The ticking of the hours as she folds her shawl about her shoulders and tends her flowers, at thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, has little to do with ‘the bolt’ of her ‘Existence’, to be found in the hinterland of the past or in what we might today call the DNA of the Dickinson family. Dickinson myth posits a wraith who is singular, but what if we tracked ‘the bolt’ into the plurality of family: the inescapable network of inheritance, the time-bomb of innate traits? DNA can be a form of tragedy. Yet during these blazing years of the early 1860s, Emily Dickinson transformed sickness into a story of promise:
My loss, by sickness — Was it Loss?
Or that Etherial Gain —
One earns by measuring the Grave —
Then — measuring the Sun —
Convalescing after another bout of sickness early in 1865, she mulls it over (‘As One does Sickness over’), still open to Gain: the ‘Chances’ of an emergent ‘Identity’ (as poet and visionary) which health (‘blessed health’) would have obscured.
Sickness is always there, unnamed, shielded by cover stories. In youth, a cough is mentioned; in her mid-thirties, trouble with eyes. Neither came to much. A love drama seems to explain her poems of collapse, but what if these dramas change places? What if the poems of collapse were the primary drama — what if sickness is the story? If so, her life shifts. A different reason for seclusion stares us in the face.
Collectively, in her poems, there’s a history of a mechanism breaking down, a body dropping, in one of her clock poems, when the ticking stops. It ‘will not stir for Doctors’. In ‘A Clock stopped’ it’s a clock with miniature figures who appear on the hour. The figures dangle, hunched in pain, like puppets bowing. Not the clock on the mantel, Dickinson says, pressing her point: it’s the body that seizes up.
‘Agony’ is her truth in a poem about telling the truth: ‘Men do not sham Convulsion, / Nor simulate, a Throe —’. Could her volcanoes and earthquakes, the unexploded Bomb in her Bosom and her life as Loaded Gun, repeat this truth? The capitals, like the distinctive nature of her ‘Existence’, are deliberate: ‘Convulsion’, she says, ‘Throe’. ‘Transport’ is taught ‘by throe’. Even without her explicitness we hear the jolting rhythms of poems with protracted breaths between spasms of words. Their spacing is unprecedented as a verbal performance. To the poet’s professional contemporaries, the performance was bizarre. ‘Spasmodic’, was the verdict of the Boston critic, Higginson, on the first batch of poems she sent to him, ‘uncontrolled’. These are the words she shoots back in her deadpan reply on 7 June 1862:
‘You think my gait “spasmodic” — I am in danger — Sir — You think me “uncontrolled” — I have no Tribunal.’
When biographer Mark Bostridge identified Florence Nightingale’s chronic illness, he warns that ‘posthumous diagnoses are rarely successful in establishing with any degree of certainty the nature of an illness experienced by a person long dead’. The same caution is necessary in naming ‘sickness’ in Dickinson’s letters and poems. What she calls ‘Dying! Dying in the night!’ invites a diagnosis, yet in this case there is also ‘Gain’. In the gifted, long-term illness, and the apartness it brings, is subversive, and as such transforming. It turns the sufferer into a solitary forerunner of ‘some strange Race’. To faint, she says, is to look deep into the darkness where things shape themselves. A jolt projects her from an abyss into an uncharted region of the mind, a purified alertness.
If the twenty-first century is to explore unknown pathways of the brain, Dickinson’s poetry is replete with information about dysfunction and recovery. Here is what she has to tell: ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’. A plank in reason broke, she says, and ‘I dropped down, and down —’. She feels a ‘Cleaving’ in her brain, as though the lid of the brain gets ‘off my head’ and can’t re-attach. Logic and its sequential language are disrupted.
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind —
As if my Brain had split —
I tried to match it — Seam by Seam —
But could not make them fit —
The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before —
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound —
Like Balls — opon a Floor —
One poem records what seems like a Throe: its slow but relentless onset, its drumming in the head, its deceptive pause before, again, a full-on bolt ‘scalps’ its victim. It’s not the victim’s fault, another poem argues; it’s Nature who imposes the blight on the young: ‘Nature — sometimes sears a Sapling — / Sometimes — scalps a Tree —’. There’s talk of constant ‘Dread’. She must control the Bomb in her body, as well as hide it: ‘to simulate is stinging work’.
Allowing for the poet’s resolve to ‘tell it slant’, through metaphor, are we not looking at epilepsy? The word, from the Greek, means seizure, and the onset, which the poems describe, is what doctors call the aura. Dickinson’s word is a ‘Presentiment’: a Shadow indicates ‘that Suns go down —’:
… The notice to the startled Grass
That Darkness — is about to pass —
In Greek, aura means ‘breeze’. In Dickinson this intensifies, as ‘Winds take Forests in their Paws —’. A ‘Thunderbolt’ blacks out consciousness (‘The Universe — is still —’), and then an ‘electric gale’ wafts the body beyond ‘its dull — control’.
If this, at least in part, is what was secret, the conditions of Dickinson’s life make sense: sickness is a more sensible reason for seclusion than disappointed love. A seizure can happen with little warning: about a minute. Too short a time to take cover. This is why those who keep the condition secret would fear to go out, even to join callers in the parlour. During the annual summer Commencement, when Mr Dickinson, as College Treasurer, entertained visitors at home, Emily would emerge, walk swiftly through the crowd and disappear. What seemed eccentric was simply dread. Marriage for epileptics was discouraged and some American states prohibited it by law.* She saw herself ‘by birth a Bachelor’.
