Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief

Roger Lundin

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781467422222
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Garnering awards from Choice, Christianity Today, Books & Culture, and the Conference on Christianity and Literature when first published in 1998, Roger Lundin's Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief has been widely recognized as one of the finest biographies of the great American poet Emily Dickinson. Paying special attention to her experience of faith, Lundin skillfully relates Dickinson's life -- as it can be charted through her poems and letters -- to nineteenth-century American political, social, religious, and intellectual history. This second edition of Lundin's superb work includes a standard bibliography, expanded notes, and a more extensive discussion of Dickinson's poetry than the first edition contained. Besides examining Dickinson's singular life and work in greater depth, Lundin has also keyed all poem citations to the recently updated standard edition of Dickinson's poetry. Already outstanding, Lundin's biography of Emily Dickinson is now even better than before.

1

The Props Assist the House

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The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Augur and the Carpenter — [#729]

Memory is a strange Bell — Jubilee, and Knell.

Remembrance often overpowered Emily Dickinson. It ran like a fault line beneath the surface of her life, frequently shifting and disrupting the normal course of affairs. As the poet wrote shortly after her mother died in November 1882, memory was to her “a strange Bell — Jubilee, and Knell.” It was “Jubilee” because it brought the dead to life and lodged them securely in the mansion of the mind. “My Hazel Eye/Has periods of shutting —/But, No lid has Memory —,” Dickinson claimed, for “Memory like Melody,/Is pink Eternally —” [#869, #1614]. Yet at the same time, memory also sounded the death “Knell,” tolling the loss of ones she had loved. “Remorse — is Memory — awake —,” and the mind that raises the dead must also acknowledge that “The Grave — was finished — but the Spade/Remained in Memory —” [#781, #886].

Because of Emily Dickinson’s passion for memory and commemoration, it seems curious that there is but a single reference to her ancestry in all of her poems and letters. Her grandfather was a founder of Amherst College and a major public figure in his day; her forebears on the Dickinson side were among the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and played vital roles in the life of the colony and the early republic. Yet all we hear of them in the writings of Emily Dickinson is one brief mention, in the form of a promise she made to send her aunt the family’s copy of her grandfather’s Bible.

Dickinson neglected her ancestral past because she had a remarkably concrete understanding of remembrance and cared little for history in the abstract. Neither the traditions of the church nor the legacies of her ancestors interested her greatly. Because she had not known them directly, she had no memory of them. For her, memory meant the recollection of intense experiences or encounters rather than rituals of general commemoration. It usually involved the revival of a sensory impress — the cadences of a voice or the sight of riveting eyes — that Dickinson carried in her mind and that brought back to life one who had been snatched from her grasp by death. To borrow one of her metaphors, she was intrigued only by the memory of what went on within the dwelling of her conscious life; in the props that had assisted in building that house she had little interest.

MILLENNIALISM AND MORALISM

It was indeed a rich family history to which Dickinson could have turned her attention, if she had chosen to do so. Her ancestry can be traced to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when Nathaniel Dickinson was among the four hundred or so settlers who accompanied John Winthrop in the migration that began in 1630. Nathaniel and his wife Anna were doubtless present on the voyage when Winthrop preached his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” offering a prophetic vision of New England. In language that continues to resonate in the American experience, Winthrop reminded his fellow sojourners to the New World: “We are entered into Covenant with Him for this work” and “we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”

The New England Puritans were in the main postmillennialists. They believed, that is, that the thousand-year reign of Christ prophesied in Revelation, the final book of the Bible, would come as a result of their ardent efforts to purify the church. The Puritans with whom Anna and Nathaniel Dickinson came to the New World believed themselves to have been sent by God on a divine “errand into the wilderness.” If they were successful, Christ would dwell in their midst and establish his rule over the earth.

The pursuit of godliness and opportunity sent Nathaniel Dickinson first from Boston to Wethersfield, Connecticut, and several decades later to the new plantation of Hadley, Massachusetts. Once planted in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts, the descendants of Nathaniel Dickinson took root in the area and, for several generations, took charge of the town of Amherst. In a biography of her aunt, Martha Dickinson Bianchi wrote of the original Nathaniel Dickinson that “he appears to have dominated to a large extent the organization of his own world in his own time.” Nathaniel had ten children, and families of nine or ten children became common among his descendants. So many of his heirs stayed in the Amherst area that by the 1880s a family historian could write that in central Massachusetts the Dickinsons “threatened to choke out all other forms of vegetation.” In reporting on a Dickinson reunion held in Amherst in August 1883, the Boston Journal observed that “we may well doubt whether the Dickinsons belonged to Amherst or Amherst to the Dickinsons.” At a Dickinson family reunion in 1933, Bianchi noted, “Our names outnumber even those of Smith in the telephone book, without counting those of us who have married into another family, and are a perplexity to strangers.”

