A Loaded Gun (6 page)

2

P
ART OF IT IS
E
MILY
S
R
.'
S OWN FAULT
. She suffered all her life from logophobia, a fear—and distrust—of the written word. Vinnie, the daughter who was closest to her, who could knit and sew and clean the house like a dervish, suffered from a bit of the same fear.

. . .
though I've always had a great aversion to writing, I hope, by constant practice, the dislike will wear away, in a degree, at least.

But Vinnie wasn't shy, the way her mother was. Vinnie loved to flirt. She was also a mime and a reader of books. And she overcame her word blindness enough to write seventeen poems that still survive.

       
The fire-flies hold their lanterns high

             
To guide the falling star,

       
But, if by chance the wicks grow short

             
The stars might lose their way.

Vinnie has almost a kind of fictional glow; we can imagine her fat little fingers, her brown hair and brown eyes, her plump arms, her growing army of cats, her waspish tongue—she assumes mythical proportions and powers in the eyes of her poet sister. Vinnie could be “full of Wrath, and vicious as Saul—” [Letter 520, September 1877]

And during the presidential campaign of 1880, Emily wrote to Mrs. Holland:

Vinnie is far more hurried than Presidential Candidates—I trust in more distinguished ways, for
they
have only the care of the Union, but Vinnie the Universe
—
    
[Letter 667, 1880]

Emily hurls a lot of her own Promethean fire on Edward, Vinnie, Austin, and Sue. We can recall her father stepping like Cromwell, or wandering in his slippers after a storm, to feed the hungry birds; and Dickinson scholars have examined and reexamined Austin, who would become a sad clown in purple pantaloons and coppery green wig; Sue remains the Dark Lady of Dickinson scholarship—volatile, complex, and ultimately unfathomable; we follow her tracks and can only find more and more mysterious lines. It's hard to determine what she really thought about
anything.
She excites us, as she excited Emily. We can imagine her dark, smoldering face, masculine and feminine at the same time. But we cannot imagine the least wisp of Emily Norcross Dickinson. We have her daguerreotype and a silhouette of her, but she still remains invisible, as if her steps can never be traced.

This was true of most women in the nineteenth century, privileged or not. But in 1975, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg published a controversial essay, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” which revealed that women had their own remarkable and secret history. Smith-Rosenberg believes they
“did not form an isolated and oppressed sub-category in male society. Their letters and diaries indicate that women's sphere had an essential integrity that grew out of women's shared experiences and mutual affection. . . . Continuity, not discontinuity, characterized this female world.”

Women had their own signs and symbols, their own love codes.
“Girls routinely slept together, kissed and hugged each other,” and they continued to kiss and hug even after they were married. Men made
“but a shadowy appearance” in this landscape of women, if they ever appeared at all. But Smith-Rosenberg seems to oversimplify the almost mystical power that women shared among themselves. Men intruded everywhere, before and after marriage.
“Women of Dickinson's class and century existed in a legal and financial state of dependence on their fathers, brothers, or husbands, that psychologically mutilated them,” according to Susan Howe. After their father died, Emily and her sister went around like paupers and could hardly make a purchase without Austin's approval. They were wards of a male world.

But there's another distortion in Smith-Rosenberg's study of female friendship and ritual. She writes about women who were highly literate and could articulate their wishes and their woes, thus giving them a power and a perspective that many men and women did not have. There must have been a far greater unwritten record—of women who never mastered the art of writing. They might have been part of the same society that Smith-Rosenberg writes about, kissing, exchanging secrets, and trooping from home to home in an endless social knot as they presided over births and deaths. But they cannot share their
pain, their joy, and their melancholy with us. They are the invisible ones, and Emily Norcoss is among them.

