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By Root 761 0

prospects began to open up for women with higher education, an opportunity her elder daughter would approach with dreaming eagerness. The 1820s was the last decade in which no college for women existed. The first of its kind, Mount Holyoke, was founded not far from Amherst, in 1836. This is not to suggest that Mrs Dickinson might have welcomed the higher education of women - there is no way to know. Yet the very existence of Mount Holyoke (following a new array of academies providing a high-school education for girls, and opening up posts for women teachers) must have shifted ideas for women’s future. Emily, her daughter, spoke of herself as ‘old-fashioned’, and this image has charmed many of her admirers. In a Broadway play, The Belle of Amherst, an archly feminine poet hardly knows what she says, so keeps busy with baking. No slight to baking. Emily, like Emily Brontë before her, preferred it to housework, for baking and, even more, gardening, complement the life of the mind with more practical kinds of creativity.4 Yet what remains odd is the poet’s care to fit the effaced model of womanhood that shaped her mother’s generation of the 1820s, in so far as 1830 (the year of Emily Dickinson’s birth) is said to mark the end of an era of domestic retirement for New England women.

To go through the Revd Mr Bennett’s rulebook is to see how ironically the poet fitted herself, point for point, with all the extravagance and precision of her character. The minister directs girls’ attention to volcanoes to awaken a sense of awe. With apparent obedience the poet internalises the volcano. But the latent explosiveness of ‘A still—Volcano—Life’ is not what he had in mind. The same with plants. ‘Pore on plants,’ advises the minister, ‘and I will engage you to become, in your turn, one of the most beautiful flowers in the creation.’ As a child, Emily works away at her herbarium and delights in her flourishing plants; later she will take on the character of ‘Daisy’: an eroticised Daisy, turning her petals towards ‘the man of noon’. Not the minister’s idea, for sure.

The most fertile loophole in the minister’s advice leaves his dear young lady free to engage in one kind of writing: ‘To write letters is a very desirable excellence in a woman . . . A man attends to the niceties of grammar . . . a woman gives us the effusions of her soul.’ Emily Dickinson arrogates this liberty, but deploys the ungrammatical deliberately to invent a language of her own. So, Dickinson both obeyed the rules and pushed them to the edge with a kind of flagrant glee. One rule, though, she disobeyed outright.

‘Poetry I do not wish you to cultivate’, Bennett advised. ‘A passion for poetry is dangerous to a woman.’ It heightens her natural sensibility to an extravagant and sickly degree, he explained, and then repeated in his most forbidding manner, ‘I do not wish you to become a poet.’ Yet he could not shut off the beat of the Isaac Watts hymns that had been adopted by the First Church of Amherst. Each Sunday that combination of scripture and hymn metre fell on the ears of a child who would one day deploy that metre as the poet she was to be.

At home, the prime arbiter was, of course, Mr Dickinson. Emily was not cowed by her father’s adversarial style. It was his way to intimidate opposition with a battering of sarcastic questions, speaking with the brevity of a curt, not expansive mind - not the inspired brevity of his daughter. Point one, he’d say, point two, when he addressed legal clients or when he rose to speak in the Massachusetts legislature or in Congress, where he served a term from 1853 to 1855. Logically, and with impeccable rectitude, he built a case against the extension of slavery to Western states entering the Union. His tone was habitually severe: one day, avarice is the worst of sins; another day, laziness. Whichever the sin, we turn to Jesus, and we do so not with love but in fear of damnation. Emily was unafraid of his fierceness: ‘Father steps like Cromwell when he gets the kindlings’, she joked, and she read his reticence with understanding.