Chapter One
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
fault line beneath the surface of her life, frequently shifting 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."
For many generations the Dickinsons farmed the land, remaining
active in civic affairs and committed to the covenantal faith of their Puritan
ancestors. Only in the generation of Emily Dickinson's grandfather,
Samuel Fowler Dickinson, did some members of the Dickinson
family begin to forsake farming for the professions. Following the lead
of his older brother Timothy, Samuel entered college and eventually
graduated second in his class from Dartmouth in 1795.
In selecting Dartmouth, Samuel Fowler Dickinson and his family
chose to align themselves with the heritage of the colonial revival
known as the Great Awakening. While the older Congregational colleges,
Harvard and Yale, were skeptical of the emotions of revivalism,
Dartmouth and other institutions had risen up to champion the Awakening.
When he graduated from Dartmouth, Samuel Fowler Dickinson
decided to follow his older brother into the ministry. Within a year,
however, he gave up training for the pastorate and turned his attention
to the law, thus setting the course for his family in Amherst for the
next century. His son, Edward, and grandson, Austin, would follow
his lead, both in their devoted service to Amherst College and in their
legal careers that placed them at the center of Amherst's life. The stage
for Emily Dickinson's life was set, then, when her grandfather left the
ministry and entered the law in Amherst at the beginning of the nineteenth
century.
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.
Yet even as his legal career flourished, Samuel Fowler Dickinson
felt driven to pursue loftier aims. There was in him a quality of restlessness
that was passed down directly to Emily's father, brother, and
herself. As a college graduate who had trained for the ministry and the
law, Dickinson sought to advance both the Kingdom of God and the
American republic through the establishment of a college in the Connecticut
River valley. His tireless labors upon behalf of Amherst College
were motivated in good measure by the postmillennial heritage
that he shared with other New England Congregationalists of his day.
Dickinson, Noah Webster, and others interpreted the moral, political,
and economic prosperity of the new republic as a sign that God was
about to establish the Kingdom foretold by John Winthrop two centuries
earlier. In the words of the first historian of Amherst College, "the
conversion of the world often pressed heavily on [Samuel Fowler
Dickinson's] mind." He viewed Amherst as "one of the agencies that
would surely hasten that promised event."
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. Edwards's incisive depiction of the will in bondage to
sin seemed poorly suited to the needs of the church in a nascent republic;
instead, what the new nation needed was a clear vision of the social
usefulness of Christian faith. "How does religion make a man useful to
his fellow?" asked Edwards's grandson, Timothy Dwight, in "Farmer
Johnson's Political Catechism." The answer: "By rendering him just,
sincere, faithful, kind and public-spirited, from principle. It induces
him voluntarily, and always, to perform faithfully in the several duties
of social life." Dwight shied away from theological and philosophical
speculation and called instead for Christian social action. "From first
to last," Mark Noll explains, "Dwight was a man in motion."
Over the course of the first several decades of the nineteenth century,
the transformation of the Edwardsean legacy continued across
New England. Following the lead of Dwight and others, evangelical
Christians sought increasingly to link church and society by stressing
the moral improvement of the self rather than the inscrutable will and
character of God. By promoting moral reform, ministers thought they
could both strengthen the tie between a distant God and everyday life
and bolster the waning influence of the church in a democratic culture.
Gradually, "with passing decades," writes James Turner, "Evangelical
millennialism merged imperceptibly into a more secular idea of progress
At times, they [Evangelicals] almost identified growing prosperity,
increasing knowledge, and improving social organization with
the perfecting of the earth supposed to presage the millennium."
Emily Dickinson's immediate ancestors found little to object to in
the theological changes taking place around them; indeed, especially
in the case of her grandfather, they eagerly supported efforts to have
their Calvinist heritage recast to bear the imprint of newly minted republican
ideals. 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.
For southern New England in general and the Dickinson family
in particular, Yale College led the way in uniting Whiggery and New
School Calvinism. Edward Dickinson graduated from Yale in 1823,
and from 1840 to 1878 - virtually the whole of Emily Dickinson's adolescence
and adulthood - the pulpit of the First Church of Amherst
was filled by Yale graduates. It was at Yale, under the leadership of
Timothy Dwight and Nathaniel Taylor, that the heirs of Edwards attempted
to sustain his influence by modifying his teachings.
Continues.