She was born on July 3, 1804, in Monson, a rural community twenty miles south of Amherst. Her father, Joel Norcross, was a rich farmer who helped found Monson Academy, a school that admitted females as well as males. Joel believed in the education of his daughters—he had three of them and six sons, several wiped out by consumption, a disease that plagued the family. His wife, Betsy Fay, would die of it at fifty-one. Emily was the eldest daughter. She was attached to her one surviving sister, Lavinia, born in 1812, a feisty girl who loved to scribble letters and poems.

Rich as her father was, Emily Norcross didn't have an easy time at home. Joel had only one servant to care for an enormous barnlike house that had once been a tavern. Most of the chores fell on Emily. Joel took in boarders, and Emily also had to care for them. Her mother couldn't do very much; she was sick a good part of the time. And we can imagine how erratic Emily's schooling must have been. She still managed to attend a fancy girls' boarding school in New Haven for several months when she was nineteen. There's no record of her having met Edward Dickinson, who was also in New Haven at the time, about to graduate from Yale.

Emily returned to Monson, her education over. She would meet Edward three years later at a “Chemical” lecture on January 1, 1828—it happened to be his birthday. Edward had just turned twenty-five; she was twenty-three, practically an old maid in Monson. Edward was a law student who had to struggle, since his father couldn't seem to juggle his own accounts. Samuel Fowler Dickinson was still one of the most prominent men in Amherst. Cofounder of Amherst College, he had run—unsuccessfully—for Congress. He wanted to bring a law school to Amherst. He would claim that Edward had been the valedictorian of his class at Yale. It was a bald lie. Samuel had to yank his boy more than once from New Haven, and Edward barely had enough
time and money to graduate. The “Squire,” as Samuel was called, continued to remain involved with Amherst College, and he sank whatever small fortune he had into paying the school's bills. He lived on loan after loan, until there was little left to borrow.

Meanwhile, Edward was now a major in the Massachusetts militia And he hadn't come to Monson to study chemistry, but to preside over a military court. He had to pass judgment over a reckless lieutenant colonel who had vanished from camp. And we have to wonder if Edward was wearing his uniform, with it ceremonial sword and sash, at the lecture. Is that what caught Emily's eye? And what did Edward see in this silent girl? He must have been bewitched by her. He wrote his first letter to her on February 8 and never stopped writing. But he realized soon enough that Emily Norcross wasn't much of a correspondent. She didn't answer him until March. He had made her aware that he was looking for a bride. He proposed marriage on June 4—marriage by mail. He received no reply. He wrote to her father, who was just as silent. Joel Norcross wasn't that eager to relinquish a daughter who had become the workhorse of his family. This accumulation of silences couldn't discourage Edward, who continued to press his case, like a lawyer and militiaman. But Emily wasn't unmoved. She must have been fond of her suitor's red hair and barrage of long letters. Finally, at the end of October, she agreed to marry him, more or less.

That's when the torture began. He couldn't get much of a commitment out of Emily. He visited Monson, but she wouldn't introduce him to any of her friends, as if his marriage plans were secret to everyone, including herself. Edward complained:

. . .
for, I think, if you intend to be seen with me at all, you can not have much delicacy in accompanying me to a neighbor's house, after I have shewn myself
publicly
to the good people of Monson . . . with no particular
business
to make my visits so frequent, except what I have transacted with you. I begin to be plain, you see. Don't you think it is time?—

Often he rages like King Lear to prove his constancy and devotion, but it is a Lear made of tin, alas.

I cannot tell when I shall visit you again—I will let your people know in season to prepare for
a storm—
Let the winds howl—let the storms beat—let my horses die!—let my sleighs break—let all the elements conspire against me. I can not, so long as my person is safe—I shall not be discouraged . . . Let us continue virtuous & we shall be happy.

He sounds like a very odd suitor, his letters stuffed with bewildering banalities.
“I know not what is in store for us—We may be happy—We may be the reverse—We may be fortunate. We may be unfortunate,” he writes to her on September 24, 1827. There isn't much blood or fire in Edward's remarks. He could be ordering a
perfect
bride out of a catalogue. He promises to be
“the lawful promoter” of her “lasting enjoyment.” His letters grow longer and longer, while he also promises
“not to send another of such an unmerciful prolixity.” But he cannot keep his promise. He wants to control her every move. He's like an intelligence officer spying on his future wife.

