Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [66]
. . . then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far—
‘Situates’ is a passive construction refusing passivity. In the end the poem questions the efficacy of observation. It rejects the allure of Romantic subjectivity and reverts to the opening premise, fusing it with a Puritan belief in the unknowable: ‘Perfectness’ - unobservable and immeasurable - defamiliarises the more ordinary ‘perfection’. This may be the most brilliant theorem Dickinson distilled from experience, applicable to any observation a reader might make. At source, the poem came out of the poet’s eye problem at the time it was written.
In the end Dr Williams’s cure was so ineffectual that he fell back on a standard defence: blame the victim. Her problem lay in her attitude, the doctor decided; it required a change of mentality on her part. At first, Emily had tried to be positive in the face of long discouragement.
‘Emily wants to be well,’ she had told Vinnie in July 1864, during the first phase of the cure. ‘If any one alive wants to get well more, I would let Him first.’
By March 1865 a disappointed Vinnie had taken the doctor’s side: ‘I cannot see why you don’t get well,’ she reproached her sister.
Emily reported these words to her sympathetic cousin Loo, adding ruefully, ‘This makes me think I am long sick, and this takes the ache to my eyes.’
Dr Williams further subscribed to the current medical view that too much thinking could damage a woman. ‘Down thoughts’, he told her.
It was as though he had told her, ‘heart be still’. To be parted from thoughts and books (for he also forbade reading)16 was an exile to ‘Siberia’. His prohibitions put an end to the booklets. She never resumed this alternative to publication, and though she did continue to write poems, the great surge of the early 1860s came to an end. Dr Williams, in the vanity of the latest know-how, simply didn’t see her. The invalid Alice James confided to her diary: ‘I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.’
One of the degrading diagnoses concocted for women was ‘hysteria’, from the Greek for womb. Respectable doctors, even Dr Jackson, believed that epilepsy could be hysterical in origin. They spoke of ‘hystero-epilepsy’17 or ‘hysteric convulsions’ and since, as they fancied, a distension of the vessels of the brain occasioned attacks, they fancied by analogy that turgid blood in the uterus and genitalia might bring about spasmodic motions.18 There’s an implication that women who are highly sexed are more liable to aberration. This would appear to place the onus on a woman who, the theory assumes, is indulging in the kind of thoughts that lead to turgidity. A misogynist diagnosis will lean to punitive treatment. The best treatment, doctors advised, was to remove the patient from the sympathies of her home so as to encourage a wanting self-control.
If the guess about epilepsy is right, then the reason Emily’s treatment failed is because epilepsy was not curable. Drugs, developed later, merely suppress seizures which often happen with the depression of consciousness at night. Dickinson’s poem, ‘It struck me’, explains how ‘it’, the electrical discharge, slit through sleep and spread like fire, leaving miasma in its wake:
It burned Me—in the Night
It Blistered to My Dream
It sickened fresh upon my sight
With every Morn that came—
Epilepsy has a genetic component, and two others in Emily’s family were subject to seizures. Cousin Zebina Montague, immured at home - he, too - across the road into town from the Homestead was a son of Irene Dickinson (‘Aunt Montague’), sister to Emily’s grandfather Samuel Fowler Dickinson. There were three unions between Montagues and Dickinsons in that generation. Emily’s grandmother, it will be recalled, was the irritable Lucretia Gunn. Lucretia’s mother Hannah, Emily’s great-grandmother,