A Loaded Gun (7 page)

“Language is first made in the mother's body,” writes Aífe Murray in
Maid as Muse.
For Emily Dickinson, it may have been a very sad song. Her mother was plaintive most of her life. And, says Murray,
“No language acquisition will ever be so sensate as the learning of our mother tongue.” But that mother tongue was shaped by the sounds and movements of a young wife in a house that must have sometimes felt like half a prison—and a morgue. Her melancholy didn't come out of nowhere. Less than a month after she gave birth to Emily Elizabeth, her father, Joel Norcross, married again, to Sarah Vaill, a much younger woman. Lavinia was perturbed by her father's decision
to remarry so soon after her mother's death. She would write to her sister on December 6, 1830:

I know of no one that I should prefer to her
    
[Sarah Vaill]
from what I have heard of her character & I hope it will be for Father's happiness & the happiness of his family—but we can not tell—what shall I call her? Can I say Mother.

We have no written record or reaction of how Emily Sr. felt. But she must have continued to grieve for her mother, and locked that grief inside herself. That hardly means she abandoned Austin and little Emily. Yet Dickinson's psychoanalytic biographer, John Cody, makes this wildly reductive remark.
“A warmer relationship with her mother would probably have made her a housewife,” as if Cody had found the dynamics of Dickinson's art. But I suspect another dynamic was at play here, that Dickinson absorbed her mother's pain, and was her own little mourner—that mourner would become Vesuvius at Home, a poet filled with a crackling rage.

       
The soul has moments of escape—

       
When bursting all the doors—

       
She dances like a Bomb, abroad . . .
    
[Fr360]

3

E
MILY
S
R
.
SUFFERED THE WAY
most other women suffered in nineteenth-century New England, however rich or poor. If she wanted to marry, she had to leave her parents' home like a vagabond in a bridal gown, shelve herself inside her husband's surname, learn to live with this man who was little more than a stranger, no matter what courtship rites were followed, and become subservient to this stranger's kin and to all his sexual needs and desires. Women were trained by their mothers and older sisters to give in to “a man's requirements” and “the low practices” of sexual intercourse. They were told to lie still and to seek
no pleasure for themselves. There was no pleasure to be had in this kind of ritualized rape. They were harlots if they ever moved or groaned with delight. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule—women who were a bit more adventurous, and husbands who were gentler and more
feminized.
Women and men were both trapped within the same Calvinist culture, and were often victims of an identical patriarchy. If they didn't profess their faith, they would rot in hell—husbands might be separated forever from their wives and children. And so there were constant religious revivals, mass professions of faith. But there were no female pastors. Men ruled the church, just as they ruled the banks and the law courts, and ruled Amherst College. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary wasn't founded until 1837; even if Emily Norcross had been a better student, she would have had nowhere else to go after she returned from her boarding school in New Haven. And Susan's daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, who was an unreliable narrator in anything to do with her aunt, still understood the merciless repertoire of every single Amherst belle:
“between the abrupt ending of school routine and the fatal hour of marriage there was for every girl a chasm to be filled in.”

Emily Norcross was a farm girl, not the daughter of an Amherst squire; she must have cleaned and scrubbed from the age of ten. And she had to grow up with all the fears and mystery that surrounded childbirth; so few children survived that they often weren't given a proper name until they reached the age of one. Austin and Susan's firstborn wasn't given a name at birth; soon he was called “Jacky,” until he survived six months and now had an official name, Edward, or Ned.

There was no anesthetic; childbirth was not only dangerous, it was also filled with shame; a male doctor, rather than a midwife, poked around in your waters. He delivered your child with medieval instruments and his own bloody hands. Women often went from pregnancy to pregnancy, with little time to recover; but being pregnant didn't
deliver
them from their chores. We have to imagine Emily Sr. in her isolation at the widow Montague's, or at the mansion on Main
Street, with Lucretia Gunn Dickinson as the real mistress of the house. Edward was seldom there; he was part of the fire brigade and would soon be running for public office. Little Emily must have
felt
her mother's loneliness; she was like a primitive Geiger counter, “a Goblin with a Guage” [Fr425]; that was her particular genius. Soon she had a little sister; Vinnie, named after her own aunt Lavinia, was born on February 28, 1833, at nine o'clock in the morning. But Mrs. Dickinson couldn't seem quite to recover, and she would never have another child. Vinnie herself was ill for a while. Perhaps it's why Mrs. Dickinson seemed to favor her.

