A Loaded Gun (11 page)

She no longer wandered through the village and the countryside, without her Newfoundland. It would have been treasonous to have another dog—Carlo couldn't be replaced. He'd been part of her thoughts and desires, had mirrored her own reticence, her shyness. Deprived of that walking mountain, she would turn inward, seldom leave her father's house.

3

“H
ALF THE PLEASURE OF HAVING A DOG
,” writes Adam Gopnik, “was storytelling
about
the dog: she was a screen on which we could project a private preoccupation.” In addition to a real dog, Gopnik “
had a pretend version, a daemon dog,” who lived inside the real one. His own fictive dog was a companion who liked long walks and “listening to extended stretches of tentatively composed prose.” And Carlo was also a daemon dog, real and fictive at the same time. We can imagine Dickinson reciting the melody of her lines to Carlo on
their
long walks. And that daemon dog appears in one of her most disturbing poems, written long before Carlo died, a poem that summons up a strange, miraculous adventure in the middle of a walk.

       
I started Early—Took my Dog—

       
And visited the Sea—

       
The Mermaids in the Basement

       
Came out to look at me—

       
And Frigates—in the Upper Floor

       
Extended Hempen Hands—

       
Presuming Me to be a Mouse—

       
Aground—opon the Sands—

       
But no Man moved Me—till the Tide

       
Went past my simple Shoe—

       
And past my Apron—and my Belt

       
And past my Bodice—too—

       
And made as He would eat me up—

       
As wholly as a Dew

       
Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve—

       
And then—I started—too—

       
And He—He followed—close behind—

       
I felt His Silver Heel

       
Opon my Ancle—Then My Shoes

       
Would overflow with Pearl—

       
Until we met the Solid Town—

       
No One He seemed to know—

       
And bowing—with a Mighty look—

       
At me—The Sea withdrew
—
    
[Fr656]

How can we enter this journey, through which porthole or door? The poem is as difficult and daunting as “My life had stood a loaded gun.” The first two lines don't indicate the peril of the poem, the fear of being swallowed up and ravished by some imagined male sea. Suddenly there are “Mermaids in the Basement,” as if the speaker had tumbled upon that perverse porthole of her own mind. But these mermaids aren't threatening. They won't seduce or bite. They're curious about the poet, want to have a look. Mermaids are a crucial piece of property in Dickinson's Lexicon. She herself is a mermaid astray on dry land. And the mermaids in the poem are like a welcoming mirror.

She would reveal the nature of her poetics to Higginson in her fourth letter to him: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person.” [Letter 268, July 1862] Perhaps she wasn't even conscious of her own lie. This “supposed person” is one more bit of camouflage. The speaker is always Emily Dickinson, the poet-wanderer, whether she appears as male or female, child, hummingbird or bee, or a ghost talking to us from the other side of the grave. It doesn't really matter what persona she inhabits—it's a reckless version of herself. But she can afford to be reckless in this poem—she has her dog.

The speaker here could be Little Alice, going through the looking glass, or down a rabbit hole—the poem has the same enchantment and menace as Alice in Wonderland, and the same sexual perversity.
She can shrink or grow enormous, as Alice does, become both powerful and puny.

The Frigates on the Upper Floor of her mind presume her to be a Mouse adrift upon the Sands. But they don't crush the poet. They extend Hempen Hands. She's not as meek as they imagine. “But no Man moved Me”—until the Tide appears and almost submerges her in its own will. It rides past her “simple Shoe,” past her Apron, and her Belt, past her Bodice, too, with its own menacing and hypnotic caress. But she resists this tide—the male sea—and she emphasizes his maleness twice. “And He—He followed—close behind,” with his “Silver Heel” of seduction until her
simple
shoes “overflow with Pearl”—perhaps the secret tides of her own creation—and she manages to escape the sea, with the dog as her silent witness, and arrives at the “Solid Town,” the safer and more conscious perimeters of her mind, where the sea isn't known and has little sway—and bowing to Dickinson, the sea departs, with a “Mighty look” at the poet.

Nothing is really stable in the poem—“nature is so sudden she makes us all antique,” Dickinson once jotted down in a fragment that may have been sent to Judge Lord. [PF 82] Perhaps the poem is about the entanglement and confusion of her sexual and creative force. “All power,” writes Susan Howe, “
including the power of Love [and the power to create], all nature, including the nature of Time, is utterly unstable.” There are no truths to discover,
“only mystery beyond mystery.”

She was frightened of her own powers, and her daemon dog must have soothed her a bit. She could saunter in and out of some treacherous dream with Carlo and still stay alive. Carlo was her mute Confederate—she and her dog were both rebels, who would weave bandages or blankets for no one. She wasn't blind to the battle reports. And she was as warlike as the generals in both camps. Her most revealing glimpse of the carnage was written long after she had lost her mute Confederate.

       
'Tis Seasons since the Dimpled War

       
In which we each were Conqueror

       
And each of us were slain

       
And Centuries 'twill be and more

       
Another Massacre before

       
So modest and so vain—

       
Without a Formula we fought

       
Each was to each the Pink Redoubt—

       
[Fr1551, about 1881, in pencil, on a scrap of paper]

And there was no room for Emily or her daemon dog on that Pink Redoubt, where
decoration
dwelled—like some murderous jewel—rather than the rectitude of war.

