Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [68]
Instinctively she sided with Austin, who looked burdened, waiting for a ‘crumb’ of sympathy from his sisters, while Susan was said to be overcharged with ‘scintillation’. Watching Austin’s mood in the autumn, Emily took in his picture of a wife entering on a buzz of activities while the put-upon husband retreats into relative seclusion. This image of a shallow socialite is not entirely convincing in light of what is known of Susan as a serious reader and sensitive mother. Were her excursions and parties an effort to cheer up the children in the face of a father who looked on darkly? When their daughter Martha (Mattie), aged ten, accompanied her father on a visit to Northampton he rebuked the child’s spirits: he was ‘much ashamed’ of her. On their return, Mattie confided to Aunt Emily and Aunt Vinnie that she had been much ashamed of him. Her father’s manner was increasingly austere as he tried on the crown descending from his grandfather through his father, both of whom had faltered in their financial management towards the end of their reigns. Austin, like his father before him, intended to make good what came to him in disarray: the college accounts. Jollities disrupted his right to quiet. They were an affront to domestic propriety.
Susan’s ‘scintillation’- alien to family reserve - reinforced a graver accusation stirring in Austin’s conscience. Refusing to consider if Ned’s epilepsy was inherited through his side of the family, he cultivated a suspicion that Sue had caused it by an attempted abortion. It’s not known at what point this medically untenable notion came to Austin, but it served to forestall guilt - especially if the Dickinsons had kept the blight from Susan before she married into the family. It was nineteenth-century practice to conceal shaming diseases: madness (in Jane Eyre) and syphilis (in Ibsen’s Ghosts) as well as epilepsy. Here is a buried seed for an efflorescence of blame yet to come. For the abortion story became the position Austin was to articulate in the 1880s, when Mabel Loomis Todd arrived on the scene, as one justification for turning against his wife. Susan, drawn into the family with pressing eagerness in the 1850s, was now re-categorised as alien, in a sense re-orphaned, and for Austin to exclude her emotionally meant that motherhood - her undeniable claim as mother of Dickinson children - had to be eroded. Forgetting Sue’s old terror of childbirth and his one-time idea of a mariage blanc, Austin’s tone was righteous: his wife had perpetrated an immoral act with terrible consequences.
Austin kept a record of Ned’s seizures in a diary of 1880 when his son was nineteen and a student at Amherst College. The eight seizures that year happened at night, about one hour into sleep. At the sound of Ned’s awakening cry, Austin would leap over the rails at the bottom of the bed he shared with Sue and rush upstairs. It was always Austin who went and he never got used to the groans from Ned’s room, the foaming mouth, the spasms of mouth, neck and chest, and the strained breathing that followed convulsions ‘distressing to see’. Later, Mabel observed Austin’s own nervous system as ‘exquisitely delicate & high-strung’ with a tendency to ‘night-horrors’.
Ned’s seizures were unpredictable, though Austin records after one attack: ‘I noticed his eyes an hour before bedtime last night as very black and bright.’ Black indicates a dilated pupil. Ned was not told he had epilepsy. He’d wake in the morning with no sign beside a sore tongue and sometimes a headache, which Sue would treat with a ‘fomentation’. It could happen that a headache preceded an attack and heavy breathing might follow. Some seizures were mild enough for Ned to go to classes next day. Some were so violent they shook the house.
We can’t know if Emily Dickinson suffered as her nephew did. There are many