The Props Assist the House
The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself
And cease to recollect
The Augur and the Carpenter – #729]
Memory is a strange Bell — Jubilee, and Knell.
Remembrance often overpowered Emily Dickinson. It ran like a faultline beneath the surface of her life, frequenty shiting and disrupting the normal course of affairs.
As the poet wrote shortly after her mother died in November 1882, memory was to her “a strange Bell — Jubilee, and Knell.” It was “Jubilee” because it brought the dead to life and lodged them securely in the mansion of the mind. “My Hazel Eye/Has periods of shutting —But, No lid has Memory —” Dickinson claimed, for “Memory like Melody,/Is pink Eternally -” [#869, #1614].
Yet at the same time, memory also sounded the death “Knell,” tolling the loss of ones she had loved. “Remorse — is Memory — awake —,” and the mind that raises the dead must also acknowledge that “The Grave — was finished — but the Spade/Remained in Memory —” [#781, #886].
Because of Emily Dickinson’s passion for memory and commemoration, it seems curious that there is but a single reference to her ancestry in all of her poems and letters.
Her grandfather was a founder of Amherst College and a major public figure in his day; her forebears on the Dickinson side were among the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and played vital roles in the life of the colony and the early republic. Yet all we hear of them in the writings of Emily Dickinson is one brief mention, in the form of a promise she made to send her aunt the family’s copy of her grandfather’s Bible.
Dickinson neglected her ancestral past because she had a remarkably concrete understanding of remembrance and cared little for history in the abstract.
Neither the traditions of the church nor the legacies of her ancestors interested her greatly. Because she had not known them directly, she had no memory of them. For her, memory meant the recollection of intense experiences or encounters rather than rituals of general commemoration. It usually involved the revival of a sensory impress — the cadences of a voice or the sight of riveting eyes — that Dickinson carried in her mind and that brought back to life one who had been snatched from her grasp by death.
To borrow one of her metaphors, she was intrigued only by the memory of what went on within the dwelling of her conscious life; in the props that had assisted in building that house she had little interest.
MILLENNIALISM AND MORALISM
It was indeed a rich family history to which Dickinson could have turned her attention, if she had chosen to do so. Her ancestry can be traced to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when Nathaniel Dickinson was among the four hundred or so settlers who accompanied John Winthrop in the migration that began in 1630.
Nathaniel and his wife Anna were doubtless present on the voyage when Winthrop preached his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” offering a prophetic vision of New England. In language that continues to resonate in the American experience, Winthrop reminded his fellow sojourners to the New World: “We are entered into Covenant with Him for this work” and “we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”
The New England Puritans were in the main postmillennialists. They believed, that is, that the thousand-year reign of Christ prophesied in Revelation, the final book of the Bible, would come as a result of their ardent efforts to purify the church. The Puritans with whom Anna and Nathaniel Dickinson came to the New World believed themselves to have been sent by God on a divine “errand into the wilderness.” If they were successful, Christ would dwell in their midst and establish his rule over the earth.
The pursuit of godliness and opportunity sent Nathaniel Dickinson first from Boston to Wethersfield, Connecticut, and several decades later to the new plantation of Hadley, Massachusetts.
Once planted in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts, the descendants of Nathaniel Dickinson took root in the area and, for several generations, took charge of the town of Amherst.
In a biography of her aunt, Martha Dickinson Bianchi wrote of the original Nathaniel Dickinson that “he appears to have dominated to a large extent the organization of his own world in his own time.” Nathaniel had ten children, and families of nine or ten children became common among his descendants. So many of his heirs stayed in the Amherst area that by the 1880s a family historian could write that in central Massachusetts the Dickinsons “threatened to choke out all other forms of vegetation.” In reporting on a Dickinson reunion held in Amherst in August 1883, the Boston Journal observed that “we may well doubt whether the Dickinsons belonged to Amherst or Amherst to the Dickinsons.” At a Dickinson family reunion in 1933, Bianchi noted, “Our names outnumber even those of Smith in the telephone book, without counting those of us who have married into another family, and are a perplexity to strangers.”
Emily’s grandfather was a brilliant man who struggled with conflicting impulses and demands throughout his life. Samuel Fowler Dickinson’s ambition initially found a satisfactory outlet in the practice of law and political affairs in Amherst. After his marriage to Lucretia Gunn in 1802, Dickinson quickly rose to the top of his profession in the town. It was not long before his became one of the wealthiest Amherst families.
By 1813, when Emily’s father Edward was only ten, her grandfather had achieved such success that he was able to build the impressive Dickinson Homestead on Main Street several hundred yards east of the center of the town. This imposing structure was the first brick house in Amherst and was to be Emily Dickinson’s home for all but fifteen years of her life.
The realities of Emily Dickinson’s evangelical Protestant inheritance run counter to many established conceptions about her religious life. It has become commonplace to claim that she was the product of a harsh Puritan environment that stifled her spirit and inspired her poetic rebellion. In her home, church, and school, young Emily supposedly had a rigid Calvinism drummed into her.