N
OTE
: Rebecca Patterson, who was the first to describe Dickinson's love for Kate Scott, believed that this poem charts the lost romance of two women—Dickinson and Kate—and their Pink Redoubt; Patterson could be right, but like most of Dickinson's poems, meaning upon meaning abounds.

FOUR

Judith Shakespeare and Margaret Maher

1

I
N
1929, V
IRGINIA
W
OOLF PUBLISHED
a short book,
A Room of One's Own,
that would become a war cry for all women writers.
A Room of One's Own
rumbles on for forty pages, until Woolf decides “to draw the curtains” and describe how women lived in Elizabethan England.
“For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song and sonnet.”

And Woolf comes to a rather somber conclusion about Elizabethan women.
“Imaginatively she is of the highest importance: practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.”

She was, in Woolf's own words, “a worm winged like an eagle.” She had no private income and a room of her own, the two essential ingredients for a female writer. She could only strut and prance about in some male poet's mind. And to support her case, Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—Judith—with his extraordinary gifts.
How could she have possibly thrived? Judith might have been
“as agog to see the world” as Will. Her father wouldn't have sent her to school—there were no schools for girls. She might have picked up one of her brother's books, taught herself to read, considering she had some of his genius. If she were lucky, she could have written a page or two in her father's apple loft, and that would have been the end of her career as a scribbler.

She still had her own secret ambition and wasn't going to tie herself for life to some bony, half-witted boy. So she breaks her father's heart, prepares a tiny bundle of her belongings, climbs down a rope from her window, and runs off to London—not yet seventeen, but with
“a gift like her brother's for the tune of words.”

She arrives at the stage door with that bundle on her back. She wants to act, she says. The stage manager and all his cronies laugh in her face. There are no females on the London stage; boys have all the women's parts. And what is Judith Shakespeare to do? She can't learn her craft, can't even have dinner at the local tavern—she would be considered a slut. Yet she has Will's gray eyes and beautiful brows. But the manager, Nick Greene, pities her in his own way, knocks her up, and with all
“the heat and violence of the poet's heart when tangled in a woman's body,” she kills herself one winter's night, and now her bones lie buried beneath some London crossroad. And, says Virginia Woolf, any woman born with Judith Shakespeare's gifts in the sixteenth century
“would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.” And she would not only have been harmed by the people around her but would have been ripped to pieces by her own contrary instincts.

Suppose by some miracle Judith Shakespeare had survived, had written plays, like her brother; she could never have signed them.
“That refuge she would have sought certainly. It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late as the
nineteenth century.” And so we have George Eliot, George Sand, and Currer Bell, aka Charlotte Brontë, all beloved by Emily Dickinson. George Eliot's picture hung on her bedroom wall, together with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whom she loved and admired all her life. When Sam Bowles visited Europe in 1862, Dickinson wrote:

Should anybody where you go, talk of Mrs. Browning, you must hear for us—and if you touch her Grave
    
[in Venice],
put one hand on the Head, for me—her unmentioned Mourner
—
    
[Letter 266, early summer 1862]

Elizabeth Barrett was born in 1806, near a tiny village in northeast England, and grew up at Hope End, an enormous estate of woodlands near Wales that would become her own Deserted Garden. She couldn't go to boarding school, unlike her brothers, but read
Paradise Lost
before she was ten, studied Latin and Greek on her own, translated Aeschylus, began to publish her poems, without ever signing her name—proper young ladies didn't become poets. But she wasn't Judith Shakespeare, forlorn and alone in London. She managed to educate herself. She'd had a troubled adolescence, with terrible backaches, and would soon become an invalid. She may have suffered from scoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, though doctors couldn't really diagnose her condition. For months she had to lie still in a
“spine crib,” a hammock that seemed to float in the air four feet above the ground. But that didn't prevent her from writing. Pampered by her father, who was strict with his other children but proud of his “Poet Laureate,” she was soon encouraged to publish under her own name. He wasn't quite as sanguine when she eloped with Robert Browning; he'd forbidden his favorite daughter—and all his other children—to marry.

It isn't hard to imagine what hold that secret marriage must have had on Emily Dickinson, who was fifteen at the time. She was mesmerized by “that Foreign Lady” with her long eyelashes and long dark curls, while she, the Belle of Amherst, with her freckles and weak
chin, morphed into “the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.” [Letter 268, to Higginson, July 1862]

       
I think I was enchanted

       
When first a sombre Girl—

       
I read that Foreign Lady—

       
The Dark—felt beautiful
—
    
[Fr627]

And Dickinson crept into that magic spot—“noon at night”—where creativity began. Barrett Browning never betrayed her. At her first meeting with Higginson, nine years after Mrs. Browning's death, she wouldn't let him leave without one of her prize possessions, a photo of the Foreign Lady's tomb.

