I’m ceded — I’ve stopped being Their’s —
The name They dropped opon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading — too — [#353]
The estrangement from her world that Emily Dickinson began to sense during adolescence surfaced most dramatically in her struggles over whether to join the church. Her difficulties began to crystallize when she was fifteen and reached a point of crisis a few years after she left Mary Lyon’s seminary. Less than two years before she enrolled at Mount Holyoke, Dickinson had told Abiah Root that she “was almost persuaded to be a christian. I thought I never again could be thoughtless and worldly — and I can say that I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior.” But other concerns quickly crowded Christ out of her life, “and I cared less for religion than ever.” In spite of feeling “that I shall never be happy without I love Christ,” she reported that she could not decide in his favor. “Last winter there was a revival here,” she told Abiah, “. . . but I attended none of the meetings. . . . I felt that I was so easily excited that I might again be deceived and I dared not trust myself.” In the closing sentence of the letter, Dickinson let her friend know that “although I am not a christian still I feel deeply the importance of attending to the subject before it is too late.”
BEYOND MOUNT HOLYOKE: THE REVIVAL OF 1850
The “Articles of Faith and Government” in force at the First Church of Amherst in Emily’s youth provide a good picture of what it meant to “become a Christian” in an antebellum New England village. The question of “coming to Christ” was never separated from joining the church in the New England Congregational tradition; in claiming Christ, one also claimed membership in the fellowship of believers by making public testimony to the grace of God. At the First Church of Amherst, when Emily Dickinson was a young woman, this involved a candidate for membership being examined by the pastor and deacons “as to his knowledge of the Gospel and experiential acquaintance with the grace of God.”
The requirement of a testimony was meant to secure the distinct identity of the church within the larger culture. With its doctrine of election and emphasis upon individual responsibility, Puritan Calvinism rejected the medieval model of the universal church in which an individual was simply born into the church. It replaced the biological model of membership with a psychological one. The public testimony was meant to provide compelling evidence of this supernatural second birth in the believer’s life.
In the seventeenth century, Puritan leaders had required lengthy narrative accounts of the soul’s struggles and the Spirit’s blessings as evidence of the applicant’s “acquaintance with the grace of God.” These narratives often scaled the bright peaks of spiritual bliss and traversed the darkened valleys of sin and despair. They were elaborate, dramatic tales of the special providences of God. What was at stake here was the eternal destiny of the individual soul as well as the future of God’s covenanted people in the New World.
By the nineteenth century, the mountains had been leveled and the dark places flooded with the light of love. With heaven increasingly sentimentalized and hell only spoken of in whispers, there was no need for prospective church members to give harrowing accounts of their wrenching conversions. Instead, as the history of the First Church in Dickinson’s own lifetime indicates, church leaders of that period did all they could to remove the last sources of torment or embarrassment from the process. To “become a Christian” and join the church in Amherst at mid-century, a person needed only to subscribe to the articles of faith and offer the briefest assurance of belief in Christ. This was hardly a demanding standard, but even such a minimal requirement proved too great an obstacle for young Emily Dickinson.
The subject of “becoming a Christian” was much on Dickinson’s mind two years after her departure from Mount Holyoke, as she watched the revival of 1850 roll through her town, her church, and her family. This particular revival swept into the very heart of the Dickinson home, with her father, sister, and future sister-in-law all confessing Christ and joining the church as a result of it. Pressured by their example, Emily pondered again this option. About to turn twenty and with her education finished, she was at a crucial point in her development when the Spirit descended upon Amherst in 1850. As she confronted the choice of marriage and church membership, the revival served to crystallize her thinking about the future.
It is easy to assume, as many have, that Dickinson turned against the revivals because she saw them as carnivals of irrational behavior and craven capitulation. In this view, the revivals were the frenzied consequence of divisive theological disputes and manipulative emotional practices. They marked interludes of irrational excess in the otherwise sober progress of secular ideals. In point of fact, they were the exact opposite. As the revival of 1850 was described years later by key participants and apologists, it seems to have been more an exercise in Whiggish control than an effort to duplicate the potent passions of the Great Awakening or the religious excitements of the American frontier.
In Amherst, the revival of 1850 began quietly. Aaron Colton, the pastor of the Dickinsons’ church at the time, later told how early in January the regular prayer meetings of his church became “notably fuller and more solemn. A cloud of mercy seemed to hang over us, and ready to drop down fatness. Days and weeks passed, but no conversions. What was the hindrance?” At length, the pastor and others came to realize that “the trouble . . . was in the rum places in the village, with fires of hell in full blast. What could be done?” Colton’s spiritual counselors advised a course of “prudence,” because it was well known that “the rum men were desperate.” Yet “kind words” had done nothing to alleviate the problem, and it was obvious that a more bracing course of action was called for.
