A Loaded Gun by Jerome Charyn Read Free Book Online

letters, where she helps save Austin’s sick rooster from oblivion. She’s a whirlwind of activity—cooking, sewing, gardening, and going off to “ramble” with her neighbors, bringing them crullers or anotherdelight, and “she really was so hurried she hardly knew what to do.” [Letter 52, September 23, 1851] Sometimes she suffers from neuralgia, where one side of her face freezes up. And in 1855, after Edward Dickinson moved his family back to the Homestead, his father’s former house, she fell into a funk that lasted four years. But her daughter was just as uneasy about the move. “. . . I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” [Letter 182, about January 20, 1856]
    Both mother and daughter had frequent bouts of melancholy. Both took part in Amherst’s most publicized event, the annual Cattle Show, where they baked pies and bread and served on committees. And even after her sibyl-like remark to Higginson, she still recognized the presence of her mother, as she wrote to her cousins Louise and Frances Norcross: “. . . Mother drives with Tim [the stableman] to carry pears to settlers. Sugar pears, with hips like hams, and the flesh of bonbons.” [Letter 343]
    Then, in 1874, she wrote to Higginson:
    I always ran Home to Awe when a child, if anything befell me.
    He was an awful Mother, but I liked him better than none.      [Letter 405]
    Here she was doubly unkind. Not only didn’t she have an anthropomorphic mother, but the mother she did have— Awe —had a male identity. She was now forty-three, long past her most productive period, as most Dickinson scholars believe. And why did she suddenly parade in front of Higginson with one of her letter bombs and annihilate her own mother? But it wasn’t only Mrs. Dickinson who was in her line of fire. In 1873, while both her parents were still alive, she wrote to Mrs. J. G. Holland, one of her most trusted friends:
    I was thinking of thanking you for the kindness to Vinnie.
    She has no Father and Mother but me and I have no Parents but her.      [Letter 391]
    It had to have been more than some momentary crisis. She adored her father—and feared him. He was constantly present in her mental and material life. She’d become a creator in her father’s house, in that corner room, with her Lexicon, her lamp, and her minuscule writing desk.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Sweet hours have perished here,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  This is a timid      [mighty] room—      [Fr1785A]
    But the two biting remarks to Higginson about her mother would have a scattergun effect. In 1971, psychoanalyst and Dickinson scholar John Cody published After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson, a five-hundred-page study that presents Dickinson as a mental case whose only manner of survival was writing her cryptic and very private poems. Cody argues that Dickinson could never have become a poet without her delinquent mother—she was indeed a motherless child, emotionally abandoned by a woman who was“shallow, self-centered, ineffectual, conventional, timid, submissive, and not very bright.” Mrs. Dickinson was utterly responsible for her daughter’s “ infantile dependence . . . and compulsive self-entombment.” And, says Cody,“one is led to conclude that all her life there smoldered in Emily Dickinson’s soul the muffled but voracious clamoring of the abandoned child.”
    Cody isn’t the only culprit. For many critics, Dickinson has remained the madwoman entombed in her own little attic. Even Alfred Habegger, one of her most subtle biographers, believes that Dickinson’s“great genius is not to be distinguished from her madness.” And for Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Emily Dickinson may have posed as a madwoman to insulate herself, but became“truly a madwoman (a helpless agoraphobic, trapped in a room in