When Emily was two and a half, she was sent to stay in Monson with her aunt Lavinia while her own mother and little sister continued to convalesce. We have a remarkable record of the trip in Jay Leyda's
The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson,
as Lavinia wrote her sister about the various stages of this voyage to Monson. Scholars have picked Lavinia's letters apart to look for signs of Mrs. Dickinson's abandonment of her little daughter. But the letters are poignant and funny, and offer our first glimpse of “Elizabeth,” as Aunt Lavinia called Emily Dickinson. She and her little niece left Amherst sometime in the spring of 1833 and found themselves in the middle of a thunderstorm.

Just after we passed Mr Clapps—it thundered more & the thunder and lightning increased—Elizabeth called it
the fire—
the time the rain wind and darkness came we were along in those pine woods—the thunder echoed—I will confess that I felt rather bad. . . . We tho't if we stopped we should not get home
    
[to Monson]
that night—Elizabeth felt inclined to be frightened some—she said “Do take me to my mother” But I covered her face all under my cloack to protect her & took care that she did not get wet much . . .

On May 9, she wrote to Edward, her brother-in-law, that little Elizabeth had learned to play the piano—
“she calls it the
moosic
.” Later that month, she wrote that Elizabeth was now a perfect little member of the
family. Joel Norcross was “much amused” by the little girl. And Lavinia now played the perfect aunt. She groomed the little girl, got her “a little gingham apron [and] some new
hose
.”

She speaks of her father & mother occasionally &
little Austin
but does not express a wish to see you—Hope this wont make you feel bad—She is very affectionate & we all love her very much—She don't appear at all as she does at home & she does not make but very little trouble—When I wish you come for her I will let you know . . .

John Cody and other Dickinson sleuths read this as a clear sign of the little girl's deprivation and distance from her mother. But Aunt Lavinia's remarks reveal more about herself than about the two Emilys. She had a new stepmother and was never comfortable around her. She was in love with her own first cousin, Loring Norcross, and would marry him the following year, but alliances between first cousins were practically forbidden, and her own alliance was frowned upon by all her relatives in Monson. She wrote to her sister about Loring:

Emily—no wonder you are astonished to hear—of the attachment between cousin Loring & myself—You expressed your surprise when I was at A[mherst] you recollect—One year ago I thought of no such thing but I know that now my heart is devoted to him. . . . I have had many sorrowful hours—for we are connected & we have been brought up together . . . If I love him, It is sufficient—& I have banished those doubts & fears—Whether it be right for cousins to marry or no—

And so it was important for Lavinia to have Elizabeth around; the little girl distracted her from her dilemma over Loring, and allowed her to become a kind of mother, or at least a motherly aunt. And she writes on June 11, just after
her
Elizabeth had been returned to the Homestead.

I cant tell you how lonely I was—it seemed so different & I wanted to weep all the time—the next Morning after Emily was gone I saw a little apron that she left & you cant think how I felt . . .

Aunt Lavinia was the deprived one, who suffered the loss of not having Elizabeth —note how she calls her Emily again once the little girl is gone. Emily Dickinson was much too young to understand Lavinia's predicament and stubborn will. She would love Aunt Lavinia all her life, and love Lavinia and Loring's children, Frances and Louisa—Fanny and Loo—and would board with them in Cambridge when her eyes bothered her. She wrote some of her warmest letters to Fanny and Loo, called them her “little brothers,” and no matter how landlocked she was in her “Pearl Jail” at the Homestead, she never denied them anything on their visits to Amherst.

