Emily Dickinson's Secret Lover!Why the big news is being ignored.
Posted Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008, at 11:43 AM ET
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StumbleUponIt wasn't that George was poor, Taggard maintained; it's that Edward Dickinson wanted Emily for himself. Asking Emily to play the piano "was Edward's way of bringing Emily back when she escaped." When it became clear, at a graduation party in 1850, that Emily and George were in love, Edward declared "that the affair must end." Taggard suggested that Emily and George continued to meet despite the ban, hooking up secretly in Philadelphia and New York as well as in Amherst until a final break in 1862, when George, who had trained for the ministry, married and settled in Worcester.
It's startling to go back to Taggard's nearly forgotten and rarely read book and find how much evidence she tracked down for her tale of star-crossed lovers. She quotes several sources, including a friend of Lavinia's, all of whom requested anonymity but confirmed the basic details of the affair. So, why wasn't her story believed?
Once again, it was the popular image of shade-seeking Dickinson holed up in her father's house that prevailed. As Andrews argues, there was a concerted effort to suppress Taggard's findings, led by Susan Dickinson's daughter, Martha, and Amherst College professor and biographer George F. Whicher, who announced that he intended "to terminate the persistent search for Emily's unknown love." Whicher attacked Taggard's book as "untrustworthy" and suggested that its plotline was derived from the "stale formula of Hollywood romance and Greenwich Village psychology"—a sly dig at Taggard's bohemian and socialist convictions.
There is more to this tale, including some pretty convincing evidence that three mysterious love letters Dickinson drafted in the late 1850s—passionate, masochistic, and lyrical texts referred to as the "Master Letters" for their unknown recipient—were actually addressed to Gould: "I've got a Tomahawk in my side but that don't humor me much, Her Master stabs her more—Wont he come to her." After Dickinson's death, Mabel Todd began collecting her letters for publication and wrote to Gould. He responded that he had "quite a cherished batch of Emily's letters myself kept sacredly in a small trunk … which some 15 years ago mysteriously disappeared."
If there's a surprise in all this, it's an ordinary one. It turns out that Emily Dickinson had the kind of early romantic entanglement and disappointment that so many young people have. They find someone congenial; they exchange gifts and promises; their parents intervene for various acknowledged and unacknowledged reasons. If such ordinariness seems somehow beneath the dignity of one of our supreme poets, that's probably why even this latest challenge to the image of isolated Emily has gotten so little attention. Alas, there's nothing mysterious or mystical here except what Emily Dickinson made, in her extraordinary poems, of her all-too-human disappointment.
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Notes from the Fray Editor
MerrilyMartha empathizes with Dickinson, Cassandra heard she had an abortion, John Problem didn't know Whitman was meant to be sexy. Most people like to claim a disdain from the sordid details of great lives, so we warmed greatly to Radiotone who, in response to "I don't care who Emily Dickinson did or did not love and/or have sex with" said flatly: "I care. I like reading about the lives of famous human writers. I also like reading their work. It's all good."
Comments from the Fray
Dickinson is often beaten, round peg into a square hole, into the role of a simple-minded inspirational poet. Dickinson is, and I hope she will remain, as enigmatic as her verse. There is, to my mind, no reason to dispel the mystery around her, nor is there any need to mystify her. Instead we should appreciate the ambiguities and uncertainties of both her life and her poetry. Certainly I think, given limited time, one would be best served reading her collected poems rather than reading even the best of biographies.
--Cracker
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I had to read Dickinson and Whitman and the Brontes and whole pile of other stuff in high school--while stuff that spoke to me and the world we or at least I live in I had to find on my own or read in college. Catch-22, I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, One Flew Over the CoCo's Nest, Native Son and such. I had to read too much Emmerson and no Langston H. I don't mean to come in here hating on Dickinson. I just feel the establishment has been too focused on too narrow a range of writers to the harm of those of us who do not see ourselves in them. Dickson and Whitman have merit. I am just tired of their occupying the highest places in the acedamy--as I experienced it anyway.
--pastorhorace
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(10/14)