The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
SCHOOL DAYS
In the fall of 1847, Emily entered South Hadley Female Seminary, which was at that time a unique establishment of learning, one of whose avowed objects was to provide mates for the missionaries sent out to the foreign field. It was in advance of the other Young Ladies' Seminaries in scope and grade, and had been founded by Mary Lyon with a zeal for service that infected all the fellowship of her co-workers. Her assistants drove over the hills far and near, day and night, summer and winter, collecting the necessary funds; many a woman still living remembers the words of her mother—"Put the kettle on, Miss White is turning in. She will be tired out, and want to spend the night"; for Ashfield supplied one of the most devoted pillagers of the neighborhood treasuries, and Great-Aunt Hannah White was known and served wherever she went on this mission of endowment.
At first Emily was desperately homesick and thought she should not live. She explained it touchingly by saying, "You see I have such a very dear home." Owing to the long list of applicants Miss Lyon had raised the standards of admission; the examinations were severe and had to be done in a specified time or the unfortunate was sent home. The nervous strain affected Emily with her excitable nature, until she exclaims, "I am sure I could never endure the suspense I endured during those three days again for all the treasure of the world!"
There were three hundred girls, and she found the teachers kind and attentive, the table better than she supposed possible for so many, the atmosphere pleasant and happy. "Things seem more like home than I anticipated," was her feeling, after the first natural strangeness wore off. Each girl was required by the curriculum to do her share of the domestic work, and Emily did not find hers difficult, which was "to carry the knives from the first tier of tables at morning and at noon, and at night to wash and wipe the same quantity of knives." She repeats often that "Miss Lyon and all the teachers try to do all they can for the comfort and happiness of the girls," and she found the girls themselves surprisingly anxious to make each other happy also with "an ease and grace quite unexpected."
She wrote out for her family the following list of her day's occupations, which seems calculated to outwit Satan of idle hours to fill!
At six o'clock we all rise. We breakfast at 7. Our study hour begins at 8. At 9 we all meet at Seminary Hall for devotions. At 10.15 I recite a review of Ancient History in connection with which we read Goldsmith and Grimshaw. At 11 I recite a lesson on Pope's Essay on Man, which is merely transposition. At 12 I practise calisthenics, and at 12.15 I read until dinner which is at 12.30. After dinner from 1.30 till 2, I sing in Seminary Hall. From 2.45 till 3.45 I practise upon the piano. At 3.45 I go to Sections, where we give all our accounts for the day; including absence, tardiness, communications, breaking silence, study hours, receiving company in our rooms and ten thousand other things which I will not take time to mention.
At half-past four they all went into the Seminary Hall and received advice from Miss Lyon in lecture form. They had supper at six and retired at eight forty-five after a long silent study period. Unless their excuse for failure in any of these things was good and reasonable, they received a black mark, which they very much disliked against their names. Emily's family came to see her and filled her with delight: her brother Austin, then a sophomore at Amherst, causing quite a flutter among the girls and even a young teacher or two, but she counted the days until Thanksgiving, with all the rest.
This first Thanksgiving at home and her drive over the mountain with her brother was momentous to her. She was thrilled by the "first sight of the spire of the venerable meeting-house rising to her delighted vision." It was in the rain and the wind of late November, but never had Amherst looked so lovely to her. All were at the door to welcome her, "from mother, with tears in her eyes, to Pussy—who tried to look as gracious as was becoming her dignity." They went to church and heard their dear Parson Colton, and had dinner and callers, and four invitations out for the evening! Only two could be accepted—to her great sorrow. At seven they all went to a delightful evening at Professor Warner's, and later the young folk went down to the home of another friend, where they played games, had a candy scrape, and enjoyed themselves "until the clock pealed out—Remember ten o'clock, my dear, remember ten o'clock." After they returned, her father wishing to hear the piano, she "like an obedient daughter played and sang a few tunes, to his apparent gratification."
Monday came all too soon to drag her back, but she soon lost herself in her studies again. Silliman's Chemistry and Cutter's Physiology were first-term studies; both of which she found intensely interesting, and with the second term began what was called English composition. In this her work differed from the rest, showing a marked originality from the first. The last half of the year she had also astronomy and rhetoric, completing the Junior studies.