But Aunt Lavinia also provided a kind of symbolic key for the future poet. By marrying her first cousin, Lavinia would guard her maiden name—she remained a Norcross. It must have been a magical quotient for Emily Dickinson. Of course, she never found a first cousin of her own. And there wasn't one to marry. But it had to give her some delight.

When Aunt Lavinia died of the Norcross disease—consumption—in 1860, Emily wrote the following to Loo:

       
“Mama” never forgets her birds—

       
Though in another tree.

       
She looks down just as often

       
And just as tenderly,

       
As when her little mortal nest

       
With cunning care she wove—

       
If either of her “sparrows fall”,

       
She “notices” above.
    
[Fr130]

Dickinson could just as well have been writing about her own mother—I'm sure the two sisters were “entangled” in her mind. And
we have to rid ourselves of the negative notions that have fallen upon Emily Sr. and threaten to wipe out whatever little traces we have of her, as if the poet's father had such significance in her life and Emily Sr. had none. Habegger calls her a woman with a
“relatively inelastic spirit.” Sewall speaks of
“this fluttery, timid woman.” Lyndall Gordon, in
Lives Like Loaded Guns,
pretends she didn't exist at all:
“the mother, the usual provider of emotional nourishment, is strangely absent.”

Sewall himself relented a bit in a letter to Jay Leyda:

Even Mrs. Dickinson's distaste for writing letters is blown up to account (in part) for Emily Dickinson's scorn of her mother, her taking over the mother's role with Austin and writing the letters for her, etc. Whereas she seems to me to be much like many people I know (including my wife) who express themselves in non-literary ways. They hate to write letters (Til would rather be hanged by the thumbs). Mrs. Dickinson sent flowers & fruit & food to her friends and made pies for her family.

But she was a little more fiery and independent than that. There's an apocryphal tale about Emily Sr., who, having hired a paperhanger, Lafayette Stebbins, against her husband's wishes,
“went secretly to the paper hanger and asked him to come and paper her bedroom. This he did, while Emily was being born.”

Of course it never happened, at least not in that way. But it's fun to imagine Emily Dickinson, who at times liked to think of herself as a mermaid, coming out of her mother's waters while Lafayette Stebbins was papering the walls. And it does reveal a stubborn streak in Mrs. Dickinson, who found her own way to defy Edward before and after their marriage. He was the invisible bridegroom at his own wedding, because the bride was so ambivalent about abandoning her family. And if she didn't have the intellectual curiosity of the rest of the Dickinson clan—even Vinnie was a religious reader of
The Atlantic Monthly
—it's partly because Edward managed to stifle whatever native rebellion she
might have had. He couldn't control her while she was still in Monson, though he tried to smother her in a constant barrage of instructions, telling her how she ought to behave and whom she ought to see. Once she was married and the mother of three small children, she had very little maneuverability. He stifled her and his children, insisting that they avoid the cold weather and dark streets of Amherst while he was away—and it seems he was away a good part of the time, either as a member of the legislature or on some urgent errand. And his wife did rebel, a little.
“I attended church all day yesterday,” she wrote on March 13, 1838. “I felt quite like a widow.”

Little Emily Elizabeth also rebelled. In that same year, while Edward was politicking somewhere on Beacon Hill, his wife wrote:

And I do indeed truly rejoice that the time is so near at hand when I hope to embrace my husband. . . . [Emily] sais she is tired of living without a father . . .

Mrs. Dickinson may have suffered from bouts of melancholy, like her poet daughter, but we trivialize her and distort her life if we consider her a chronic invalid, or someone who spent half her days dusting the stairs. She was probably up and about by 4:00
A
.
M
., as Aífe Murray suggests, dealing with stove ash, and firing up a stove that had come with her all the way from Monson; attending that stove was
“primitive, complex, and continuous.” Murray also suggests that the kitchen was the most creative room in the house; it was her mother who taught the poet various household witcheries—baking, gardening, and sewing would become
“key silent texts, a place for words to pour into and disappear from,” just as “needlework, brooms, and spider webs” would appear and reappear like witchcraft in Dickinson's poems.