For many generations the Dickinsons farmed the land, remaining active in civic affairs and committed to the covenantal faith of their Puritan ancestors. Only in the generation of Emily Dickinson’s grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, did some members of the Dickinson family begin to forsake farming for the professions. Following the lead of his older brother Timothy, Samuel entered college and eventually graduated second in his class from Dartmouth in 1795.

In selecting Dartmouth, Samuel Fowler Dickinson and his family chose to align themselves with the heritage of the colonial revival known as the Great Awakening. While the older Congregational colleges, Harvard and Yale, were skeptical of the emotions of revivalism, Dartmouth and other institutions had risen up to champion the Awakening. When he graduated from Dartmouth, Samuel Fowler Dickinson decided to follow his older brother into the ministry. Within a year, however, he gave up training for the pastorate and turned his attention to the law, thus setting the course for his family in Amherst for the next century. His son, Edward, and grandson, Austin, would follow his lead, both in their devoted service to Amherst College and in their legal careers that placed them at the center of Amherst’s life. The stage for Emily Dickinson’s life was set, then, when her grandfather left the ministry and entered the law in Amherst at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Emily’s grandfather was a brilliant man who struggled with conflicting impulses and demands throughout his life. Samuel Fowler Dickinson’s ambition initially found a satisfactory outlet in the practice of law and political affairs in Amherst. After his marriage to Lucretia Gunn in 1802, Dickinson quickly rose to the top of his profession in the town. It was not long before his became one of the wealthiest Amherst families. By 1813, when Emily’s father Edward was only ten, her grandfather had achieved such success that he was able to build the impressive Dickinson Homestead on Main Street several hundred yards east of the center of the town. This imposing structure was the first brick house in Amherst and was to be Emily Dickinson’s home for all but fifteen years of her life.

Yet even as his legal career flourished, Samuel Fowler Dickinson felt driven to pursue loftier aims. There was in him a quality of restlessness that was passed down directly to Emily’s father, brother, and herself. As a college graduate who had trained for the ministry and the law, Dickinson sought to advance both the Kingdom of God and the American republic through the establishment of a college in the Connecticut River valley. His tireless labors upon behalf of Amherst College were motivated in good measure by the postmillennial heritage that he shared with other New England Congregationalists of his day. Dickinson, Noah Webster, and others interpreted the moral, political, and economic prosperity of the new republic as a sign that God was about to establish the Kingdom foretold by John Winthrop two centuries earlier. In the words of the first historian of Amherst College, “the conversion of the world often pressed heavily on [Samuel Fowler Dickinson’s] mind.” He viewed Amherst as “one of the agencies that would surely hasten that promised event.”

The realities of Emily Dickinson’s evangelical Protestant inheritance run counter to many established conceptions about her religious life. It has become commonplace to claim that she was the product of a harsh Puritan environment that stifled her spirit and inspired her poetic rebellion. In her home, church, and school, young Emily supposedly had a rigid Calvinism drummed into her. As a recent biography puts the matter, the Dickinson family clung to a reactionary Calvinism “containing elements of terror and psychic violence” and spurned the new Unitarian faith, which “stood for serenity, a life of rational virtue, a view of Jesus as a model for imitation rather than a divine savior.” With its visions of a terrifying hell and a dour heaven, this dire Puritanism oppressed the gifted young woman. Only through heroic resistance, the argument goes, did Dickinson manage to define herself in contradiction to it. Her eventual choice of a poetic career, her embrace of solitude, and her alleged lesbian practices, among other things, have been attributed to her revolt against the tyranny of an overbearing creed.

