Reading Emily Dickinson's Letters: Critical Essays

Emily Dickinson and Marriage: “The Etruscan Experiment”

161 Judith Farr Emily Dickinson and Marriage “The Etruscan Experiment” “Will the sweet Cousin who is about to make the Etruscan Experiment, accept a smile which will last a Life, if ripened in the Sun?” Emily Dickinson to Eugenia Hall, mid-October 1885 What would it be like to receive a letter from Emily Dickinson? Thomas Wentworth Higginson always remembered where he was standing when he took one from a mailbox on April 16, 1862. The letter Dickinson sent (he would receive many more) was direct and determined but made an effort to be suppliant and polite to the literary figure whose advice she desired. Beginning without blandishments or even a classic salutation, she asked,“Are you too deeply occupied to say if myVerse is alive?”(L260).Higginson’s was to become one of the earliest published accounts of being startled by a Dickinson letter. But there were many people to whom Emily Dickinson wrote amiably, heartily, confidingly, mischievously , consolingly, erotically, whose responses to her letters we lack. On occasion, therefore, one is free to speculate. Suppose you were twenty years old and received a brief note from a lady (reputed to be brilliant if strange) whom you rarely saw and who signed herself “Somewhat Cousin Emily –” (L1002)? The note was accompanied by flowers which (the writer declared cryptically)“without lips, have language” and it was preceded by another longer letter that offered thanks as well as this request: 162 Judith Farr “May I know how to make the Music [you played], and the Cake [you baked].” This note was signed “Smilingly, Cousin Emily” (L1001). If you were Eugenia Montague Hall, praised by her family for good taste, you might be delighted to be thus singled out for your talent in singing and baking by one whose garden was a legend in her village and whose cakes and bread were almost equally famous. If you were Eugenia, however, the diction of the letter-writer might remind you of an earlier time, a different letter.You were only eleven then and the same person had addressed you fondly as just“Genie”and shown much tact in writing to you intimately and fancifully of what you loved best: your flowers,your dolls. “The lovely flower you sent me,” she had written then, “is like a little Vase of Spice and fills the Hall with Cinnamon – You must have skillful Hands – to make such sweet Carnations. Perhaps your Doll taught you. I know that Dolls are sometimes wise. Robins are my Dolls. I am glad you love the Blossoms so well. I hope you love Birds too[.] It is economical. It saves going to Heaven” (L455). The fondness you would surely have discerned in Cousin Emily’s lines might have provoked fascination with her mode of utterance; after all,she didn’t mind sounding preposterous (everybody knows dolls can’t teach!); she didn’t mind stretching the truth (birds reach the sky, maybe, but heaven is different from the sky!). You yourself might only be eleven but you never wrote in such an odd, eccentric, yet delicious way. Then, in October 1885, you are no longer a child but a woman about to embark upon the vocation most women of your era think nobler than any other: marriage. Engaged to Mr. Franklin Lambert Hunt of Boston, you are to be joined in sacred matrimony at the home of your Montague grandparents in Amherst. On your wedding day you are handed a loving note from your now truly remote cousin, the reclusive Emily Dickinson. Do you recognize the style and reflect that only Emily would be likely to have employed it?“Will the sweet Cousin,” the note asks,“who is about to make the Etruscan Experiment, accept a smile which will last a Life, if ripened in the Sun?” (L1021). At present, these questions lack answers. Indeed, one is tempted to pose another more specific one: Would young Eugenia Hall Hunt, only twenty, have grasped the meaning of the term “Etruscan Experiment”? Why “Etruscan”? Why“Experiment”? In the flurry of her wedding festivities, did she simply put aside the note and attribute the Etruscan allusion and the simple gift of a“smile” to Cousin Emily’s curiously unique way of expressing herself? Did she have time on that wedding day to wonder whether Cousin Emily was teasing her, trying Emily Dickinson and Marriage 163 to baffle her with such a word as...