Emily Dickinson left behind three unsent drafts to a person who was addressed as "Master." This has caused a great deal of scholarly speculation, which, according to Habegger, isn't really all that important. One possible candidate was the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who had visited her at least once. They appear to have been written in the late 1850's and early 1860's. At a later date, in April, 1862, she read the article in Atlantic Monthly, written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which I discussed earlier here in connection with Renée Bergland's book, and Higginson thereafter became her de facto "Master," though probably not at an exalted level. The intellectual men who attracted Dickinson's attention tended to have religious training, and that even included Higginson.
Habegger's book is full of minutiae regarding boring bourgeois life in the last days of Puritan New England. He is dutifully reporting it, given that he is a scholar of the subject, but, understandably, this is not a particularly exciting topic, to me at least. Even so, it is still of some value to know that the people in Dickinson's life faced problems different from the ones we have now. Besides the Civil War, with a lack of effective contraception and a primitive state in medicine, people tended to have enormous families, and they were often ill, dying or going bankrupt. Dickinson herself had eye problems and spent a lot of time in Cambridge getting treatments.
As I am reaching the end of the book, I am tending to think about Dickinson in the context of the history of poetry. Since the only other poet I know much about is Denise Levertov, I am often making comparisons. They had a few things in common and a few major differences. They both had hard times establishing their footings as poets. Both wrestled with their religious backgrounds. Levertov's father was a fringe Jewish theologian who came to recognize Christ, and she grew up admiring Rilke. Dickinson's family consisted of rather bourgeois lawyers. Her brother, Austin, lived next door in a showy house; he became an art aficionado, making special trips to New York City to purchase art objects, and this perfectly fits my model of a social climber. Levertov had greater political proclivities than Dickinson; her sister had traveled to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and Denise actively opposed the Vietnam War. Both Dickinson and Levertov had very strong religious interests, and in this area, Dickinson seems to have been more sophisticated because of her awareness of science, as discussed in Natural Magic. Levertov, on the other hand, was scientifically illiterate, and she seemed to go off into a haphazard religious exploration at the end of her life.
I was intrigued that both Dickinson and Levertov used the word "Master" to designate people who could guide them in their poetic development. In Dickinson's case, there was no existing blueprint for female poets in the U.S. at the time. She really wanted guidance, and I don't think that she ever found it. By 1862, she had settled into the idea of writing for posterity, and there does not seem to be any evidence that she wanted a public life. She was bound by her family culture and the artistic environment of Massachusetts at the time. Thus, for her, Walt Whitman was not an acceptable or even a readable model, and even Emerson and Thoreau may have been too risqué for her. In Levertov's case, she knew from an early age that she wanted to be a poet and unselfconsciously engaged in networking until she became established. Her transition to the poetry ecosystem within the U.S. after World War II was challenging, and she at one point designated Robert Duncan as her "Master." Because she had worked in Massachusetts for several years, she may have picked up the term from Dickinson.
Dickinson and Levertov are two of my favorite poets, and they both occasionally seem like mystical visionaries. At the time and place of Dickinson's life, it was impossible for her to have experiences similar to those of Levertov. Thus, what we see is a restricted artistic expression, which I think demonstrates a restrained challenge to religious dogma, along with a remarkable linguistic inventiveness. Levertov lived during a far more propitious time for female poets, and her poems cover a wider range of human experience than Dickinson was capable. However, because Dickinson's work was essentially private during her lifetime, she never had to make compromises for commercial considerations or the prevailing views of the arts crowd.
I expect to finish the book soon and will make a final post.