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151 i 5 Dickinson’s Reluctant New England Narratives “A Field of Stubble, lying sere” Emily Dickinson lived in the middle of an agricultural enclave in an increasingly industrialized region. In the mid-1850s, Amherst was a rural farming community, but industrial North Amherst was already referred to as a “city” (Habegger 669n70), and by the 1880s, the town’s hat factories had expanded right in front of the Dickinson homestead (Erkkila, “Dickinson and Class” 18). Dickinson’s letters occasionally talk about Amherst’s ways of working the land in these times of change—she reported that “Old Amos weeds and hoes and has an oversight of all thoughtless vegetables” (L49) and that she “hayed a little for the horse” (L215); she expressed concern that the rye field she and her mother had planted might be mortgaged (L16); she wondered if “[t]he trees are getting over the effect of Canker worm” (L131). Some of her reflections on New England’s agricultural practices are particularly rich in cultural implications, such as this mock indignation about “gentlemen” who debase themselves by “plucking” trees and fields and eagerly storing the produce: Gentlemen here have a way of plucking the tops of trees, and putting the fields in their cellars annually, which in point of taste is execrable, and would they please omit, I should have fine vegetation & foliage all the year round, and never a winter month. Insanity to the sane seems so unnecessary —but I am only one, and they are “four and forty,” which little affair of numbers leaves me impotent. (L209) For all its playfulness, this leisurely lady’s complaint about economic practices that ruin the land aesthetically contains a narrative that echoes broader sentiments of nature’s appreciation espoused by moral-aesthetic preservationists, as well as more specific upper-class interests that fed into New England’s intensifying environmental concern.1 At the same time these lines, especially in their irony, imply a couched critique of nature’s “insane” commodification in which New England’s utilitarian conserva- 152 • p a r t i i i tionists, paradoxically, themselves participated. Even the earthly paradise she envisions, which refers to the cultural narrative of America as the new Garden of Eden, can be linked to conservationist notions of restoring nature ’s divine harmonies and preservationist ideals of undomesticated nature as a spiritual realm. Ultimately, however, Dickinson’s suggestion that one might simply live off the land without destroying it, and that there would be no “winter”—neither hunger nor a loss of innocence—because nature would miraculously feed people, seems just as fantastic as the “insane” work of the gentlemen she criticizes. In other words, to try to draw a viable conclusion from her text would be missing its point; rather, it admits, in a roundabout way, to our “impotence” in terms of effectively countering certain economic developments. Letters such as this one offer a glimpse of the workshop of a poet who occasionally engages her region’s shifting agrarian setup by way of narratives that address some of the “insane” conflicts in people’s economic relationships with the land, in a cultural climate where conservationists and preservationists were performing similar moves. Yet instead of feeding the illusion that there are alternative stories that might resolve these conflicts, she focuses on eloquently sounding out some of their irresolvable contradictions. So far, Dickinson’s views of New England as a geographic entity have received comparatively little sustained attention, even though she wrote poems about New England farming that matter apart from their religious and broader cultural implications.2 Approaching these poems from an environmental perspective, it is helpful to consider the conservationist and preservationist arguments that developed in the wake of the region ’s changing agricultural practices. After all, it was in New England, and Massachusetts specifically, that a new industrialized agriculture, based on rather grand notions about managerial control of nature, became dominant, while noteworthy conservation practices, equally shaped by utilitarian reform ideas, pointed in a different direction. For instance, ordinary New England farmers and fishers replaced patterns of ruthless exploitation with techniques developed to ensure nature’s resources for future generations (see Judd, Common Lands, Common People). At the same time, George B. Emerson’s influential Report on the Trees and Shrubs Growing Naturally in the Forests of Massachusetts (1846) derided the relentless cutting of New England’s forests, urging more careful management and the propagation of native trees (see Merchant, Ecological Revolutions 228). And Thoreau, who used George...

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