In its full-blown form, known as grand mal, a slight swerve in a pathway of the brain prompts a seizure. As Dickinson puts it, ‘The Brain within its Groove / Runs evenly’, but then a ‘Splinter swerve’ makes it hard to put the current back. Such force has this altered current, it would be easier, she thinks, to divert the course of a flood, when ‘Floods have slit the Hills / And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves’.
As the Throe comes on, consciousness is not wholly extinguished. The speaker in these poems is alive to ‘Murder by degrees’, like a mouse in the teeth of a cat who will tease it before she ‘mashes it to death’. Part of this torture is the space for breath to ‘straighten’ and the brain to ‘bubble Cool’ before the kill re-starts. In another poem it’s as though the body is a house haunted by an ‘Assassin’ of the Brain, who prowls its corridors until the tormented Body ‘borrows a Revolver’ and prepares for a secret shoot-out behind a bolted door.
In the poems that recount the various stages of ‘Dying in the night’, the horror lies in the onset and aftermath. The Throe itself is brief — ‘The Maddest — quickest — by —’, and in its course the body sheds the flesh and becomes an immortal soul. A sign of divine favour, she would not wish to exchange this for what we call normality.
Afterwards, the brain sinks into a ‘Fog’. A dimness envelopes consciousness, she says, as mists obliterate a crag. In this state, the soul seems to abandon the body to a death-in-life she calls ‘Languor’ or ‘the Hour of Lead’. Languor and visions, Throe and art co-exist in ways understanding of the brain can’t, as yet, follow.
The Boston doctor and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes said in 1891: ‘If I wished to show a student the difficulties of getting at truth from medical experience, I would give him the history of epilepsy to read.’ The ancients called it ‘the sacred disease’ because of the visions, and the artist Raphael depicts the proximity of sick and sacred, the association of extreme otherness, in The Transfiguration (1517): a boy with a swivelling eye undergoes a seizure while Jesus, in radiant light, hovers on high.
The oldest recorded idea (on a Babylonian tablet in c. 650 BC) is ‘possession’ — a demon to be driven out, indicated by an eye moving to the left and the jerking of the body. Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BC) resisted the supernatural when he deduced a physiological basis in the brain. In Julius Caesar it’s called ‘the falling sickness’, as Dickinson, a constant reader of Shakespeare, would have known:
CASCA: He fell down in the market-place, and foam’d at the mouth, and was speechless.
BRUTUS: ‘Tis very like, he hath the falling sickness.
CASCA: … And so he fell. When he came to himself, again, he said, if he had done or said any thing amiss, he desir’d their worships to think it was his infirmity.
Shakespeare refers to the infirmity again when Iago goads Othello into the frenzy of jealousy. ‘My lord is fall’n into an epilepsy,’ Iago tells Cassius. Emily Dickinson pitied ‘the throe of Othello’.
Traditionally, epilepsy has carried a stigma. In the Middle Ages it was seen as a form of demonic possession and seizures played a part in convicting witches. In the nineteenth century, epileptics were sometimes incarcerated in asylums, and the more advanced asylums segregated them: too disturbing for the mentally ill. Females especially provoked genteel aversion as they broke the rules of ladylike control. Families therefore colluded to keep the condition a lifelong secret. Dickinson’s poetry speaks of a ‘reticent’ volcano: though its explosiveness would be relevant to her condition, the volcano’s still, temperate facade compels her imagination even more: the tremendous power of suppression ‘when upon a pain Titanic / Features keep their place —’. The Loaded Gun of her art has the deceptive stillness of a ‘Vesuvian face’.
In Emily’s youth the sickness was described in violent terms. The victim falls ‘as if hit by gunshot’, followed by ‘spasmodic throes’. These appear as if a creature, recently dead, were subjected to ‘the shocks of a galvanic battery’. A spark as to a ‘barrel of gunpowder’ will ‘induce the explosion’. Fingers are clenched and eyes, ‘suffused’ with moisture, swivel.
From her schooldays, when Emily was not well, she stayed for long periods in Boston with her Aunt Lavinia and little cousins Loo and Fanny Norcross. Between 4 and 22 September 1851, when Emily was twenty and staying with her aunt, she consulted Dr James Jackson, a man of seventy-four, dressed in a long-tailed coat and old-fashioned white neckcloth. He had been Professor of Physic at Harvard Medical School, President of the Massachusetts Medical Society and co-founder of the Massachusetts General Hospital. This, then, was an eminent physician, not to be consulted for anything trivial. He was thought of as the last resort in chronic cases from all over New England. His best-known book, Letters to a Young Physician (1855), has a chapter on epilepsy.
Jackson was a doctor who practised medicine with delicate attention to the patient, eliciting facts without intrusive questions. Everything about him suggests how suitable he was for Emily Dickinson. His looks were grim, reassuringly like her father — not one to overdo a bedside manner. At this time she had lost confidence in the local Amherst man, Dr Brewster, and in Dr Wesselhöft, a Boston homeopath urged on her by Aunt Lavinia.
It was Dr Jackson’s practice to converse with the patient for a whole hour without taking notes, so as not to deflect attention from every nuance of the patient’s history. He welcomed subjective details; it was his way never to fault the patient even in tone of voice. Alert to character and to the effect of the mind on the body, he treated each case as individual. Following no formula, his habit was to listen and then to communicate ‘principles rather than rules’. After discussing at length the patient’s mode of life, he could satisfy an incurable patient without any prescription for a drug. In the case of epilepsy, he told his patient at once not to use any drug to remove it.
