Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [49]
It’s by no means certain that this protest comes from the writer herself, even though Emily Dickinson herself was small and thin, weighing about 107 pounds. She is as capable of entering into the elation of ‘Wild Nights!’ as of lending herself to sexual fear. The Dickinson parents would never have mentioned sex. Her most likely source would have been ‘Sister’. When Sue confides to ‘Sister’ of the thorn in her flesh, it’s not the voice of a contented wife.
The scene switches from the tomahawk assault of frontier narrative to Wuthering Heights and strains of deathless love. ‘Let me in!’ pleads Catherine Linton from the other side of death. In Dickinson’s second letter, a ghost voice pleads with the wrongly married Master to take her in for ever. Heaven is not for her ‘because it’s not so dear’. In the background the twenty-third psalm wafts into the airwaves: ‘I shall not want’. This love is heaven-sent, the only heaven worth having.
The third letter, supposedly a month or two later, in the summer of 1861, imagines togetherness at night. Instead of the marital ‘frost’ Master must endure, Daisy would breathe beside him. Her mood is now playful, rather cosy. She would then be nearer than his new coat, but this is ‘forbidden me’. If this love is heaven-sent, adultery is not at issue. The true reason it’s forbidden she can’t say.
‘Vesuvius don’t talk - Etna - don’t - one of them - said a syllable - a thousand years ago, and Pompeii heard it, and hid forever - She could’nt look the world in the face, afterward . . .’.
This voice erupts in a blaze of destructive scenarios, flashing too fast for coherence: a woman in white - a bride it may be - could be shut in a chest; alternatively, there’s the dungeon of Chillon, Byron’s scene of long-term imprisonment; a ‘bullet’ hits a Bird; a ‘gash’ stains Daisy’s bosom. Master seems impervious to the damage in his vicinity, so Daisy offers to exhibit a tell-tale drop of blood. To tell or not to tell? Dickinson herself concealed what she called, in confidence to her cousin Loo Norcross, ‘that old nail in my breast’ (like Susan in her role as the nightingale who sings with a thorn in its breast). What’s genuine in the hidden pain of ‘bullet’, ‘nail’ or ‘tomahawk’ should not obscure the bravura of the poet’s professionalism: the way these letters draw on a dazzling array of historical and literary models. What appeared to be love letters may in fact be closer to exercises in composition.
Though the Master letters play variations on the romance plot, they also confirm Dickinson’s aversion to weddings and marriage. ‘Master’ is neither tender nor considerate. Nor can he hear what his correspondent is saying.
All the same, there was huge benefit from ‘Master’: what Dickinson gained was fuel for a new phase of her oeuvre. As Yeats would say of his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, there was an advantage to so much effort to verbalise his feelings: ‘I have come into my strength, / And words obey my call.’ Since, in this sense, the poet’s life is there, what links may be found between the facts of Dickinson’s life and her leap between setting up her private poetry base in 1858 and the poetic immortality she knew she had achieved by the end of 1863?
The starting point must be the fact that Emily Dickinson wasn’t required to earn her living in the drudging ways then open to women; she was also relieved of the pressure to marry. In her domestic seclusion, white dress, and Daisy manner, hers seems a womanish life, but it hides another, as proved by the lifetime’s work discovered after her death. ‘I cannot dance upon my toes’, she writes in 1861, ‘No man instructed me’, and then continues with a long list of all the things she can’t do. Untaught by men, she can perform none of the acts of female contortion: no platform for her; no applause. Not for her the ‘claw upon the air’, the wilted