To be sure, the Puritan legacy was still strong in the Connecticut River valley in Emily Dickinson’s day, and many of the poet’s personal traits and poetic practices show the imprint of that heritage. Her poetry, as we shall see, was shaped in complex ways by the Trinitarian theology that had been preached from the pulpits for two centuries before her in the Connecticut River valley. Her complex understandings of God, self, nature, and human destiny were all influenced in manifold ways by the Reformation tradition that permeated life in the towns of western Massachusetts. Like many significant literary figures in nineteenth-century England and America, Dickinson adapted and transformed that inherited faith in her art, where its imprint remains clear and unmistakable.

To understand Emily Dickinson’s life, however, it is crucial to note that by the time she was born in 1830, the transformation from the austere Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards to a more genteel Christian profession was well under way in the Amherst area. Edwards, who died in 1758, had promoted a majestic vision of God’s economy; in the scheme of things as he envisioned it, the human will stood naked and vulnerable before the throne of God. “Natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell,” his most famous sermon asserted. “They have no refuge, nothing to take hold of, all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted unobliged forbearance of an incensed God.” Edwardsean Calvinism offered a bracing theological vision that demanded a great deal of the wounded rebel and promised even more to the repentant sinner. With its stringent diagnosis of sin, it labored to expose the gaping wound of the human will and applied the crucified and risen Christ as the only salve for that wound.

Gradually by the end of the eighteenth century and more rapidly in the first decades of the nineteenth, Edwards’s descendants had begun to blunt the edge of the scalpel he had used to cut into the New England soul. Edwards’s incisive depiction of the will in bondage to sin seemed poorly suited to the needs of the church in a nascent republic; instead, what the new nation needed was a clear vision of the social usefulness of Christian faith. “How does religion make a man useful to his fellow?” asked Edwards’s grandson, Timothy Dwight, in “Farmer Johnson’s Political Catechism.” The answer: “By rendering him just, sincere, faithful, kind and public-spirited, from principle. It induces him voluntarily, and always, to perform faithfully in the several duties of social life.” Dwight shied away from theological and philosophical speculation and called instead for Christian social action. “From first to last,” Mark Noll explains, “Dwight was a man in motion.”

Over the course of the first several decades of the nineteenth century, the transformation of the Edwardsean legacy continued across New England. Following the lead of Dwight and others, evangelical Christians sought increasingly to link church and society by stressing the moral improvement of the self rather than the inscrutable will and character of God. By promoting moral reform, ministers thought they could both strengthen the tie between a distant God and everyday life and bolster the waning influence of the church in a democratic culture. Gradually, “with passing decades,” writes James Turner, “Evangelical millennialism merged imperceptibly into a more secular idea of progress. . . . At times, they [Evangelicals] almost identified growing prosperity, increasing knowledge, and improving social organization with the perfecting of the earth supposed to presage the millennium.”

Emily Dickinson’s immediate ancestors found little to object to in the theological changes taking place around them; indeed, especially in the case of her grandfather, they eagerly supported efforts to have their Calvinist heritage recast to bear the imprint of newly minted republican ideals. In the first several decades of the nineteenth century, the Dickinsons were, like many well-situated families in Congregational New England, Whiggish in their politics and New School Calvinist in their theology. The Whig ideal provided for these antebellum New Englanders a means of securing the social order for divinely appointed ends without emphasizing the more abstruse or embarrassing elements of the Puritan theological tradition. In the words of Louise Stevenson, “Whiggery stood for the triumph of the cosmopolitan and national over the provincial and local, of rational order over irrational spontaneity, of school-based learning over traditional folkways and custom, and of self-control over self-expression.” It was the ideal faith for men of the rising professional class in the early nineteenth-century New England village, and it would prove to be a superb foil for Emily Dickinson, the greatest poet of the age.

For southern New England in general and the Dickinson family in particular, Yale College led the way in uniting Whiggery and New School Calvinism. Edward Dickinson graduated from Yale in 1823, and from 1840 to 1878 — virtually the whole of Emily Dickinson’s adolescence and adulthood — the pulpit of the First Church of Amherst was filled by Yale graduates. It was at Yale, under the leadership of Timothy Dwight and Nathaniel Taylor, that the heirs of Edwards attempted to sustain his influence by modifying his teachings. Called New School Calvinists, these Yale theologians and their supporters had it as their objective “to blend the activist, voluntarist ambitions, fluid attitudes of nineteenth-century America, with the religious doctrines of the Reformation,” argues Daniel Walker Howe. “Broadly stated, this meant formulating into a religious ideology the culture associated with Whiggery.”