His strict adherence to the good of the patient was exceptional, for though Jackson had the curiosity of a scientist he would not try this or that in ignorance of side-effects. Because he was intelligent enough to admit the limitations of medical knowledge, he refused ‘idiot medications’, over-dosing and disregard of relief through the natural processes of the body. From his youth he had been impressed by Robert Boyle’s ideas on the healing power of nature and the advantage of a simple regimen of hygiene, outdoor exercise and rest.
He said, ‘I am convinced that all active interference, during the fit, is useless and may be injurious.’ When he faced a patient who had ‘at all times a liability to the epileptic paroxysm’, he put the question to himself: ‘can this liability be removed?’ Sympathetic though he was to the distress of the patient and the family’s need to overcome this ‘dreadful’ liability, the answer had to be no. He warned against experiment. Once the disease had begun, there was no stopping its course. The best practice was to avoid whatever might aggravate or prolong attacks: agitation, fright, fatigue and excitement.
After assessing a case, he would state the truth plainly. He claimed that in no instance had a patient made him regret candour when there was no cure. Where other doctors who treated epilepsy at the time spoke glibly of ‘cures’, Dr Jackson had more sense. He preferred to speak positively about devising a mode of existence that would mitigate and comfort suffering. In such a situation, he believed, the taste and inclination of the patient should be indulged. Patients left his rooms ready to meet trials bravely. It could have been Dr Jackson who persuaded Emily Dickinson to accept the prospect of seclusion and singleness in the hope of doing something with the intellectual and creative gifts that this doctor had the capacity to discern. Here was just the person to help this young woman devise the way of life to which she adapted with such extraordinary results.
Dr Jackson’s authority would have weighed with Mr Dickinson, who agreed to relieve his daughter of the household tasks and empty social gatherings she loathed. Instead, he indulged the priority she wished to give to poetry and promoted mild exertion in the fresh air: daily walks with her dog Carlo (named after St John Rivers’s dog in Jane Eyre) and her taste for gardening. For her sake Mr Dickinson added a conservatory in a corner between the dining room and the library, with indoor access through the library, so that she might continue to garden during the winter.
Dr Jackson gave Emily a prescription which was filled at a drugstore in Tremont Row (now Center Plaza, across from Boston’s City Hall), near to where Dr Jackson lived on Hamilton Place. She delivered the prescription to her father and took the mixture with confidence. ‘I have tried Dr Jackson’s prescription and find myself better for it,’ she wrote to Austin (then teaching in Boston) on 7 October, in the month following the consultation. ‘I have used it all up now, and wish you would get me some more … I should like to have you get three or four times the quantity contained in the Recipe, as … I think it benefits me much.’
This bit of paper, which survives, is a crucial clue to Dr Jackson’s diagnosis. What he prescribed was half an ounce of glycerine diluted with two and a half ounces of water. Glycerine has many uses, but one of the medical uses in those days was for epilepsy. In a nineteenth-century listing of ‘Medicinal Uses of Glycerine’ in Amherst’s Jones Library, there is a recommendation for epilepsy: dissolve half an ounce of chloral (a sedative) and twenty-five drops of peppermint essence (for flavour) in four ounces of glycerine. This use of glycerine in the treatment of epilepsy (as distinct from its use for TB) has gone unnoticed. In treating both diseases the substance would have been futile, though it had a placebo effect on Emily Dickinson, a consequence of her trust in Jackson together with an urgency to be cured. She used the prescription until 1853 with diminishing confidence. The editors of her letters thought that her prescription was a hand lotion, but she would hardly have troubled an eminent physician for something so trivial. Then, too, her dosage, as discussed by Dr Norbert Hirschhorn in the New England Quarterly, was too small for external use. It had to be a dose taken internally: a teaspoon a day.
Dr Hirschhorn asks an extremely pertinent question: why did Dickinson persist in asking Austin to send her this medication from Boston even though there was an adequate drugstore at home in Amherst? This practice was sanctioned by her father, who carried the prescription to Boston on at least one occasion. Dr Hirschhorn admits that if TB were the case (an idea he generally favours) her action is puzzling, since no stigma attached to TB. It was all too rife in distinguished families: Emerson’s brothers and first wife, the Adams family in Quincy and indeed Emily’s well-off Norcross relations. The question of secrecy about her medication is therefore still open. The undeniable stigma of epilepsy could be the answer, given its shaming associations at that time with ‘hysteria’, masturbation, syphilis and impairment of the intellect leading to ‘epileptic insanity’.* This would explain why she wished this prescription to be filled in Boston, away from the small-town tattle of Amherst.
The main regimen recommended by authorities was what they called hygiene, and central to this was cleanliness. In On Epilepsy, the London authority Sir Edward Sieveking is almost obsessive in his warnings against what’s unclean, including ‘unsanitary’ theatres, concerts, balls and parties. Other people are unclean; places where other people congregate are unclean — in contrast to the spotless Homestead. A simple and entirely unromantic reason for Emily Dickinson to wear white could be sanitary, the same reason why white would be worn by doctors and nurses: to show the presence of dirt in situations where it presents a threat to health.
