Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [84]
‘I have done with guises’, she declared at the time the relationship moved forward in 1878. ‘I never seemed toward you’, she confirmed in the course of 1880.
Was she too frank for her own good? The fear did cross her mind, and it’s possible that she edited the surviving drafts or didn’t send them. Whether she did or not, her father’s friend gave her emotions a ‘fair home’, replacing the vacancy in what she still called ‘my father’s house’. And yet he was not like her father. His racy talk, familiar to colleagues on the bench, called out an unfamiliar side to Emily Dickinson.
‘I will not wash my arm’, she said, ‘twill take your touch away -’, and again: ‘It is strange that I miss you at night so much when I was never with you - but the punctual love invokes you soon as my eyes are shut - and I wake warm with the want sleep had almost filled . . .’.
She speaks like a guilt-free child - childlike in the Romantic sense, untrammelled by what Wordsworth called the prison-house: capitulations to social norms that blight the innocent who comes into the world trailing clouds of glory ‘from God who is our home’. To lie in Lord’s arms, to evoke his touch in bed at night was as spontaneous, as free of definition, as the way Dorothy Wordsworth lay beside her beloved brother or held his head against her breast.
Wafting through the poems is a woman playing a counter-role: this purified creature has to freeze the life of the ‘Ethiop within’. Abandoned to solitude, she retires from existence; puts on purity in her white dress; assumes ‘Cobweb attitudes’; and hangs her head in ostensible submission. In this poetic role she enacts the appealing helplessness and self-effacement of nineteenth-century womanhood, but a cutting voice finds the role absurd: ‘such was not the posture / Of our immortal mind—’. All the same, the white legend was to linger: as late as 1976, in the Broadway play The Belle of Amherst, a ‘shy’, ‘chaste’, ‘frightened’ poet charms the audience with her feminine winsomeness. The playwright called it an ‘enterprise of simple beauty’.
The sentiment of this cult invites satire. A giant (sixty-foot) puppet of the Belle of Amherst, in the signature white dress, pops out in the 1999 movie Being John Malkovich. Demurely, book in hand, this famous ‘Nobody’ decries ‘Somebodies’ who croak about themselves the livelong day. Then, in 2008, ‘EDickinsonRepliLuxe’, a futuristic tale by Joyce Carol Oates, imagines the mass-marketing of a Dickinson robot half the poet’s size. This diminutive Belle in her dimity apron is designed to be a harmless pet, a consolation for wives buried in suburban deadness - so unlike the ardent woman who flung out her lassoes.
After a springtime visit to Amherst in 1882 the Judge conducted a trial in Springfield, as reported daily in the Republican. On 29 April he sentenced the accused, Dwight Kidder, to twenty years for the manslaughter of his half-brother Charles. Emily Dickinson wrote to Lord the following day, a Sunday, unsure whether he was still occupied with the case or whether he had returned to Salem. Her letter is again extraordinarily frank in its strange allusiveness and innuendo: she appoints him ‘the judge’ of their varied moments, and herself the advocate for contentment with the status quo.
30 April 1882
. . . To write to you, not knowing where you are, is an unfinished pleasure - Sweeter of course than not writing, because it has a wandering Aim, of which you are the goal - but far from joyful like yourself, and moments we have known - I have a strong surmise that moments we have not known are tenderest to you. Of their afflicting Sweetness, you only are the judge, but the moments we had, were very good - they were quite contenting . . .
I am told it is only a pair of Sundays since you went from me. I feel it many years . . . I have been in your Bosom . . .
Heaven, a Sunday or two ago . . .
‘Impregnable’ was a word of the moment. She placed it between them, teasing a legal mind for whom words have precise