Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [138]
One small clue to seclusion was Austin’s uneasiness about his sister’s eyes. When Roberts Brothers wished to include a picture of Dickinson with the Letters, Austin ruled out the now famous daguerreotype taken when Emily was sixteen. Austin told Mabel it didn’t resemble her and Lavinia concurred. In that image her eyes are large, wide, dramatically alert, rather like the spare facial structure of a kangaroo, the creature to which she likened herself at the time. There was an attempt to doctor the daguerreotype with a tint, and in 1894 an artist, Laura Hills, was asked to introduce curls on Emily’s forehead in place of hair drawn straight back from a centre parting in a way that bares her face. Emily’s brother and sister would have remembered her hair as curly - not evident in the daguerreotype - and they would have been aware that curly hair had come into fashion. Now, in the nineties, a curly fringe overlaid the bared brow of the 1840s, yet the family aim is less fashion than a wish to revamp Dickinson’s image in the direction of tameness and femininity. The artist filled in the neck with a lace fichu. The girl’s level gaze and sensuous, almost swollen lips are toned down to a faintly smiling sweetness.
In the end, the daguerreotype did not appear in Austin’s lifetime. He insisted that a likeness to Emily was ‘far better’ in an oil portrait painted of her as a child, looking much like her red-haired brother and unlike their small dark sister. The child has a less distinctive look - she might be any ‘normal’, neatly turned out and reasonably placid little girl with short hair and a white frill about her neck - and this was the first image to be published, even though the unformed face of a child consorts oddly with the sophisticated verbal play of the letters. Curiously, even here, Austin expressed uneasiness. Todd, he said, must ask the artist at Roberts Brothers to ‘soften the eye in some way’. It must be ‘altogether softened’.
Lavinia remained dissatisfied with the ‘revised’ daguerreotype after she fell in love with a portrait that appeared in the pages of Century magazine in April 1897. It’s a miniature of Mrs Lloyd Rogers, a beauty with propped-up rounded bosoms and curls tumbling over her forehead. Lavinia detected, she thought, a likeness to Emily, though the beauty’s nose is narrower and her mouth small, set off by a stiff, upstanding ruff behind Mrs Rogers’ head. Lavinia decided to have a miniature painted, prettying the daguerreotype further on the model of Mrs Rogers and her outfit. The bogus miniature of Emily Dickinson perpetrated in May 1897 was beyond Lavinia’s ‘highest expectations. It really seems as if Emily were here’, she rejoiced. ‘I think the artist can create some fluffy finish for the neck. Perhaps a ruffle half as high and not quite so full as Mrs. Rogers’ would be the thing.’ In time this became a ruff to cover up the exposed funnel of the poet’s throat (and presumably the abnormalities coming out of it, what one reviewer called ‘the neuralgic darts of feeling’ voiced in ‘curiously farfetched’ words spaced out by ‘the hardly human dumbness’).
From the first, Todd too concocted a ‘picturesque’ image - the white legend - speaking as one who had witnessed it. ‘Dressed always in white, her graceful passing about the house seemed rather the coming and going of some gentle spirit than any mere earthly presence.’ Housekeeper’s Magazine picked this up and spread it further: Mabel Loomis Todd was one of the few privileged ones who were admitted to intimacy with the poet, ‘a dear ghost, seen but scarcely tangible’. Hardly the Emily who welcomed Lord’s touch.
At the same time, Todd did bring out the explosive character of the ‘startling little poetic bombs’, as though earthquakes, bolts, the revolver pointed at an unwanted self, and a life that stood a loaded gun had no connection with the ghostly writer. This blend of truth and evasion was to characterise future legend. Todd did