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The following biographical information is taken, in most places, word for word from
Richard B. Sewall. The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1974.
Biography: Emily Dickinson's Early Life
Poems That Indicate a Breakdown, Perhaps Psychosis
Psychoanalytical Interpretation of Poems 579 and 609
Psychoanalytical Interpretation of "My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun"
Emily Dickinson was born Dec. 10, 1830. During her life she wrote 1800 poems, but only a few were published in her lifetime. But she was famous, at least locally, as The Myth of Amherst, whom many gossiped about. She was known to be an eccentric spinster recluse who always wore white and who stayed upstairs whenever guests visited her family's home, sometimes speaking with guests while she stayed out of sight at the top of the stairs. In the last years of her life no one outside the family ever saw her.
There has been endless speculation about what caused her gradual but total withdrawal from the world, why she never married, etc. We must look into her life for these answers or at least to try and separate the myth of Emily Dickinson from the real woman and poet. Though she retreated from the world she never ceased to communicate via letters. Fortunately, for her biographers and students of her poetry, there are 1000 letters extant. And there is always the possibility that someone will find a new cache of letters that will shed light on the many mysteries surrounding her life.
She was born into a prominent family of lawyers and educators associated with Amherst College in Amherst, Mass. Her earliest years were spent in a crowded house of 13 shared with her father's family. Only two bedrooms were available for Emily's family of 5. Her father was strict and ruled the family absolutely which was not particularly unusual for the nineteenth century. It was not uncommon for parents to expect one of their daughters to remain unmarried and to stay at home and take care of the aging parents. This is what Emily did. It is also what Emily's youngest sister did. For whatever reasons neither of the girls were ever able to cut the strings.
In the Dickinson family, the father was strong and the mother was weak, apparently unintelligent and cold. By all accounts there were no outward displays of affection between family members. E's brother, Austin, as an adult wrote to his mistress that he never received any tenderness as a child.
When Emily was two and a half, her sister, Lavinia (Vinny) was born. Her mother became very ill and Emily w as sent to live for some months with her Mother's sister, Aunt Lavinia who adored her little charge and showered her with an affection and t tenderness she did not receive at home. Whether this was a traumatic event for a small child to be separated from her mother or whether this was an unexpectedly nourishing event in her life we do not know. Aunt Lavinia wrote that Emily did not ask after any one in her family except her brother Austin. Emily remained close to her aunt; and her cousins, the Norcross sisters, were the recipients of some of Emily's most intimate letters, even very late in her life.
If there were any signs of budding genius in the young Emily, her family failed to notice them. She was considered a quiet, obedient, unremarkable child.
#959 A loss of something ever felt I --
This poem may refer to what she considered a spiritual lack. In her circle of pious school friends she was the only one not to be able to accept Christ as her personal savior. She was very troubled by her inability to respond as they did.
#486 I was the slightest in the House --
#613 They shut me up in Prose --
In her poetry, she uses childhood as a metaphor for conveying an attitude toward a kind of pain that may have had nothing to do with childhood itself, but of frustration of any sort, the experience of being excluded, or the frustration she always felt as an unrecognized poet. Never straying far from home, she used not only childhood but domestic living for the symbols she used in her poetry.
Childhood was a serious matter to her, and indeed she loved all children and was a great favorite among the children in her family and in her neighborhood.
School: at nine she entered Amherst Academy and this was a very happy experience for her. But at 16 she was sent to Mount Holyoke Seminary for Girls where she remained for only two terms. The reasons for her leaving are debated among her biographers: her poor health, her father's desire to have her home, her rebellion against the evangelical fervor at the school, dislike of discipline and the teachers she found there, simple homesickness, or because she felt her education was complete and preferred to read on her own.
The friends she made at Amherst Academy were very dear to her and many letters to these friends still exist and are a useful window into her youthful state of mind. Gradually she became aware of a painful difference between her and her friends, particularly over religion. She wrote to Abiah Root about her wariness of religious emotionalism: ". . . I attended none of the meetings last winter. I felt that I was so easily excited that I might again be deceived and dared not trust myself (p. 381).
