Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [25]
When Jane took up a new teaching post in Willoughby, Ohio, in 1852, Emily accused her of caring too little. She consoled herself with an image of Jane as sad stranger in the Midwest. Jane’s readiness to take up a post far away was a venture Emily found incomprehensible. Her own ‘desolation’ away from home and recurrent sickness had closed off any such course. Her father comforted her further with a possibility that he might send her to complete her studies elsewhere. Nothing came of this, and at the age of twenty, she rebelled against the narrow-mindedness she encountered in Amherst.
In a Shakespeare reading group a righteous young man tried to censor the bawdier lines. One of those present, Emily Fowler, recalled ‘the lofty air with which the future poet ended the debate, saying, “There’s nothing wicked in Shakespeare, and if there is I don’t want to know it.”’ For the others it carried the punch of an exit line.
At home, an unending tide of cleaning closed over and seemed to obliterate her. She tried to practise ‘kind obedience’, doubtful if her act was convincing, and mocking herself as ‘the Queen of the court, if regalia be dust, and dirt’. She could see herself through the eyes of the saved as she slunk away, ‘one of the lingering bad ones’ who pause and think, and think and pause, drawn neither to heaven nor the world. Her real prayer was ‘God keep me from what they call households.’
There were ‘cross’ days when she didn’t hide her frown, and her nearest and dearest were made to hear ‘how loud the door bangs whenever I go through’. When she neglected to attend the winter season of the Sewing Society, who kept themselves pleasantly occupied with offerings for the poor, hints of hard-heartedness followed her, as well she knew: ‘I am already set down as one of those brands almost consumed.’ Nothing, she began to see, would rescue her from ‘this wilderness life of mine’ but a waking dream when she lived ‘in the books the Shadows write in’.
At the time Emily was banging doors she talked to a young lawyer who was gaining experience in her father’s office. Benjamin Franklin Newton, aged twenty-eight, was ten years older than Emily. As a reader he was in contact with ‘the Shadows’ - enough for Emily to confide something of her own book-life and to accept Newton’s guidance in her reading. During 1848-9, he became her mentor, with Emerson one of their common topics.
Emily had put Emerson’s belief in ‘the integrity of the private mind’ to the test at Holyoke. Whether consciously or not, she had proved herself a model of Emersonian self-reliance. Throughout her ordeal she had resisted the entrenched Puritanism (revived by Jonathan Edwards as a counterblast to the optimism of Unitarians when this form of faith took over in eighteenth-century Boston). As a Unitarian and an Emerson enthusiast, Newton would have understood Emily’s private revolt against dogmatism; as her mentor, he would have reinforced her private declarations of spiritual independence - ‘wicked’ in the puritanical terms of their locale.
Emily Dickinson’s private confrontation with the puritanical community was not peculiar; it’s in a long tradition of American dissent, going back to an early English settler, Anne Hutchinson. Soon after her arrival in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, Hutchinson set up a weekly meeting to discuss the previous Sunday’s sermon. Preachers seemed to her ministers of the letter, not the spirit. She stood for grace freely given. For a self-taught woman, however well-versed in the scriptures, to bypass and comment on the words of properly educated men struck the Puritans as enthusiasm,