After her return the little minor note, later so characteristic, comes in when she writes her brother she is getting along nicely in her studies and is "happy, quite, for me." She finished her examination in Euclid without a mistake. Always she was counting the weeks—"Only 22 weeks more!" between her and home; imagining them there, missing herself among them. December 11, 1847, she writes to them on her seventeenth birthday, but it was contrary to the rules to allow the pupils to go home during the term, and only nine weeks before her release she was refused by a teacher who seemed stunned by her request to drive the eight miles over the mountain with her brother. Cramped, curbed, repressed in every natural desire or impulse, her youth seems to us, now, responsible for her later almost wilful love of solitude and the habit of repression, but at the time it was a universal condition applying no less to all her young companions who were more stolidly unconscious of any counter-emotions.
But if Thanksgiving was radiant, Christmas was gloom in comparison, and the legend of Emily's insurrection is one of the best in the family archives. It was only a day in advance that Miss Lyon announced, at morning devotions, that Christmas would be recognized as a fast. The girls were not to leave their rooms through long, definite hours and were to meditate to order. After laying down this unseductive programme she added that the school might rise in token of responsive observation. The school did rise—all except Emily and her roommate. The school sat down and Miss Lyon, appalled by such flagrant disregard of the decent required pieties, enlarged upon her programme. At the end of which she added that if there were any so lost to a sense of the meaning of the day as to wish to spend it otherwise, they might stand that the whole school might observe them. And be it said to her eternal glory, of the two terrified objects of her anathema Emily stood alone.
The derelict took the afternoon stage home, causing panic in her family by such a spirit of 1776, but the matter was finally arranged, and she was allowed to be returned, unconvinced and unrepentant.
When one of South Hadley's ardent lovers asked permission in recent years to raise a tablet to her memory there, the question hovered amusingly as to her heresy of youth. It would be interesting to know what Miss Lyon thought of her with her conflicting elements of shyness and fixed certainty of right and wrong, which established her own code regardless of her superior's opinion.
From a mere child Emily had been a newspaper reader, and heard much discussion of politics and world affairs at her father's table. She missed this during her cloistered life with mere femininity, and once in an outburst of smothered intelligence wrote her brother Austin—in mock despair—
Please tell me who the candidate for President is! I have been trying to find out ever since your last visit, and have not succeeded. I know no more about the affairs of the outside world here than if I were in a trance. Was the Mexican War terminated? Is any nation about to besiege South Hadley?
Certainly the term "feminist" was unheard of then, but in this alert young mind there was a latent tendency stirring already toward indignation at being counted as non compos in a man's world of reality. A friend who wrote her of meeting Daniel Webster at this time provoked the retort, "You don't know General Briggs, and I do, so you are no better off than I."
In an echo of this same spirit she exclaimed at the end of a letter to Susan Gilbert at Baltimore, the year before her marriage in 1856:
P.S. Why can't I be a delegate to the great Whig Convention? Don't I know all about Daniel Webster and the Tariff and the Law? Then, Susie, I could see you during a pause in the session, but I don't like this country at all and I shan't stay here any longer! Delenda est America! Massachusetts and all!
From another letter written later in the same year:
I count the days. I do long for the time when I can count the hours—without incurring the charge of Femina insania. I made up the Latin, dear Susie, for I could not think how it went in Stoddard and Anderson!
But if South Hadley in the forties denied political interest to women, it suppressed any idle amatory inclination with an equally firm hand, though not altogether successfully. The sending of those "foolish notes called Valentines" was forbidden by Miss Lyon under penalty. But according to Emily, she was outwitted by an elaborate system of bribery including the village postmaster, and some hundred and fifty were received in that February of '49 in spite of the prohibitory edict.
In May, owing to a temporary bad cough that terrified her father, Emily was taken home, much against her will, but kept up with her studies and was able to return to South Hadley at the beginning of the summer term. Meantime she was reading every sort of prose and poetry, mentioning as her especial favorites, "Evangeline," "The Princess," "The Maiden Aunt," "The Epicurean," and "The Twins and Heart," by Tupper.
