Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [23]
‘It startles me when I really think of the advantages I have had, and I fear I have not improved them as I ought.’ This is how she spoke, adopting a politely sorrowful tone. ‘Many an hour has fled with its report [of the saved] to heaven, and what has been the tale of me?’
What Emily rejects is not religion, but coercion. Signalling from behind her public failure is an intelligence collected enough to combat bullies who want to take over her mind and hardwire into it a formulaic ‘tale’ - the ‘tale’ of all fundamentalist faiths that close down the right to freedom of judgement. This negates the intellectual development for which she had come to college and, at the same time, negates notions of self-reliance she had come upon in the essays of Emerson. She talked appreciatively of visits from her fellow students, but sensed that these attentions were not friendship as she understood it. Though she did have the moral support of her father and brother, they were not on the scene and undoubtedly the strength to face this out alone came from herself: ‘I generally carry my resolutions into effect’, she had reminded her brother in a lighter mood. It’s an accurate self-estimate of a young woman of extraordinary integrity and firmness.
Emily’s refusal to conform coincides with the official start of the women’s movement in America (marked by the Seneca Falls declaration of June of that year); the ferment of women’s rights fuelled by the 1848 revolts in Europe; and the appearance of Jane Eyre, with its self-contained, rebellious heroine. Emily read it eagerly at the time of her own revolt against the housekeeping that awaited her at home: ‘. . . so many wants - and me so very handy - and my time of so little account - and my writing so very needless’. She was writing, then, at the ages of eighteen and nineteen.
Commencement on 3 August 1848 was the cut-off point: it brought to an end the scientific study she had pursued every day till the second night bell. Convalescing in the spring, she had read ‘The Princess’ (published in December 1847), where Tennyson seems briefly to concede women’s blocked aspirations through the outcry of Lilia, who wishes she could be a mighty poet. Women’s inferiority, Lilia believes, is all a matter of education:
It is but bringing up; no more than that . . .
Ah, were I something great! I wish I were
Some mighty poetess, I would shame you then,
That love to keep us children! O I wish
That I were some great princess, I would build
Far off from men a college like a man’s
And I would teach them all that men are taught;
We are twice as quick!
Tennyson goes on to spoof the possibility of a women’s college. His fantasy of unfit women is a far cry from the academic success of Holyoke. For Emily, though, it was over. That August, housework replaced classwork. Astronomy, the last of her courses, was irrelevant to the tasks her mother assigned. As sole daughter at home (Vinnie was still away at boarding school), Emily was expected to make herself useful; duty was to rule her days, not learning. To encourage her, Mr Dickinson bought his daughter a volume of Letters on Practical Subjects, inscribed to her on April 18, 1852. At this stage he cooled her taste for poetry, as she reported to her brother: ‘we do not have much poetry, father having made up his mind that its pretty much all real life. Father’s real life and mine sometimes come into collision, but as yet, escape unhurt.’
It did not escape Emily that her father did not take kindly to a woman who made herself conspicuous in public. At the age of twenty she accompanied him to hear the Swedish nightingale Jenny Lind perform one thundery night in Northampton. Mr Dickinson found that he was discomforted to see a female on stage. A gift was no excuse for a woman to exhibit herself. So what was his daughter to do with the gift that seethed inside her?
There was tenser friction with her mother, who was trying to introduce her to the finer points of housekeeping and whose care for the creature comforts of visitors often