"I—Pay—in Satin Cash—": Commerce, Gender, and Display in Emily Dickinson's Poetry

The court case pitting Lavinia Dickinson against the family of Mabel Loomis Todd, which came to trial on 1 March 1898, was ostensibly a dispute over the rightful ownership of a strip of meadow. Vinnie Dickinson was trying to reclaim land that had been given over to the Todds at the instigation of her brother Austin, who had been Mrs. Todd’s lover. But as a spectacle, the trial offered the people of Amherst a great deal more. It dramatized, in particularly stark form, tensions that had pervaded this community and others for some time. Accounts both of the litigants’ styles of dress and of the lawyers’ arguments make it clear that the trial became a struggle between different types of womanhood. Vinnie presented herself in court in strikingly poor clothes: an old blue flannel dress, yellow shoes, and a long black veil. She was accompanied by her long-time servant, Maggie Maher, and a friend, Miss Buffum. Her female adversary was the much younger Mabel Loomis Todd. Mrs. Todd had always displayed a subtle sense of style, exceptional in the relatively provincial milieu of Amherst. She was later pleased to remember that on this occasion she had worn a black hat with white wings.

It may be that Vinnie did not have other, smarter clothes. But her ignorance of the imperatives of fashion also conveyed meanings having to do with the entitlements of class. Whether calculatedly or not, Vinnie presented herself as a gentlewoman of the old school, unconcerned about making a showy appearance. One contemporary observed that Vinnie was dressed in such a way as to suggest her “unworldliness.”¹ Her lawyer exploited this notion of her as a woman out of time, portraying her as a relic of a more venerable social order tricked out of her inheritance by an acquisitive and morally dubious modern woman. He emphasized that Vinnie “live[d] alone with her maid in Amherst, in the house built by her grandfather, and the house in which her father lived, the old Dickinson Homestead.” Vinnie, he asserted, was “very quiet, and according to the testimony of Mrs. Todd, of ‘retiring’ disposition.” Whereas the old-fashioned, genteel Vinnie stayed at home and “knew little of the world and nothing of business,” Mabel Todd was “very much a woman of the world.” Not only had Mabel “not spent her life in the seclusion of the little village of Amherst,” but she had “been somewhat extensively upon the lecture platform” and was therefore “conversant with business affairs.” Vinnie’s lawyer was suggesting that the decision in the case should take into account these women’s respective characters and experiences. He insinuated that a modern, public woman such as Mrs. Todd might well defraud a woman like Lavinia Dickinson. In fact, the opposite was the case. Vinnie perjured herself repeatedly in order to regain property that had been legally conveyed to the Todds.²

Public sentiment seems to have approved of Vinnie’s victory, even though it was generally understood that she had not acted honestly. The fact that the land had come to the Todds as a result of Mabel’s adulterous liaison with Austin Dickinson never came up during the trial, but it may have had a bearing on public reaction to its outcome. The community’s happy acquiescence in the miscarriage of justice may also have reflected Yankee respect for Vinnie’s cunning in playing the unworldly and absent-minded old spinster. But there is also a hint of general dislike for Mrs. Todd, who had always displayed a little too much style for the wife of a minor professor. She had affronted Amherst with everything from her long drives with Austin to her ideas for window shades. In her time there she had developed into a widely traveled published author and a sought-after lecturer with an attractive air of cosmopolitanism. From the outset...