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The Last Train to Amherst:
Dickinson and Modernity
by
Michael Dellert
It seems impossible to speak of Emily Dickinson’s poetry without speculating on the subject of her biography: Was she a poetic radical, or ignorant of belles lettres? Was she a reclusive spinster, a mad woman lurking in an attic? Was she a lesbian? An incest victim? A sexual debauchee with an admiring multitude of lovers? It seems that much energy and ink has been spilled in pursuit of answers to such questions.
For example, in her essay, “Emily Dickinson and Class,” Betsy Erkkila takes great pains to “(re)situate Dickinson as fully and complexly as possible in relation to the social, political, and cultural struggles of her times” (Erkkila p1), painting a picture of Dickinson as the scion of a pseudo-aristocratic bourgeois family struggling to maintain their position of social power in the face of the encroachment of the Industrial Revolution and the leveling, democratizing influences of Jacksonian politics. In his essay “Modernity and Revolution,” Perry Anderson, using Marshall Berman’s All that is Solid Melts into Air, establishes certain criterion for determining what “modernism” and “modernity” mean within the sort of Marxist framework that Erkkila uses to examine Dickinson’s biography. It will be my argument in this essay that Erkkila’s (re)situation of Dickinson in her socio-cultural milieu provides a foundation for examining how Dickinson’s poetry illustrates Anderson’s and Berman’s ideas of what constitutes the Modernist literary movement.
No matter what their biographical theories about Dickinson, all critics seem to agree on placing Miss Dickinson at the forefront of the emergent Modernist movement in English literature. But what does that mean, that Miss Dickinson was “modern,” in our quaint “modern” use of the word? For Anderson and Berman, socio-economic modernization is “a host of social processes – [Berman] lists scientific discoveries, industrial upheavals, demographic transformations, urban expansions, national states, mass movements – all propelled … by the ‘ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating’ capitalist world market” (Anderson 97). Modernization creates a historical experience marked by a two-pronged “development”: economic development, characterized by “the gigantic objective transformations of society unleashed by the advent of the capitalist world market” (98), and self-development, characterized by “a heightening of human powers and widening of human experience” (98). This dual (and dueling) historical experience of the development of economics and the self is what Berman and Anderson define as modernity. Through the experience of modernity emerges an “‘amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own’” (98).
Erkkila certainly makes it clear that Emily was strongly influenced by the “gigantic objective transformations of society” brought about by economic developments in Amherst. In 1833, half of the Dickinson “Mansion” had to be sold to “General David Mack, who came to Amherst to set up a factory for the manufacture and sale of straw hats” (Erkkila 5). The factory system had come to Amherst, and Dickinson watched the poorer women and children of the town put to work making “straw hats for David Mack’s hat factory” (2). Before and after the economic panic of 1837, “Amherst shifted from self-sufficiency to dependence on outside markets and control of manufacturing moved from independent household production to the factory, [and] the town began to lose manufacturing strength and population both to the large-scale industrial development of eastern cities and to the expansion of settlement westward” (4). By 1840, David Mack’s “prosperous hat business enabled him to buy the entire Dickinson mansion. The Dickinson family moved to a house on North Pleasant Street, where they lived until 1855, when an improvement in their finances enabled them to repurchase the ‘Old Homestead’ from Mack” (6).
Thus, we can see how Dickinson’s family, part of “an older New England elite of landed wealth and social status” (Erkkila 6), was being buffeted by the waves of democratization arising from the changing socio-economic climate of early industrial New England as capitalism and individual enterprise (the so-called ‘meritocracy’) challenged their traditional social position. Changes in Amherst continued with the arrival of the Belchertown Railroad in 1853, which “quickened the pace of life and thrust Amherst into the grip of outsiders” (7), “brought business, goods, and what Dickinson called the ‘almighty dollar’ to Amherst” but also “linked the town with large-scale and mechanized national and international markets, destroyed its nascent manufacturing economy, and eroded Amherst’s population growth and status as an educational center by carrying young people out of the town to points east and west in search of their fortunes” (13-14).
When Dickinson’s brother, Austin, married Sue Gilbert in 1856, Austin was considered to have “married beneath his class” (Erkkila 3) because Sue Gilbert was the daughter of the local tavern owner, indicative of “‘the democratic mixing of the upper and lower classes’” that was becoming increasingly common (3).
