreign languages, geology, botany, history, natural philosophy, grammar, arithmetic, music, even gymnastic exercises. (Higginson would have been pleased.) Regardless, religion underlay it all: instructors shall be “firmly established in the faith of the Christian religion,” parents were told, “the doctrines and duties of which they shall inculcate as well by example as precept.”

  “We have a very fine school,” Emily bragged to Abiah Root, no longer at the academy. On the surface she appears a typical teenager: roguish, affectionate, energetically devoted to her circle. And good-looking, or at least self-conscious about her looks: “I am growing handsome very fast indeed!” she joked. “I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year.” (When Higginson requested a picture, she said she had none and went on to describe herself rather seductively as “small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur—and my eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the Guest leaves.”)

  Actually, there is one known image of her; a daguerreotype taken around that time. She is young, seated, solemn, and secretive. She faces front, unafraid, her eyes wide and clear, her lips slightly parted, her hair drawn back. She neither smiles nor frowns. She waits. She looks. And except for that expectant glance, she seems a creature of the stolid bourgeois world. Her dress is dark and well made, with dropped shoulders and tucks about the waist. She wears a ribbon around her neck clasped with a small brooch. Otherwise, she is unadorned except for the book near her elbow and the flowers in her hand, a symbol of her beloved herbarium.

  The herbarium was a green album containing 424 specimens of dried plants and flowers and finished by her when she was about fourteen years old, her passion for botany as intense as Higginson’s. Perhaps we should consider this her first book even though keeping a herbarium was the pastime of many a schoolgirl or New England dame. But how to separate the typical from the singular? This is the question underneath those well-worn anecdotes about Dickinson’s refractory nature, stories that would be fragrant with forgettable petty rebellions if, that is, they didn’t involve Emily Dickinson. Recalled her niece, Emily once “put four superfluous kittens on the fire-shovel and dropped them into the first convenient jar the cellar offered, her family being in church—her chosen time for iniquity.”

  This startling story likely contains a germ of truth even if the circumstances surrounding it have long vanished, and the real point of it may lie in her family’s sense of Emily as unruly, hostile, possibly cruel if she did not get her own way. More credible is the story about Edward Dickinson’s hustling his children off to Sunday school, insisting they leave the house immediately. Emily was nowhere to be found. After church, when the Dickinsons returned home, they discovered Emily in the cellar, quietly reading. Technically speaking, she had obeyed her father by “leaving” the house.

  And more verifiable are those spasms of worrisome sadness. After one, precipitated by the death of her friend Sophia Holland in 1844, her parents sent her to relatives in Boston for a few weeks. That was like her too: to form heated, ravening attachments and to grieve inconsolably when, for whatever reason, the friendships faded. Early on these attachments were to schoolmates like Abiah Root; then, to Sue Gilbert; and still later, to Sue’s friend Catherine Scott Turner Anthon. So fierce was this connection that a scholar, writing in 1951, prematurely nominated Kate Anthon as the love of Dickinson’s life. (“That her thesis is partially true,” Elizabeth Bishop observed, “might have occurred to any reader of Emily Dickinson’s poetry—occurred on one page to be contradicted on the next, that is.”) Today Sue Gilbert is considered the prime recipient of Dickinson’s erotic outpourings, but there were doubtless other loves as well, female and male, most of whom we do not know.

  Chatty, affectionate, and hyperbolic, she was also competitive. In later years she was said to confide to a visitor that, on hearing Rubinstein play in Boston, she had abandoned her piano completely. This too may be apocryphal, but as her father’s daughter she judged herself harshly, it seems, and despite her self-assurance did in fact ask Wentworth Higginson if her verse was alive when she clearly suspected it was. At the Mount Holyoke Seminary, in South Hadley, in the fall of 1847, she was frantic about her initial exams, which she handily passed—many did not—and despite the victory soon doubled over with homesickness, crying, “Home was always dear to me & dearer still the friends around it, but never did it seem so dear as now.” Perhaps competition produced too much anxiety. Yet Emily could hold her own.

  Emily Dickinson, 17 years old, daguerreotype, 1847.

  And she did when assailed by the proselytizers clucking over her spiritual health. “There is a great deal of religious interest here and many are flocking to the ark of safety,” she told Abiah. “I have not yet given up to the claims of Christ, but trust I am not entirely thoughtless on so important & serious a subject.�
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  Founded by Mary Lyon, Mount Holyoke was conceived by her as a place to save the spotted souls of young girls. An intelligent woman, formidably devout, Lyon intended not just to educate her students but to prevail on them to embrace their Savior and appreciate—especially the truculent ones—their awful sinfulness. Once they accepted their Savior with love, they too would save other impenitents from perdition. To that end, Miss Lyon held meetings, private and public, lots of them, meetings for the converted, meetings for those who hoped for conversion, meetings for the unconverted.

  According to Vinnie, “There were real ogres at South Hadley then.”

  Dickinson’s roommate was her cousin, one of the “established Christians.” Not Emily. A tale from these days, credible and certainly suggestive of how others viewed her, was later recounted by another cousin. Emily said that when Miss Lyon asked all students who wanted to be a Christian to stand, she sat stock-still. “They thought it queer I didn’t rise,” she quipped. “I thought a lie would be queerer.”

  But that was after the fact. “I have neglected the one thing needful,” she moaned at the time to Abiah Root, “when all were obtaining it, and I may never, never again pass through such a season as was granted us last winter.” Again she had resisted, completing the school year as a “no-hoper”—one with no hope of conversion.

  Dickinson family silhouette, 1848.

  Then again, there was another place of needful comfort, where she could be herself, where grapes grew purple and peaches fat and pink, where the autumn smelled of sweet, wet leaves, and rich brown bread, freshly baked, came smoking onto the table, where the hay scented the meadow and cherry trees blossomed in spring. “Home,” she would write, “is the definition of God.”