Emily Dickinson and Her Familys Feuds

Marquis Knapp

22 February 2010

So entrenched is the picture of Dickinson as a partly cracked poetess at Amherst, whose refusal to leave her dad's house for the second 1/2 her life made a puzzle that favored imagination hasn't hesitated to fill with love, pathology and craziness, that she has become the academic equivalent of a tabloid celebrity. Lyndall Gordon has set out to test the fey white legend, making a much more human Dickinson, one who wore her red hair low

on her neck in a brown velvet snood, whose bread won prizes at Amherst carnivals and who was satisfactorily unsentimental to drown surplus kittens in pickle brine. God keep me from what they call homes, she wrote as a young lady. Eventually , Gordon's coup de grce : Dickinson punned frequently about fits in her poems and her letters, and some of her most celebrated spasmodic verse plays on pictures that suggest not only epileptic fits, but the idealist aura with which they have traditionally been associated:. Austin began a fifteen year affair with Mabel, first using the Homestead for their trysts, with Lavinia's connivance - and to the clear ire of Emily, who refused ever to meet the lady who was in her home just about each day. The feud spread to the new generation, carried on by Mabel's girl Millicent Todd and Sue's child Martha Dickinson Bianchi, both of whom went on to edit and write authoritative books about the poet they knew essentially thru violently partisan family legend. Gordon does an excellent job of bringing much-needed objectivity to the story, but does have her very own axes to grind, most saliently her detestation of Mabel Todd.

out to read Dickinson in familial contexts, Gordon also indicates that the poet was adequately reclusive to miss the war that split the country in the years of her best productiveness. Incredibly, she touches on the civil war twice only, in passing, and never in connection with the poet - though it was undoubtedly the outlining historical event of Dickinson's lifetime. Disagreeing that many of the poems of the early 1860s have to do with the unexplained onset of dysfunction, she neglects to claim that they also dealt with the beginning of war, including the poem from which she gets her title, My life had stood - a Loaded Gun -, and others like A chop of Blue - / A sweep of Grey -. She so continues, by implication, the parable that Dickinson was involved with private, domestic matters only ; busy stitching her tiny verses, the Belle of Amherst didn't spot the civil war.