Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [89]
She expressed ‘a strong intuition’ that her life would be ‘full of romance and uncommon adventure . . . There are capacities in me, I know, which I’ve not yet begun to feel . . . I shall yet do something which will be heard of - that I know.’ It meant she would never give herself to domestic trivia - a bold declaration at the time and for almost a century to come. Here David Todd excelled: he encouraged plans for her own significant future.
What he revealed of his sexual history came as a shock, so much so that David scissored out a good many entries in his diary for 1878. Uncomfortable rumours led him to hasten the date of the wedding. As a bachelor he may have been less careful than he became. There were three daughters in the house where he lodged and as a single man he’d been well placed to make up to one or other before Mabel caught his fancy; it would explain why their father, the influential Newcomb, did not offer David a permanent post - why, we might ask, did David move to a low-grade post in Amherst when he had a patron in the capital?
Mabel didn’t enlighten her parents but confided to her journal, in unusually muted tones, her hope that David would turn faithful. She intended to ‘purify’ him with her love. Voicing her disgust with loveless sex, she gave him a biography of Madame de Pompadour. So, when David renewed his philandering after their marriage, she might have left him had she not found herself pregnant. She had been determined to prevent this and her account of her failure to do so (in her journal and a ‘Life of Millicent’) shows her flair for writing about sex with ease and finesse.
When they conceived Millicent (named after the British suffragist, Millicent Fawcett), ‘it was not at all from uncontrollable passion’, but to prove a theory of contraception. Mabel expected to be fertile only ‘at the climax moment of my sensation - that once passed, I believed the womb would close, & no fluid could reach the fruitful point’. A parallel theory was that the womb closed after menstruation, so that on the eighth day of her cycle a woman would be safe. Accordingly, on 15 May 1879 the Todds took themselves upstairs after breakfast to test these theories, with Mabel, as she records, receiving ‘the precious fluid at least six or eight moments after my highest point of enjoyment had passed, and when I was perfectly cool and satisfied, getting up immediately, thereafter, and having it all apparently escape’.
So firmly did she hold to these misguided ideas of contraception that she refused to recognise her pregnancy until the fifth month, when she could no longer ignore her thickened waist. During these first months she tried various forms of abortion: vaginal suppositories of belladonna and morphine, jumps and prolonged immersions in boiling baths, all the while telling herself and her doctors that menstruation had stopped for other reasons. The doctors accepted her version, against all medical indications. (One physician of fifty years’ experience, her uncle Dyer Loomis, responded to her complaints of nausea by prescribing quinine for a supposed residue of malaria in her system.) Her persuasiveness with these doctors is characteristic of the power she could exercise over others: it’s the power of conviction conveyed with an irresistible combination of eloquence, tact and the lift of her head and breast as she sailed confidently into consulting rooms.
As well as their child, there were three other reasons to remain with her husband. First and foremost is the traditional reason of dependence. Mabel had nothing to live on: she did love her parents and, like women before her, would not have wished to become a burden. She was proud enough to keep David’s affairs from them. Then, too, David convinced her that he was