Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [103]
Dear friend—
Nature forgot—The Circus reminded her—
Thanks for the Ethiopian Face.
The Orient is in the West.
‘You knew, Oh Egypt’ said the entangled Antony—
There’s no certain solution to this riddle but what is unmistakable is the curtness, unlike Dickinson’s warmth to other correspondents. A possible decoding could be that the poet had forgotten this ‘friend’ (with her ‘circus’ of show-piece accomplishments) until nudged by a gift. Her reply calls up the (‘Ethiopian’) Queen of Sheba bearing gifts to a king renowned for wisdom. This alien seductress with the Oriental wiles of a Cleopatra (‘Egypt’) has come ‘in’ - intruded into - the poet’s home in her native West. The verbal combat returns Mabel’s blackening of Sue as ‘great Black Moghul’. Here, Sue’s defender exposes Mabel’s ‘Ethiopian Face’: the real foreign potentate who, through sexual conquest, has an unnatural sway in the Dickinson family. The poet’s ‘thanks’, though obligatory, is shot through with sarcasm.
When other overtures from Mabel compelled replies, Dickinson wrote acidly, ‘Will Brother and Sister’s dear friend accept my tardy devotion?’ and again, in 1885, she addressed Mabel as ‘Brother and Sister’s Friend!’ Not her own friend (after Mabel had been haunting the Homestead for three years). Dickinson’s signature on this letter is unprecedented: she signs herself ‘America’, ostensibly because Mabel was abroad at the time, but ‘America’ implies independence. In this sense the signature seals the warning: Mabel, as ‘Egypt’, may have disarmed ‘Antony’, representative of Rome, but she can’t take over ‘America’.
This is the only drama in Dickinson’s life that’s not of her making, ever since Miss Lyon’s attempt to command her soul in 1848. As a girl, Emily had been free to turn her back on Miss Lyon, but this conflict of mature people with a lot to lose - ‘Sister’, wife, children, reputation, peace of mind, privacy - has worked its way inside her home.
Some of Dickinson’s readers, like Sue, were admitted to intimacy; to others, like Mabel and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson wrote in her most riddling manner. Where Higginson was willing to own his bewilderment, Mabel did not. It was part of her script to act the favourite. Impossible to know to what extent Mabel could decode Dickinson’s stabs and sarcasms in every instance, but one diary entry records the receipt of ‘some adder’s tongue sent over by Lavinia’. Adder’s tongue is a plant, but I think Mabel is referring to a pencilled poem. If so, Lavinia would have been an innocent pawn in this war of words, with no idea what the poem was saying, but Mabel did, it seems, detect the venom of the following riddle:
Their dappled importunity
Disparage or dismiss—
The Obloquies of Etiquette
Are obsolete to Bliss—
Again there’s no certain reading, but we may surmise that when it comes to ‘them’ [Mabel and her lover] there are only two possible responses for the poet: she can ‘disparage’ or ‘dismiss’ their devious [‘dappled’] and persistent intrusion [‘importunity’]. The slanders [‘Obloquies’] - presumably Mabel’s detraction of Austin’s family - that are part of Mabel’s manners [a sardonic take on her taste for ‘Etiquette’], have nothing to do with the soul’s superior instants [‘Bliss’] the poet enjoys, however insistently the lovers claim theirs to be a higher love. The poet, therefore, scorns the lovers’ project.
Even so, Mabel was not to be put off. She meant to gain access to the poet in one way or another. It was simply a matter of waiting.
Meanwhile, there was another determined woman with an eye to Emily. Helen Hunt Jackson, as we know, recognised Dickinson’s stature. ‘You are a great poet’, she wrote on 28 March 1876, ‘- and it is wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud. When you are what men call dead, you