Emily Dickinson As A Woman Poet

 

Dickinson was a dynamic poet in her fast-changing era. At that time where women were expected to put their ambitions at stake and serve their domestic life, Emily succeeded in balancing between the two. She was a prolific writer, writing to express her true perceptions and philosophies of life along with taking care of all her domestic responsibilities. She didn’t just write for writing sake, rather she poignantly raises the question about God, church, politics and society in general. We could imagine her helplessness while manipulating some of her excerpts according to societal norms in order to get them published. She went to Amherst Academy in her childhood and the academy had just begun to admit women.  She built a good circle of friends there. Dickinson wrote about her school, “We really have some most charming young women in school this term. I shan’t call them anything but women, for women they are in every sense of the word”. Just look at her emphasis on choosing the word ‘women’ and admiring the very essence of womanhood.

 Some of her cherished friends were Abiah Root, Helen Fiske and Helen Hunt. She wrote to Abiah “I keep your lock of hair as precious as gold,”, further she adds, “I often look at it when I go to my little lot of treasures, and wish the owner of that glossy lock were here”. Her friendship with Abiah Root ended in 1854 after Abiah’s marriage. The critics are uncertain about the reason behind it but the most accepted notion is that the marital duties of Abiah kept her so occupied or the bond with her husband grew so strong that it replaced a decade long friendship. Apart from her friend, when one of Emily’s most beloved teachers got married and left the Academy, Dickinson tried to pacify herself by telling herself that she shall be happy for her teacher’s future. In 1847 she wrote a letter expressing how much she loved her and felt alone in her absence: “Life Yet, much as we love her, it seems lonely and strange without our dear Miss Adams. I suppose you know she has left Amherst, not again to return as a teacher. It is indeed true, that she is to be married . . . She seemed to be very happy in anticipation of her future prospects and I hope she will realize all her fond hopes. I cannot bear to think that she will never more wield the sceptre, and sit upon the throne in our venerable schoolhouse, and yet I am glad she is going to have a home of her own and a kind companion to take life’s journey with her”.

 The words like ‘sceptre’ and ‘throne’ suggest her sense of respect and admiration for her teacher. Her knowledge of botany is also reflected in her letters and poems. Although she refers to common names of plants and flowers in her poems, she had a sound knowledge of the scientific names and classifications of many plants and flowers. The herbarium prepared by her for one of the school projects is an object of keen interest for Dickinson scholars as something that shows Dickinson’s love of nature and her scientific precision. We could draw an analogy to the way she cared for the plants and flowers of her garden and nurtured words in her poetry. Outside the humdrum of domestic chores and visiting guests, she found a sense of contentment in writing and visiting her garden. After the Amherst Academy, Dickinson joined the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley in 1847. The founder of the Seminary was Mary Lyon who sought to implant religious values in students and prepare them to become suitable wives and mothers. Dickinson was sixteen-years-old and the strict discipline of the Seminary was choking her. Thus she wanted to escape to her home. She wrote on 6 November 1847 “It has been nearly six weeks since I left home and that is a longer time, than I was ever away from home before now. I was very homesick for a few days and it seemed to me I could not live here” (L 53, no. 18). Feeling that she is cut off from the outside world and curious about current events taking place out there she wrote letters to her brother: “Won’t you please to tell me when you answer my letter who the candidate for President is? I have been trying to find out ever since I came here and have not yet succeeded. I don’t know anything more about affairs in the world, than if I was in a trance . . . Has the Mexican war terminated yet and how? Are we beat? Do you know of any nation about to besiege South Hadley?” (L 49, no. 16). We notice here that though in Seminary, she was learning the values suited to women but she could bear to remain ignorant of the current socio-political situation of the outside world. In one of her letters, she writes about her strict father or patriarch of the family and we get to know about gender binaries of those days: “[Father] buys me many Books – but begs me not to read them – because he fears they joggle the Mind". 

