Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [53]
The wedding night of this alternative bridal is rehearsed in a ‘Master’ poem of 1861, ‘A wife—at Daybreak I shall be—’, which Dickinson recopied with variations in 1862 and 1863. Midnight’s transforming hour is at hand with Master mounting the stair to where his destined mate awaits him in her room. This is the last moment she’s still a child; the next, she will be transformed for ever: ‘How short it takes to make it Bride!’ Is he a human bridegroom who’s approaching, or is it a ghost of a love that might have been, or is this a visionary encounter? The bride looks to her ‘Victory’ at sunrise, an elevating turn to the east. Here (in first draft) is what she’s thinking as the footsteps approach:
The Vision flutters in the door—
Master—I’ve seen the face before—
In the end this is not about a wedding night. It’s not about the love of man and woman. Dickinson was inspired by some more general conception where ‘I’, as a mortal being, meets an eternal force: in later drafts ‘Master’ is interchangeable with ‘Saviour’. Yet, as the dashes suggest, any sentence on this subject must remain unfinished. Her model could be Emily Brontë, who was not writing about ordinary human love when Catherine dies and her servant feels ‘an assurance of the endless . . . hereafter - the Eternity they [the dead] have entered - where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy . . .’. Dickinson too yearned for infinities and dreamt up a Master to yearn with her.
The real biographical question is not the identity of ‘Master’, who vanishes into an array of dramas, particularly as bridegroom of the spirit (a drama utterly beyond Bowles or any other of the candidates). No, what matters is when something happens that should not have happened, and that is when the control Emily Dickinson exercised over every detail of her life slipped. This was rare, but did happen. It happened when the imaginative life of poetry, feeding to some extent off ordinary life, spilt into an actual relationship on the ground. She was more scrupulous than other poets - Shelley and Byron, say, wreaking havoc around them - in holding herself apart from what we’d ordinarily call life. But now and then imagination crossed the boundary, as in her ‘gun’ letter to what must have been a bewildered Norcross uncle - a threat that belongs in our lawless fantasy life and nowhere else. Dickinson’s ‘wife’ poems celebrate an emotional bond that transcends social and legal ties. The bond prompts a breakthrough of the speaker’s buried fire, her private character as ‘Vesuvius at Home’. Fuelling the poetic eruptions from well below the surface there’s an adulterous fantasy, dangerous if let loose in real life, as it proved when Emily intruded on Mrs Bowles.
At the height of Dickinson’s ‘wife’ drama, between the second and third Master letters, Bowles again brought his wife to visit the Dickinsons. This, in early May 1861, turned out as much a disaster as her first visit in 1858.
‘You must make some allowances for her peculiarities,’ Bowles defended his wife to Austin. ‘Her very timidity & want of self-reliance gives her a sharper utterance. The porcupine I take it is really a very weak & . . . distrustful animal, & so puts out his fretful quills to hide his soft heart. - I think she was somewhat disappointed in her Amherst visit - it did not turn out so pleasantly, as she meant to have it.’
He did accept some of the blame: his wife, he owned, wished him to ‘manage’ her ‘as she wanted to be managed’, but this concession, coated in the mild language of the pleasant, leaves out the torment he inflicted on a wife whose face was drear, as though drained of life.
In the autumn of 1861, when Bowles was out of reach in a Northampton sanatorium, Emily turned her attention to his again pregnant wife, who found her ‘alarming’. Emily, amused, played up to Mrs Bowles’s alarm. She pretends to be advancing on this wife, alone and unprotected at home; scary