Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [102]
What Emily thought is less certain. If Mabel was telling the truth (always questionable), Emily too was charmed. Mabel watched people fall under her ‘spell’, women as spellbound as men. Up to a point it’s fair to assume the poet’s response to Mabel’s songs and eagerness to read her poems. But Emily’s letters - to Susan, to Ned, to Mabel herself and, surprisingly, also to Mabel’s parents - suggest a different story.
Can it be that Emily Dickinson was the first target of Mabel Todd’s takeover? With writing ambitions of her own, she was gripped by the poems Sue shared soon after Mabel’s arrival in Amherst. She began to put herself in the way of the recluse. That first autumn of 1881, when Mabel was about to depart on a visit to Washington, she ventured to send the poet a message of farewell. The reply was a rebuff to any delusion of intimacy Mabel might cultivate. ‘The parting of those that never met, shall it be delusion, or rather an unfolding of a snare whose fruitage is later?’
This is well before the men in her family fall for Mabel. Such prescience seems uncanny, but there’s no mystery here: supremely alert, the poet is a decoder of signs - a lurking intention. Ignoring the snub, Mabel persists in believing that Emily Dickinson pined for her when she went away. What Dickinson called ‘delusion’ was actually something Mabel had in common with the poet: invention. The situations Mabel invents carry artistic conviction - enough, almost always, to see them through - though there’s all the difference in the use of words. The poet’s words stab us awake; Mabel’s words are imitations of others’ scripts, just as her manners imitate society ladies’. Refinement and courtesy are manifest, but not always that care for others that marks real manners. Mabel could be impervious to what did not impinge on her self-making, while the poet, secluded though she was, took in everything.
This was apparent on 10 September 1882, when Mabel entered the Homestead for the first time. The poet hears fateful footsteps coming through the door and foresees the necessity for ‘fortitude’. It’s as though Dickinson scents Mabel’s appropriation of herself and conveys what she can, within the bounds of politeness, to ward her off.
Later that month, Mabel sent her a painting of Indian Pipes. She would have gleaned from Austin or Vinnie that this was the poet’s favourite flower, a white woodland plant native to New England. As a child Emily had pressed and labelled it monotropa, uniflora. Hers are ghostly white in the shadow of their bold, dark stalk, unlike Mabel’s painted, full-bodied Pipes (below). The gift obliged Emily to thank her: ‘I know not how to thank you. We do not thank the Rainbow, although its Trophy is a snare.’ Again, a snare. Dickinson warns the many-hued Mabel that she spots it.
When the adultery was underway Mabel tried a second gift, a yellow jug painted with red trumpet-vine blossoms. Dickinson’s acknowledgement is once more a coded rebuff: it characterises Mabel as ‘Egypt’, as Cleopatra, mistress of ‘the entangled Antony’. Antony’s sister could hardly be more explicit in pointing the blame. Cleopatra is, of course, no mean power: to a poet who characterises herself repeatedly as ‘Queen’, ruler of her private realm, here is a rival queen positioning herself on her territory, first as a family friend, then the chosen of her brother, then stepping some twelve times a month through the Homestead door.
Once Austin entered into his affair it was impossible to be direct. Austin was head of the family. His wife and children, who opposed Mabel openly, had found themselves in the poor position of rejected dependants. The poet encased her rebukes in riddles. It’s Hamlet’s ploy, bound as he is by ties of nature to the family a usurper has destroyed. Like Hamlet, she puts on an antic disposition, her words so opaque and apparently incoherent the speaker appears to be deranged.