It gets him nowhere. Emily isn't unkind.
“Pleasant dreams to you dear Edward,” she writes in September of 1827, after a lapse of six weeks. She has her own wayward sense of grammar and punctuation. Her spelling is perverse, as her poet daughter's would be. Her handwriting is beautiful and precise, almost sculpted; not a single line wavers. We can imagine the care that must have gone into every word. Vivian Pollak, who edited
A Poet's Parents: The Courtship Letters of Emily Norcross and Edward Dickinson,
believes that Emily had the upper hand in this battle of words between Edward and his reluctant bride-to-be. She used silence as a strategy, as her armor against Edward's maneuvers and warlike advances.

I'm not so sure. I suspect her silences masked a kind of shame. She would be marrying a lawyer.
“My education is my inheritance,” he
wrote her at the beginning of their romance. He'd gone to Yale, and she was a farmer's daughter who had mastered the art of penmanship, but that itself was a ruse; all the curlicues covered up a genuine hysteria about the deeper twists of language. Yet we're always touched by what she writes, while Edward's sentences have their own hard shellac. He just won't understand that she may love him and still be afraid of marriage.
“I have many friends call upon me as they say to make their farewell visit. How do you suppose this sounds in my ear But my dear it is to go and live with you.”

She kept delaying the wedding date, wouldn't even visit him in Amherst.
“Have I not reason to fear that you will think it best to remain at Monson after we are married?” he writes. She still refused to visit him, and sent Lavinia as her surrogate. And poor Lavinia, now fifteen, was lonely from the instant she arrived in Amherst.

Emily was determined about one thing: She wanted a wedding
“with as little noise as possible.” There would be no bridesmaid or bridesman. They were married in Monson on May 6, 1828, in her father's house, while her mother was mortally ill.

Edward had established himself as a lawyer in Amherst; and he moved his bride into
half
the widow Jemima Montague's house, near his office. We know almost nothing about the widow Montague or her house. All we know is that she wouldn't provide Edward with any milk, and he had to keep a cow. Emily didn't have a single male or female friend—Amherst might as well have been Antarctica. She had to take in student boarders, or they could never have afforded to live in Jemima Montague's house. Edward's parents and siblings were very little solace. His mother, Lucretia Gunn Dickinson, was a cold, bitter woman with a sharp tongue. His father was sinking into bankruptcy. Emily was all alone. Edward couldn't even take her to Monson to see her mother—he was much too busy with his career.

No one but Lavinia understood her pain, her loneliness, and grief. A few years later, she would write:

       
Sister! Why that burning tear

       
Stealing slowly down thy cheek

       
To my friendly listening ear

       
All thy little sorrows speak.

Meanwhile, Austin Dickinson, named after one of her dead brothers, was born on April 16, 1829. Emily hadn't seen her mother once. And she wouldn't visit Monson until a few days before Betsy Fay Norcross died that September. She had to grieve alone. She didn't even have the security of her new home. A year after Austin's birth, Edward moved out of the widow Montague's and into his father's house, the Homestead; built by Samuel Fowler Dickinson in 1813, it was the first brick mansion in Amherst. But the Squire was swimming in mortgages and had to sell the Homestead to one of his cousins; he remained in the eastern half as a tenant, while Edward purchased the western half of the house.

Emily had almost nothing to do with Edward's siblings, and she was like a sibling herself. She didn't get along with Lucretia Gunn Dickinson; no one did. And on December 10, 1830, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Squire Dickinson's former house, presumably at five o'clock in the morning. Whatever gifts she had or developed with such tenacity didn't come from that stilted language revealed in her father's courtship letters. She inherited his red hair, not his writing voice.