Emily Dickinson, Harper's, and Femininity

One of the obstacles to solving the tantalizing riddle of Emily Dickinson's life and work lies in the difficulty of clarifying the nature of her progressive withdrawal from public life. What did withdrawal mean for a woman from a prominent family, in her late twenties, in Western Massachusetts, in mid-century America? This is not to ask about any specific events that precipitated her withdrawal or about any individuals who pushed her into her loneliness or about her personal or religious or political motives for forsaking Amherst society. Those questions have been addressed by two decades of diligent Dickinson scholarship, though often with diverse and contrary results. Rather, it is to ask about the significance of Dickinson's developing isolation and about the values and implications that might have been allied to it.

To identify the meaning of Dickinson's withdrawal, we must first determine from what Dickinson withdrew, which is to say, we must determine what constitutes the border between social withdrawal and social involvement. Only if there stands a fairly clear boundary between private and public can an action be interpreted as a withdrawal, a reclusion. That is, for Dickinson's withdrawal to make sense as such, her culture must present a more or less accepted model of woman's place, of her proper sphere, of her rights and responsibilities. Unless the time includes a social definition for woman, one that outlines where her society begins and ends, then Dickinson's actions may constitute something else—not an anti-social retreat, but perhaps a political protest, a religious dedication, a literary vocation. The difficulty, then, with coming to terms with Dickinson's life today could be due less to an absence of information about her life than to her culture's uncertainty about where and how a woman's life should be lived.

If we examine the public discourses of the day, the places where woman's social prospects and duties get popularized, we find that the traditional definition—woman is a subordinate domestic partner to man, managing the home, with no "power" but only "influence"—was, in fact, hotly debated, in flux, challenged and defended and modified. Let us take one example, a magazine that Dickinson read consistently for several years: Harper's New Monthly Magazine. First published in 1850, Harper's was sent on a regular basis to the Dickinson home from that year onward, the subscription probably belonging to Lavinia. Emily read it and quoted from its articles and stories and cartoons in letters to friends and family. As befitting patrons like the Dickinsons, Harper's was considered one of the more intellectual and liberal periodicals of the time, each issue containing fiction, travel narratives, book reviews, editorials on social issues, biographical essays on historical figures, reports on wars abroad and Senate slave debates at home, satiric commentaries and cartoons on current events and social mores. Its literary content was particularly impressive. Here Dickinson read Bleak House and Little Dorrit, enthusiastic notices about The House of the Seven Gables and Moby-Dick (with "The Town-Ho's Story" printed in full), reprints of Thomson's Seasons and Gray's "Elegy" and Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," approving reviews of anthologies of women writers and biographies of "great women," as well as reviews of conduct books and etiquette manuals.

Naturally, Harper's devotes many stories and editorials and reviews to women's issues, particularly, the institution of marriage and the question of "Women's Rights." For example, the table of contents of the June 1850 number lists the following titles: "Men and Women," "Married Men," "The Mother's First Duty," and "Women in the East." Several such pieces outline "Woman's Offices and Influence" in predictable, straightforward ways: "The best service that woman can confer upon the State, (and thus, through it, obtain the best security for her own personal rights and dignity) is by making the home what it ought to be" 7 (1853), 838; "The feminine virtues are all of a retiring kind . . . they are seen through a halftransparent vail [sic] of feminine timidity and self-postponement" 1 (1850), 742; "[Woman's...