She decorated her room with a few pictures of her favourite authors such as Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot. In 1849, Dickinson read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Charlotte had used her pen name ‘Currer Bell’. After its publication, people were clueless about the real writer behind this mysterious name. Critics often even complained that Jane Eyre’s heroine was too self-reliant and common to be a moral model for women. Ten years later, in August of 1859, the Republican revealed another such type of writer, George Eliot. Dickinson greatly admired Eliot’s fiction Adam Bede and the pseudonym used for this book was Marian Evans. In her twenties, Dickinson got to know the real names of her favourite authors and it left a deep impression on her mind. Perhaps she hesitated to publish her poems because she understood that women writings wouldn’t be valued or they needed to be published anonymously or perhaps she was afraid her father would know if she published anonymously and wouldn’t allow her to write.

In 1855, the family returned to The Homestead. But this was not a favourable time for her. Dickinson’s mother got sick and the primary household responsibilities were completely shifted on Dickinson sisters. She grew responsible and mature at an early age. She was twenty-four years old when she started nursing her ailing mother, taking responsibility of housekeeping and taking care of her father’s visitors. Her father remained busy with his speeches and travels. The sisters though got admitted to higher education were mainly expected to take care of household chores and then eventually marry. But both the girls remained unmarried throughout their lives and dedicated their lives to the household. When she was fifteen-years old, Dickinson wrote to her friend, Abiah Root, about how the stacks of mending had occupied her to the extent that she really had to stretch herself to write: “I found a quantity of sewing waiting with open arms to embrace me, or rather for me to embrace it, and I could hardly give myself up to ‘Nature’s sweet restorer,’ for the ghosts of out-of-order garments crying for vengeance upon my defenceless head. However, I am happy to inform you, my dear friend, that I have nearly finished my sewing for winter, and will answer all the letters which you shall deem worthy to send so naughty a girl as myself” (L 40). The influence of the kitchen, hearth and fire can be seen in many of Dickinson’s poems. She imagines “Hope” as a ‘soft songbird’, a ‘thing with feathers’. Dickinson shows that even the smallest portion of oneself, a single “crumb,” can provide an entire meal for hope. “Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/And never stops – at all” (254). In another poem about a common woman cleaning her kitchen she writes, “She sweeps with many-colored Brooms/And leaves the Shreds behind/Oh Housewife in the Evening West/Come back, and dust the Pond!” (219). Dickinson gives her housewife authority “an active participant through striking, active verbs. The housewife’s near-mythic power, combined with the closeness of ‘Brooms’, ‘fly’, and ‘stars’ may also suggest another powerful female image, particularly for a woman writing in Massachusetts: the witch” (Martin 57). Dickinson meanwhile developed friendship with Sue. She writes, “One Sister have I in our house, And one, a hedge away. There’s only one recorded, But both belong to me” (14). Here we get to know her sense of sisterhood. She says history will record only sister of hers, Lavinia but sisterhood does not need biological relation and thus Sue is also my sister. They maintained this friendship till Dickinson’s death. In 1861, Austin and Susan had their first child, Edward Dickinson (named after his grandfather).  Dickinson’s excitement in becoming an aunt can be seen in the note she sent to Susan: “Is it true, dear Sue? Are there two? I should’nt like to come For fear of joggling Him!”. Dickinson took care of all three children of Austin and Susan’s as her own: Edward (Ned), Martha (Mattie) and Thomas Gilbert (Gib). Once Higginson got injured in a battle: “Dear friend, Are you in danger – I did not know that you were hurt. Will you tell me more? . . . I am surprised and anxious”. 

