Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance

9. Dickinson's Unpublished Canon

9 · Dickinson's Unpublished Canon ust as we have endeavored to bring Twain's view of black Americans into line with the utopian consciousness of our twentieth-century desires, so have we sought to update Emily Dickinson with regard to the most recent engagement of American middle-class anxiety, the gender debate. Cynthia Griffin Wolff's biography of the poet culminates with impressive historical detail the effort in the last decade to see the poet as chafing under the social constraints of womanhood (or "ladyhood") in the nineteenth century. We want now a poet-a female-who had already inscribed this view of women before history demanded it. In an attempt to characterize almost a score of books on Dickinson between 1980 and 1985, I wrote that she has been viewed as a modernist, feminist, symbolist, linguist, philosopher, crypto-politico, cultural inebriate, unrequited lover, aging adolescent, inverted astronaut, and ravished romantic.! Yet the underlying theme of most of these (otherwise mutually exclusive) categories is feminism: the desire to revise the ideology that is said to have privileged the male since the misogynistic mythmaking of biblical times and before. Because Dickinson is America's greatest female poet, it is imperative that her work be enlisted in the contemporary debate or cause. The "cause," of course, has been vocalized in the United States ever since the first national women's convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848- [ 1 4 1 ] Dickinson's Unpublished Canon when Dickinson was eighteen. It was the only year (1847-48) that she lived for any significant length of time outside Amherst and outside the home of her father. Her other absences-in Washington, D.C., and in Cambridge, Massachusetts-were clearly temporary, but this one could have led to her independence from her family because it was for the purposes of a formal education, the very solution for women that Mary W ollstonecraft argues for in her Vindication of the Rights ofWoman (1792). Of course, Dickinson was not attending Yale College, the alma mater of her father, or even Amherst College, the school her grandfather had helped to found, but Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, begun and tightly controlled by Mary Lyon, described by Wolff and others as intense, earnest, and deeply religious. 2 Although the curriculum was theoretically "academic" or secular, it was in fact preponderately religious. Lyon's campaign to persuade the young women to declare their commitment to Christ clearly set the educational agenda and defined the tone of how the students' education might liberate them. The daily schedule, as Dickinson described it to her friend Abiah Root, consisted of an hour of "devotions " in the morning and "advice from Miss. Lyon in the form of a lecture" in the afternoon for at least another ho·ur.3 As the school year progressed, the headmistress divided the school into "Hopers" and "No-hopers" in terms of their Christian status. She met with each group separately once a week, and by the end of Dickinson's time at Mount Holyoke had reduced the ranks of "No-hopers" by 85 souls. That 30 (out of a class of 230) remained uncommitted Christians, however, suggests-as Richard B. Sewall reminds us-that Dickinson was not alone in her rebellion.4 It also implies that the long-brooding spirit behind the Seneca Falls Convention had already begun to filter down to the population, to the extent that some women of Dickinson's age were not so readily persuaded by the myth whose icon was corporeally male. As Dickinson told her friend shortly after returning from Thanksgiving vacation, "I have not yet given up to the claims of Christ, but trust I am not thoughtless on so important & serious a subject." 5 In the very next (and last) sentence, however, she turned to the subject of the weather. If the spiritual "marriage" to Christ was not simply a boring prospect, it was at least less interesting than the spring-like winter she described. Dickinson did, of course, fret about not convert- [ 1 4 \2 ] Dickinson's Unpublished Canon ing, but it may have been a pose to dramatize the sense of loneliness that would become memorialized in her poetry. By the close of the school year she told Root that she still regretted missing the "golden opportunity" of becoming a Christian, "but it is hard for me to give up the world." 6 She did not return...