Emily was going her own way and there are hints of this in her letters to friends, her growing sense of self, even a developing sense of herself as a poet. At the time she felt her difference as painful, but some years later (1863) she was able to say, "There is always one thing to be grateful for -- that one is one's self and not somebody else."
#789 (1863) On a Columnar Self --
In may ways she had quite a normal early life. There were a few contacts with young men. Amherst was a college town and the place was awash in undergraduates some of whom visited Emily's brother, Austin, at the family home. What mention there is of these boys in her letters is unenthusiastic compared to her enthusiasm for the friendships with the young women of her acquaintance. Her friendships all tended to fade away; the young women went on to marry and have children, quite a few of them even had careers as teachers before they married. None of these experiences were for Emily who hated leaving home for any reason.
She wrote this to a young man who for awhile was a friend before he too pulled away from Emily: "Ah John -- Gone? Then I lift the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay another in, unto the Resurrection -- then will I gather in Paradise, the blossoms fallen here, and on the shores of the sea of Light, seek my missing sands."
At the age of twenty she started resisting socializing as a drain on her resources; it was too taxing for her. She writes, ". . .But if you talk with no one, you are amassing thoughts which will be bright and golden for those you left at home -- we meet our friends, and a constant interchange wastes tho't and feeling, and we are then obliged to repair and renew -- there isn't the brimfull feeling which one gets away."
This 'brimfull feeling' depended on sufficient solitude, which was becoming more and more necessary to her and which in later years she guarded obsessively. Paradoxically, a repeated theme in the letters is her loneliness.
The most intense relationship for Emily as a young woman was with a school mate named Susan Gilbert who eventually married Emily's brother, Austin. Susan and Emily lived next door to each other for 30 years and her relationship with Sue was one of the controlling influences of her life. Fortunately, for biographers, Sue kept her letters from Emily. The girlhood phase of their relationship did not last long and ended sadly for Emily.
E's early letters to Sue are rapturous. Seward says that "the letters to Sue, even discounting the romantic style then in fashion and her own flair for rhetoric, are nothing short of love letters."
An example: "I miss you, mourn for you, and walk the Streets alone -- often at night, beside, I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face, yet not one word comes back to me from that silent West, If it is finished, tell me, and I will raise the lid to my box of Phantoms, and lay one more love in; but if it lives and beats still, still lives and beats for me, then say so, and I will strike the strings to one more strain of happiness before I die."
By the age of 20, E had narrowed her circle of friends, male and female, and she began to see Sue and Austin as all the company she needed.
It was she who encouraged Sue and Austin's courtship, and she looked forward to their marriage as gaining a second sister and soul mate. E's and Sue's mutual school friends wrote that the two girls were in love with each other. What seems most probable was that Emily was in love and Sue gradually became repelled by it or at least found it too demanding; in any case when she became engaged to Austin she began to pull away from Emily which occasioned many letters from Emily reproaching Sue for her coldness and begging her for a return to their old intimacy.
p. 165: "Sue -- you can go or stay -- There is but one alternative -- We differ often lately, and this must be the last.
You need not fear to leave me lest I should be alone, for I often part with things I fancy I have loved, -- sometimes to the grave, and sometimes to an oblivious rather bitterer than death --thus my heart bleeds so frequently that I shant mind the hemorrhage, and I only add an agony to several previous ones, and at the end of day remark -- a bubble burst! . . . . Few have been given me, and if I love them so, that for idolatry, they are removed from me -- I simply murmur gone . . ."
This letter (1854) indicates Emily's continuing grief at Sue's increasing coldness.
Gradually there came to be what the local towns people referred to as "the War between the Houses"; the two houses were the Homestead, the Dickinson family home and the Evergreens, the house next door where Austin installed his bride. At first this seemed to be a good thing for both households but gradually tensions developed that finally resulted in a complete break between Sue and the family at The Homestead. What really happened no one really knows but there were a number of problems.
First of all, the marriage was not a success and Austin often ran across to The Homestead to find solace from his marriage with his adoring sisters, which is bound to have alienated Sue. What the problem was in the marriage is also somewhat of a mystery. Sue apparently was unwilling to have children and may even have tried unsuccessfully to have ended a pregnancy. Eventually Austin had a rather public affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, strangely, for such a era of sexual prudery, many people in the town did not blame Austin. Sue was known to be an ambitious social climber and was disliked by many. Emily, in spite of the affection she always felt for Sue, was on Austin's side in everything which was typical of the Dickinson family. Interestingly enough, Mabel Loomis Todd after Emily's death became Emily's champion and her efforts produced the first publication of a limited edition of Emily's poetry.