Colton and his allies came up with the solution of holding a town meeting on the subject, to be capped with a special plea from Edward Hitchcock. When the Amherst College president concluded with a challenge — “But it were better that the college should go down, than that young men should come here to be ruined by drink places among us” — the crowd demanded action. “Four hundred hands shot up for abating the nuisance,” and the following morning the selectmen went around town shutting down the rum shops. “Then the heavens gave rain — blessed showers, and there was a great refreshing.”
In classic Whig fashion, the 1850 revival worked men and women into a state of emotional crisis for the express purpose of making them more self-controlled and disciplined. It was a frenzy for the ordered life, a drunken quest for spiritual sobriety. The temperance movement fit neatly within the Whig view of the world, for as Daniel Walker Howe observes, “the Whig personality ideal emphasized self-development but not self-indulgence, and it encouraged striving to shape the self according to an approved plan.” There were sinners’ benches at tent meetings in Ohio at this time, and revival fervor in Kentucky struck some as bearing the signs of a spiking fever, but Amherst experienced nothing of the kind. Like virtually everything else in Emily Dickinson’s early environment, the revival of 1850 conformed to Whig standards. Whatever fervor there was, the Amherst authorities were not about to let a revival, or anything else, get out of hand.
The historical record of the revival of 1850 calls into question the standard assessment of Dickinson’s response to revivals in particular and the Christian faith in general. For instance, Paula Bennett claims that “reared in an era when theological points were the subject of vituperative debate in the popular press, and surrounded by religious revivalism and sectarian controversy, Dickinson . . . chose not to ‘listen.’” Or in the words of Dickinson biographer Richard Sewall, writing about the poet’s reluctance to be converted during an earlier revival: “It seems clear that her absence from the revival meetings was not because she was unmoved, or alienated, or bitter. She was afraid of being too much moved.”
Dickinson’s own accounts show that she did indeed “listen” to the pleas of the revival and that the circumstances surrounding it never threatened to overwhelm her. Only weeks after the closing of the rum shops, Dickinson wrote to Jane Humphrey: “How lonely this world is growing. . . . Christ is calling everyone here . . . , and I am standing alone in rebellion, and growing very careless.” Of the number who had found Christ, including Emily’s sister Lavinia, she said, “I cant tell you what they have found, but they think it is something precious.” The sanctification undergone by the converts Dickinson called “strange.” It did not issue in passion, ecstatic gestures, or frenzied outbursts, but in calm, measured actions exhibiting self-control. “They seem so very tranquil, and their voices are kind, and gentle, and the tears fill their eyes so often, I really think I envy them.” In a letter written a month later to Abiah Root, Dickinson spoke of a mutual friend’s face as being “calmer, but full of radiance, holy, yet very joyful.” It was the quiet tranquility of Amherst and the church that she noted, for “the place is very solemn, and sacred.”
Without question, Dickinson felt that she had failed somehow in refusing conversion. Later in life she would take a bemused approach to revivals, but as a young woman she worried that in resisting conversion she had spurned a priceless offer of divine love. Just as she had learned earlier in life to scrutinize the faces of the dead for signs that they had been “willing to die,” so did she now scan the countenances of the living. She detected on many faces evidence of something “precious” that she could not name but envied others for possessing. Like many of her friends, Dickinson felt beset by the vague fears and aching longings that were a vital element of the romantic sentimentalism of the day. Here in conversion and revival, many of those friends had found a peace that passed all understanding and that left them exuding a “radiance, holy, yet very joyful.”
And yet Emily Dickinson did not know this joy. Even as others found themselves blissfully transformed, she continued to set herself apart, “standing alone in rebellion.” At this point in her life, Dickinson believed that the glory the revivals claimed to disclose was genuine but that it had been denied to her: “It certainly comes from God — and I think to receive it is blessed — not that I know it from me, but from those on whom change has passed,” she wrote to Jane Humphrey in April of 1850. Dickinson feared that her rebellion had cut her off from bliss. If she did not experience “radiant, holy joy,” it was because she did not deserve it.