In one of Dickinson’s most famous poems, “Much Madness is divinest Sense –” (Franklin 278), we can see Dickinson’s feelings about the democratic impulse. “Much Madness is divinest Sense - / To a discerning Eye - / Much Sense – the starkest Madness”. In these opening lines, we see a world that is topsy-turvy, unhinged, where insanity is a virtue, while the virtues of reason and good sense are insane. “’Tis the Majority / In this, as all, prevail - / Assent – and you are sane - / demur – you’re straightaway dangerous - / And handled with a Chain”. Here we see Dickinson’s perception of democracy as a tyranny of the mob, and those who do not agree with or abide by this law of the mob are treated as outlaws, leashed like a dog, and imprisoned.
Similarly, in “I lost a World – the other day!” (Franklin 97), we see Dickinson’s perception of the changes in the culture she lives in. The lost world is the old social order, the bourgeois “squirearchy” (Erkkila 3) of early post-colonial New England to which Dickinson belongs. This lost world has a symbolic crown of royalty or aristocratic privilege, “the Row of Stars / Around it’s forehead bound!” And this world might be overlooked, specifically by “A Rich man,” a capitalist entrepreneur, who would not have thrived under the traditional system. The capitalist cares little for the world he is changing, so long as there is money to be made in the changing. The capitalist does not appreciate the old order of things, but whips up change in the name of progress and economic development, while Dickinson mourns the loss of the old way of life, which to her “frugal Eye” is more dear than money. “Oh find it – Sir – for me!” But that lost way of life is so truly lost that she can only plead hopelessly for it to be found.
Thus we can see that Dickinson lived at the heart of “‘a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish’” (Anderson 97) which is the process of modernization. Such upheaval in the formerly self-contained little world of Amherst had a unique effect on Dickinson: she retreated inward, developing a fear (some have said a phobia) of going out into the community. Her self-development became literally a development within herself: within her own home, her own room, her own mind. As Anderson points out: “on the psychological plane, self-development in these conditions could only mean a profound disorientation and insecurity, frustration and despair” (98).
We can see this frustration in Dickinson’s “Civilization – spurns – the Leopard!” (Franklin 123). In this poem, the Leopard symbolizes the wild and the untamed, the natural world, which Dickinson held in such high regard; and I would dare say that the Leopard is Ms. Dickinson idealizing herself. The Leopard, the natural world, Ms. Dickinson herself, is “spurned” by civilization, and one must always read Dickinson carefully: ‘to spurn’ means not only to reject something with disdain or contempt, but also to tread heavily upon something or to deliver a blow with the foot, to kick. Certainly these multiple meanings did not elude Ms. Dickinson, and invoke the sense that the Leopard has been physically mistreated by civilization. But the Leopard was never “rebuked” or spurned by deserted wastelands, or the ancient and powerful kingdom of Ethiopia, or by “brown-skinned persons,” as an archaic meaning of “tawny” suggests; it is only by “civilization,” the advance of modernization, the emerging capitalist industrial system, that the Leopard is spurned. The poem suggests that the Leopard is perhaps in a zoo, for she defends the Leopard’s nature to “Signor,” Italian for ‘lord’ or ‘master’, and questions whether a (zoo?) “keeper” need frown at the Leopard’s nature; so we have the sense the Leopard is imprisoned, chained (like those who demur against the rule of the majority in “Much Madness makes divinest Sense”), and no “balm” or “narcotic” can relieve the imprisoned Leopard’s longing for the freedom it once knew.
Yet if the advance of modernization meant the erosion of the social order of which Dickinson was a part, Dickinson still retained certain aristocratic prerogatives and “could exercise the class privilege of choosing to stay at home and ultimately not to marry, reproduce, or circulate” (Erkkila 4). By exercising this class privilege, Dickinson had the “leisure, freedom, and space ‘to think’” (3) which was apparently her primary responsibility in the family’s household (2). Thus, through thinking, through correspondence, and through reading, Dickinson was able also to experience the “tremendous emancipation of the possibility and sensibility of the individual self, now increasingly released from the fixed social status and rigid role hierarchy of the pre-capitalist past” (Anderson 98). Anderson and Berman describe that tremendous emancipation as being “concomitant with – indeed inseparable from” the sense of alienation and disorientation brought on by modernization (Anderson 98).
In “Unto my Books – so good to turn – ” (Franklin 232), we see how dearly Dickinson loved reading and thinking at the “Far ends of tired Days.” After any absence from her library, returning to her books at last “half endears the Abstinence.” Although the world outside of her small library “may be Wilderness,” any time spent in her library is a “Holiday.” She regards the authors of her books as “Kinsmen of the Shelf,” and “Their Countenances Kid [deceive or fool] / Enamor – in Prospective - / And satisfy….” Clearly, Dickinson had a love affair with her books and thoughts, if with no one else.
