Michelle Found an Article about Emily Dickinson's "Loaded Gun" poem

Link

Susan Howe provides another viewpoint on Emily Dickinson's poetry, especially on her Civil War work.

Thank you, Michelle!

Lives Like Loaded Guns

In this gripping book, British author Lyndall Gordon explores the family constellations surrounding Emily Dickinson and the publication of her work.  These constellations include the family that ED knew during her lifetime as well as the family of Mabel Loomis Todd, the woman who edited and regularized ED's poetry after her death.  (She called it preparing the poems for publication, and she did do much to promote them.)  After ED's death in 1886, her remaining family came into a long, sustained conflict with the Todds.  This conflict continued throughout the lives of the last remaining Dickinson and the last remaining Todd, and the echoes of this conflict continue even today in the way that scholars and students read ED's poems and the people who inspired her.

Let's begin with a pictorial family tree of the Dickinsons!


Apologies for the size of the picture, but it shows the details much more clearly.  Gordon looks at more of ED's extended family: a grandmother Gunn with a fierce temper, an invalid male cousin who probably suffered from epilepsy, a maternal aunt who mothered ED, and cousins who were ED's lifelong friends and withheld her letters from the Todds.  Of course, Gordon gives us a stronger sense of what ED's mother was like and how her marriage constrained her.   These constraints were a social phenomenon.  As Gordon points out, poet Julia Ward Howe's husband forced her to abandon her introspective, critical style of poetry.  He threatened to divorce her (which meant that he would have custody of their children) unless she stopped writing poetry--or started writing less controversial poetry.  We know this less controversial poetry as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  Closer to home, ED's sister-in-law Sue was bullied and cajoled into marriage to a man whom she did not love.  She was not able to pursue the teaching career that she loved.  ED's sister Lavinia could not marry the man she loved.  On the other hand, ED chose not to marry, a choice that enabled her to write.

Or...as Gordon speculates...did ED's epilepsy free her to write?  Here are links to poems that may indicate her epilepsy.

http://www.sanjeev.net/poetry/dickinson-emily/my-first-well-day-since-many-ill-163327.html

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_like_a_look_of_Agony,

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_felt_a_Funeral,_in_my_Brain,

Keep in mind that, in the 1800s, epileptics were not allowed to marry and that they at best lived in seclusion.  At worst, they were sent to psychiatric hospitals, and women were more likely be admitted to these institutions.  Medical treatment was very primitive, and the most insightful doctor whom ED consulted advised her to stay away from experimental cures and pursue a calm, home bound life.

Below is a picture of a psychiatric hospital on NYC's Blackwell's Island.  If you've taken EN 211, you may recognize this place from Margaret Fuller and Fanny Fern's non-fiction.


Below is a picture of ED's home in Amherst, MA. 


Although ED did not marry, perhaps because she did not marry, she experienced several intense relationships.  In my previous entry, I mentioned her intimacy with her sister-in-law, Sue, and then with editor, writer, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  ED's relationship with married newspaper editor Samuel Bowles could be described as an entanglement.  She sent this poem to him.  Could it be about their relationship?  Or, as Gordon suggests, could it be a persona poem?

http://www.kalliope.org/digt.pl?longdid=dickinson200108301072

Her correspondence with classmates is both compelling and awkward.  Frequently, her classmates chose not to respond to her.  Later in life, after her father's death, she became involved with his friend and colleague, Judge Otis Lord, a widower.  Her letters to him are lively, charming, and more down-to-earth.  The couple even discussed marriage, but it was not to be.  Below is a picture of Judge Lord.




I also like how Gordon discusses ED's year at Mount Holyoke Seminary, the first American college for women (pictured above).  Academically, her year was successful as the future poet thrived on the college's challenging curriculum.  (She studied geology, chemistry, and astronomy among other courses.)  However, the college's emphasis on evangelical Christianity isolated ED, for she was very much a skeptic and resisted the college president's attempt to convert the student body en masse.  Worse, the college president encouraged students to spy on each other and discouraged them from forming close friendships.  ED's roommate and cousin, Emily Norcross, spied on her.  Eventually, ED left the college due to "ill health."  Does stress bring on seizures?