If in late adolescence Dickinson yearned for the “glories” delivered through the revivals, why did she not convert and join the church? Undoubtedly one factor was her reluctance to make a public profession of any kind. Even a brief testimony before the church leaders and a public assent to articles of faith seemed to demand too much of her. As much as she longed to experience the joy others had known, she cherished the shelter of her solitude even more. Though she was eager to be known, addressed, and loved, she was even more fearful of being violated. An observer who did not wish to be observed, Dickinson would have found it painful to hazard the gaze of congregation and community.
In addition to her fear of exposure, Dickinson’s failure to detect the fruits of grace in her experience also kept her from professing the faith as her own. A person saved by Christ was called to recognize dramatic changes in his or her life, as Emily’s brother Austin did when he gave his confession of faith. “I tell each of you,” he testified, “the full abounding happiness of the last two weeks has been more than all I have ever know[n] before, that never has life seemed half so bright, my friends half so dear, nor the future half so glorious.” But as Emily examined her own experience, she could not detect a similar joy or tranquility. Whenever she came to the brink of conversion, Emily stepped back because she found her attention wavering and her heart curiously empty. At fifteen, she had been “almost persuaded to be a christian,” but her mind strayed from the object of faith and soon “I cared less for religion than ever.” Unable to taste the fruits of the Spirit in her life, she refused to claim that she had been grafted onto the vine that was said to be their source.
Larger cultural forces also worked upon Dickinson to keep her from joining the church. One of the most powerful was the conception of the self that she had already begun to cultivate in adolescence. From the books she read and culture she inhabited, Dickinson acquired a highly romantic view of the person in her years after Mount Holyoke. That understanding of selfhood placed an inordinate emphasis upon the role of volition in the formation of beliefs and the practice of virtues. In effect, it took to an extreme the Reformation’s stress upon the necessity of the individual appropriation of beliefs. As John Dillenberger and Claude Welch explain, for Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the other major Reformers, the preached and written word “became the Word of God” only “when they became alive in the heart and mind of man through the Spirit.” For the Reformers, “one of the prerequisites of a proper sacrament was the faith of the believer.” In Protestantism, faith became the subjective appropriation of the objective reality of God’s activity; in romanticism, the subjective powers of choice came to eclipse even the object of that choice. “It is not this or that political, philosophical, religious or even aesthetic commitment that marks the romanticist,” argues Robert Langbaum. “It is the subjective ground of his commitment, the fact that he never forgets his commitment has been chosen.”
This was how Emily Dickinson knew the self; for her in adulthood, the substance of belief remained secondary to the fact that that belief had been chosen. In the mid-twentieth century, the poet W. H. Auden wrote of his adopted land that America had come to stand “for the principle that liberty is prior to virtue, i.e., liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one.” As she wrestled with decisions about faith, marriage, and life in public, Dickinson was hammering out an understanding of the self that was unique to her but also reflected crucial changes in American culture.
As a young adult, Dickinson wrote a poem that clarified her stance toward the Christian faith. It connected her refusal to join the church to her need to define her own identity:
I’m ceded — I’ve stopped being Their’s —
The name They dropped opon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading — too —
Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, Of Grace —
Unto supremest name —
Called to my Full — The Crescent dropped —
Existence’s whole Arc, filled up,
With one — small Diadem —
My second Rank — too small the first —
Crowned — Crowing — on my Father’s breast —
A half unconscious Queen —
But this time — Adequate — Erect,
With Will to choose
Or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown — [#353]
The poem opens with a reference to Emily’s baptism as an infant in 1831. That first baptism had made her “Their’s” — her parents’ and her community’s — “without the choice,” but this second baptism she has chosen “consciously, of Grace.” Her received identity she has stored away “with my Dolls,/My childhood, and the string of spools.” As an adult, the poet is now the “half unconscious Queen” who is able to stand on her own, “Adequate — Erect,/With Will to choose/Or to reject.” As the product of a consciously free choice, the second baptism has an authenticity utterly lacking in the first.
“THE REVERY ALONE WILL DO”
The disestablishment of the New England church, first in Connecticut in 1818 and then in Massachusetts in 1833, only served to reinforce the voluntarist tendencies incipient in New England Protestantism. Deprived of state support and sanction, the Congregational churches turned to revivalism and moral suasion to replenish their ranks. In virtually every New England village, voluntary societies sprang up to supplement the work of local congregations. Some of these “societies,” such as Amherst College and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, furthered the kingdom of God by training moral agents and missionaries to serve in neighboring villages and foreign lands. Other “societies” drew together people of like mind on a particular subject for a concerted moral effort; there were Sabbatarian societies, temperance societies, and even “cent” societies that raised funds by the penny to support young people training for ministry or missions.
