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| Amherst and the Fathers Sometime between 1636 and 1638, Emily Dickinson's earliest American progenitors in the paternal line, Nathaniel and Ann Gull Dickinson, left the parish of Billingborough in Lincolnshire, England, for the raw British outpost of Wethersfield, Connecticut. One motive for their drastic move was a determination to practice without interference the militant late-Reformation faith known as Puritanism. The times were hot with rebellion against the Church of England. | |
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| In 1659 Nathaniel, Ann, and their children moved north into Massachusetts with a number of other families and established a town along the fertile Connecticut Valley deep in Norwottuck country. They called it Hadley, and Nathaniel played a leading role in organizing and regulating its municipal, educational, religious, and military affairs. When savage warfare broke out in 1675 between the indigenous peoples and the English, three of his nine sons were slain. When England's Puritan rule ended and those who had condemned Charles I to the headsman's block fled for their lives, they ended up in this frontier town, founded on righteousness and violence. And when a new town was carved out of Hadley's eastern parts a century later, in 1759, it was named for the man who would recommend using smallpox-infected blankets to "extirpate" the Indians: Lord Jeffrey Amherst. | |
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| By 1830, the year Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, the area was thick with light-skinned farmers bearing her last name, and the ancestral zealotry had moderated into a quirky hardheaded stubbornness known locally as Dickinson grit. A Dickinson reunion held there in 1883 was attended by a huge number of Nathaniel's descendants, who listened to a minister declaim a versified panegyric composed by Elizabeth Dickinson Currier, one of Emily's aunts. The poem termed the clan's patriarchs "men of muscle, as of mind" and denounced any falling away from their evangelical zeal. What the ancestral legacy meant to the event's organizers is suggested by a photograph of the stage, which shows a slender gun standing on the floor next to portraits of Dickinson judges, generals, governors, and ministers. The weapon was said to have been "used in killing Indians and wolves." Although Emily Dickinson would not have attended this pious family gathering, she was very much a member of the tribe-savvy, tough, resolute, heaven-obsessed, independent, unusual. In one of her most eye-catching poems, "My life had stood a loaded gun," she, or at least the speaker, almost seems to be the deadly Dickinson musket come to life: None stir the second time - On whom I lay a Yellow Eye - Or an emphatic Thumb - Fr764 (about 1863) A later and less enigmatic poem concerns the unavoidability of "fighting" for one's life "In that Campaign inscrutable / Of the Interior" (Fr1230). Another, "My wars are laid away in books" (Fr1579), obviously retrospective, dates from about 1882, not long before the reunion. Hard battle resulting in victory or defeat was a central, lifelong metaphor for her. Far from being a wispy escapist, she was as martial a Dickinson as any of them. Yet she had no one's blood on her hands and paid little or no attention to family or local history, including her father's toast at Hadley's 1859 bicentennial invoking the by now moss-covered theme of New England's errand into the (so-called) wilderness. | |
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| What complicated this inheritance for the poet was that she was not only disqualified by her sex from entering public life but actively instructed not to define herself in terms of the collective struggles of her time. Unlike her father, Edward, a conservative bulwark of the public world as she knew it, she was relegated to the private sphere, and that at a time when specifically domestic and affectionate qualities were assigned to women and given an extreme emphasis and development. Also, sentimental writing by both sexes was in vogue. If Emily's letters and poems often express a kind of ultimate in exquisite tenderness, we should bear in mind that the energies that might have been expended otherwise in different conditions were, with her, compressed into writing that had to remain a part of private life, even when confided to close friends. | |
