Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [48]
Rowing in Eden—
Ah—the Sea!
Might I but moor—tonight—
In thee!
Does she mean a lover or the divine Guest? The one often means the other. To put such fragments together in order to compose a coherent story about a secret love affair with ‘Master’ is a dubious exercise. For these fragments are not biographic facts; they are states of being consequent on events closed to us. It’s uncomfortable not to know what the poet ‘knows’; and so uncomfortable to biographers and scholars, who pride themselves on knowing, that successive commentators have contrived to weave a romantic fiction around Charles Wadsworth, the Philadephia minister. Dickinson liked him enough to confide some distress, and he paid her one visit in 1860 (a good while before he moved to California in 1862) and another in 1880, but none of these facts adds up to much. Pasty-faced and beardless, with a beautiful, supportive wife, Wadsworth obliged her with a routine pastoral letter, signing it ‘in great haste’ - hardly the language of romantic love. He sounds kindly attentive, no more, too busy to share sorrows in the way Dickinson may have hoped. Those who plumped for Wadsworth had to believe in instant love (the poet spent only two weeks in Philadelphia), followed by chaste renunciation. Here, ready to hand, was a story fit for a proper New England spinster.
It’s a mistake to read the Master letters literally. The voice is too absurdly abject not to be a performance. It amuses her to prod the power relations between the sexes. Master’s skin is so swollen with self-absorption that it must be soothed with the balm of feminine humility and sacrifice, delivered to him in the modest manner of nineteenth-century ladies. Master does not notice that her words are over-the-top, just short of hilarity.
Prior to the first surviving letter to ‘Dear Master’, thought to be in 1858, the writer has tried to communicate in the language of flowers. If he cannot understand, she blames the flowers for failing to communicate. ‘They were disobedient. I gave them messages.’
In the second letter, written early in 1861, the writer names herself ‘Daisy’, the girl-in-waiting in the fantasy Emily had confided to Sue in their early twenties (three years before she encountered Wadsworth, and six years before she came to know the newspaperman Sam Bowles, another leading candidate for ‘Master’). Daisy’s freshness, like early-morning dew, will be drained by the rising sun of desire. As she lifts up her petals to the burning ray, her ‘dew’ gives way to thirst and she yields to ‘the man of noon’. That’s as far as the fantasy went in 1851. In this second letter, ten years on, ‘Master’ appears responsible for a ‘gash’ and drops of blood from Daisy’s body. Daisy refrains from explicit blame - though she’s on the verge of it - as ‘Master’ knows, and resents.
‘Oh did I offend it - [Did’nt it want me to tell it the truth]’.
Daisy puts on an apologetic act, calculated to placate Master even as she shames him by the overdone abasement he seems to require. Daisy, who once sat on Master’s knee, now kneels to him. ‘Low at the knee that bore her once . . . Daisy kneels a culprit . . . but punish don’t banish her’. A coloratura voice soars to a top note as she asks Master to kill her if he thinks she deserves this.
It’s a non-stop act. Daisy is not really cowed. She points to the wound by boasting that, on parting, she contrived to hide it. Daisy ‘never flinched’. The noble pathos is operatic; her letter, in effect, an aria. She has at her command an abundance of affecting words, and after she’s abased herself for long enough, and told Master that he fills her brown eyes with tears, the moment arrives for a dramatic gesture: she uncovers a weapon.
‘I’ve got a Tomahawk in my side’.
It now comes out that so long as she’s been brave enough to conceal the tomahawk, Master has been taking advantage: ‘her master stabs her more’. The tomahawk and blood suggest a virgin’s defloration. (There is similar violence in Dickinson’s botanical dramas: ‘My Fuschzia’s Coral Seams