A Companion to Emily Dickinson

Martha Nell Smith, Mary Loeffelholz, Martha Nell Smith, Mary Loeffelholz

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118836026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This companion to America's greatest woman poet showcases the diversity and excellence that characterize the thriving field of Dickinson studies.

• Covers biographical approaches of Dickinson, the historical, political and cultural contexts of her work, and its critical reception over the years
• Considers issues relating to the different formats in which Dickinson's lyrics have been published? manuscript, print, halftone and digital facsimile
• Provides incisive interventions into current critical discussions, as well as opening up fresh areas of critical inquiry
• Features new work being done in the critique of nineteenth-century American poetry generally, as well as new work being done in Dickinson studies
• Designed to be used alongside the Dickinson Electronic Archives, an online resource developed over the past ten years

PART I

Biography – The Myth of “the Myth”

1

Architecture of the Unseen

Aife Murray

Emily Norcross Dickinson was pregnant with the future poet and arrived at 280 Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts with her one-year-old son Austin in tow. She surveyed the brick “Homestead” which commanded a rise and took in a view of the Pelham Hills. The west side of this house was to become her family's new quarters. A gracious Federalist-style home, the place was considered “over the top” when it was commissioned seventeen years earlier by her father-in-law Samuel Fowler Dickinson who, by local standards, had achieved a small fortune as lawyer and businessman. Her husband Edward had just bought the west half of the house to staunch the bleed of his father's ruin. To accommodate the young family, Samuel Fowler and his wife and daughters compressed themselves into the east half. An impetuous and passionate man, decidedly reckless, Samuel Fowler had committed his entire fortune in founding Amherst College aimed at preparing young men for the Congregationalist ministry. He also established Amherst Academy to educate local youth. His great granddaughter would later refer to him as a “flaming zealot for education and religion” (Bianchi 76–77).¹

Four of Samuel Fowler's sons quit the town in order to separate themselves from their father's financial debts – a disaster that the eldest, Edward, hoped to forestall by buying half the house, paying his father's interest on the Homestead mortgage, and disentangling his father's debts (Wolff 29). A former legislator and town clerk, once active in town committees, and a famous orator, Samuel Fowler was, by the 1820s, financially and politically bankrupt. Those failures would loom over his children like a foreboding alter ego.

Emily Norcross packed up kitchen, furniture, and clothes while her one-year-old toddled amidst the dismantling of one home and reconstruction of another. The one she was leaving was a tenuously possessed (because of her father-in-law) portion of the widow Jemima Montague's house – and she was about to step again on terra infirma. These were assuredly tense times for the young couple setting up housekeeping next to the source of trouble. The central hallway bisecting the house front to back was surely not as ample a division as Emily Norcross Dickinson would have liked.

Austin was almost four and Emily just two years old when Lavinia, the youngest, was born. The day after “Vinnie's” birth, the mortgage on the Homestead was foreclosed. Two months later the entire house was sold to General David Mack Jr, who had arrived to manufacture palm leaf hats for which Amherst was to become the national production center. Samuel Fowler left the Homestead in disgrace, moving his remaining family to Ohio where Lyman Beecher had offered him a post at Lane Theological Seminary. Edward and family, however, stayed on as renters and moved to the roomier east half vacated by his father. For about six years the Macks and Dickinsons continued this intimate, “pretty perpendicular” living arrangement until Edward purchased a house with two acres around the corner on Pleasant Street, allowing the family home to pass out of Dickinson hands (JL 52).

Driven to restore the family fortune and what he saw as his rightful place in the Amherst pantheon, attorney Edward Dickinson embarked on a scheme to buy back his father's house when it came on the market in 1854. To consolidate his wealth Edward may have engaged in questionable practices (such as dipping into his wards' inheritance) to raise the $6,000 necessary to purchase the place and another $5,000 to “repair” it.² In the spring of 1855, fifteen years after he had left, Edward reclaimed the Homestead – a symbol of his regained status and an act that marked the “zenith of his career” (Mudge 77). A central piece of the Homestead remodeling scheme was a reordering of the family's spatial boundaries. The Pleasant Street house, where the family had spent fifteen happy years, had been dominated by a central stone chimney. Intellectual life had found a center in the kitchen where a table facing a north window was always “burdened with books, including Webster's Dictionary, pen, and ink paper” (Mudge 46–47; JL 129). Instead of the “kitchen stone hearth” where the teenagers gathered to do homework and talked long into night “when the just are fast asleep” – and where the reproduction of everyday life was central – this former heart of the household was reassigned, in the Homestead, to its own distinct area (JL 118). The Main Street “mansion” was grander and a much more formal abode that “required” the ongoing assistance of a maid-of-all-work. In quick order the Dickinsons hired Margaret Ó Brien, their first “permanent” maid.

