New York
The myth of Emily Dickinson as the dark-haired, inveterate recluse who created her innovative poetry in isolation from the outside world is just that—a myth, according to this wonderful, unprecedented exhibition.
Never before have Amherst and Harvard, the two institutions that maintain the largest holdings of Dickinson’s documents, letters, and original manuscripts, cooperated in allowing their Dickinson collections to be shown simultaneously. Not only does this exhibition reveal that Dickinson was not a brunette—she was a redhead, as a portrait and lock of her hair prove—it also demonstrates that her reputation as a recluse is not nearly as accurate as it has previously been made out to be. As an adolescent, Emily Dickinson participated in many meetings with an eclectic society of individuals; and as the thousand-plus letters she wrote will attest, she cultivated a small but close-knit group of friends with whom she continued to correspond throughout her life.
The exhibition traces Dickinson’s social and literary influences back to her birth and upbringing in the small college town of Amherst, Massachusetts. She was born there in 1830, where her grandfather had cofounded Amherst College as a school dedicated to training pious, impoverished young men to be missionaries, and where Dickinson’s father served as treasurer for nearly 40 years. As the town of Amherst gradually evolved into a more cultured, cosmopolitan hub, Emily Dickinson grew up in the center of one of the more important intellectual regions of antebellum America.
The exhibit also contains Dickinson’s extensively marked-up Bible. Though religious people might commend her for how well-read she was in sacred texts, others would likely disapprove of the irreverent way she treated it, dog-earing pages and cutting out words and phrases she used in some of her poetry.
Dickinson’s willingness to push against the bounds of convention—both religious and poetic—began at the age of 16 during her brief tenure at the Mount Holyoke Seminary for girls. The Second Great Awakening—the nationwide Protestant revival—had reached Amherst, and a spirit of zealous Calvinism swept through Mount Holyoke. The school’s Congregationalist faculty pressured students into making religious declarations, and when Emily declined to do so, her friends worried that she was a “no-hoper,” one of the unsaved. Though she would never be conventionally religious, spirituality remained one of Dickinson’s lifelong concerns, as reflected in “My Sabbath,” one of only 10 poems published in her lifetime and showcased here in its original 1864 publication:
Dickinson’s childhood verse was conventional and sentimental, long narrative poems with tight rhyme schemes and religious themes. Later, when she was taken out of Mount Holyoke and confined to her home out of concern that she might be developing tuberculosis, her poems became shorter, unsentimental, and more lyrical, employing advanced meters and themes and containing idiosyncratic punctuation (especially dashes)—all so unconventional, for the time, that editors either declined to use her poems or published them in revised forms against her wishes.
Far from creating her unconventional style in a vacuum, the Civil War had a major impact upon Dickinson’s work: Of her 1,789 poems, about 900 were written between 1861 and 1865, and with Amherst close to Springfield, home of the Union’s primary arms manufacturer, news of the war reached Amherst early and often. As this exhibition makes clear, the Civil War clearly provided a major stimulus for her artistry—although in what precise ways remains a mystery, as does much of the life of Emily Dickinson.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a rabbi and doctoral candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
