Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [165]
At the age of fifteen another girl told Millicent about sex. ‘They say they enjoy it.’
‘No, not that,’ Millicent said. ‘No.’ She cherished romantic feelings for a future missionary called Alden. She prayed for him to notice her.
At fifteen she was required by Mamma to re-address a love letter from Austin, so that his hand would not be detected. Afterwards Millicent discovered The Scarlet Letter and read it by stealth, while her parents were out. Her cheeks were burning, for to read of sin seemed to her to partake in sin. She was transfixed by this tale of adultery that makes the adulteress the pariah of the Puritan community. It confirmed what Millicent knew: like Hester Prynne’s daughter, she could not escape the sin bred in her through her mother.
There came a flash of hope when Austin died. ‘Yes, I am all that Mamma has left now’, she thought. Her lesser life might be of use.
At seventeen, Millicent knew nothing of the court case accusing her parents of fraud. In 1897 she was sent off to Miss Hersey’s boarding school in Boston and she remained with friends during vacations. The trial was reported in newspapers, but no one mentioned it to Millicent, and later she wondered at her oblivion. Study was her refuge; she immersed herself in natural history. At the time her parents lost their appeal to the Supreme Court, in the fall of 1898, Millicent entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Here, at a college for bright women, the fog of untruth at last appeared to lift: ‘no cloaking under fine-sounding phrases, no uncertain expressions’. She thrived in an academic environment and chose to major in biology. Yet even here, around the clear pools of fact, a fog gathered. Parthenogenesis was the only mode of reproduction laid out in biology lectures. In 1900 it would be improper for young women to be informed of the facts of life, even in the lower species. Millicent went out into the world in 1902 wrapped in her unknowing.
When she asked herself what she wanted, it was to be unlike Mamma: no courting of status and flattery. ‘Ugh! It is all obnoxious to the last degree,’ she ordered her better self. ‘Deliver me from push.’
Over the next decade she travelled extensively and taught modern languages at Vassar, Wellesley and Sarah Lawrence, but all the time and for the rest of her life her real wish was to write her own story: a daughter’s authentic tale of a latter-day Scarlet Letter: the adulteress exposed to censure in her New England community; her lover, the impeccable leader of that community; the intensity of secret assignations; and the purity of their love, as they felt it to be. What we did had a consecration of it’s own. But then, too, as Millicent had reason to know, there’s what that love chooses to ignore. A truth-telling memoir surged continuously beneath the surface, but a daughter could not set it down because it would hurt Mamma.
Unlike Millicent, Mattie Dickinson was born to status and privilege. Aunt Emily called Mattie ‘an imperial Girl’ with a capital G. At fourteen, under a jaunty hat, she looked like the girl Aunt Emily would have liked to be. In the privacy of her room, Aunt raised a hand holding an imaginary key between thumb and forefinger, and turned her wrist as though she were locking her door.
‘Just a turn - and freedom, Mattie.’ A Dickinson daughter is privileged to be an exception: she is not to be ‘bridalled’. Content and safe in her father’s house, a writer holds to her vision.
There’s a side to Aunt Emily that Mattie never mentioned: a moody strain, evident in one of her six letters to her niece. On Mattie’s seventh