In a case of incurable sickness, Jackson advised, ‘it affords much consolation to have one to watch over them’. This is a consolation Emily Dickinson experienced from ‘Sister’ in the late 1850s. Susan Dickinson, as a member of family, must have been in the know, to judge from her central role in the earliest poem ‘Sister’ wrote on the subject. ‘Dying! Dying in the night!’ (c. 1860) is a humanist take on God’s absence (‘And “Jesus”! Where has Jesus gone? / They said that Jesus — always came’) in contrast with the comfort of hearing Sue’s step. At this moment, she’s ‘Dollie’ again, the pet name of those who’d loved Sue as a girl:
… Somebody run to the great gate
And see if Dollie’s coming! Wait!
I hear her feet upon the stair!
Death won’t hurt — now Dollie’s here!
Epileptics are often attached to a member of family, who makes it their lifelong task to care for them. In the Dickinson Homestead, Lavinia took this on. Because the diagnosis was rarely uttered, still less put on paper, there’s little chance of explicit evidence. In any case, epilepsy was often mis-diagnosed, and still so. Well into the twentieth century, there’s a common misapprehension that seizures could be deflected by self-control, extending the sufferer’s torment with a moral obligation to stop what physiologically can’t be stopped without medication. Since poetry was all-important to Dickinson, it was in a sense fortunate that she lived before barbiturates came into use in 1912 for, in sedating the brain, drugs dulled it.
Whatever Dickinson may have endured in loss of control before, during and after a Throe, some part of her brain remained, as she said, alert. Sufferers like Dostoyevsky can be visionary, as well as plumbing hellish depths. The range of experience opened to the gifted can’t be tabulated.* Dickinson’s oxymorons defy definition: calm bomb; quiet earthquake; reticent volcano. Still, if she did suffer from epilepsy it would explain her claim that Existence struck through the daily ticking of her life. ‘Struck, was I, nor yet by Lightning — /… Maimed — was I — …’.
On the surface of that life nothing to see but a closed door; and behind the door, writing at a small cherrywood table, a woman in white; and ‘it’, the unmentionable, waiting there in her room like a loaded gun. She was proud of ‘it’. ‘I like a look of Agony,’ she said, because Agony opened up what lies beyond the limits of language: visionary states of mind she would not otherwise have comprehended and which became prime material for poems. We might guess that during the four years when she produced so much of her greatest work, her sickness was at its height. In later years it was less active, as was her poetic output. By her fifties, the ‘Torrid Noons’ of her early thirties had ‘lain their Missiles by —’, though the Thunder that once brought ‘the bolt’ did rumble still.
To see epilepsy as part of Dickinson’s secret Existence cannot explain genius, only certain conditions that facilitate it: freedom from the demands on a nineteenth-century wife; freedom to keep odd hours; and the seclusion she had to have if she was to take poetic risks that were certain to jar public taste. She was fortunate in her father. Traditional and formidable though he was, he supported her, we might guess from the respect and security she enjoyed in a home she always called ‘my father’s house’.
The shock of discovering a lifelong condition of this kind is the subject of one poem. Evidently Dr Jackson did not name it, because she invents a name, drawing, she says, on a residue of Latin from her schooldays. She does not tell us the invented name, only that to put the unmentionable into Latin helps to distance the blow. She turns over this word — ‘it’ — in her mind, trying to adapt to the diagnosis:
It dont sound so terrible — quite — as it did —
I run it over — ‘Dead’, Brain — ‘Dead’ …
How like ‘a fit’ —…
A fit. So close did her lips come to utterance. The victim promises herself that what looms so horribly at present, in a year’s time will be a verbal habit.
The daring of genuine confession fuels such poems from well below the surface. She got away with explicitness by telling it ‘slant’. For she plays on the ambiguity of ‘fit’ in the context of wearing an outfit. ‘Murder — wear!’ She will ‘fit’ herself to ‘Murder’, another code word for ‘dying in the night’. In a later poem, ‘I fit for them’, she again draws on the double entendre of fitting herself to certain conditions, as though she had chosen them. At thirty-five, helplessness becomes agency: ‘I fit for them — I seek the Dark / Till I am thorough fit.’
Does ‘thorough’ imply a full-scale fit, as distinct from averted ones? It’s impossible to be certain because her words and grammar are undergoing transformation. Even that’s too weak for her purpose which is nothing less than transfiguration, as though the poet were inventing a sacred text. For the ideal outcome of ‘fit’ (a familiar noun transformed as a verb, infused with a verbal power to ‘do’) is to produce ‘a purer food’ (poetry) for readers’ souls. At the same time, there’s a calm acceptance that should she not succeed, she has still had the ‘transport of the Aim —’. Again, the final dash registers her leap beyond language into the lacunae of unknown modes of being.
And yet she never got over her fear of ‘it’ and in time her constant apprehension of ‘a Fitting’ turns out to be ‘terribler’ than when it’s on — when she’s ‘wearing it’. She was forty-three when she set this down in the first person; the fair copy shields ‘I’ with ‘we’:
While we were fearing it, it came —
But came with less of fear
Because that fearing it so long
Had almost made it fair —
There is a Fitting — a Dismay —
A Fitting — a Despair —
’Tis harder knowing it is Due
Than knowing it is Here.