In addition to the problems between Sue and Austin there were also problems between Emily and Sue. As we have seen Sue's coldness to Emily after her marriage was a great disappointment for Emily, and for two years after the marriage in 1856 there was no correspondence between Emily and Sue, but then it started up again in 1858. The letters and notes at this time were cordial but have none of the passion and yearning that marked Emily's early letters to Sue. In the early days of Sue's marriage, she entertained a lot and this kept Emily in circulation, for at first Emily came to the parties and met people, but 10 years later she mysteriously stopped visiting altogether and for 15 years never entered her brother's home. After 15 years she visited one time and one time only for the rest of her life: the night that Austin and Sue's child, Gilbert died. But after t his she never visited again. But though she never consented to see Sue, she wrote to her all her life, and terms of endearment persist to the end.
#67 Success is counted sweetest
#303 The Soul selects her own Society --
These are a few of the many poems written to Sue over the course of a lifetime. Her sister Vinny later wrote that Sue's "cruel treatment" to Emily shortened her life. Certainly Vinny, always Emily's protector, hated Sue.
Her editors and biographers point to the years 1858-62 as extraordinary period of stress and inner turmoil. It was also one of the most productive periods of her life as a poet. What happened during this period? In a note Sue wrote to Emily, that reflects yet another quarrel between the two women where Sue apologizes for not writing, she mentions Emily's "suffering" in the summer of 1861. We don't know what this suffering was though Sue seems to know. 1861 was the year of the second and most anguished of the famous Master Letters. These are three letters addressed to Master whoever that maybe, letters that were never sent. These letters are about Emily's suffering an unrequited love. Several candidates have been put forward as the mysterious Master. Sue, of course, or one of several men Emily met and corresponded with about this time. One of them, Charles Wadsworth, a Philadelphia preacher Emily met on the only other trip away from home besides her brief career at college. Like all the men she had intense correspondences with he was married and unattainable.
The most likely candidate was Samuel Bowles, a friend of Austin, the editor of the Springfield Republican magazine who began visiting the family in 1858. In an incredibly misguided move, Emily tried to interject herself into the life of this extremely busy married man. She sent him 35 letters, at least that have survived and 50 poems that she hoped he would publish. His taste in poetry was very conventional, even old-fashioned, and he disliked her poetry. He printed 5 of them anonymously, with manufactured titles and alterations, trying to make the poems more conventional.
We don't know if Bowles' rejection was the primary sorrow of these years, or whether it was a break with Sue, a religious crisis, or frustration over a still unidentified person.
"Of the intensely personal poems incorporated in the letters to Bowles or sent as letters, an early one of about 1860 is typical. The Harvard editors link it to her 'turbulent emotional disturbance' of about this time, suggest its connection with the 'Master' letters, and point ahead to a similar letter poem of 1862 as a sign that she made Bowles a confidant in her love secret" (Sewall 477).
#201 (1860)
"' I cant explain it, Mr Bowles.
Two swimmer wrestled on the spar
Until the morning sun,
When one turned, smiling, to the land --
Oh God! the other One!
The stray ships -- passing, spied a face
Upon the waters borne,
With eyes, in death, still begging, raised,
And hands -- beseeching -- thrown!'"
The fulfillment she yearns for may be one of erotic passion or the joy of greatness as a published poet.
#249 Wild Nights -- Wild Nights! (1861
#691 Would you like summer? Taste of ours.
#280 (1861) I felt a funeral, in my Brain,
#252 (1861) I can wade Grief --
#937 (1864) I felt a cleaving in my mind
#341 After a great pain, a formal feeling comes --
What was this great pain? Some of the theories are
1) Rejecting mother.
2) Dominating father
3) Austin and Sue -- a double sexual loss
4) Religious crisis
5) Love tragedy -- as indicated by the Master letters
6) Homosexual longings -- grief at understanding this aspect of herself, an aspect always to be denied in the conventional trappings of life in Amherst, Mass. In the nineteenth century.
