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By Root 775 0

the health of his family and realistically so, given high mortality in chilly, tubercular New England, with risks increased for women weakened by constant child-bearing. But what looks like a responsible decision to have no more births may have constricted their relationship. They were then no more than twenty-nine and thirty years old. Some years later, their daughter Emily was amused at the sight of them on Sundays sitting in state in the parlour, ‘perusing such papers only, as they are well assured have nothing carnal in them’. As the years passed, Mr Dickinson’s pure and abstinent life stilled his face: white and hollow of cheek, silent at times. It was a controlled household (apart from Mrs Dickinson’s tendency to tears) and this, conceivably, was to have consequences for their children, who gave vent, later, to extravagant passions: Austin and Lavinia overtly, Emily in a more private manner of her own. One of her poems pictures a child craving emotional nourishment:

It would have starved a Gnat—

To live so small as I—

And yet I was a living Child—

With—Food’s necessity . . .

The craving is upon the child ‘like a Claw’ it cannot remove. If there is any interior truth in this surreal impasse, the mother, the usual provider of emotional nourishment, is strangely absent. In the spaces of the poem there is something unexplained. Did this child take up her mother’s craving? Another imaginary childhood wrong is to be ‘shut up’ in ‘Prose’ - in this context the prosaic, a smallness of mind the poet often associated with Mrs Dickinson (‘My Mother does not care for thought’, she alleged at the age of thirty-one when she approached a man of letters with her poems). The poem pictures a girl with a free spirit, like a bird’s, who finds herself ‘caged’ in a domestic destiny. In the privacy of her soul the girl’s brain (with a capital B) remains active; she defies her stilled positioning:

. . . Still! Could themself have peeped --

And seen my Brain -- go round --

They might as wise have lodged a Bird

For Treason—in the Pound—. . .

These poems are dramatised, not to be read literally. Emotional repression in their parents did not inhibit the children from saying what they thought. All three were clever and ready to air their wits. Austin and Lavinia inclined to the cutting; Emily to the merry and irreverent. At two and a half she had been fearless at the sight of lightning which she called delightedly ‘fire’. As a child she was attracted by the ‘cordiality’ of the Sacrament, and when a clergyman invited ‘all who loved the Lord Jesus Christ to remain’ she recalled, ‘I could scarcely refrain from rising and thanking him for the to me unexpected courtesy, though I now think had it been to all who loved Santa Claus, my transports would have been even more untimely.’

Only Mrs Dickinson, it appears, being a wife and not of the blood royal, had no part in the Dickinson aplomb. While unmarried, Emily Norcross had enough curiosity to attend a chemistry lecture; as Mrs Dickinson, she gave herself to home and children. There’s nothing to explain what happened to that curiosity, beyond the historical fact of Tocqueville’s astonishment when he visited America in 1831 and observed how free-spoken American girls curtailed themselves on marriage. Why, Tocqueville wondered, should this girl, freer than her European counterpart, constrict herself in so willed a way? Her daughter’s poems take a dim view of what it was to become a wife: ‘Born—Bridalled—Shrouded—in a day’. The pun on ‘bridalled’ seals her fate.

Abruptly, overnight, the bride - the one-time Emily Norcross - was moved twenty miles away, to find herself dependent on a husband with troubles of his own. He was too busy to drive her to see her family, even when her mother, Betsey Norcross, was dying. Despite her sister’s urgings that Betsey was asking for her, she was able to come only the day before her mother’s death. The younger sister, still at home, saw a ‘burning tear’ of guilt mixed with grief slide down her married sister’s cheek.

Soon after Emily Norcross married Mr Dickinson,