The Trying on the Utmost
The Morning it is New
Is terribler than wearing it
A whole existence through —
On 4 February 1864 Emily and Vinnie returned to Amherst from Boston, following a consultation with New England’s foremost ophthalmologist, Henry Willard Williams, then in his mid-forties. He was a big man and a forcible speaker, the first to introduce a clinical course in ophthalmology in America and one of the first to use ether as surgeon to the City Hospital. In 1864 he founded the American Ophthalmic Society — another distinguished doctor. From April to November 1864 and for a similar period in 1865 Emily, aged thirty-three to thirty-four, spent the better part of two years in Boston for treatment of her eyes. Eyes? She never wore spectacles, and though she may have used Dr Williams’s (commonly prescribed) eyewash, there is no other confirmatory sign of a disability grave enough to justify this level of disruption for a person who didn’t take kindly to leaving home. ‘Bereaved of all, I went abroad —’: death-in-life awaits her in the form of lodgings in a strange street. There’s no repose there, because ‘it’ goes with her, even when she takes sleeping draughts (‘Cups of artificial Drowse / To steep its shape away’):
I waked, to find it first awake —
I rose — It followed me —
I tried to drop it in the Crowd —
To lose it in the Sea—…
She stayed in a Cambridgeport boarding house with her orphaned cousins Loo and Fanny Norcross, and went for treatment to the doctor’s rooms at 15 Arlington Street near Boston’s public garden. But can eye treatment alone necessitate such prolonged stays in Boston, when the distance from Amherst was not so great as to prevent her father’s coming and going? Common sense suggests a major disability, and a concerted attempt at a cure.
Epileptics’ eyes are vulnerable to stimuli. During the aura they might see spider webs, thin clouds, spots, fiery circles or other premonitory signs. Charcot, the celebrated professor of the nervous system at the Salpětrière in Paris, said that the visual abnormalities accompanying epilepsy are ‘like so many sphinxes’ defying anatomical investigation. Alternatively, a fit can start with a spot of blindness known as scotoma. A physician would shine his ophthalmoscope (developed during the 1850s, and newly in use for searching out diseases of the brain) into a dilated pupil in order to examine small blood vessels at the back of the eyeball, the only vessels visible without surgery. In 1865 Dr Williams won a prize for his treatise Recent Advances in Ophthalmic Science, announcing a new dawn of discoveries and cures, which Mr Dickinson bought for his library. Here, Williams investigates what he terms ‘hyperaesthesia of the retina’ (amongst a range of ills). He describes how contraction of the blood vessels at the back of the eyeball activates nerves going to a troubled part of the brain. For a person who was predisposed, repeated flashes of light would set off convulsions, and if this were so in Emily’s case it would have been logical to approach her problem through an initiating symptom. If the patient could be cured of her photosensitivity, the attacks might be stopped.
At first DrWilliams was enthusiastic about a cure, and ordered Emily Dickinson to avoid sunlight as well as snow light — the glitter coming off the snow affected her eyes. A poem of 1864 talks of those who must ‘forget the color of the Day’. This would have suited her preference for the dark hours of the night. In the same poem the speaker labours by night to fatigue the ‘glittering Retinue of nerves’ and ‘put a Head away’. (‘Retinue’, aurally close to ‘retina’, would be typical of Dickinson’s aural word-play: a half-note off like a sharp or a flat.) For this speaker, there’s ‘No Drug for Consciousness’, only death, and the voice in this poem despairs of other relief. Her words suggest more than eye trouble: ‘Affliction’, she calls it, ‘Being’s Malady’. If the poet’s eye problem was a symptom, not the prime ill, it would explain why there’s no sign of serious eye trouble before and after this period.
What does seem evident before she went to Boston is an almost desperate hunger to feast her poetic eye on all that exists under the sun,
As much of Noon as I could take
Between my finite eyes —
There’s a before-and-after narrative in this poem, ‘Before I got my eye put out’: before, the poet ‘liked as well to see — / As other Creatures, that have Eyes’. In the context of her submission to Dr Williams it’s tempting to read this poem literally. The poem is posited on a conditional clause: if she ‘might’, if she were told she might, if she were allowed ‘to look at when I liked’, her Heart would split as it took in the crowded sights of her release. ‘I tell you’, she says. As it is, she has adapted to certain constraints on seeing and developed the traditional ‘other way’ of the blind seer. The poem ends with a contrast of soul versus eyes, deprecating the ‘safer’ enclosures of the soul:
So safer Guess —
With just my soul opon the Window pane —
Where other Creatures put their eyes —
Incautious — of the Sun —
Though she endured the treatment, she found it hard to share the surgeon’s hopefulness. Throughout this ordeal, she maintained that she was neither better nor worse. The treatment, whatever it was, made her eyes water, so that the doctor had to wipe her cheeks — to protect her hat, he said.
Dr Jackson, by now almost ninety, had always warned that experiments could be injurious in the case of incurable sickness, and so it proved. Not only did Emily force herself to undergo a nightmare protracted over two years, but Williams disrupted a creative life at its peak. It seems not to have occurred to him that the instrument of diagnosis, powered by gaslight or sunlight (first tried in 1860), would itself have been likely to set off the contraction of the retinal nerves it intended to examine. Since his patient was sensitive to light, examination would have been stressful, even painful, which, in turn, would have affected the tissues the doctor observed. In 1865, Dickinson sent Sue this rebuttal of scientific observation:
Perception of an Object costs
Precise the Object’s loss —
An act of observation is an act of transformation. Her proposition anticipates the Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg, that an act of measurement will, in the process, alter the object measured. There’s consolation in the next couplet: a recompense for a loss of objectivity is an enlargement of the fund of the imagination. ‘Perception in itself a Gain / Replying to its Price —’. The third proposition strengthens the second, ‘The Object absolute — is nought — / Perception sets it fair’. This was articulated most famously by Coleridge: the imagination, he declares, ‘is essentially vital even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead’. Romantic theory views the object as nothing until it receives its character from the subjective mind. Dickinson’s conclusion overthrows this. An object has, after all, a wilful life of its own. Subjectivity, confounded,
… then upbraids a Perfectness
That situates so far —
‘Situates’ is a passive construction refusing passivity. In the end the poem questions the efficacy of observation. It rejects the allure of Romantic subjectivity and reverts to the opening premise, fusing it with a Puritan belief in the unknowable: ‘Perfectness’ — unobservable and immeasurable — defamiliarises the more ordinary ‘perfection’. This may be the most brilliant theorem Dickinson distilled from experience, applicable to any observation a reader might make. At source, the poem came out of the poet’s eye problem at the time it was written.