This tension between alienation and elation, disorientation and exhilaration, is what Anderson and Berman define as “the modern sensibility” (Anderson 98). But does this make Emily Dickinson a “modernist?” The term itself, of course, is problematic, as Anderson points out in his essay (100-104), but Anderson provides a hypothesis, a “conjunctural explanation of the set of aesthetic practices and doctrines subsequently grouped together as ‘modernist’” (104). According to Anderson, “‘modernism’ can best be understood as a cultural field of force triangulated by three decisive coordinates” (104), and he defines those coordinates thus:
Certainly the first and third of Anderson’s coordinates were prevalent in Dickinson’s life. Dickinson had been formally educated at the Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she had studied English and classical literature, Latin, religion, history, mathematics, and many of the other subjects of a so-called “classical education.” Anderson argues that “academicism … provided a critical range of cultural values against which insurgent forms of art could measure themselves, but also in terms of which they could partly articulate themselves” (Anderson 105). Certainly, Dickinson’s opinion of formal academicism was fairly mocking, as can be seen in her early poem, “Sic transit gloria mundi” (Franklin 17). Here, she mockingly mixes a variety of school lessons in Latin, grammar, astronomy, history and other subjects, while writing in a much more traditional style (regular rhyme scheme and meter) than she would later adopt. Thus, she opposes formal academicism in terms derived from that very same formal academicism. Likewise, Dickinson lived in imagined proximity to an impending social revolution: the “locofocos,” radical New York Democrats, were believed (perhaps mockingly so) to have infiltrated the local Amherst postal system and suspected of reading the mail of honest citizens (Erkkila 4); less mockingly, industrializations such as Mack’s hat factory and the arrival of the Belchertown railroad were creating revolutionary changes in the socio-economic landscape of Amherst, and the daughters of tavern-owners were marrying into bourgeois families.
Although Anderson specifically identifies telephone, radio, automobiles and aircraft, I would argue that the precursor technologies of the railroad and telegraph would fill the same roles during Dickinson’s lifetime as their descendents would fill in later decades: reliable communication and the rapid transportation of large masses of people and goods over great distances. If we accept this latter substitution, Anderson’s “three decisive coordinates” can be seen as present within the world of Emily Dickinson, explaining the emergence of Emily Dickinson’s “modernist” sensibility.
It may be mildly surprising that Marxists should find Amherst’s “madwoman in the attic” so magnetizing. One might be tempted to dismiss such a socio-economic reading as irrelevant, in these days when Marxism is mildly unfashionable. But should such a reading be dismissed out of hand?
The wisdom of the ages, I think, would argue against it. In November of 1929, an essay appeared in American Literature magazine, entitled “Early Criticism of Emily Dickinson” and written by one Anna Mary Wells. In this essay, Ms. Wells quotes an enlightening early review of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. This review appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1891 and was written by no less a person than William Dean Howells, American realist author and notable literary critic, whose opinion of Dickinson was thus:
If nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry, we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson, America, or New England rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world, and could not be left out of any record of it. This poetry is as characteristic of our life as our business enterprise, our political turmoil, our demagogism or our millionaire. (Wells 243)
It seems pertinent that in the very decade when Emily Dickinson’s work first began to truly reach the American public, her poetry was considered by one of the most influential literary critics of the time to be as characteristic of America and of New England as the very socio-economic and political circumstances that surrounded it. And it seems almost too neat to further mention that Howells’ review of her poetry should be quoted some thirty-eight years later on the same page with Wells’ observation that “The attitude of most of Emily Dickinson's poetry is closer to what we choose to call modern than to the general conception of what people were thinking in the eighteen-nineties” (Wells 243).
Bibliography
Anderson, Perry. “Modernity and Revolution.” New Left Review I/144, March-April 1984, pp. 96-113. New Left Review Archives: http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=70
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R.W. Franklin. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999.
Erkkila, Betsy. “Emily Dickinson and Class.” American Literary History, Vol. 4, No. 1. (Spring, 1992), pp. 1-27. Stable URL = http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0896-7148%28199221%294%3A1%3C1%3AEDAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L
Wells, Anna Mary. "Early Criticism of Emily Dickinson." American Literature, Vol. 1, No. 3. (Nov., 1929), pp. 243-259. Stable URL = http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-9831%28192911%291%3A3%3C243%3AECOED%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y