I did not forget the Todds!  It was very hard for me to find a picture of this family: the bewitching Mabel Loomis Todd; her husband, David, a professor of astronomy at Amherst College; and their daughter, Millicent Todd (later Bingham), who continued her mother's work on a more scholarly note.  Instead, I found the cover of a collection of Mabel's correspondence with her lover and ED's brother, Austin Dickinson.


Married to a very junior professor at Amherst who was also unfaithful to her, Mabel Loomis Todd was a bright, beautiful young woman in search of...something!  Initially, she was Sue Dickinson's protege, but then her flirtatious ways attracted first Sue's son--and then Sue's husband.  (Where is Carolyn Hax when you need her?)  Mabel also wanted to become friends with ED herself but was unable to.  However, after the poet's death, she helped ED's sister Lavinia transcribe the poems for a collection.  Mabel's role in the collection became greater and greater even as she strove to alienate her lover from his wife and children and to "feather" her family's nest.  (Austin Dickinson was a wealthy, powerful lawyer in Amherst and the college's treasurer.  Ironically, he didn't recognize his sister's greatness, but he did help his lover's husband.)  I must add, though, that Lavinia didn't pay Mabel and that she didn't recognize how much the younger woman did.


Ultimately, after her lover's death and the publication of two volumes of poetry, Mabel attempted to wrest a parcel of land away from his family.  Below is a picture of the Todds' house.  It is now a bed and breakfast.



Back to my story...In order to get the land she wanted, Mabel had to first get Lavinia's signature on a deed...as it turned out...under questionable circumstances.  It goes without saying Lavinia and Mabel could no longer work together.  They went to court over the signature.  Lavinia won the suit and its appeal; Mabel locked away the poems and letters that she had been working on.  This was in 1898.

By the way, here is a picture from a 2000 recreation of Mabel and her husband's presentations on their expeditions together.  One was to Japan where she climbed up to the sixth stage of Mt. Fuji, a remarkable feat for a woman of those days.


The picture below is of a 1906 *summer* climb of Mt. Fuji.



For many years, in fact, over the course of much of the 1900s, the Todds and the Dickinsons fought over ED's work and her public image.  Mabel Loomis Todd's editing was heavy handed by our standards, and she fought to slander Sue Dickinson's character and diminish her role in ED's life, but she did much to promote the poet's work, including lecturing on it.  Her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, a professor of geography, continued the task of promoting ED's work--and her mother's work after MLT died in 1932.  She also argued against Martha Dickinson Bianchi's attempts to romanticize her aunt's life.  However, MDB's 1914 edition of her aunt's poetry and her subsequent biography drew readers' attention to ED's poetry.  Moreover, the critical climate in the early 1900s was more receptive than it had been in the 1890s.  A romance novelist, MDB provided her aunt's story with a master narrative: one unhappy love affair had caused her to retreat from society and write poetry.  MTB, on the other hand, specifically argued against this master narrative.  She published ED's letters to Judge Lord as part of her argument, and she encouraged Yale professor Richard Sewell to write a scholarly biography of ED.  This two-volume biography would appear in 1974.  Then readers and scholars would be even more receptive to ED and her work.

I'll close with a picture of Sewell's book


and of some pictures from the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.

This picture shows more of the museum's gardens.

Below is a picture of Emily Dickinson's bedroom.



Finally, below is the cover of the first edition of ED's poems.  The painting on the cover is by Mabel Todd Loomis.

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Emily Dickinson's life has intrigued many people over the years.  Why did she withdraw from society, refusing to "cross [her] Father's ground to any House or town"?  Why did she write such strangely compelling poetry?  Who inspired her?

One popular reimagining of ED is William Luce's 1976 play The Belle of Amherst.  (The picture below is from Redmond, Washington's Sound Theater Company's recent production.)


