LEARNING THE WAYS OF DISENCHANTMENT – cont.
It was not only a preoccupation with mortality and the fading of life’s splendor that led to the disenchantment of the young Emily Dickinson; her formal education also played a crucial role in teaching her “Men — to anticipate/Instead of Kings —” From that education she acquired a keen sensitivity to science and a deep interest in languages and literature.
In her eight years of formal schooling at the Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson developed her extraordinary intellectual powers and sharpened her awareness of the limits set to those powers by nature and the social order she inhabited.
The formal training ended when Emily was only seventeen, after her first year at Mount Holyoke, but its influence can be traced throughout her poetic career.
Dickinson was nine when she entered the Amherst Academy, and in her years there she studied a broad curriculum that included Latin, Greek, geography, ancient history, botany, physiology, and English grammar. She thrived in this environment, where the teachers were excellent, many of them being recent graduates of Amherst College. The course work was challenging and sufficiently interesting for someone of Dickinson’s abilities.
In one of her earliest letters, eleven-year-old Emily told her friend Jane Humphrey, “I am in the class that you used to be in in Latin — besides Latin I study History and Botany I like the school very much indeed -” This same letter to Jane Humphrey also gives evidence of the critical playfulness already developing in the precocious Emily Dickinson. She told her friend that in that afternoon’s “Speaking and Composition” section, one “young man” read a “Composition the Subject was think twice before you speak —” The boy spoke of a young gentleman who “knows a young lady who he thinks nature has formed to perfection let him remember that roses conceal thorns.” Emily would not accept this slight without her own retort.
“He is the sillyest creature that ever lived I think,” she explained to Jane. “I told him that I thought he had better think twice before he spoke —” Even at an early age, Dickinson was never at a loss for words.
By all accounts, Dickinson was an outstanding student. Shortly after her death in 1886, one of her early principals at the Amherst Academy, Daniel Taggart Fiske, set down his “very distinct and pleasant impressions” of the young Emily Dickinson. “I remember her as a very bright, but rather delicate and frail looking girl,” he wrote, “an excellent scholar, of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties; but somewhat shy and nervous. Her compositions were strikingly original; and in both thought and style seemed beyond her years, and always attracted much attention in the school and, I am afraid, excited not a little envy.”
Emily enjoyed her studies and impressed her peers and teachers, but her education was to equip her in ways her father and grandfather may not have anticipated.
The Dickinson men were fervent supporters of women’s education at a time when the practice had many detractors, but they did not envision it producing spinster skeptics of the kind Emily became. Instead, they saw the education of women as a key link in the chain of virtue in the republic. Through education, the perfection of women’s domestic roles could be made complete, Samuel Fowler Dickinson and his son believed.
In a speech delivered less than a year after his granddaughter Emily had been born, Samuel Dickinson vigorously promoted women’s education as a means of furthering the glorious work of God in the American republic.
“The whole earth is to be subdued, and made habitable and productive; and its whole population, civilized,” he exhorted his audience. “Let every one, therefore, gird on his strength; putting forth his first efforts, on his own farm; making Eden his pattern.” He called for the training of daughters in the “useful sciences,” including the study of language, geography, history, mathematics, and moral philosophy. The purpose of that education was clear to him: “the business and cares of a family… are among the first objects of woman’s creation; they ought to be among the first branches of her education. She was made for a mother.”
The irony, of course, is that instead of equipping Emily Dickinson for marriage, formal education deepened her suspicions about the very institutions for which it was intended to fit her.
Of all the subjects that Dickinson studied formally, the natural sciences were to have the most lasting influence in developing her skeptical turn of mind. For nature she had from early childhood a fascination that emerged readily as she grew up in a region of abundant beauty and variety.
Dickinson’s education, however, trained her to move beyond the simple observation of nature to the complex analysis of it. One of her early biographers, George Whicher, noted that the formal study of science “taught her to look closely at the object before her, to record her observations unchanged, to respect facts.”
Throughout her life, Dickinson would remain a close reader of nature’s text and a keen chronicler of its activities. Her poetry is replete with observations of natural processes as minute as a spider “sewing at night” and as vast as the “firmaments rowing” their way across the heavens.
Of the more than seven hundred words from special sources that Dickinson employed in her poetry, the largest body came from contemporary technology and science. And as the understanding of nature changed radically in her lifetime — particularly in the fields of geology and
hexafu 