In the end Dr Williams’s cure was so ineffectual that he fell back on a standard defence: blame the victim. Her problem lay in her attitude, the doctor decided; it required a change of mentality on her part. At first, Emily had tried to be positive in the face of long discouragement.
‘Emily wants to be well,’ she had told Vinnie in July 1864, during the first phase of the cure. ‘If any one alive wants to get well more, I would let Him first.’
By March 1865 a disappointed Vinnie had taken the doctor’s side: ‘I cannot see why you don’t get well,’ she reproached her sister.
Emily reported these words to her sympathetic cousin Loo, adding ruefully, ‘This makes me think I am long sick, and this takes the ache to my eyes.’
Dr Williams further subscribed to the current medical view that too much thinking could damage a woman. ‘Down thoughts’, he told her.
It was as though he had told her, ‘heart be still’. To be parted from thoughts and books (for he also forbade reading)* was an exile to ‘Siberia’. His prohibitions put an end to the booklets. She never resumed this alternative to publication, and though she did continue to write poems, the great surge of the early 1860s came to an end. Dr Williams, in the vanity of the latest know-how, simply didn’t see her. The invalid Alice James confided to her diary: ‘I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.’
One of the degrading diagnoses concocted for women was ‘hysteria’, from the Greek for womb. Respectable doctors, even Dr Jackson, believed that epilepsy could be hysterical in origin. They spoke of ‘hystero-epilepsy’* or ‘hysteric convulsions’ and since, as they fancied, a distension of the vessels of the brain occasioned attacks, they fancied by analogy that turgid blood in the uterus and genitalia might bring about spasmodic motions.† There’s an implication that women who are highly sexed are more liable to aberration. This would appear to place the onus on a woman who, the theory assumes, is indulging in the kind of thoughts that lead to turgidity. A misogynist diagnosis will lean to punitive treatment. The best treatment, doctors advised, was to remove the patient from the sympathies of her home so as to encourage a wanting self-control.
If the guess about epilepsy is right, then the reason Emily’s treatment failed is because epilepsy was not curable. Drugs, developed later, merely suppress seizures which often happen with the depression of consciousness at night. Dickinson’s poem, ‘It struck me’, explains how ‘it’, the electrical discharge, slit through sleep and spread like fire, leaving miasma in its wake:
It burned Me — in the Night
It Blistered to My Dream
It sickened fresh upon my sight
With every Morn that came —
Epilepsy has a genetic component, and two others in Emily’s family were subject to seizures. Cousin Zebina Montague, immured at home — he, too — across the road into town from the Homestead was a son of Irene Dickinson (‘Aunt Montague’), sister to Emily’s grandfather Samuel Fowler Dickinson. There were three unions between Montagues and Dickinsons in that generation. Emily’s grandmother, it will be recalled, was the irritable Lucretia Gunn. Lucretia’s mother Hannah, Emily’s great-grandmother, was a Montague and elder sister to Luke Montague, who married Aunt Irene Dickinson. Intermarriage alone cannot cause a recessive disorder, but if a gene for epilepsy happens to be latent in a family’s DNA, intermarriage can lead to homozygosity — the doubling of a gene — activating it in following generations.
After his graduation from Amherst College in 1832, Zebina became a rector of an academy in Tennessee; then almost at once he left off teaching, sold up (as he put it) and joined his brother, a merchant in Georgia. There the bookish Zebina, keen on Latin and English literature, worked in a store and then as assistant cashier in a Georgia bank. Inexplicably this sedentary man volunteered to fight some escaped Creek Indians in Florida, but was assigned only camp duties. Returning to the bank in Georgia, he became engaged at the age of twenty-nine. His record says nothing of his fiancée apart from her wealth and social standing, as though this were yet another career move. He will draw a veil over what happened next, he says, for it was then, in 1839, that ‘disaster’ struck: he was sick and the marriage was off — or those two linked events may have happened in reverse. The veil consists of one inadequate word of explanation: he was ‘paralysed’. Whatever actually happened, it left him dazed, and when he could not recover, a devoted slave (whom he’d taught to read and write) undertook to convey the sick man a distance of some fifteen hundred miles — an inter-minable journey in bumping coaches — to a sick and ageing mother in the Montague homestead in Amherst. Secure in the belief that his mother loved her ‘diseased lamb’ best, he became a permanent recluse, and what is curious is the silence around his condition. He was a ‘mystery’, it was said at his graveside, for this supposedly sick man went on living for a very long time — another forty years. His paralysis was said to be ‘partial’, without indicating, as people usually do, what (if any) part of his body was visibly affected.
When Emily, aged eleven, heard that Zebina, aged thirty-two, had bitten his tongue in the course of a fit, secrecy was not preserved — not in the family. The word ‘fit’ was in the air in 1842, and an alert child picked it up. It’s impossible to know if the fit was epileptic or caused by some other chronic condition. What is certain is that it was not a fatal condition.
