Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [12]
For his part, Mr Dickinson would have expected domestic competence as well as wifely compliance; his wife, as attentive to home and table as he could wish, deferred to him as ‘my dear’. Her first child was their only son, William Austin Dickinson, always called Austin after one of Mrs Dickinson’s dead brothers. He was born in 1829, a year after the marriage, closely followed on 10 December 1830 by a girl, Emily Elizabeth. Her second name was after Aunt Elizabeth. This connection did not endear her wilful aunt to a niece only seven years her junior and with a will of her own. A third Dickinson child, another daughter, was named after Mrs Dickinson’s lively younger sister Lavinia. This was to be a close tie. Lavinia Norcross opened her home to her nieces, and Emily’s affection for this loving aunt would extend to her children who would become part of the poet’s inner circle of correspondents, the chosen audience for her poems.
After Lavinia’s birth in 1833, Mrs Dickinson languished. Two years later there were still questions about her condition, as if she had undergone an illness serious enough to have been a blight on the household. Since there is no sign of physical harm, it sounds like postpartum depression. Her suppressed wish for expressiveness suggests that Mrs Dickinson was not the cipher she has seemed. Her daughter the poet would define a wife as one who rose to her husband’s ‘Requirement’, dropping ‘The Playthings of Her Life’, and if she missed anything in her day-to-day life it fell outside the accepted vocabulary. Only a poet determined to re-invent language, riding metaphors that carry her to the frontier of a buried life, could articulate an ‘unmentioned’ thing: a submerged self, ‘Fathoms beneath the sea’.
This generation of mothers and daughters would be the first to respond to a new kind of man capable of saying to a repressed young woman: ‘I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you.’ Jane Eyre flashed on Emily Dickinson like a mirror in which she saw, bared, a soul to be preserved.
‘If you were God’ on the receiving end of prayers that the author might be saved ‘would you answer’, she asked the junior lawyer in her father’s office who had lent her his copy of the novel in 1849. Five years after the author’s death in 1855, a still-fervent Dickinson imagines the benefit for heaven when Charlotte Brontë arrived:
Oh what an afternoon for Heaven,
When ‘Bronte’ entered there!
When Jane Eyre calls Rochester ‘my master’ the word conveys no sense of tyranny; rather, a master of character. For Mr Rochester, riding out of darkness, can detect the invisible woman behind the schooled façade of Victorian conformity. Charlotte Brontë and her sisters - born halfway between the dates of Mrs Dickinson and her daughters - were spokeswomen for submerged words, a voice Emily Dickinson would take up with a ‘Master’ of her own.
At a guess (it has to be a guess since there is little record of Mrs Dickinson) she was not naturally effaced, and in the aftermath of childbirth, when emotions swim to the surface, needs she had learnt to control overtook her. Her husband thought the answer was retreat from life: women were safest, he thought, if they stayed at home, and to stress this he gave his wife another advice book, The Mother At Home: Principles of Maternal Duty. The aim is to firm up mothers with wilful children, and to achieve this a mother must bring her own feelings ‘under a system of rigid discipline’. If she keeps her mind ‘unimpassioned’ she will bring up better children.
The seriousness of Mrs Dickinson’s condition is suggested by the fact that, unusually for a time when their kin on both sides had eight to ten children, the Dickinsons stopped at three. Mr Dickinson would have been considerate of his wife’s health. He was minutely concerned with