Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886 from Literature Online biography   Published in Cambridge, 2000, by Chadwyck-Healey (a Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company) Copyright © 2000 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All Rights Reserved. EMILY DICKINSON presents particular problems for the biographer. The poet who wrote 'my life has been too simple and stern to embarrass any' has, since her death, been transformed into something of a cultural myth, her name conjuring up the image of a spinster recluse who wore white and was obsessed with death. Such speculative, sensationalist treatment of this poet's life has proved extremely damaging to readers' responses to her work. The aim of any biographical sketch of Emily Dickinson must be to return to the terrain of her material and emotional world, while avoiding the seductive pitfalls of rumour and legend. Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in the small Connecticut Valley town of Amherst, New England. In the eighteenth century, the Connecticut Valley had been the scene of a series of religious revivals led by Jonathan Edwards and known as The Second Great Awakening. By the time of Dickinson's birth, Amherst was still viewed as something of a bastion of traditional Puritanism, attempting to stand firm against the forces of more liberal religious thought. Dickinson's father, Edward, was a dominant figure both in public life (as town lawyer and as representative in the General Court of Massachusetts) and within the family circle. Yet the popular image of Edward Dickinson as a tyrannical patriarch, an imposing obstacle to his daughter's creativity, is too reductive and simplistic a view of a complex character. A more accurate image is of a man schooled in traditional New England reticence in matters of emotional intimacy, but who could, nonetheless, prompt his daughter to write of a visit to church: 'We spent the intermission in mimicking the Preacher, and reciting extracts from his most memorable sermon. I never heard father so funny' ( Letters , ed. Johnson, L 125). Similar caution needs to be exercised in relation to popular views of Dickinson's mother. Until recently, critics tended to take literally Dickinson's enigmatic comment 'I never had a mother,' yet recent research (Vivian Pollak, Martha Ackmann) has challenged the view of Emily Norcross as an ineffectual and passive influence on her daughter's life, drawing attention to the strong tradition of female education within the Norcross family and Dickinson's close relationship to her Norcross cousins Louise and Francis. Dickinson's own education was progressive for its time: from 1840-1847 she attended Amherst Academy, whose pupils were often given access to speakers invited to address the older (male) students of Amherst College (the eminent natural scientist, Professor Edward Hitchcock, lectured there between 1845 and 1849, and is a probable source for Dickinson's detailed knowledge of this area). From September 1847-August 1848 she attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in nearby South Hadley. Although committed to the conversion of souls, Mount Holyoke was also attentive to the intellectual development of its female students and offered a broad and challenging curriculum. The seventeen-year-old Dickinson's reasons for leaving Mount Holyoke after just two terms are unclear, although letters from this period point to a mixture of homesickness and a growing resistance to pressure to give herself to Christ. Such non-conformity in religious matters was to be a lifelong trait, and a recurring theme of her poetry. Dickinson returned to Amherst in 1848 and, with the exception of brief absences, was to remain in the parental home for the rest of her life. Yet such a position was not, necessarily, the mark of a reclusive temperament. As a college town, Amherst had a busy, varied social life, and letters from her adolescence and early twenties show Dickinson's involvement in that life. Then, during her thirties, came Dickinson's much analysed retreat from public life. That Dickinson withdrew from public life is not in dispute; what is in dispute is the tendency of some critics to assume that this retreat was the mark of an unhinged, abnormal mind. Among the various critical diagnoses of Dickinson's retreat have been psychotic breakdown (John Cody) and rejection by a lover. This second thesis has attracted the most speculation, leading to a range of possible candidates for the title of lost lover: the popular newspaper editor, Samuel Bowles, the Reverend Charles Wadsworth and Judge Otis Lord. Such speculation has been fuelled by the existence of a series of letters from Dickinson to an unidentified 'Master,' letters in which the Master is addressed in a tone of intense (and often masochistic) devotion. Recent critics, however, (including Martha Nell Smith) have argued that rather than reading these letters as addressed to an actual lover (and becoming fixated on identifying this individual) readers should be open to the possibility that these letters may never have been sent, that they may have been imaginative exercises, epistolary performances of emotional intensity. Certainly, the idea of using romantic loss as a way of explaining Dickinson's retreat from public life, or the power and intensity of her poetry, is both highly speculative and, ultimately, reduces a complex poetic process to a kind of therapy for unrequited love. In 1976 Adrienne Rich proposed another way of reading Dickinson's seclusion: as a retreat into a creative space which offered her more freedom as a writer ('Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson'). Underlying Rich's reading is the sense that given the social position of the nineteenth-century 'spinster' (the assumption that her life would be subsumed in charitable work) Dickinson's gravitation towards seclusion may have been a practical strategy for gaining control over her writing life. Certainly Dickinson's sense of herself as a poet was clear from her early letters. Writing to her brother Austin in 1853, Dickinson indulges in some playful rivalry: And Austin is a Poet, Austin writes a psalm. Out of the way Pegasus [...] Now Brother Pegasus, I'll tell you what it is -- I've been in the habit myself of writing some things, and it rather appears to me that you're getting away my patent [...]