LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
PAST Out: Was Emily Dickinson a Lesbian? |
by David Bianco |
Since the first publication of her poems four years after her death, many literary critics have painted Emily Dickinson as a passionless, reclusive spinster who pined away for an unidentified man she referred to in several verses as the "Master." In recent years, feminist scholars have suggested that Dickinson'spassionate friendship and creative collaboration with her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert, may have been the most significant relationship of her life. Dickinson and Gilbert were born within nine days of each other in December 1830. Dickinson was from a prominent, old Massachusetts family. Her grandfather had been one of the founders of Amherst College, and her father served for many years as the school's treasurer, in addition to holding several posts in state and federal government. In 1847 or 1848, probably while attending Amherst Academy, Dickinson met Gilbert, whose father was an innkeeper in Amherst. Sharing a love of nature and literature, the two girls quickly became friends and began exchanging letters. The first known letter from Dickinson to Gilbert dates from 1850 and shows an established intimacy between the two: Dickinson writes of wanting to "steal a kiss" from "Susie." Over the years, Dickinson's letters to Gilbert were filled with increasingly passionate and homoerotic phrases, even after Gilbert married Dickinson's brother in 1856. Most critics have dismissed Dickinson's language in these letters as just a reflection of custom in the mid-19th century, when female friends routinely expressed their feelings for each other in ardent terms. Yet Dickinson's references to Sue as an "absent Lover" whom she wants to hold and kiss, and to herself as "Susan's Idolator [who] keeps a Shrine for Susan" suggest a deeper love. "Susan knows / she is a Siren," Dickinson versified in one letter, "and that at a / word from her, / Emily would / forfeit Righteousness...." There haven't been many good friends, past or present, who get "hot and feverish" (in Dickinson's words) at the prospect of seeing each other again, or who express desperate grief at being separated. "I miss you, mourn for you, and walk the Streets alone," Dickinson wrote urgently during one of Gilbert's absences from Amherst. "Often at night, besides, I fall asleep in tears, for your dear face." Aside from the romantic content of the correspondence, the sheer volume of it hints at Gilbert's importance in Dickinson's life. During almost 40 years of friendship, 30 of which were spent as next-door neighbors, Dickinson sent Gilbert 267 letters and "letter-poems" (as Gilbert called them)three times the number she gave to any other friend or acquaintance. The worn folds of the paper on which these poems were written suggest that Gilbert read them again and again. Though Dickinson wrote to other correspondents on formal stationery, the notes and poems to Gilbert were often on scraps of paper that indicated a casual intimacy. Besides being her muse, friend, and confidant, Gilbert also served as Dickinson's primary reader. Dickinson gave Gilbert drafts of poems for comments and suggestions, though she sent only finished poems to others. Gilbert repeatedly encouraged her friend to publish her poetry, but Dickinson was hesitant to do so. The support that Gilbert gave to Dickinson's work stands in sharp contrast to the response her poems received from Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an eminent literary scholar whose name has been linked romantically with Dickinson's. In 1862, after receiving some of Dickinson's work in a letter, Higginson dissuaded her from publishing what he called her "remarkable, yet odd" verses. "Thank you for your advice," Dickinson wrote back, "I shall implicitly follow it." Except for seven poems that friends submitted for publication, Dickinson's work remained unpublished in her lifetime. Instead of publishing, Dickinson produced her own arrangements of verses, neatly stitched together into books, or fascicles. At the time of her death in 1886, Dickinson had amassed 40 fascicles containing almost 1,800 poems. What critics have viewed as an uneventful and hermetic life appears in fact to have been packed with creative production. Gilbert was the original choice of Dickinson's sister, Lavinia, to edit a collection of the poet's work after her death. But Lavinia became impatient with Gilbert's methodical slowness and took the project away from her. The task of producing a first collection of Dickinson's work fell instead to two unlikely peopleHigginson, who had discouraged Dickinson from publishing in the first place, and Mabel Todd Loomis, the mistress of Gilbert's husband, Austin Dickinson. One Dickinson scholar believes that it was Loomis who, out of jealousy for Gilbert, crossed out or erased Gilbert's name from many of Dickinson's poems and letters, thus obliterating her importance. Though it may be anachronistic to call Dickinson a lesbian, the fact remains that Gilbert played a major role in her life and art - arguably a much larger role than any of Dickinson's male friends and admirers. It was Gilbert who prepared Dickinson's body for burial and who penned her friend's obituary in the Springfield Republican. "To her, life was rich," Gilbert wrote, leaving a portrait of Dickinson very different from the more common one passed down in literary historythat of a lonely, unfulfilled spinster. For further reading: Bennett, Paula. Emily Dickinson, Woman Poet (University of Iowa Press, 1991). Farr, Judith. The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 1992). Hart, Ellen Louise, and Martha Nell Smith, eds. Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris Press, 1998). David Bianco is the author of Gay Essentials ( www.alyson.com ), a collection of his history columns. He can be reached at DaveBianco@aol.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 10, No. 4, May 5, 2000. |