Emily Dickinson and The Indicator: A Transcendental Frolic

Emily Dickinson's wit, expressed in sometimes playful, sometimes mordant terms in both her letters and her poetry, was well-honed by her later removal from the town of Amherst's social scene. Yet she fully enjoyed this buzzing world and was well schooled in its literary possibilities, when she attended Amherst College from 1849 to 1851.

Of course, Dickinson never actually graduated from the institution that had been largely founded by her grandfather, and she attended it only in absentia. Her brother Austin did graduate in 1850, and even though her father was the college treasurer for thirty-seven years (Sewall 1, 52), Dickinson and her female contemporaries were forbidden to roam the masculine halls of the higher learning in nineteenth-century America, no matter what the quality of their heritage, connections, or intellect. Even so, she had an extraordinarily wide-ranging and deep education for a woman of her time, attending Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847 and staying on at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary for two terms, until the religious revivalism encouraged by its director, Mary Lyon, drove her home to the comparative safety of her father's house. Dropping out from a strictly separate wo man's educational sphere, however, allowed her to transfer intellectually, if not physically, to Amherst College's exclusively male enclave.

This she accomplished through her vicarious participation in the production and reception of a literary periodical that had been started at the college in 1848. By this date, Amherst had passed beyond its early, grimly militant stage of Calvinist development and had loosened up enough to sustain the publication of an elegant monthly magazine by the most avant-garde of its undergraduates. Although it took a few issues to build up intellectual steam, this journal, named The Indicator, became an excellent compendium of all that the newness of Romanticism and Transcendentalism meant to Dickinson's spiritually liberated generation.¹

In 1850, the chairman of its editorial board was the dashing George Gould, Austin Dickinson's classmate, friend, and fellow fraternity member. He was an orator of Byronic magnetism, and it was he who penned the main editorial statement of June, 1849, which set out high and idealistic goals for the new periodical. Emersonian Transcendentalism itself was only thirteen years old at the time, if we date it from the publication of Nature in 1836, but thirteen years constitutes a literary generation, and what was already becoming old hat in Concord was still a fresh and even radical gospel in Amherst. The Indicator truly indicated a change in consciousness, a new emphasis on Romantic as well as Orthodox religious feeling. This novel frame of mind encouraged high thinking undertaken not so much in an atmosphere of plain living as one of exhuberant spirits and comradely congeniality. It was, like Dickinson herself, even a little arrogant, taking one of its epigraphs from the English poet Cowper's challenging words: "If the world like it not, so much the worse for them." Its cover engraving underlined that it would also deal with the other, darker, more Gothic side of Romantic extremism, since it depicted a solitary student alone in his library, surrounded by paintings and busts—an image reminiscent of nothing so much as Edgar Allan Poe's histrionic poem "The Raven."

Naturally, such a bold yet sensitive publication attracted its female admirers, Emily Dickinson among them, since it was her nonsense prose-poetic Valentine that The Indicator chose to publish in February of 1850. Dickinson had sent this piece of parodic rhetoric, done in the style of a genteel Mike Fink, to Gould. He turned it over to his fellow editor Henry Shipley, who was privileged to write the first published critical commentary on a piece by Emily Dickinson:

February is indeed a cold rough personage, and were it not for St. Valentine's day we should be scarcely able to relax our features with a smile during his whole reign. Between the hilarity and pleasure of winter, and the anticipations of spring he stands; giving us no enjoyment except the knowledge that his...