Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [26]
Nathaniel Hawthorne stirred the controversy over female free-thinking through the outcast figure of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (1851). Emily Dickinson’s spiritual freedom seems quirky but exists in this contemporary context. Women educated at the level of educated men were a new phenomenon in her generation, which may explain the concern of their elders, including Monson’s Female Praying Circle (filled with the Norcross faithful), to police Holyoke and stamp out any tendency on the part of young women to think for themselves. It so happened that Monson’s Female Praying Circle wanted a report on Emily Dickinson in particular. If she already nursed the dissenting spirit of Anne Hutchinson she would have taken care to speak the communal language with no sign of sedition as it could have led to expulsion from college. The most useful lesson she had learnt there was how to protect a private self at odds with the pieties of her society.
The pressure against forwardness still held sway. In 1830 Hawthorne had published a diatribe against a ‘monstrous regiment’ of female scribblers who had entered the literary marketplace. More insidious than his ridicule of shallow sentimentality was Hawthorne’s attack on the indelicacy of public utterance. A woman writer stripped herself ‘naked’. Charlotte Brontë, Madame Dupin and later Mary Ann Evans and Olive Schreiner - in fact almost all women writers - had to publish under male or neutral pseudonyms if they were to avoid censure as women exposing themselves in the public arena.
Dickinson had this dual challenge: as a woman, she was compelled to avoid public utterance; at the same time, to find a voice of her own she had to trust herself, as Emerson urged. During her Holyoke ordeal and after, she aligned herself with a creed of her own, opposed to the sermons and missions closing in about her. Dinning in her ears was the old, grim conviction of innate depravity. All the while, away in Boston, Emerson and other lapsed Unitarian ministers were proclaiming the reverse: our perfectibility, what Emerson termed ‘the infinitude of the private man’. Where earlier in the century the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing had spoken of man’s ‘likeness unto God’, Emerson asserted that man is god, and a god most of the time in chains. In his thrilling ‘Divinity School Address’ of 1838, Emerson had proclaimed that every person has the divine spark within. A person who recovered it would possess the creator’s power.
Benjamin Newton gave the young Dickinson a volume of Emerson’s poems (the first, published in 1847). A challenge about substance is pasted on the flyleaf:
All can write autographs, but few paragraphs; for we are mostly no more than names.
B. F. Newton
August 1849
It was Emerson, Emily said, who ‘touched the secret Spring’. Emerson sanctioned ‘stinging rhetoric’, ‘laconic and brisk’ words as opposed to the pale language of literary magazines. He called for words that, if cut, would bleed; not tripping speech but ‘a shower of bullets’. At Holyoke the young poet-to-be had looked into Emerson as into a secret self. ‘In silence we must wrap much of our life,’ he acknowledged, ‘because we cannot explain it to others, and because somewhat we cannot yet understand.’ In his central statement, ‘Self-Reliance’, he declares that his life ‘is for itself and not for a spectacle’; therefore, he advises, keep ‘the independence of solitude’.
The headiest element in Emerson is an offer of power if an individual remains unfixed, unaligned, in a state of becoming:
I tire of