With this exception she was always well, and delighted in nothing more than long wanderings in the woods with her young friends. She knew exactly where the first faint arbutus clung to the grey rock under a protecting bank in Pelham, and the wet, inaccessible spot the rare yellow violets chose as their home in the South Amherst swamp; the columbine and adder's-tongues had their own haunts fixed in her mind, and she could walk straight to the trillium, the bloodroot, even the pink lady's-slipper, as if their homes had street and number. There was no faint frail evidence of the shy New England spring that was not rejoiced over by this flower-sister, hardly less a creature of Nature than they.
After leaving the Seminary for good, in 1848, she reëntered the Amherst Academy: as the wit of the school, becoming humorist of the comic column of a paper edited by the girls of the school, called "Forest Leaves." Her life was stirred by all the mild gaieties of Amherst, the little social ripples which came at long intervals and which she anticipated with the rest. A party at Professor Tyler's, or the rumor of one to come at Professor Hazen's, filled them all with girlish zest, and Commencement always threw the town into a spasm. "Everything will soon be all in a buzz," was her way of expressing the universal premonitory excitement, that caught her like the rest.
One letter hitherto unprinted gives her mood after coming home to stay:
Another little picture of their earliest girlhood remains in her own recording, "Vinnie sits sewing like a fictitious seamstress," and Emily is imagining a Knight at the door for her; they talk of growing old and Emily naïvely adds:
Vinnie thinks twenty must be a fearful position for one to occupy. I tell her I don't care if I am young or not. I'd as lief be thirty!
Again she gives a domestic interior with a word.
We cleaned house—Mother and Vinnie did—and I scolded because they moved my things. I can't find much I used to wear. You will conceive I am surrounded by trial.
Later that same fall she writes:
But life had other diversions than church-going that first summer after Emily left South Hadley, and even the grim funerals of the remoter branches of the Dickinsons had a silver lining for her guilty satisfaction. One of her most madcap escapades occurred one lovely afternoon when, after being driven decorously to the burial of some unknown kinswoman in old Hadley, Emily ran from the open grave with her favorite cousin, a rather dashing young beau from Worcester—connived at his taking her home the long way round through Sunderland, full seven miles in the wrong direction, via his shining buggy and fast black horse, so fast, in fact, that when her parents and retribution caught up with her, she had capped her infamy by being securely locked in her own room at home. Perhaps to-day it does not sound so very rash and unforgivable—the gay young cousin, the joy of motion, and the seductive beguilement of the sunshine beneath the lacy elms full of bird-songs may plead for the culprit—but before the eyes of her immediate connections it was a misdemeanor at a scene of decent burial quite beyond imagination, and leading to untoward fears for her future state. She was wept over by her mother and ignored quite conspicuously by her father, who saw doom for her plainly; but her spirit was about as easy to chasten as a dawn. As well correct the bobolink for his madrigal or the meadow grass for bowing in the breeze! And so the incident was closed without much evidence of its instructive value against like dereliction under equally provocative circumstances.
In December she wrote to Sue:
There is a tall pale snowstorm stalking through the fields and bowing at my window. I shan't let the fellow in! Went to church today in second best and boots, sermon from Dr. D. on unbelief. "Another Esau." Sermons on unbelief ever did attract me.
Her shyness, her shrinking from anything she could not explain or reason with, comes out in her droll description of going to church alone when her family were called to an obliging funeral which gave her a day of rare liberty. She says she went in circles puzzling Euclid:
She never went back to South Hadley, for although the cough of the winter before had entirely succumbed under the merciless family dosing, her father decided to keep her at home for a year under his own supervision. Already he must have been aware of her brilliant intellect and the powers of her imagination extraordinarily evidenced in all she said or did. As yet there was no hint of her later reclusive tendency, and she sent her young friends off into fits of laughter over her impromptu stories, while her familiarity with the Bible gave her an ease at apt quotation appalling to her elders in its secular application—and jocular yet never of irreverent intent. One who loved her said of her, "Physically timid at the least approach to a crisis in the day's event, her mind dared earth and heaven. That apocrypha and apocalypse met in her explains her tendency so often mistaken for blasphemy by the superficial analyst."
Whatever her docile mother thought about this most unique offspring, whatever her observant father hoped from his older daughter, it was summed up in silence by his decision that Emily should remain at home.
The next years of her life were accordingly passed like those of the other young people of Amherst in the forties, as far as the external went. On what strange adventures she was already led by the wings and fins of her soaring and diving mind even she could not and would not have told.