Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [202]
Obscuring the drama of Emily Dickinson’s legacy have been the dust-heaps of slander and sentimental conjecture that fortified the battlers in the war between the houses. When Mabel Todd visited the Homestead for the first time in September 1882, she imagined Emily Dickinson a Miss Havisham, a disappointed bride turned eccentric recluse. I suspect that behind Todd’s conjectures and slanders lurks the real Miss Havisham of this story: a proud beauty betrayed by her chosen bridegroom, not at the altar but soon after, when David Todd resumed his philandering. Millicent stood by her mother as, in Dickens, Estella stands by Miss Havisham, becoming her creature. All the same no one formed Mabel more than Susan Dickinson during their idyll of 1881-2, when Susan invited Mabel into the family and introduced her to the poems of Emily Dickinson. There was a future in wait for Mabel Todd. If she appears to shadow the poet, angling for the poet’s attention, and sets up her editorial workshop as Susan’s rival, there was more to it: Mabel had qualities in common with the poet, a basis for identification. Both were founts of eloquence; both felt like queens; both were strong-willed, controlling; and, above all, both were workers with terrific application. Both amassed vast archives with an eye to the future.
These similarities had to be less compelling for the poet, if not irrelevant, beside her affinity for Susan who mirrored the poet as ‘Nobody’ in the unseen space of lives destined to be distorted. While Sue became a dependent wife, Emily held to the rare thing she was. This shadow life was as far as can be from the visibility of Mabel Todd. In appropriating Emily Dickinson for the public spotlight in which Mabel moved and had her being, Mabel did all she could to negate Sue’s tie with the poet.
This has been a story of the buried life after all: Emily and Austin and Vinnie firing up at the spark Mabel touched off when she flirted with Austin’s buried passions and intruded on the Homestead and coveted the shadow-world of Sue and Emily. But to touch off that spark was Austin’s doing as well as Mabel’s. The feud was not wholly something that was done to the Dickinsons but was in some sense a sequel to what they were.
Fifteen years after Mary Hampson’s death, her dream came true. In June 2003 the house appeared sunk in gloom; the following month, it opened its door to the public as a museum. The two family houses are once again conjoined, The Evergreens an extension of the museum next door to commemorate the great poet. It is fitting to see her in relation to the intimacies and dramas of this two-house family. Visitors walk between the houses. The deep reds of The Evergreens’ hall gleam in contrast to the whites of the Homestead. The gloom, though, has vanished together with the dust and papers.
The poet foresaw us visitors of the future, viewing what’s left: how gullible we could be as we turn over clues to the modest littleness of her person and the quaint little ambition that took its own way. A poem mocks our attempts to track her steps. That she struck out alone we do see, little tracks ‘close prest’. Then her tracks disappear. Is she lost to sight? But no: her ‘little Book’, hat and worn shoe are found.
Relics do indeed remain: the poet’s white dress on display in her room at the Homestead; her square piano, her chest of drawers and the books in the Dickinson Room at the Houghton Library; and there too the oval brooch she