As a recent biography puts the matter, the Dickinson family clung to a reactionary Calvinism “containing elements of terror and psychic violence” and spurned the new Unitarian faith, which “stood for serenity, a life of rational virtue, a view of Jesus as a model for imitation rather than a divine savior” With its visions of a terrifying hell and a dour heaven, this dire Puritanism oppressed the gifted young woman. Only through heroic resistance, the argument goes, did Dickinson manage to define herself in contradiction to it. Her eventual choice of a poetic career, her embrace of solitude, and her alleged lesbian practices, among other things, have been attributed to her revolt against the tyranny of an overbearing creed.
To be sure, the Puritan legacy was still strong in the Connecticut River valley in Emily Dickinson’s day, and many of the poet’s personal traits and poetic practices show the imprint of that heritage. Her poetry, as we shall see, was shaped in complex ways by the Trinitarian theology that had been preached from the pulpits for two centuries before her in the Connecticut River valley. Her complex understandings of God, self, nature, and human destiny were all influenced in manifold ways by the Reformation tradition that permeated life in the towns of western Massachusetts. Like many significant literary figures in nineteenth-century England and America, Dickinson adapted and transformed that inherited faith in her art, where its imprint remains clear and unmistakable.
To understand Emily Dickinson’s life, however, it is crucial to note that by the time she was born in 1830, the transformation from the austere Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards to a more genteel Christian profession was well under way in the Amherst area. Edwards, who died in 1758, had promoted a majestic vision of God’s economy; in the scheme of things as he envisioned it, the human will stood naked and vulnerable before the throne of God. “Natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell,” his most famous sermon asserted. “They have no refuge, nothing to take hold of, all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted unobliged forbearance of an incensed God.” Edwardsean Calvinism offered a bracing theological vision that demanded a great deal of the wounded rebel and promised even more to the repentant sinner. With its stringent diagnosis of sin, it labored to expose the gaping wound of the human will and applied the crucified and risen Christ as the only salve for that wound.
Gradually by the end of the eighteenth century and more rapidly in the first decades of the nineteenth, Edwards’s descendants had begun to blunt the edge of the scalpel he had used to cut into the New England soul.
In the first several decades of the nineteenth century, the Dickinsons were, like many well-situated families in Congregational New England, Whiggish in their politics and New School Calvinist in their theology. The Whig ideal provided for these antebellum New Englanders a means of securing the social order for divinely appointed ends without emphasizing the more abstruse or embarrassing elements of the Puritan theological tradition.
In the words of Louise Stevenson, “Whiggery stood for the triumph of the cosmopolitan and national over the provincial and local, of rational order over irrational spontaneity, of school-based learning over traditional folkways and custom, and of self-control over self-expression.” It was the ideal faith for men of the rising professional class in the early nineteenth-century New England village, and it would prove to be a superb foil for Emily Dickinson, the greatest poet of the age.
On May 6, 1828, not long after he had begun his law practice in Amherst, Edward Dickinson married Emily Norcross of nearby Monson after a two-year courtship. The letters they wrote to each other during that courtship reveal two young adults well versed in the Whig virtues of prudence and self-restraint. In the history of Emily Dickinson criticism, the complaints against her parents run deep, with Edward in particular being singled out for his “harsh,” “tyrannical,” or “Puritanical” attitudes. His letters to Emily Norcross during their engagement, however, show a different man. They rarely mention God or anything that might be construed as Calvinist doctrine but contain countless references to “piety,” “virtue,” “universal benevolence,” and “rational happiness.” If Edward Dickinson was austere to the point of severity, his courtship letters indicate that his cramped personality and sober Whiggish views, rather than a rigid orthodoxy, made him so.
The realities of the lives of Emily Dickinson’s grandfather, father, and brother put into perspective both the poet’s own disdain for travel and her love of home.
In outline form, the story of Dickinson’s reclusiveness is familiar to many: except for one academic year at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and two extended visits to Boston for eye care in the mid-1860s, Emily Dickinson lived at home with her family for her entire life. In her thirties, she secluded herself so completely within her parents’ home that few outside her family were ever to see her again. Her retreat became so total that she left the grounds of her home only once in her last twenty years.
When Thomas Wentworth Higginson met the poet for the first time in 1870, he asked “if she never felt want of employment, never going off the place & never seeing any visitor.” No, she said, “I never thought of conceiving that I could ever have the slightest approach to such a want in all future time’ (& added) ‘I feel that I have not expressed myself strongly enough.’” A few months later, she wrote to one of her closest friends that she had no need of travel, for “to shut our eyes is Travel. The seasons understand this.”
“I do not go away, but the Grounds are ample — almost travel – to me, and the few that I knew — came — since my Father died —” Emily explained in 1881.
Her family and a select circle of friends, most of whom she knew chiefly through correspondence, were to comprise Emily Dickinson’s world in adulthood. To understand and explore the world, she felt she needed nothing more than what her ordinary experience and her imaginative powers provided her. She had no desire to travel back in time through history or across vast stretches of the nation expanding around her.
“I like travelling,” Edward Dickinson wrote to his pregnant wife in May of 1830, “but home has charms for me, which I do not find abroad.” What was true for the father would be even more the case for the daughter about to be born into the Dickinson family.
hexafu 