Before hiring a permanent maid, the family got by on their own labor. Austin was responsible for the chickens and horse, with general oversight of the grounds and laborers, while the two girls were trained in sewing, baking, and other domestic arts. As was the common practice and family preference, temporary help was hired seasonally or for specific tasks such as laundry and dressmaking. While the children were young, helpful relatives pitched in. Delia (surname unknown) Mary, Delotia and Catherine were among the long-term (or permanent) helpers hired to keep the household on track until the children were old enough to contribute. But life was to be conducted differently on Main Street; the finer house required grander domestic plans.

“We shall be in our new house soon; they are papering now” Dickinson remarked on the progress in mid-October 1855 (JL 180). The renovations that lasted from May until November followed the then new architectural premise that “everything in architecture … can be made a symbol of social and domestic virtues” (Downing 23; quoted in Fuss 5). A dining room and conservatory were added to the eastern side of the house. The new domestic wing, consisting of kitchen, washroom, and shed, jutted from behind the dining room out toward the barn. With its own staircase to the second floor, there were three rooms above designed for live-in or temporary servants who could be segregated largely to their own wing except when serving at table, cleaning, or sewing (McClintock 149). This configuration, in which Dickinson would do the bulk of her writing, was a house where divisions between people and functions could be achieved through smaller, highly specialized rooms within a “geometry of extreme separation” (McClintock 168). In this setup, the maid is not supposed to be seen and yet, paradoxically, she must be seen in order to confirm “that class is there and negotiable in stable and unthreatening ways” (Hitchcock 21). Segregated from the family's living quarters, servants and visible signs of their labor were absent. To go from the Homestead's double parlor to kitchen, one now passed through four doors and three passageways; it was much simpler to enter the kitchen from the yard.

I Thought that Hope was Home – a Misapprehension of Architecture (JL 600)

The triumph of what's best described now as the family's “class” change was symbolized and effected by the move from Pleasant to Main Street – with so much encoded in those two names. Life in the house on Pleasant Street was just that and the move to Main Street soberly underlined the centrality of the Dickinsons' civic role and page in history. They went from the “haves” to the “have mores,” securing themselves as provincial elites.³ Noting the house sale, the local paper concluded: “Thus has the worthy son of an honored sire the pleasure of repossessing the ‘Old Homestead’ ” (Mitchell 71). But rather than glide regally, Dickinson takes a bit of wind from the over-puffed family sails by describing their November 1855 move as a straggling party of western pioneers:

I cannot tell you how we moved. I had rather not remember … Such wits as I reserved, are so badly shattered that repair is useless – and still I can't help laughing at my own catastrophe. I supposed we were going to make a “transit,” as heavenly bodies did – but we came budget by budget, as our fellows do, till we fulfilled the pantomime contained in the word “moved.” It is a kind of gone-to-Kansas feeling, and if I had sat in the long wagon, with my family tied behind, I should suppose without doubt I was a party of emigrants!

They say that “home is where the heart is.” I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings. (JL 182)

The new house and adjacent buildings made a very different dwelling than one shared along a north–south axis some fifteen years earlier. This new configuration sanctified “home [as] a holy thing,” an “Eden” whose “placid portals,” for the middle class and elite, were increasingly seen as defense against what the poor represented: degradation of the “street,” an eroticism associated with pre-industrialism (before “taylorization” or the scientific management of work advocated by Frederick Winslow Taylor), and the unruly natural world. These were things the accumulating capitalist had had to give up but still yearned for, projecting these qualities onto the poor as when Dickinson's elder nephew referred to African American waitresses as “Lurid Ladies” (JL 59; Roediger 14). Control was the “central logic” of the nineteenth-century upper-class creation and policing of spatial boundaries. Deference rituals – bowing, backing out of the room, uniforms, silence, “invisibility” – helped reduce the employer's anxiety around boundary confusion and class antagonism (McClintock 33, 71–72, 156–71; Stallybrass and White 150). It was this gesture that underscored the Homestead renovations and the addition of a “permanent” maid-of-all-work.