She grew sensitive towards human sacrifices in war where only victorious ones are glorified and the one who lose are treated as condemned, weak, lazy, ignorant and failures. This winning and losing dichotomy she deals with in one her most celebrated poems: “Success is counted sweetest/ By those who ne’er succeed/To comprehend a nectar/Requires sorest need/Not one of all the purple/Host Who took the Flag today/Can tell the definition/So clear of Victory” (p.35, no.67). According to Dickinson, the one who loses, gets a comprehensive understanding of mixed emotions of pain, dejection, despair, imagining the true taste of victory, the urge of winning while the winner knows only the feeling of victory. Dickinson’s poems were unparalleled. She has written on almost all the subjects, be it war or the kitchen. The American Civil War was a macrocosm of the war inside Dickinson herself. She uses the images of violence, war, battle, weapons, and death in her poems. She wrote in a poem, “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun/In Corners – till a Day/The Owner passed – identified/And carried Me away” (754). In the nineteenth century, women were actually encouraged to learn letter writing. Dickinson stretched herself to twist the traditional styles of letter writing: “I have written you a great many letters since you left me – not the kind of letters that go in post-offices – and ride in mail-bags – but queer – little silent ones – very full of affection – and full of confidence – but wanting in proof to you – therefore, not valid – somehow you will not answer them – and you would paper, and ink letters – I will try one of those – tho’ not half so precious as the other kind. I have written those at night – when the rest of the world were at sleep – when only God came between us – and no one else might hear”.

 One of the innovative ways of her letter writing is that besides writing condolence letters, she took it as a responsibility to console the grieving family of the dead through her words. In the mid nineteenth century, poets like Walt Whitman and Henry James had become experts at framing the condolence letters obviously because they got so many to write. For Dickinson, condolence letter writing was a chance to heal someone’s wounds with her words. How she could do such a difficult task of consoling the mourning family can be understood by digging into her life. Dickinson herself had suffered the loss of her relatives as well as many close friends: Samuel Bowles (died in 1878), followed by Reverend Wadsworth (1879), and her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson (1882). At the age of fifty-one years, Dickinson had lost both her parents. In the following years, she again grieved for the loss of her friend Helen Hunt Jackson. The most tragic or toughest death to bear for Dickinson was the loss of her nephew Gib, who died of typhoid fever on 5 October 1883. Some of her biographers claim that Gib’s death was the beginning of Dickinson’s own decline. 15 May 1886, Dickinson took her last breath at the Homestead due to Bright ’s disease. Dickinson’s first major biographer, Ralph W. Franklin analysed, in the summer of 1858, she began collecting all of her poems, copied them and stitched the pages together by hand, and destroyed the original drafts of her poems. The period from 1861 to 1865 is called as the “flood” years of Dickinson’s poetic production by the editor Thomas H. Johnson. These “flood” years coincidentally coincided with the American Civil War. In around 1869, when she was thirtyeight years old, she was seen completely in recluse and hardly any visitor had seen her even in her home. She never left the grounds of The Homestead and The Evergreens. “I do not cross my Father’s ground to any House or town,” she explained to Thomas Wentworth Higginson .

What caused Dickinson to seclude herself from the society? She was a learned lady, an intellectual, an artist, a poet and responsible daughter and aunt, a woman who constantly evolved in writings, had her preceptors and suitors, and also a vast knowledge of current events of the world. This question still persists amongst Dickinson scholars. One could argue that Dickinson took up the confinement ritual as pregnant women practiced in the nineteenth century, in order to give birth to her writings. The man who is supposed to be her love was Otis Phillips Lord. He was a judge in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and was closer to Dickinson’s father’s age. Although Judge Lord and Dickinson were close, her father’s disapproval and her own reservations about marriage and unwillingness to leave her family would have prevented this marriage. Dickinson’s decision to remain aloof from the society is reflected in the following poem, “The Soul selects her own Society/Then – shuts the Door/To her divine Majority/ Present no more” (303). In addition to her own physical troubles (assumed that she also suffered tuberculosis), she had endured many other hardships in her personal life. In 1874, soon after delivering a speech, her father, Edward Dickinson collapsed and passed away. She was forty three years old. She wrote to Higginson, the morning her father left for his trip, she “woke him for the train – and saw him no more” (L 528). Thus we find that there could be many possible reasons of her seclusion such as perhaps her own willingness to spend her spare time in reading and writing poems, or family responsibilities occupied her, or patriarchy or the tragic deaths of her closed ones or simply her introvert and shy behaviour. But we, the readers are fortunate enough to be introduced to one of the major woman poets of America. Had her sister Lavinia not dared to get her poems published, Dickinson would have remained unheard and unsung. Rather than a recluse or a victim of the Victorian society, Dickinson is “a pioneer who chose the domestic as her frontier because it provided the freedom to write” (Martin 52).