Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [7]
With Mabel at The Evergreens nearly every day, Susan continued to talk of Emily Dickinson’s poetry as the rarest of treasures. Report of the newcomer’s enthusiasm reached the poet herself, who was accustomed to circulate her poems to a number of chosen readers. She sent Mrs Todd a few poems, possibly with a view to drawing her in. Lavinia said that her sister was ‘always watching for the rewarding person to come’. This was Mabel’s impression, and when she calls it ‘friendship’ it’s not necessarily as fanciful as it would seem. For Emily Dickinson did conduct her ties through handwritten copies of poems sent to those she admitted to friendship.
‘She writes the strangest poems & very remarkable ones’, Mabel wrote in her journal on 15 September 1882, four days after her initial visit to the Homestead. ‘She is in many respects a genius. She always wears white, & has her hair arranged as was the fashion fifteen years ago when she went into retirement. She wanted me to come & sing to her, but she would not see me. She has frequently sent me flowers & poems, & we have a very pleasant friendship in that way.’
It was only a matter of time, Mabel was sure, before she saw the poet face to face.
Mabel Todd’s entry into the Homestead looks politely obliging beside her attachment to Austin, but it was to present a parallel and more lasting threat to family cohesion. In the course of the following year Mabel would prise open the seclusion of the Homestead and establish herself as an habituée of the house, in a position to claim one of its rooms for three or four hours at a time. Until then the poet had controlled all contact with others. Her reclusive existence had served to release her gift and hold it at its explosive edge. But in the course of 1883 and 1884 she came up against the unstoppable momentum of this takeover. This advance of sexual energy on more sensitive forms of life - the Darwinian tragedy - presents a real-life drama nearly twenty years ahead of Chekhov’s Three Sisters where a robust female, a brother’s choice, takes over a family of three sensitive women. To what extent did Emily Dickinson resist the intrusion? Later, Mabel Todd would take possession of Dickinson’s papers and market them on her own terms, so that the strange nature of the poet became obscured.
To see the poet through a family upheaval that was to determine her image, we need to go back and back in time. Thirty years before Mabel Todd won Austin Dickinson, he had been in love in much the same way. Clever and ardent, with a moody arch to his lower lip, and determined to see his love through, whatever the obstacles, he had married a girl whose father had died a bankrupt alcoholic. If this had been almost any other place beside New England the bridegroom’s family might have opposed such a match. But in this region of rural Massachusetts during the 1850s, what mattered was faith.
Six years before the marriage of Austin and Susan a religious revival had gripped Amherst. In August 1850 Austin’s upright father, Edward Dickinson, had been moved to fall on his knees and declare himself a miserable sinner. Despite this gesture, his minister was not entirely pleased with the dry manner of Edward Dickinson’s salvation, as though this lawyer were arguing a case. But there could be no doubt about the feeling of Susan Gilbert, a girl of