A Prolific Poet and a Strange Woman
Emily Dickinson’s life has always aroused my curiosity. She was one of the most original 19th century American poets. She had her own unconventional broken rhyming meter. She used dashes and capitalization in a way that was unusual at the time. She was a prolific poet and wrote almost eight hundred poems. Yet, not more than a dozen were published during her lifetime. She corresponded with famous journalists, writers and editors of the time, yet she refused to see visitors as she grew older. Whenever anyone came to visit her, she would talk to them from behind a door or shout to them from upstairs.
Family and Childhood
Emily Dickinson came from a successful and influential family in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her grandfather Samuel Dickinson was the founder of Amherst College. The family lived in a big mansion on the Main Street where Emily spent most of her life. Emily’s father Edward Dickinson was the treasurer of Amherst College for almost forty years. He also represented the Hampshire District in the United States Congress. Emily had the same name with her mother Emily Norcross, and she had two siblings named William Austin and Lavinia.
As a child, Emily was well-behaved. She didn’t cause any trouble for her parents. She played the piano. She was a hard-working student. Her father Edward Dickinson was ambitious about the education of his children. Each time he arrived at home, he wanted them to tell him one by one all the new things they learned that day. Later in her correspondences, Emily described her father as a good, warm man although in a letter she wrote after he died, she said he had a pure but terrible heart. However, she described her mother from the beginning as an ‘awful mother’ who was aloof and cold. She also implied in a letter she wrote later that her mother favored and loved Austin more than her other kids.
Emily’s Youth
As years past by, Emily turned into an introvert and a melancholic girl. She often became sick and couldn’t go to school. When Sophie Holland, her cousin and close friend, died because of typhus, she was crushed. She started becoming obsessed with the idea of death and thought she could die anytime, too. She became so depressed that her family had to send her away to Boston with the hope that she would pull herself together in a different environment. The change of atmosphere helped her recuperate. Upon her return, she was feeling much better. She returned to Amherst College to continue her studies.
A religious revival swept Amherst in 1845, and Emily, like many of her peers, was affected. However, it did not last long, and she stopped going to church after a few years. After graduating from Amherst Academy, she went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for ten months, but then, returned home to Amherst.
Years in Seclusion
Emily Dickinson spent the rest of her life in Amherst. She corresponded with many friends including Leonard Humphrey and Susan Gilbert. She and Susan exchanged hundreds of letters. Susan had a great influence on Emily, to the point of manipulating her, but she also upset the poet quite often with her haughty and harsh manners. Later, she married Emily’s brother.
Leonard, on the other hand, was a friend from her Amherst College days, and his untimely death at the age of twenty-five shook Emily once again, causing her to become even more obsessed with the idea of death. When her mother became sick and bedridden in the 1850s, Emily had to take over the domestic chores, and she gradually withdrew herself from the outside world.
A Series of Unfortunate Events
The rest of Emily Dickinson’s life can be summarized by saying that it was a series of unfortunate events. Thinking about it really breaks my heart. Such a talented woman, who was so capable of loving and being loved and of creating and nourishing, had to submit to her fate and suffer in silence. She must have felt so much pain. There must have been times when she wanted to end it all.
First, her father had a stroke and died. Emily couldn’t bring herself to attend the funeral. Soon after, her mother suffered a stroke that worsened her condition. After that, Phillips Lord, Emily’s friend and perhaps late-life romance, as well as her good old friend Charles Wadsworth, passed away. Her brother Austin fell in love with another woman, left his wife Susan and distanced himself from his family. Before soon, Emily’s mother died. The next year, Gilbert, who was Austin and Susan’s youngest child and Emily’s favorite nephew, lost his life because of typhoid fever.
External Ghost, That Whiter Host
Emily tried to cope with her painful life through writing, baking, gardening, and herbology. In her last years she didn’t step out of the house at all. She wore white from head to toe. She turned into a white ghost who was doomed to a life in the same empty rooms filled with apparitions. She developed agoraphobia and anxiety disorder.
Her life was merely a shade of death, and she knew well that one could not avoid passing through ‘the invisible door’ and walking through the corridors of death. Her fear of evil, which she often mentioned in her poems, probably reflected her fear of losing control in the course of a life woven with grief and never-ending trouble.
Did she put those strange dashes and unusual capital letters in her poems each time the spirits of sorrow clamped her heart? Was she wearing white because she was desperately trying to bring some light into her life and to get rid of the funeral blues?
Home Is So Far From Home
In many families, one person ends up being the victim. Emily seems to be the victim in the Dickinson family, and she fulfilled that role obediently. Like many victims, she remained silent. She didn’t fight back. She didn’t revolt openly. Instead, she screamed through her poetry, which she tried to keep under cover. Her sister Lavinia found Emily’s hundreds of poems and shared them with the world. Why did she do that? Did she share her deceased sister’s feelings? Did she find some solace for herself and for Emily’s soul by bringing out the amazingly crafted silent anguish of the woman in white?
Emily Dickinson died at the age of fifty-five. She was laid in a white coffin decorated with heliotropes, orchids and violets. Her funeral was short and simple. Upon her request in her death bed, her coffin wasn’t driven but carried through fields of buttercups before she was buried in the family plot at West Cemetery.
Her Subtle Poems and the Ghost of Her Smile
Dickinson’s poetry was influenced by her Puritan upbringing, the Book of Revelation and the metaphysical poets of 17th century England. She especially admired Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and John Keats. She used metaphors in the most creative manner and applied an innovative style in her poems that reflected her background and spirituality. She refrained from adopting the romantic style of her time. Her poetic voice was bold, witty, concise, and sometimes sardonic.
I cannot help but think that Emily Dickinson lived in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hope that her poetry, which still captivates and impresses masses, gives her soul the peace she couldn’t find as a mortal being.
She was right when she wrote one doesn’t need to be a house to be haunted. Sometimes being human alone and devoid of love is enough to feel haunted because you carry your own haunted chamber within you. She thought it was safer to see a ghost than to confront the ghosts in her mind. Gazing into herself terrified her for she couldn’t stand facing the darker things in her mind.
Here, I dedicate this song to her memory:
HAUNTED
Interesting Links:
Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poetry
Today in Literature: Emily Dickinson
Literature Network: Emily Dickinson