From his late twenties until his seventies Zebina remained in seclusion, and therefore needed that sort of support in which one member of family puts her life at the service of another. Zebina’s sister Harriet did this. He didn’t marry and neither did his sister.
Zebina wrote Cousin Emily a long letter, we recall, after ill health had forced her to leave college for a month when she was seventeen. If she were showing symptoms of permanent illness he would have wished to enlighten her so far as he could. His situation was hardly cheering. In Amherst he and his sister were regarded as oddities. ‘Poor Harriet and Zebina’, Emily said in 1863. They were a ‘genteel’ pair, given to sighing reminiscences, punctuated by ‘God help us.’
Then another member of the family turned out to be afflicted: young Edward (Ned) Dickinson, born to Austin and Sue in 1861. At the age of fifteen, in mid-February 1877, Ned had a fit, to his family’s dismay. ‘It seems he went to bed as well as usual Sunday night,’ a caller was told, ‘— in the night was taken with a fit, followed by another on Monday morning’ while the doctor was present. Dr Fiske feared the fit was linked to Ned’s weak heart, the result of rheumatic fever in 1874. By the following day, the caller reports, the family, though anxious, began to think ‘the trouble might not be so serious’.
Emily wrote to her nephew after a few weeks, hoping he’d recovered, but the fits returned. It can’t have helped that his parents’ marriage was strained. The preceding autumn, while Susan and the children had paid their annual visit to Geneva, New York, Austin had lived at the Homestead for four weeks. This is when Emily noticed a change in her brother: he’d withdrawn and she could no longer reach him. It felt ‘antediluvian’ to have Austin back in his childhood home, and yet his sisters missed him while he stayed, and then missed him after he left. ‘Curious’ was all Emily was prepared to say.
Instinctively she sided with Austin, who looked burdened, waiting for a ‘crumb’ of sympathy from his sisters, while Susan was said to be over-charged with ‘scintillation’. Watching Austin’s mood in the autumn, Emily took in his picture of a wife entering on a buzz of activities while the put-upon husband retreats into relative seclusion. This image of a shallow socialite is not entirely convincing in light of what is known of Susan as a serious reader and sensitive mother. Were her excursions and parties an effort to cheer up the children in the face of a father who looked on darkly? When their daughter Martha (Mattie), aged ten, accompanied her father on a visit to Northampton he rebuked the child’s spirits: he was ‘much ashamed’ of her. On their return, Mattie confided to Aunt Emily and Aunt Vinnie that she had been much ashamed of him. Her father’s manner was increasingly austere as he tried on the crown descending from his grandfather through his father, both of whom had faltered in their financial management towards the end of their reigns. Austin, like his father before him, intended to make good what came to him in disarray: the college accounts. Jollities disrupted his right to quiet. They were an affront to domestic propriety.
Susan’s ‘scintillation’ — alien to family reserve — reinforced a graver accusation stirring in Austin’s conscience. Refusing to consider if Ned’s epilepsy was inherited through his side of the family, he cultivated a suspicion that Sue had caused it by an attempted abortion. It’s not known at what point this medically untenable notion came to Austin, but it served to forestall guilt — especially if the Dickinsons had kept the blight from Susan before she married into the family. It was nineteenth-century practice to conceal shaming diseases: madness (in Jane Eyre) and syphilis (in Ibsen’s Ghosts) as well as epilepsy. Here is a buried seed for an efflorescence of blame yet to come. For the abortion story became the position Austin was to articulate in the 1880s, when Mabel Loomis Todd arrived on the scene, as one justification for turning against his wife. Susan, drawn into the family with pressing eagerness in the 1850s, was now re-categorised as alien, in a sense re-orphaned, and for Austin to exclude her emotionally meant that motherhood — her undeniable claim as mother of Dickinson children — had to be eroded. Forgetting Sue’s old terror of childbirth and his one-time idea of a mariage blanc, Austin’s tone was righteous: his wife had perpetrated an immoral act with terrible consequences.
Austin kept a record of Ned’s seizures in a diary of 1880 when his son was nineteen and a student at Amherst College. The eight seizures that year happened at night, about one hour into sleep. At the sound of Ned’s awakening cry, Austin would leap over the rails at the bottom of the bed he shared with Sue and rush upstairs. It was always Austin who went and he never got used to the groans from Ned’s room, the foaming mouth, the spasms of mouth, neck and chest, and the strained breathing that followed convulsions ‘distressing to see’. Later, Mabel observed Austin’s own nervous system as ‘exquisitely delicate & high-strung’ with a tendency to ‘night-horrors’.
Ned’s seizures were unpredictable, though Austin records after one attack: ‘I noticed his eyes an hour before bedtime last night as very black and bright.’ Black indicates a dilated pupil. Ned was not told he had epilepsy. He’d wake in the morning with no sign beside a sore tongue and sometimes a headache, which Sue would treat with a ‘fomentation’. It could happen that a headache preceded an attack and heavy breathing might follow. Some seizures were mild enough for Ned to go to classes next day. Some were so violent they shook the house.
