My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson IV

I'm up to the year 1860, when Emily turned thirty, and will finish the book within a couple of weeks. During the 1850's, her life took more shape, and her writing skills continued to improve. Most of her childhood friends drifted away, and she became close to Susan Gilbert, who came from a wealthy family but was orphaned at a young age and had grown up with relatives in Geneva, New York. Subsequently, she moved to Amherst and lived with a sister and her brother-in-law. Apparently, Susan and Emily didn't meet until late in 1850. They were the same age and seemed to hit it off immediately. Susan had a sharp mind, and they had productive discussions and correspondences. However, Susan occasionally gave Emily the brush-off, so she must have had other priorities. The most obvious one was her involvement with Emily's brother, Austin, with whom she became engaged in 1853. 

In 1855, the former Dickinson Homestead came on the market, and Edward decided to buy it back. Initially, Emily wasn't excited about moving there, because she liked her home on West Street, and the Homestead was becoming decrepit. But Edward devised a plan, not only to refurbish the Homestead, but to build another home, later called "The Evergreens," an "Italianate villa," next door for Austin and Susan. By then, Austin had graduated from Amherst and Harvard Law School. Austin and Susan had planned to move west, and apparently this was an incentive for them to remain in Amherst, with Austin working at his father's firm. "The Evergreens" thereafter became the site of much of Emily's social life.

Habegger, I think, effectively captures the emotional dynamics and the poetic results created by this living arrangement:

What made Sue's distant nearness so powerful a stimulant was that it fit a basic rule of life for Dickinson: always seeking intimacy and finding it withheld. The pattern shows up not only in her friendships but in her orientation to nature and religion. The naive fixation on heaven that was so central in Protestant America, and which she had recklessly taken to heart without experiencing a conversion, had generated a pressing quest for the absolute within the mundane. This perennially expected rush is one of the things that gives her poems on bees, sunsets, and the seasons their Dickinsonian cachet:

A something in a summer's Day

As slow her flambeaux burn away

Which solemnizes me.

A something in a summer's noon—

A depth—an Azure—a perfume—

Transcending extasy.

The last line was not hyperbole. Ecstasy comes with fulfillment, but what moved Dickinson was expectation: not rowing in Eden, but the thought of rowing in Eden. A later stanza of this poem describes the action of nature's fingers on the responsive heart:

The wizard fingers never rest—

The purple brook within the breast

Still chafes its narrow bed—

Sexual, yes, but so much more than sexual, this constant chafing that results in a poetry of increasing power, daring, mastery. The poetry of arousal, it is the product of the single heart lying in its narrow bed and dreaming of a final escape from itself.

I'm not sure whether Emily Dickinson herself would agree with this analysis, but it's the best one I've seen on the dynamics within her poems.

Besides this important artistic tension, social events at "The Evergreens" provided Emily with interesting discussions occasionally. She got to know Samuel Bowles (1826-1878), the editor and owner of the Springfield Republican, quite well. He was far more progressive than her family members and an advocate of women's rights. Although Sue and Austin did not operate what would be called a literary salon, Sue may have intentionally invited guests who would suit Emily. One such guest was Ralph Waldo Emerson, though Emily apparently never met him. It isn't clear whether this was Emily's choice or an accident. In any case, Emily seemed to find ample intellectual stimulation from English authors, particularly the female poets and novelists of the time.

It would seem that, by the age of thirty, Emily had settled into a life that would intentionally not entail marriage, employment or fame.