In Amherst and across the land in 1850, revivalism and moralism worked hand in hand to perfect the disciplined self and redeem the culture. Increasingly in the decades before the Civil War, the New England church saw itself not as a holy body called out from the world but as an earnest organization cast into the world. Having lost through disestablishment their power to shape directly the course of public life, ministers under the new dispensation scrambled to find ways to influence what they could no longer control.
Dickinson shrank from the voluntary societies as much as she did from the revivals. As the revival of 1850 was about to begin, Emily wrote to a friend in late January that the “Sewing Society has commenced again — and held its first meeting last week —.” If Emily is to be trusted in her hyperbole, this society was typical in the daunting scope of its mission: “Now all the poor will be helped — the cold warmed — the warm cooled — the hungry fed — the thirsty attended to — the ragged clothed — and this suffering — tumbled down world will be helped to it’s feet again — which will be quite pleasant to all.” While all of this was going on, Emily had made herself conspicuous by her absence. “I dont attend — notwithstanding my high approbation —” she wrote. “I am already set down as one of those brands almost consumed — and my hardheartedness gets me many prayers.”
If Dickinson was listening for a counterpoint to the boring melody of moralism at this time of revival, she did not have to wait long to hear it. Later that same year, a new novel struck a responsive chord in Emily, Lavinia (or Vinnie, as her family called her), Austin, and countless other young adults. In the fall of 1850, Reveries of a Bachelor by Ik Marvel (Donald G. Mitchell) appeared. The book consisted of a set of fantasies and ruminations about subjects as vast as life and death and as petty as the passing fancies of a young man. It quickly made the rounds of the Dickinson children and their friends, even though many parents, Edward Dickinson included, did not approve of it. More than two years after Reveries appeared, Emily wrote to Austin that their father had given her “quite a trimming about . . . these ‘modern Literati’ who he says are nothing, compared to past generations, who flourished when he was a boy. Then he said there were ‘somebody’s rev-e-ries,’ he did’nt know whose they were, that he thought were very ridiculous.”
“Can we understand reverie as an historical phenomenon?” asks Richard Rabinowitz, and his question is pertinent to the life of Dickinson in the decade before the Civil War. Mid-nineteenth-century diaries show that young people spent much more of their time in daydreams and “reveries” than their parents and grandparents had ever done. The generation emerging into maturity at mid-century found encouragement for their “reveries” in contemporary devotional literature as well as in sensational novels. The Christian devotionalists urged believers to cultivate their unfettered imaginations, for they were thought to afford unique access to truth and the presence of God. For a group saturated in romantic poetry and sentimental fiction, as Emily’s circle was, “reverie became the perfect antidote for those long boring meetings of the local self-improvement league and the perfect medicine for a hundred other social disappointments.” While conventional society mumbled in a monotone, those who experienced reverie overheard a resonant harmony in their inner selves.
An 1851 letter from Emily to her friend and future sister-in-law Susan Gilbert illustrates the place of this newly discovered “reverie” in her life. When Emily wrote to her, Sue was hundreds of miles away, teaching school in Baltimore. In the letter, after having mused upon the “‘sweet silver moon’” that was shining on both of them that night, Emily told her friend: “It is such an evening Susie, as you and I would walk and have such pleasant musings, if you were only here — perhaps we would have a ‘Reverie’ after the form of ‘Ik Marvel.’” But there would be a difference; “‘Marvel’ only marvelled, and you and I would try to make a little destiny to have for our own.”
Emily then mentioned newspaper notices about the new Ik Marvel novel, Dream Life, which was to be published in two months. She asked Sue, “Dont you hope he will live as long as you and I do — and keep on having dreams and writing them to us.” She followed that rhetorical question with a statement of devotion: “We will be willing to die Susie — when such as he have gone, for there will be none to interpret these lives of our’s.” Those lives, Emily wrote, could not possibly be interpreted by the same texts and doctrines that made sense of the lives of ordinary people. Writers like Marvel and Longfellow were necessary, “for our sakes dear Susie, who please ourselves with the fancy that we are the only poets, and everyone else is prose.”
Dickinson’s letters from this period show what cultural forces were touching the nerve of the generation before the Civil War. The fascination with “reveries” was only one of many signs pointing to significant developments in thinking about God, truth, and the self. By 1850, the year Emily Dickinson turned twenty, English romantic poetry had been circulating for half a century; for more than two decades German Idealist philosophy had been making inroads into American culture; and in the 1830s and 1840s the novels of Dickens, the poetry of Longfellow, and the essays of Emerson had been spreading the message of sentiment and intuition among the educated public.