We can’t know if Emily Dickinson suffered as her nephew did. There are many forms of epilepsy, and the mild petit mal does not involve convulsions. Much depends on what region of the brain is affected, and where it spreads. If it’s the motor region at the top of the brain sufferers, like Ned, undergo the visible jolts we associate with the condition. The mildest manifestations are absences. A friend of Dickinson’s youth, Emily Fowler (later Mrs Ford), recalled that she dropped crockery. Plates and cups seemed to slide out of her hands and lay in pieces on the floor. The story was designed to bring out her eccentricity for, it was said, she hid the fragments in the fireplace behind a fireboard, forgetting they were bound to be discovered in winter. This memory is more important than Mrs Ford realised because it suggests absences, either accompanying the condition or the condition itself.
What’s clear, on the evidence of Dickinson’s writing and the sheer volume of her output, is that she coped inventively with gunshots from the brain into her body. In ‘My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —’, the ‘power to kill’ makes the gun a ‘deadly foe’, but since this gun outlives its Master it’s no ordinary gun. Can it be the poet’s art? By late 1863, when this poem was probably written, the poetic force is sure of itself, exultant when it dares to expose its ‘Vesuvian face’. To write this kind of poetry is a form of action, an act of pleasure ‘every time I speak for Him’ — ‘Him’ (the owner or Master) being the mortal self.
So it was that art and life converge at this point, when poetic immortality is certain. Poetry is not only celebrated for its explosiveness; it’s also the protective gun that guards the ‘head’ by night (art’s ability to protect against outbreaks of sickness), and this guardianship is preferable to the shared pillow of matrimony. By day this force roams the ‘Sovreign’ woods. It’s not reclusive, it’s adventurous; it ‘roams’, and its arena claims the same regal status Dickinson confers on her ‘Queen’ role in other poems. A poem like this outlives the body, though for obvious reasons the body, art’s vessel, must continue as long as it can. The poem itself has ‘no power to die’ — it’s an immortal power, wielded by a killer eye and thumb, that is the control art imposes on the ephemeral, the mortal, passing across its field of vision.
In this way, ‘My Life had stood — a Loaded Gun —’ turns an explosive sickness, its recurrent dramas of ‘Revolver’ and ‘Gun’, into well-aimed art. I fit for them … The secret is on her lips or it’s kept like a bomb in her breast — a timebomb ticking softly in some of her poems, yet ‘calm’. Art is made at the interface of abandon and decorum: the abandon of mind and feeling under the control of form, a tight form like Dickinson’s four-line stanza, the beat of hymns thrumming in the veins of her forebears. Contained further in her own domestic order, propped up by her protective father and sister, Emily Dickinson saved herself from the anarchy of her condition and put it to use.
* A leading London authority, Edward Sieveking, stated the reasons in On Epilepsy (1858): the excitement of the ‘marital act’ might cause fits in those susceptible. Marriage was discouraged also for the sake of the partner and potential offspring.
* This sinister diagnosis permitted the incarceration of epileptics in asylums. Women were more susceptible than men, in the view of the French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Esquirol in 1838, and women were more numerous in his National Asylum at Charenton. Of 385 epileptic female patients placed in this asylum, forty-six were diagnosed as ‘furious’ and thirty-four as ‘hysterical’. Anger and hysteria would have appeared contrary to the prevailing model of passive, compliant womanliness.
* Dickinson’s words correlate with Dostoyevsky’s extraordinary record of epilepsy in The Idiot (1868), part two, chapter 5 (Penguin Classics, 263–4). Both stress a breakthrough into what Dickinson called ‘Existence’ and what Dostoyevsky called ‘a higher existence’: at once, a supreme rationality and vision. Dostoyevsky reports a stage immediately before the seizure when the brain ‘seemed to burst into flame’ and with a jolt all vital forces tensed together. The sensation of life and of self-awareness increased almost tenfold. But these moments ‘were merely the presentiment of that final second (never more than a second), with which the fit itself began’. Afterwards, Prince Myshkin would ask himself if he had experienced a violation of the normal condition. ‘What does it matter if it’s an illness then,’ he decides, if the result yields an unheard-of completeness, proportion, reconciliation and ecstasy? In the very last conscious moment he could to say to himself: ‘Yes, for this moment one could give up one’s whole life!’ Myshkin does not insist on this conclusion because of the aftermath when the fit subsides into ‘stupefaction’ (what Dickinson calls languor). He’s left with the question of what to do with this ‘reality’. In both writers, the ‘moment’ opens up a sense of the timeless. Myshkin quotes from Revelation, x: 1–7 — ‘there shall be time no longer’ — and conjectures a similar revelation for ‘the epileptic Mahomet’: ‘in that very second he was able to survey all the habitations of Allah’.
* Since reading can lead to changes in the brain, there was a belief that reading excited the brain in a way that prompted attacks in those who were susceptible. (Scott, The History of Epileptic Therapy, 134).
* A supposed disease, ‘hystero-epilepsy’ was part of the proliferation of hysteria as a diagnosis reserved for women in the nineteenth century. Charcot, in Paris, emphasised the passions — wrath, fright, lust, disgust — as a cause of epilepsy. He implied that epilepsy was psychological, self-induced and, as such, controllable. This message was coercive: a woman should exercise decent control. (In a letter to her friend Abiah Root, Emily Dickinson mentions feeling unwell from time to time, her understanding that she should control the ‘feelings’ and then, ruefully, confesses her inability to do so when the ‘feelings’ come upon her.) If she was enduring a physically uncontrollable sickness such as epilepsy, she was fortunate not to have been exposed to a reproving diagnosis. The price of protection, to take cover at home, would have been the natural choice.
† In the prostitute setting of ‘Sweeny Erect’ (1919), Eliot’s poem revives the link between female sexuality and an epileptic attack.