7) Failure to publish
John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (1971) uses a psychoanalytical approach to Dickinson's poetry that is fascinating. Briefly, his theory is that E's mother a lifelong hypochondriac who communicated her fears of death to her children, an abjectly dependent wife, fussy housekeeper, cold mother, never gave Emily the love or attention any small child needs. Emily's voracious love-hunger was never satisfied, and she interpreted this failure as a cruel rejection and grew up in repressed bitterness toward her mother; resented being female; rebelled against traditional roles of the female; hence the theme of death, anxiety, suffering, deep sense of alienation. She said several times that she never had a mother. "I suppose that's someone one runs to when one is hurt."
Possibly E. fled sexuality because she feared it, spinster hood seemed preferable. She seems to confess this in two highly symbolic poems:
#609 I Years had been from Home
#579 I had been hungry, all the Years. (1862)
"Although sexual love is not directly specified in these poems, it is difficult to imagine that the sequence of need, partial gratification, anxiety, renunciation that constitutes the emotional essence of both of them could refer as readily to any other experience. Food and home are the symbols she uses. Of course, she lacked for neither literally which calls attention to their obvious symbolic use. The equation food=love with its roots in early infancy is nearly universal. She used the word home in many letters and other poems as a symbol for appreciation and acceptance.
The hand upon the latch seems a female sexual symbol rather than a phallic one, which is typical of some of her images with an apparent unconscious bisexuality.
#754 (1863) My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun --
The poem's themes:
1) the fusion of sexuality and destructiveness, 2) the oedipal constellation, and 3) the poet's acceptance of masculine components of her personality.
The loaded gun, the volcanic face, the emphatic thumb-bullet are instruments of death. The poem tells of the release, channeled but exuberant, of pent-up aggression. There is a well-known relationship between depression and anger. When intense rage is denied, suppressed, and there is no outlet for anger, the most frequent result is depression. Her depression is often described in her poems. Consider "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain "(1861). There is some evidence that she may have had a very bad breakdown, possibly even a psychotic break. This probably lasted no more than a few months and as she recovered from her depression she channeled release through the poetic skills she had already developed. Previously repressed and forbidden erotic drives were contained and made permissible by a displacement to a safely unobtainable love object. The aggression and hostility stimulated by her frustrated love needs also found their way into the poems. Some of this hostility expressed itself in her obsession with death and in her agoraphobia which made her a prisoner in her father's house for the last fifteen years of her life.
"My life had stood": my vitality lay unused. My potential lay dormant.
"a Loaded Gun": I had within me all I needed for effective action and expression. (The loaded gun is also sexual -- phallic -- and destructive, a dormant, repressed potential for aggression.)
"In Corners": these abilities were stagnating, hidden away.
"Till a day/ The Owner passed": the owner, an unfamiliar aspect of my divided self suddenly came to my awareness. (Some aspect of her personality had become accessible to consciousness.)
"identified": This new aspect of myself claimed the dormant and repressed aggression within me as its own.
"And carried Me away": My former incomplete personality was overwhelmed. (The new sectors of the poet's personality are masculinized. When E. emerged as a poet, it can only have been her identification with her active father and her brother that came to the fore not her identification with her passive and inadequate mother.)
"And now We roam in Sovereign Woods": (the poet embarks on what she fancies as characteristically masculine adventures. The active, aggressive, aspect of my masculinized personality is now in full command of its emotional energies.)
"The Sovereign Woods" (may be the domain of poetry , or of love.)
"And now we Hunt the Doe": (it seems appropriate for the male to hunt the female deer, the Doe. The object of aggression is conspicuously female. But the doe is also an erotic object. The doe may represent poetry, beauty. The doe is swift, delicate elusive, wild, hypersensitive.)
"And every time I speak for Him --/The Mountains straight reply": (the gun and the mountain may be sexual symbols. The discharging gun suggests a masculine orgasm; the echo from the mountains -- breast like -- a responsive orgasm from the female symbol.)