You may also see part of Jennifer Levinson's performance at this video linked below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz8girAKwJM

Others are intrigued by ED's relationship to her sister-in-law, Sue.



http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/emily-dickinson-lesbian-her-letter-to-susan-gilbert-in-june-of-1852-might-tell-us-less-than-you-think/

http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/ed/node/78

Brenda Wineapple has decided to examine ED's friendship with poet, editor, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  As she points out, often people have wondered just what ED saw in Higginson.  He has been caricatured as the man who tried to regularize ED's poetry.  After all, his poetry tended to be carefully crafted sonnets, and his most well-known poems today are translations of Petrarch, the 14th century Italian poet known for his love poems to Laura, a woman he never actually met.

http://www.sonnets.org/petrarch.htm#010

http://www.sonnets.org/petrarch.htm#020

Also, take a look at the cover of White Heat above.  How old does she look?  What comes to mind when you look at her?  when you look at her next to the middle-aged man with facial hair and a military uniform?

 
It is one of the few photographs of ED.  True.  It was taken when she was a teenager.  She began to write to TWH when she was thirty.  Without fooling around with her existing photographs (which in itself is trouble and which ED's family did do), we will always have a distorted view of ED (and therefore of her relationship to TWH) if we focus on the photographs.  I don't know what I would have placed on the cover of White Heat, but something less direct and more evocative might have been better.

However, Higginson was more than "just" a translator and magazine editor, and his relationship with ED was fairly complex.  Wineapple notes its sexual tension.  Today we might consider their relationship to be an emotional affair and even emotional infidelity as TWH was married to a chronically-ill woman at the time.  Wineapple also speculates about what he gained from ED as well as about what she gained from him.  Moreover, as Wineapple points out, ED consciously chose Higginson as her mentor, for she would have been familiar with his work for the Atlantic Monthly as well as his political activism.  This is not to say that ED was politically radical or even engaged with politics.  Some of the tension in her relationship with TWH occurs when she downplays his desire to fight in the Civil War.  (He ultimately trained African-American soldiers in South Carolina.)  She was much more interested in TWH's nature writing, and her family was relatively conservative.


Below is Frederic Edwin Church's painting of Mount Katahdin in Maine, one of the many subjects of TWH's nature writing.

However, TWH tended to examine nature closely.  A more typical topic for him would be the water lily (shown below):


As you'll note from these poems, ED also likes to examine nature closely.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20949

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=180204

http://www.tcnj.edu/~carney/dickinson/poems.html#did_the_harebell



Yet Wineapple is persuasive in her readings of ED's poems with imagery relevant to the Civil War.  See these links for a few of these poems: 

Apologies for any pop-ups!

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson/10548

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Portion_is_Defeat_%E2%80%94_today_%E2%80%94

Below is a picture of Glory, a 1989 film about the company that Higginson had wanted to command.




ED and TWH's friendship began in 1862 and continued through the rest of her life despite his remarriage to a much younger woman and her intriguing relationship with Judge Otis Lord.  ED & TWH's correspondence periodically slowed, but she would send him her poems, referring to herself as his "Pupil" as late as 1884, the year before her death.  Interestingly, even then, she also toyed with submitting her poems for publication when another of TWH's proteges, Helen Hunt Jackson, contacted her about submitting them to The No Name Series.  ED sent Jackson one poem, "Success is counted sweetest":
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=174990

This poem would be published...anonymously.

After her death, TWH co-edited her poems with Mabel Loomis Todd, the mistress of ED's brother.  Todd, as it turns out, was responsible for the "regularization" of ED's poems.  TWH was more of an advocate, convincing Todd to include particular poems and writing the preface to the collected poems.  Initially, this project was successful, but 19th century readers were not quite ready for Dickinson, and Lavinia Dickinson, ED's sister and heir, soon quarreled with both Todd and TWH. 

Below is a link to a version of TWH's preface that appeared in the October 1891 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.  Beneath the Victorian verbiage, he quotes freely from ED's poems and letters:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/emilyd/edletter.htm

I'll close with a picture from the garden at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.  During her lifetime, ED was also known as a gardener.