The theological milieu in which Emily Dickinson was raised, then, was dramatically different from the Calvinist world of William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, or Jonathan Edwards. A curious mix of Whig republicanism and evangelical moralism framed the religious debate in her home, church, and village. If Dickinson was reacting against anything in her adult struggles with the church, it was against this alloy of elements rather than against the undiluted Calvinism of an earlier age.

The speech delivered by the famed lexicographer Noah Webster at the dedication of Amherst College in 1820 displays a perfect blend of Whig goals and evangelical principles. Webster was a close associate of Samuel Fowler Dickinson, and his granddaughter was to be one of Emily Dickinson’s closest childhood friends. In his dedicatory speech, Webster set forth the task of Amherst College as “that of educating for the gospel ministry young men in indigent circumstances, but of hopeful piety and promising talents”; he described that mission as “one of the noblest which can occupy the attention and claim the contributions of the Christian public.” With deliberate echoes of the millennial and imperial imagery of his Puritan forebears, Webster depicted the college’s efforts as seconding those of “the apostles themselves, in extending and establishing the Redeemer’s empire — the empire of truth.”

The truth to be discovered and propagated by Amherst College was to be not a body of doctrine but a way of life. Webster defined the mission of the college as a work of social improvement: “It is to aid in the important work of raising the human race from ignorance and debasement; to enlighten their minds; to exalt their character; and to teach them the way to happiness and glory.” The benefits of an Amherst education were to spread throughout society; eventually the college would even help to “dispeople the state prison and the penitentiary!”

The goals of Amherst College’s founders were impossibly ambitious, and Samuel Fowler Dickinson came close to ruining himself and his family in pursuing them. For several years Emily’s grandfather was embroiled in disputes concerning the manner in which he and others had solicited funds for the new college. A special committee of the Massachusetts legislature was formed to investigate the charges, and though Dickinson was eventually exonerated, his reputation had been badly sullied by the affair. In addition, to help finish the necessary work to open the college, Dickinson had put up his own property as collateral for loans, had provided his own horses and laborers for the construction project, and had taken a number of the workmen on as boarders at no charge. “His large-heartedness and desire to help those in need sometimes overtaxed his judgment,” one of his descendants wrote of him in August 1883, “and his name was often endorsed on notes to a large amount, which he was obliged to furnish the money for, while several men thus helped lived in affluence on his bounty, without recognizing the source.”

Not surprisingly, Samuel Fowler Dickinson’s difficulties caused problems for his eldest son, Edward. While the latter was enrolled at Yale in the early 1820s, his father sent him letters filled with complaints about money. Repeatedly, Samuel prodded Edward to find less expensive ways to travel home and to cut his expenses at school. At one point, he warned Edward that he might have to withdraw from Yale: “What may be my determination respecting your continuance at N[ew] H[aven] I do not know — this must be left till we see how things shall be at Amherst — One reason seems, however, almost unanswerable — necessity — inability to supply the money necessary at N[ew] H[aven].”

Reckless in the expenditure of his energy and funds on behalf of Amherst College, Samuel Fowler Dickinson was forced in 1833 to leave Amherst, at the age of 57. He, his wife, and their youngest children moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he served as the superintendent of labor and building at the new Lane Theological Seminary under its first president, Lyman Beecher. Within several years, he left Lane and traveled north to become the treasurer of Western Reserve College. He fared no better there than he had at Amherst College and Lane Seminary. Of Samuel Dickinson’s tenure, the official historian of Western Reserve was to write that “his experience was insufficient for the position and his health was poor. He died in the second year of service leaving his accounts in a sorry mess.”

While Samuel Fowler Dickinson was floundering in Ohio, his son Edward was doing what he could to restore the family name back home. Born in 1803, Edward was the only one of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword, by Mark A. Noll
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1. The Props Assist the House
• 2. The Child’s Faith Is New
• 3. I’ve Stopped Being Their’s
• 4. Homeless at Home
• 5. Laying Away the Phantoms
• 6. A Soul at the White Heat
• 7. A More General Sorrow
• 8. Vesuvius at Home
• 9. The Mind Alone
• 10. A Blissful Trial
• 11. Rendevous of Light
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Permissions
• Index of First Lines
• Index of Names and Subjects