"And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow --
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let it's pleasure through--": (When I give vent to my feelings, my surroundings are illuminated by a psychological truth from deep within me. I experience this explosive release as a pleasurable expression of my nature, as a volcano must enjoy disclosing its inner fires. If mountains are female, so are 'valley'.) Can it be that the appreciation and fame she hoped to get from her writing -- regarded in this context as the masculine activity of a phallic woman -- represent unconsciously the longing for maternal love, more easily gained, she fancies, if one has made oneself a male? There is considerable evidence that she resented being a female.
"And when at Night -- Our good Day done --
I guard My Master's Head --
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow -- to have shared --": My newly awakened aggression stands ever ready, even when the remainder of my personality relaxes its defenses. My masculine poetic faculty while quiescent and not engaged in its work of fusing my aggression and eroticism into creative art, is rendered safe. . .
"To foe of His -- I'm deadly foe --
None stir the second time --
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye --
Or and emphatic Thumb --": Anything impeding the free creative expression of my erotic and aggressive impulses must brave the threat of my destructive wrath. (The yellow eye is the explosive flash at the end of the barrel of the gun and the thumb is the bullet.)
"Though I than He -- may longer live
He longer must -- than I --
For I have but the power to kill,
Without -- the power to die --": Though my rage, hostility, and aggression may outlast those masculine components of my personality that bend my destructive impulses to creative purposes, he must outlive me because the thought of my survival without him is too terrible to contemplate.
"Without the power to die": she doesn't have the power to extinguish her physical life.
Emily Dickinson realized the price of her commitment to her poetry. "pearl, gem, diadem" are metaphors for her gifts as a poet.
#279 Tie the strings to my life, My Lord,
The last Master letter was dated 1862.
Emily Dickinson failed with people . She never realized a single satisfying relationship. All her life she demanded too much of people. She could not take friendships casually. She was too intense and there was excessive tension at every meeting.
One meeting was enough for Higginson, a writer and editor Emily latched on to after Samuel Bowles failed her. Higginson wrote to his wife of Emily: "I am glad not to live near her."
By 1858 she started arranging her poems in groups and binding them. In 1862 after she read an article of Higginson's about fledgling writers, she started sending her poems to him asking for his advice.
This is a famous letter she sent to Higginson in response to a letter he wrote inquiring about her life.
p. 542
She sent him 102 poems and letters until her death. Even after she accepted that he would never really appreciate her poetry, she valued him for his friendship, for he was a kind man, generous in his way to this intense recluse who needed so much. He saw her briefly only twice in 24 years of friendship and correspondence.
He arranged her poems in categories and gave her a lot of bad advice: he urged her to overcome what he considered to be spasmodic in her poetry with a lack of control. One of her most famous poems he relegated to his designated "death" group. He seems to have missed the point:
#712(1863) Because I could not stop for death
"This poem commemorates the "Day" of the last stanza when the thought of eternity struck with full force and glimpsing" circumference" she saw her poetic mission unfolding before her. The fourth stanza gives the sense of chilling awe as she contemplates the task and her own slim equipment" (p.572).
The last documented relationship with a man occurred late in her life with Judge Otis Lord, a friend of her father and 18 years her senior. As all relationships with ED, there is a lot of mystery, but one thing seems clear. Finally, she knew someone who loved her. And she seems to have loved him in return though few of their letters survive. He may even have asked her to marry him, but it was too late for Emily. She could not at that point give up her seclusion. It's unclear when the relationship began, probably in the late 70s or early 80s. Emily Dickinson died in 1886.
After her death, her devoted sister Vinny was determined to get Emily's work published. She asked Higginson to help her, and she asked Sue to help with the editing process. Sue was uninterested which enraged Vinny. Finally, she got her brother's mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd to help. Mrs. Todd became fascinated with the project though she had never met Emily face to face. Emily had asked her to the Homestead to play the piano for her. Emily, characteristically, listened from upstairs out of sight and when Mrs. Todd finished playing, Emily sent her a glass a sherry and a little poem she wrote while listening. Thanks to the efforts of Vinny, Mrs. Todd and Higginson, the first limited edition of Emily's poetry was published in 1890. But the complete works were not finally published until 1955. And so it was the twentieth century, not the century in which she lived, that finally appreciated her genius.
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