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| of her poems from early in the Civil War sums up a woman's life and death by tracing her footprints into a deserted and unfamiliar place. Although the woman's path is untraveled by others, it is, paradoxically, already there, familiar, old: 'Twas the old - road - through pain - That unfrequented - One - These lines take us back to the old Puritan allegories of life's hard and lonely course, except that here the journey begins not in sin but in anguish. Observing the woman's tracks as if from just above, the speaker follows with breathless engagement: This - was the Town - she passed - There - where she - rested - last - Then - stepped more fast - The little tracks - close prest - Then - not so swift - Slow - slow - as feet did weary - grow - Then - stopped - no other track! The footprints hint at an extreme and convulsive effort, which appears to have failed. But the story isn't over: Wait! Look! Her little Book - The leaf - at love - turned back - Her very Hat - And this worn shoe just fits the track... | |
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| Fr376 In the end, we are assured the traveler has been translated to a bed in "Chambers bright." That her place of rest is made up by women, not angels, hints that her impassioned but unknown errand into the wilderness was in some way specific to her sex. | |
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| The only friends to whom Dickinson is known to have sent the poem were two first cousins on her mother's side, sisters, of whom she was especially fond. At the time she copied it in her secret manuscript books, about 1862, her own tracks were also extremely "close prest," resulting in 227 poems for that year alone, by R. W. Franklin's count. Her book, too, was dog-eared at love, and pain and solitude, and laughter and risk and freshness and power and so much more. Devious, disguised, and mostly obliterated, Dickinson's tracks are going to be harder to read than those of the risk-taking woman she wrote about. Is the poem about a single woman whose capacity for love drives her into panic, solitude, and death? At times it will look as if the poet was on that "unfrequented" road. But hers kept going where the other woman's stopped. | |
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| In 1850, writing the future president of Dartmouth College, Charles Hammond described Amherst, the town Dickinson passed, as "the land of the fathers," the place where "the ancient altars" were still honored and tended. To follow her road to greatness, we have to go back to her paternal grandfather, whose dedication to those altars helped set the terms within which she defined and dared to exercise her high calling-an artist's heroic errand into and out of a wilderness all her own. | |
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| All the Armor of Fortitude and Determination Samuel Fowler Dickinson, the poet's grandfather, embodied much of her paternal heritage, being both a man of means and a man of thought-a promoter of education, a community leader, a defender of Calvinist orthodoxy. He rose to greatness as a cofounder of Amherst College, but he also proved an obsessive, unbalanced, and scattered man whose judgment went astray and whose life ended in a shambles. | |
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| After graduating from Dartmouth as Latin salutatorian in 1795, Samuel spent a year teaching school, an occupation he found too dependent on the "whims" of constituents. His lungs unwell, he underwent a conversion and began studying with the Reverend Nathanael Emmons, one of New England's most energetic and eminent Calvinists. Four months of Emmons convinced the young man he was not cut out for the ministry, but he continued to regard his instructor as a "great Divine." Indeed, judging from Samuel's intense lifelong drive, it looks as if he took to heart Emmons's curious "Exercise Scheme," a religious teaching that gave unusual emphasis to the power of the will and the obligation to use it.1 Returning to Amherst, Samuel put himself under the tutelage of Judge Simeon Strong, the town's leading lawyer and the owner of much valuable land in its center. In a letter to a college friend dating from this period, the young man wrote that "for entering the world we need all the armour of fortitude and determination." This statement, that of someone putting the Exercise Scheme into motion, catches the embattled drive working within Samuel and some of his descendants: all the armor and determination was precisely what they required. His imagery gives us our first sight of the resolute will to be great that his granddaughter would quietly assert some sixty years later. | |
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| In 1817, well before the Squire's contributions to Amherst College began consuming his estate, he mortgaged this house for $2,500 (today roughly $75,000), an encumbrance he was never able to lift. The household that shaped the poet's father was marked by high dreams and ambitions, a generosity as reckless as it was shining, worsening indebtedness, and a series of desperate expedients concluding in disaster. Having known what it was like to live without the security and dignity that should have gone with his rank, Edward Dickinson would prove extremely protective of his own family, particularly his wife and older daughter. | |
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| From the Hardcover edition. | |