Emily Dickinson Essay Research Paper Emily Elizabeth

Emily Dickinson Essay, Research Paper

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10, 1830, the second of three children of Edward and Emily (Norcross) Dickinson. Samuel Fowler Dickinson, her grandfather, had been one of the founders of Amherst College, and had built a mansion on Main Street, reputed to be the first brick house in Amherst, which became known in the family as the Homestead. (Godden, 7) Her father was, like his father before him, a lawyer. Emily’s older brother Austin would be a lawyer as well. Treasurer of Amherst College for twenty years and in later life a pillar of the Congregationalist Church, Edward Dickinson appears to have been as limited emotionally as his wife was intellectually. Neither of them was equipped to deal with a genius in the family, especially a female genius. (About.com, n.pag.) Her brother, Austin, was bossy but ineffective. Her sister, Lavinia, who never married and lived with Emily, was protective of the much shyer sister. (Enigma, n.pag.)

After several years of primary school, Emily attended Amherst Academy from 1840 to 1847. From September 1847 to August 1848, she was a student at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts. (Encarta, n.pag.) Despite her interest in her studies, especially chemistry, her father decided not to send her to Mount Holyoke for an additional year, and thus her formal education came to an end. (Enigma, n.pag)

Her close friend, Susan Huntington, later married Emily’s brother Austin, and Susan and Austin Dickinson moved to a home next door. Emily and Susan exchanged ardent and passionate letters over many years. (Scholars are divided today on the nature of the relationship. Some say that the passionate language between women was simply an acceptable norm between friends in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; others find evidence that the Emily/Susan friendship was a lesbian relationship). (Narth, n.pag.)

In all outward respects, Emily Dickinson was, in these years, indistinguishable from the other young people of Amherst. As a lively and engaging young woman, with her younger sister Lavinia, she participated in local social events with a circle of friends of both sexes. (About.com, n.pag.) .At school she was a wit, especially in writing valentines, and she often sent gay, small, in those days, frequently sentimental notes and especially wry letters to her friends. As she grew up, she went to all functions of Amherst; evening parties and candlelight suppers; flower-picking excursions in the hills; in winter, .sugaring off. parties with bonfires in the snow.. (Godden, 8) With Lavinia, she would visit Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. in 1854 and 1855. (About.com, n.pag.) One friendship in particular would be crucial to her as she began to write poetry as a teenager; Benjamin Franklin Newton, a young clerk in her father’s law office. He helped to guide her in the development of her literary taste and her independent-minded spiritual sensibility. Newton was also the first to recognize her talent and encourage her poetic aspirations. Even after he married and moved away from Amherst, they continued to write to one another. His death in 1853 at the age of thirty-two was the first of many bereavements that she would endure, of which the cruelest was the death in 1883 of her beloved nephew Gilbert, Austin’s eight-year-old son. (Editing, n.pag.)

With the passing of time, Dickinson’s social life began to be carried on less through personal contact and more through correspondence. Her letters, like her poems, display a witty and constantly stimulated mind expressing itself in effortlessly fresh and inventive turns of phrase. As she matured, she became increasingly aware of the gap between herself and her family in intellectual and religious attitudes. Hers was a profoundly religious sensibility, but not at all a conventional one. (Enigma, n.pag.) She caused something of a stir as a young woman by her refusal to accept the God of her parents. Accepting things as they were, or as the majority of people saw them, was never quite her style. It was unthinkable in nineteenth-century New England for a well-bred, unmarried young woman to live on her own, so in effect the only direction in which Emily could move was inward. Luckily for her, the New England tradition, however rigid it might be in many ways, had at its best always included a healthy tolerance for personal eccentricity, and her parents, although largely uncomprehending, were quite indulgent toward their “peculiar” daughter. When young, she regarded them with affectionate bemusement; in her maturity, she came to appreciate and to sympathize with the sadness inherent in their constrained lives. (About.com, n.pag.)

What some consider the most significant emotional occurrence in her life is an event totally lost to history, if it took place at all. She is assumed to have undergone a crisis in the early 1860s, culminating in 1862, in which single year she wrote the phenomenal total of 366 poems. (About.com, n.pag.) This crisis is usually ascribed to a failed romantic relationship. Speculation has centered on several married men of her acquaintance, including the Reverend Charles Wadsworth and Judge Otis Lord, but no conclusive evidence exists to support any of these claims. (Enigma, n.pag.) Popular depictions of Dickinson, as in the play The Belle of Amherst (1976), have pe