Interestingly, the 1855 move back to the Homestead coincides with a division in Dickinson's writing, for the most part separating Dickinson's pejorative letters about the working class as a group from both her later defense of her servants and the anomalous ways she talked about them – using them as tropes – to underscore a point or advance a plot; both of which I shall describe below. Many things were changing at this time so the division might be coincidental, not simply ascribable to architectural shifts of home life. Dickinson, whom many think of as living outside the tide of events, was privy to the nation's politics and progress. The family subscribed to at least a half-dozen periodicals and discussion of local, regional, and national events was daily mealtime fare (Wolosky 35; Pollit 211–32). Key players in those political dramas were often guests at supper or tea during her father's lifetime. As a young person, Dickinson was vulnerable largely because of her grandfather's fantastic failure and her mother's uncertain health. She despised the Irish and loathed the general grab for the “almighty dollar” even as her father wrested his successfully. Although the encoded fear about ruin was seemingly abated by the move to Main Street, the need to denigrate the poor through differentiation or the impulse to shore-up identity would never be as strong as it was in her early twenties. Like Thoreau, she softened on these topics as she became familiar with and dependent on those not just like her and, in maturing, deepened her understanding of the world. While she never championed causes, and even disparaged those who were bent on “extricating humanity from some hopeless ditch,” Dickinson's writing becomes a map of changing tides on class and race (JL 380). They chart the ways identity is formed through a type of humor or commentary that underscores social differences – or what I will call Dickinson's “literary rituals of recognition” – and how race, which was used as a descriptor earlier in her life, becomes a pejorative in later correspondence.

In many ways 1855 was a watershed year, a coalescing point from which to look forward and back. On one side of that date the roles of stableman and gardener seem to have been dominated by African Americans. On the other side those posts came to be largely filled by Irish and English immigrants. On one side, the family managed with the assistance of relatives and alongside help hired for specific or seasonal tasks but, on the other side, an Irish maid-of-all-work became a domestic mainstay. Tasks that had once been Austin's – care for the animals and grounds – were shifted permanently to hired hands.

The 1855 return to the Homestead was definitely an important moment for the family. Her parents met the change eagerly, but it was with mixed feelings that Dickinson registered the move to the “ancient mansion” (JL 52). As it turns out, the formality and new stiffness of life in the “old castle” would have some positive consequences (JL 52). With architectural divisions operating like an invisible handler and the addition of a maid as a buffer between writer and intruding world, Dickinson was able to give flight to her imagination and create her identity as a writer. With Irish immigrant Margaret Ó Brien at the stove, Dickinson's contributions decreased to wiping the plates her maid washed or baking all the breads and puddings (JL 311; Leyda 1: 152). While people do not necessarily live in rooms exactly in the ways prescribed by architects, one might safely conclude that spatial formalities were largely adhered to while Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson ruled the roost. By the time household management passed to their daughters, the organization of daily life shifted. Dickinson was spending more of her day drafting poems in the kitchen and nearby writing table. Class strictures about time and place increasingly eased by the time the “good and noisy” Margaret Maher joined the fold as maid-of-all-work (Holland 170; Murray 697–732; JL 690). Deference was not in their parlance, for Maher spoke to her mistress as “Emily” (JL 610).

Dickinson's correspondence maps dominant issues spanning the nineteenth century from the War of 1812 to the Civil War, when there was a great deal of apprehension, among all classes of people, about the profound societal change they were experiencing, driven in part by new accumulations of wealth. The taylorization of time was so painful that people both scorned and yearned for a more natural, chaotic and erotic, past (Roediger 95–96, 14). Manifestations of apprehension included the associations of alcohol use and dirt with the working class, and a middle-class effort to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Sources
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Biography – The Myth of “the Myth”
• PART II: The Civil War – Historical and Political Contexts
• PART III: Cultural Contexts – Literature, Philosophy, Theology, Science
• PART IV: Textual Conditions – Manuscripts, Printings, Digital Surrogates
• PART V: Poetry & Media – Dickinson's Legacies
• Index of First Lines
• Index of Letters of Emily Dickinson
• Index