She modeled herself on Mrs. Browning, not in her poetry—that electric leap from line to line is all her own—but in the way she lived. The Foreign Lady hid herself, ran from strangers, and saw only a few friends. This would become Dickinson's own
style
and battle plan as a poet. Someone who was truly agoraphobic couldn't have warded off Professor Joseph Chickering the way she did—with such humor and élan. Chickering was a graduate of Amherst College and taught English there for thirteen years. He was also Dickinson's neighbor and had befriended her and Vinnie several times. He knew about her poetry, and when he wanted to visit, she wrote:

I had hoped to see you, but have no grace to talk, and my own Words so chill and burn me, that the temperature of other Minds is too new an Awe
—
    
[Letter 798, early 1883]

There's a bit too much art in her
agoraphobia,
and a touch of malice. She could sing nonstop to Higginson, suck the blood out of his bones, until he was worn down, and had to retreat with his little memento of the Foreign Lady, but she didn't want to talk about her poems to a college professor.

She'd rather read and reread
Aurora Leigh,
Barrett Browning's epic
portrait of the artist as a young woman, first published in 1856, around the time that Dickinson was flirting with her own powers as a poet—and daring to write in her Pearl Jail.
Aurora Leigh
would serve as a road map and rallying cry for Dickinson's own struggles as a poet. It's a great big clunky book that enthralled a whole generation of readers, male and female. Sam Bowles adored every line and could recite entire sections by heart. Virginia Woolf captured all its contradictions, more than half a century later:

Stimulating and boring, ungainly and eloquent, monstrous and exquisite, all by turns, it overwhelms and bewilders. . . . We laugh, we protest, and complain—it is absurd, it is impossible, we cannot tolerate this exaggeration a moment longer—but, nevertheless, we read to the end enthralled.

But it was far from monstrous for Emily Dickinson. She would mark up the copies she had, and Jay Leyda uncovered several of these markings. Aurora's aunt had lived
“a cage-bird life,” leaping mindlessly from perch to perch, and loving every leap.

That was not the life for Emily, or Aurora Leigh.

       
The works of women are symbolical.

       
We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight,

       
Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir . . .”

And to her cousin Romney, who wants to marry her and bridle her will to create, Aurora answers:

                                       
. . . I may love my art.

       
You'll grant that even a woman may love art,

       
Seeing that to waste true love on any thing

       
Is womanly, past question.

Leyda believed that one or two of these markings may have been a secret dialogue with Dickinson's own father. She couldn't have known
anything about Shakespeare's imaginary sister, of course. But she would have understood Judith Shakespeare's suffering and suicide. “I knew a Bird that would sing as firm in the centre of Dissolution, as in it's Father's nest—” Dickinson wrote in 1881. [Letter 685]

She was that bird, and she was still in her father's nest. She had a room of her own, like Virginia Woolf, and even if she didn't have a private income, her father paid for all her wants. She also had “a cage-bird life,” but she didn't leap mindlessly; she leapt into song. And Judith Shakespeare must have lived inside her blood, unbeknownst to her, with all the other phantoms of lost female genius. And this is the rage that flew out of her, “a sumptuous Destitution—/Without a Name—” [Fr1404]. And if we want to celebrate her as a Civil War poet, talking about the bloodbath “In Yonder Maryland—” [Fr518A], we had better look twice—she was a poet of apocalypse. We cannot shackle her to one side or another—her compass didn't read North and South. The poet dreams of the dead rather than the living. When a townswoman—Mrs. Adams—loses her
second
boy during the first year of fighting, Dickinson writes to one of her Norcross cousins about ghost riders: “Poor little widow's boy, riding to-night in the mad wind, back to the village burying-ground where he never dreamed of sleeping!” [Letter 245, December 31, 1861]

She was also a ghost rider in her father's house, flitting around in her white dress, without anywhere else to go. She could “touch” the universe with her mind, and all alone—

       
A speck opon a Ball—

       
Went out opon Circumference—

       
Beyond the Dip of Bell
—
    
[Fr633]

And that's where she lived most of the time, after Carlo died; not with her sister-in-law, a hedge away, though she sent 252 poems, often like love missiles, across the lawn, according to R. W. Franklin's count; not with Austin, who had distanced himself from her world
of poetry and allowed Edward to entomb him in the Evergreens; not with her mother, who had become more and more morose once she moved back to the Homestead and would suffer a stroke in 1875; not with Vinnie, who was a stranded mermaid, like her sister, but had come up from a different well. Her argument was with her father, dead or alive. The martial spirit in her poems, her warlike rumbles, her constant riddling, was a dialogue with Edward Dickinson, in slant rhyme. “Out opon Circumference,” she was his secret son. In the poet's psyche, Judith Shakespeare had suddenly turned into Will. She was Edward's heir apparent.

       
Amputate my freckled Bosom!

       
Make me bearded like a man!
    
[Fr267]

It's not that she wanted to do away with her brother—she adored him. But she couldn't attend Amherst College, or become a lawyer, so she became a lawyer in her poems—her lines swell with legal terms. Here she writes a legal brief
against
a spider, who has occupied her place in the privy.

       
Alone and in a Circumstance

       
Reluctant to be told

       
A spider on my reticence

       
Assiduously crawled

       
And so much more at Home than I