. L 110 Another early correspondent was Susan Gilbert, with whom Dickinson formed a close emotional bond, a relationship complicated when, in 1856, Sue married Austin. The emotional consequences of Sue's marriage to Dickinson's brother have been the subject of much critical debate with readers alert to the intensity of Dickinson's letters to Sue, an intensity which some have interpreted as highly eroticised (see Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart, who also highlight Sue's role as an early reader of Dickinson's poetry). In 1862 Dickinson initiated a correspondence with the writer and literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson . Dickinson's letters to Higginson (continuing until her death) are particularly intriguing. In many of the letters she adopts the posture of a submissive pupil asking for creative guidance from an experienced teacher ('Mr Higginson , Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?' L 260). Read closely, however, the letters reveal a fully independent poet, one who, whilst soliciting Higginson 's advice, never altered her innovative style to suit his more conventional tastes. What these letters also reveal is Dickinson's ability to balance intimacy and distance, inviting Higginson into her life, yet keeping herself (in his words) 'enshroud[ed] [...] in this fiery mist' (L 330a). It is a strategy which is repeated throughout her letters and one which means that those turning to the letters for a clearer sense of Dickinson's character will be disappointed. In many ways, her letters are literary experiments in self-creation, as condensed and challenging in their use of language as her poetry and, by the late 1860s, had become her main mode of literary expression (Salska, The Emily Dickinson Handbook ). Certainly the range and diversity of Dickinson's correspondence, including figures from the world of journalism (Bowles, Dr Josiah Holland and Elizabeth Holland) and popular writers ( Higginson , Helen Hunt Jackson ), challenges an overly simplistic view of Dickinson as a shy, retiring figure. It also challenges the assumption that Dickinson had little desire to publish (only seven of her poems were published during her lifetime, these with significant alterations): given that Dickinson's numerous letters (1,049 have been recovered) often included poems, it could be argued that these 'letter-poems' represent an alternative form of epistolary 'publication,' a way of circulating her work among a chosen readership, one independent of the literary marketplace. Despite Dickinson's habit of circulating her work through letters, her full productivity was only discovered after her death in 1886. Her sister Lavinia found some 1,775 poems in a bureau in her bedroom, a substantial number sown into small booklets (termed 'fascicles' by scholars), others on single worksheets, and some scribbled on a variety of fragments (envelopes, the back of recipes). The process leading to the publication of these manuscripts was complicated by tensions within the Dickinson family. Austin Dickinson's affair with Mabel Loomis Todd (the editor, with Higginson , of the first and second series of Dickinson's work, Poems 1890 and Poems 1891) led to a situation in which Susan Dickinson retained half of the manuscripts, Todd the other half. Consequently, the early editions of Dickinson's poems and letters, tended to proceed either from Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham, or from Sue's daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi. The speed with which the first series of poems was reprinted (eleven editions by the end of 1892) and the strong interest in the first edition of Dickinson's letters (1894), gives a clear sense of the popularity of Dickinson's work among her first readers. Yet (with some exceptions) these early readers appear to have been drawn to Dickinson through the growing mythology around her life, and most early reviewers were less than enthusiastic in their response to her innovative use of language, viewing her highly condensed, fragmented style (with its hallmark dash) as the mark of a writer who had failed to grasp the basic grammatical rules of her craft ( Thomas Aldrich , The Atantic Monthly , 1890). This sense of a poet whose culture was not prepared for her linguistic difference, is evident in the fact that many early editions of her work standardised her grammar, making it conform to more conventional tastes and offering titles for poems which Dickinson had left untitled--their themes and contexts, tantalisingly obscure. One of the earliest critical approaches to shift the focus away from biographical speculation and towards the text itself, was that of New Criticism, exemplifed in Allen Tate 's 1932 essay 'New England Culture and Emily Dickinson.' The critical methods of New Criticism (a prioritization of close textual analysis over issues of historical or biographical context) led Tate to an early appreciation of the technical achievement of Dickinson's poetry, yet he was also attentive to the cultural influence of New England Puritanism upon her work. In 1955 Thomas Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson , a huge scholarly endeavour which attempted to reassemble and reorder all the manuscripts (numbered according to estimated dates) and to produce versions of the poems which included Dickinson's dashes, her capitalisation, and her variants (alternative word choices). In 1958 Johnson (with Theodora Ward) published The Letters of Emily Dickinson . Johnson's editions ignited a new era in Dickinson studies, displacing the image of the poet of faulty grammar, with that of a writer in full control of her medium. Despite a growing sense of the linguistic power of Dickinson's work and the variety of voices within her poetry, many readers continued to read the poems in purely biographical terms. Dickinson herself had foreseen this danger. In a letter to Higginson she wrote: 'When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse -- it does not mean -- me -- but a supposed person'(L268). For Dickinson, hers