Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [21]
Massachusetts at this time was the scene of a religious revival opposed to the inroads of science. Dickinson later makes her allegiance clear:
‘Faith’ is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see—
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.
Unfortunately for Emily, Miss Lyon was bent on pressing students to be ‘saved’. The overwhelming majority succumbed; Emily did not. On one occasion, Miss Lyon called on all who wished to be Christians to rise. Emily Dickinson remained seated - the only one, so the story goes.
‘They thought it queer I didn’t rise,’ she reportedly recounted the scene to her family. ‘I thought a lie would be queerer.’
‘Have you said your prayers?’ Miss Lyon demanded during this or a similar confrontation.
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘though it can’t make much difference to The Creator.’
Extra meetings took place in Miss Lyon’s room and targeted girls were required to indicate in advance, with a note, if they wished to attend. On 17 January 1848, at the end of her first term, Emily attended a session for those who ‘felt an uncommon anxiety to decide’. Either it was politic to undergo this session or Miss Lyon really did manage to induce some concern.
‘Many are flocking to the ark of safety,’ Emily said in a letter that same day. ‘I have not yet given up to the claims of Christ.’ Again, on 16 May, she felt compelled once more to own her failure: ‘I have neglected the one thing needful when all were obtaining it.’ It seemed that other girls desired only to be good. ‘How I wish I could say that with sincerity, but I fear I never can.’ Her tone is rueful. It was not amusing to be a moral outcast when Miss Lyon consigned her to the lowest of three categories of students: the saved, the hopeful, and a remnant of about thirty no-hopers.
Miss Lyon had founded the college with the help of an evangelical network of donors who saw it as a recruitment centre for missionary work of every kind. Emily, holding out against recruitment, continued to be the object of pressure, and yet she speaks of kind teachers and scientific gains. Her troubles in college had nothing to do with learning: her progress proved so rapid that by the close of the academic year she was ready for Senior work.
Curiously, she formed no lasting ties with her fellow students. There were ‘many sweet girls’, but something in the atmosphere of the college led her to guard against intimacy. Her childhood bedmate Jane Humphrey was there, but since she was a Senior they saw little of each other. In any case, Miss Lyon discouraged exclusive friendships. Emily was ready to ‘love’ a teacher called Miss Fiske from Amherst, who visited her in her room and went out of her way to cultivate their common ties, as Emily put it humorously to Austin: ‘Miss Fiske told me if I was writing to Amherst to send her love. Not specifying to whom, you may deal it out, as your good sense & discretion prompt.’
For all her amusing self-possession, she says nothing of another persistent trouble: some form of ill-health. In mid-April 1848, an Amherst visitor to Holyoke informed the Dickinsons that Emily had been ill all winter. At once Austin appeared ‘in full sail’ to fetch her. Protesting and in tears, she was hauled away from college and kept at home, an invalid, for a whole month. Every day a physician came to examine her and every day her father dosed her in his forceful way.
What made Emily ill? Why did the physician come back so frequently? Was her illness difficult to diagnose? A pattern of withdrawals from formal education precedes the pressures of Holyoke. If the illness is the same it’s never named, apart from