Lonesome in Eden: Dickinson, Thoreau and the Problem of Community in Nineteenth-Century New England

LonesomeinEden:Dickinson,Thoreau andtheProblemof Community inNineteenth-Century NewEngland Robert A. Gross Emily Dickinson was so deeply private a poet, so unique, so idiosyncratic a sensibility,so dedicated to exploring a self-constructed house of the imagination that an historian who wishes to use her art and life to talk about nineteenthcentury culture and society-as I propose to do-ought to begin with a good defense. I come to the study of Dickinson as an outsider, one whose principal scholarly interest has been the history of New England community, and one community, in particular-the town of Concord, Massachusetts. Concord is, of course, the home of Minutemen and Transcendentalists, the place where the "embattled farmers" launched America's fight for political independence on April 19,1775at the old North Bridge and where more than a half-century later, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau waged their own revolution of the spirit. As a center of literary and cultural rebellion, Concord became, at least symbolically, the intellectual capital of the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. The town belonged to a very different mental world from Emily Dickinson's Amherst. Between the two towns lay not only some seventy-five miles but also an immense cultural divide. Unitarian and Transcendentalist Concord, that rural outpost of Boston and Cambridge civilization , represented everything that Trinitarian Amherst, with its intense moral piety, meant to reject. What, then, can a student of Concord and its writers, one who reads the history of Amherst as a sideline, have to say about the Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 1983, 1-17 2 Robert A. Gross community in which Emily Dickinson lived and wrote? And what can a view from Concord possibly suggest about the complex connections between the Amherst citadel of Connecticut Valley Puritanism and the reclusive poet who withdrew from active engagement in the life of her town, yet somehow managed to incarnate its spirit ?1 Clearly, I believe that seeing Amherst in the light of Concord can tell us a great deal, not just about Emily Dickinson's immediate surround but also about the larger history of New England in the nineteenth century. There is a strong tendency among Dickinson scholars to overplay the tenacious hold of the Connecticut Valley religious milieu on the poet's imagination, with the result that her quiet subversion of Puritan orthodoxy reduces to a tribal and family quarrel. In this local perspective, the poet suffers her private pain, born in the intimate setting of her father's house and refracted in the college community he dominated; ultimately, Dickinson turns life into art and triumphs over her father's world. Now, this story is not wrong: Dickinson surely wrestled continually with a family legacy of orthodoxy. But stepping back from the parochial world of Amherst, we can see that Dickinson's rebellion had much in common with Thoreau's dissent from the ways of his native town. And by taking the two writers together, we can perceive that they were responding, in their works and their lives, to a fundamental problem of community that beset all the Amhersts and Concords of New England in a nineteenth-century ''Age of Revolution." 2 The parallels between Dickinson and Thoreau have often been noticed. Dickinson scholars have been quick to detect the Transcendentalist echoes in the poet's verse and to examine her relation to Emerson and Thoreau. There is no doubt that Emerson was by far the more important influence. For both Dickinson and Thoreau, he provided an essential model and inspiration , making possible the pursuit of their distinctive literary visions. The younger writers repaid their mentor by living out the logic of his ideas with an unswerving commitment from which Emerson himself invariably recoiled. Both Dickinson and Thoreau embodied extreme versions of Emersonian self-reliance. Their separate withdrawals from the world into the retreat at Walden Pond and the seclusion of the Dickinson Mansion proclaimed the superiority of the single person to the claims of community and the allsufficiency of the life of the mind. ''The greatest part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad ... ,"Thoreau declared...