was not simply a poetics of the self, but one of 'supposed person[s]', of multiple, imaginative identities, and even a brief selection of her poems supports this claim: in P874 (Johnson numbering) we encounter the persona of a 'little Girl' confronting the authority of her elders; in P1072, a self-crowned 'Empress of Calvary'; in P288, a self-confessed 'Nobody'; and in P315 a speaker (whose gender is never defined) is at the mercy of some unidentified terror. In P754, we find perhaps her most explosive 'voice': My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun -- In Corners -- till a Day The Owner passed -- identified -- And carried Me away -- And now We roam in Sovereign Woods -- And now We hunt the Doe -- And every time I speak for Him -- The Mountains straight reply -- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (c. 1863) While these poems do not exclude a biographical dimension (many readers have proposed that the 'Loaded Gun' is a metaphor for Dickinson's relationship to her own poetic power) the relationship between the life and the poem is a complex one, mediated by the imaginative energies of the text. The sometimes fraught relationship between biography and the Dickinson text, received sensitive, scholarly treatment in Richard Sewall's indispensable biography of 1974 which combined close analysis of the poetry with detailed research into Dickinson's immediate family and her wider cultural environment. The 1980s were characterised by the contribution of feminist scholars, seeking both to challenge the gender bias inherent in earlier scholarship and to highlight the subversive elements within this poet's work: her destabilizing of conventional constructions of gender (Juhasz, Pollak, Smith) her questioning of cultural authority, especially that of a traditional Calvinist God (Wolff, Eberwein), and the ways in which gender may have influenced Dickinson's experimental use of language (Miller). Cristanne Miller's landmark study A Poet's Grammar (one which builds upon the linguistic analysis of critics like Roland Hagenbuchle) describes the 'linguistic screws' Dickinson applies to conventional grammar, producing a poetry of radical indeterminacy--particularly open to diverse critical readings. Cynthia Griffin Wolff's 1986 biography of Dickinson foregrounded the relationship between gender, language and religion. The 1990s saw a greater problematization of feminist readings of Dickinson, with Mary Loeffelholz using psychoanalysis and deconstruction to examine not only the possibilities but also the limits of feminist scholarship. Such feminist interventions have reshaped the landscape of Dickinson criticism, providing the foundations upon which later scholarship has built (even when such scholarship is not explicitly feminist in nature). This is particularly true in recent studies of Dickinson as a religious poet. The dominant image of Emily Dickinson as a religious rebel (a stance which is played out again and again within the poetry) does not account for the depth and the complexity of her use of the Bible (the most frequently quoted text in both her poetry and her letters). Although critics differ as to the degree of Dickinson's faith, some seeing her as, essentially, a devotional Christian poet (Dorothy Huff Oberhaus), others as a rather more feisty female prophet (Beth Maclay Doriani), most agree that here was a writer who never aborted her difficult debate with the God of her Puritan forefathers, a poet who wrestled with that God (Wolff), and his Word, to the end of her life. The most recent Dickinson scholarship has been focused on the manuscripts and on the issue of cultural context. Ralph W. Franklin's new variorum edition The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998) alerts readers to the differences between a Dickinson poem in its original manuscript form and in its print translation (e.g. the way in which the dash has different lengths and directions on the manuscript page, the fact that Dickinson's manuscript poems, with their variant words and stanzas, raise fundamental questions about what constitutes a 'final' Dickinson text). Franklin's Poems has attempted to produce a print version of the poems which is closer to the multiplicity and variety of the original manuscripts than the Johnson edition (challenging Johnson's numbering sequence) and it is rapidly replacing Johnson's as the most authoritative edition of Dickinson's work. Yet for a growing number of critics, the manuscripts themselves have become the only adequate source for analyses of this poet's work. Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart, Susan Howe, Sharon Cameron, and Marta Werner are among those at the forefront of manuscript studies: for Howe and Werner, the visual quality of Dickinson's inscriptions is essential to a full understanding of her work, and for Smith, it is only through the manuscript that we can appreciate how Dickinson's writing challenges conventional ideas of genre, destabilizing our very sense of what a 'poem' is. Given the fragility of the manuscripts, Smith and other members of the Dickinson Editing Collective are using the electronic medium to build a hypertext of manuscript sources, accessible to a wide range of Dickinson's readers. The growing interest in the materiality of the manuscripts is balanced by an interest in another kind of materiality: that of historical and cultural context. The foundations for this kind of work were laid by Barton Levi St Armand and by Shira Wolosky in 1984. In Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War , Wolosky highlights the fact that Dickinson wrote most of her poetry during the years of the American Civil War (one of the most traumatic chapters in the history of her nation), a fact which again challenges the popular conception of Dickinson as a private poet, disconnected from the national events around her. Most recently, Domhnall Mitchell's Monarch Of Perception (2000) combines close reading of the manuscripts with an insistence that Dickinson belongs, not on the margins of her culture, but at its very centre. Finally, The Emily Dickinson Handbook (1998) provides an invaluable overview of the past and present state of Dickinson scholarship. MS , 2000