Mid-nineteenth-century evangelical religion was hardly immune to the powerful appeal of the romantic view of the self being trumpeted about in many quarters. New ideas promised to secure the unmoored faith in a time of intellectual storms. As the higher criticism of the Bible and scientific naturalism began to wear away at the pillars of belief, evangelical leaders scrambled to lash their faith to the moorings of the self and the innocent human heart. The children of these same evangelical leaders, who were reading Byron and the Brontës, rather than Goethe and Coleridge, were only too happy to endorse such efforts and to carry them even further than their parents had dared. When Lyman Beecher welcomed his son Charles into the ministry in 1844, he advised him, “Take heed to thy heart. . . . The power of the heart set on fire by love is the greatest created power in the universe — more powerful than electricity, for that can only rend and melt matter; but LOVE can, by God’s appointment, carry the truth quick and powerful through the soul.” Charles and his generation, which included Emily Dickinson, accepted the charge gladly.
By the time Dickinson turned her back on the church and her face toward poetry in the 1850s, New England theology had been struggling for almost a century with the issues laid out in Jonathan Edwards’s monumental Freedom of the Will, in which he had attacked the Arminian idea of freedom. Their “notion of liberty,” Edwards had written of the Arminians, is “that it consists in a self-determining power in the will, or a certain sovereignty the will has over itself, and its own acts, whereby it determines its own volitions; so as not to be dependent in its determinations, on any cause without itself, nor determined by anything prior to its own acts.” Edwards’s critique of Arminianism reads like a commentary on Dickinson’s “second baptism”:
My second Rank — too small the first —
Crowned — Crowing — on my Father’s breast —
A half unconscious Queen —
But this time — Adequate — Erect,
With Will to choose,
Or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown — [#353]
Poetry was to be the “Crown” that Dickinson chose. It would serve as her means of moving through the impasses of conventional religious faith as well as her way of establishing an identity that she had freely willed. For several centuries before Dickinson, of course, many devout Protestants had turned to poetry to explore their spiritual experience in ways unavailable in prose. So in one sense, in choosing poetry, Dickinson was merely following in a line of great Protestant devotional writers. Some, such as George Herbert, John Donne, and Edward Taylor, had been ministers who found in the poetic medium vital resources for their life of faith. They used poetry to clarify their convictions and purify their practices. Others, such as Christopher Smart and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, while not preachers or pastors, also found in lyric poetry an irreplaceable means of delving into sacred matters to deepen the faith they already held.
Like other key romantic poets, Emily Dickinson drew upon this devotional tradition of Christian poetry while leaving its specific commitments behind. That is not to say that in her maturity Dickinson definitively renounced the Christian faith; there is too much evidence of her continuing spiritual passion and intense religious devotion to prove any such assertion. Instead, it is to say that, unlike Herbert, Donne, and others of an earlier age, Dickinson chose poetry as a surrogate for traditional religion rather than as a support for an established belief or practice. For her willing self, the world of infinite aesthetic possibilities and inward reveries seemed more enchanting than the ordered world of orthodoxy and Whig moralism:
A fairer House than Prose —
More numerous of Windows —
Superior — for Doors — [#466]
To remain viable, orthodox faith needed the support of history, science, and the suspension of critical disbelief, while poetry demanded only an unassailable belief in the unimpeachable self:
On a Columnar Self —
How ample to rely
In Tumult — or Extremity —
How good the Certainty
That Lever cannot pry —
And Wedge cannot divide
Conviction — That Granitic Base —
Though none be on our side —
Suffice Us — for a Crowd —
Ourself — and Rectitude —
And that Assembly — not far off
From furthest Spirit — God — [#740]
The life of conventional faith and practice called for assent to a body of doctrine and active participation in the life of the church, but the poetic imagination demanded nothing more than a spirit of reverie:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few. [#1779]
In choosing poetry, Dickinson thought she was opening herself to infinite possibilities. In this realm, she could stop being theirs and lean instead on the “Columnar Self” that she was coming to recognize as her greatest asset. If her choices meant that she might have to experience her “revery alone,” that was sufficient, for “The revery alone will do,/If bees are few.”
In the choices she made and refused as a young adult, Dickinson implacably set herself upon a course that would lead her away from marriage and church and into solitude. Whatever its costs, that solitude to her was worth its price. It granted her a freedom of self-definition unavailable in the obligating arrangements of marriage, family, and church. And it offered her a more fertile world than the sterile Whig culture she knew so well.