Anna Cindy♥Emily Dickinson, the Invincible Woman

EMILY DICKINSON, THE INVINCIBLE WOMAN

By Anna Cindy Panjaya(61413012)

                Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. She was born on December 10, 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts. She has one brother and one sister. Her brother’s name is William Austin Dickinson, known as Austin. Her sister’s name is Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, or known as Lavinia or Vinnie. Her parent’s names are Edwards Dickinson and Emily Norcross.

Emily’s ancestor is one from the Puritan group that was immigrated to the new world. Later, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, Emily’s grandfather, built Amherst College and with his eldest son, Edwards Dickinson, was accompanying him as the college’s treasurer. Amherst College is one of the schools that Emily attended.

Younger Emily was known as a well-behaved girl. She has interest for music and piano. Her attitude is like a noble-woman in her era. They called it as a Victorian girl. In addition, she portrayed her father as a warm person but it was the opposite with her mother, who was cold and aloof.

She lived in a prominent family, not wealthy, but she spent her life in an introverted and reluctant style. She is well known as an eccentric person. She loves to wear white gown and hardly ever greet the guests. Her only friends are from the correspondence of her writing. However, she becomes an important person in American history of poetry.

Emily Dickinson’s works as a poet are known early in 1860, in the Transcendentalism and Realism era. Most of her poems are having themes of death and immortality. However, it wasn’t purely her work. Most of it was being reedited by the publisher. Emily has unique style in wrote her poem. Her poem wasn’t following the traditional poetic rules. I think that’s why her poem is being reedited.

They shut me up in Prose –
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet –
Because they liked me "still" –

Still! Could themself have peeped –
And seen my Brain – go round –
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason – in the Pound –

Emily Dickinson, c. 1862

This is the first poem that Emily wrote in her teenager year. Emily spent her seven years, in Academy, taking English and Classical Literature, Latin, Botany, Geology, History, "Mental Philosophy," and Arithmetic. She is later stamped as the best student in the Academy.  Even as the best student in her academy, young Emily has many ‘feeling’ problems during teenage year.

Emily Dickinson is famous for her poems that are having one themes of death. I, personally, think that it is because she had trouble in accepting the death from the ones that she loved. It is started from the death of her beloved cousin, Sophia Holland. The death of Sophia is caused by typhus in 1844. They aren’t only tied by blood-relation, but also by friendship. In addition of that, Emily became traumatized even her parents have to sent her to Boston to restore her spirit.

After finishing her last term in Academy, in 1847, she went to South Hadley. She is going to attend Mary Lyon’s  Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (which later became Mount Holyoke College). However, she wasn’t stay for a long time. In 1848, her brother Austin was coming to get her back to home. Back in home, Emily is busy with household activities.

When she was eighteen, Emily started writing poem with the influence of men. Those men are Benjamin Franklin Newton and Leonard Humphrey. However, Emily’s talent in writing is already showed in her teenager life (when her close cousin died in typhus). She sees Newton and Humphrey as her brilliant teacher and so. When Newton was died, Emily made a statement, “When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality – but venturing too near, himself – he never returned”, it is believed to refer to Newton.

However, there is also an influence from many authors, for examples are Lydia Maria Child’s Letters from New York, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Kavanagh and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. However, the one that influenced her most is William Shakespeare. Even a letter was written to her friend, “Why is any other book needed?” according to the Shakespeare’s literary works.

“Some keep the Sabbath going to Church – / I keep it, staying at Home.”

That is a religious poem by Emily. While everybody was out there to go to the church, she was staying at home. She found that worshipping God was more intense in her house. From that writing, I assume that Emily is a religious person and she serious about it.

In 1849, Emily's sister Lavinia left home for Ipswich Female Seminary, a boarding school. Many of the household chores fell to Emily, and they usually took all day. She took her evenings for reading. For the first time, she began to write poetry. She often kept her lamp burning late as she sat at her desk, composing a poem. No one in her family knew of Emily's inclinations toward poetry. She kept her writing a secret from them, locking away everything she produced in a secret drawer in her desk.

…the hour of evening is sad –

It was once my study hour –

My master has gone to rest,

And the open leaf of the book,

And the scholar at school alone,

Make the tears come,

And I cannot brush them away;

I would not if I could,

For they are the only tribute I can pay the departed Humphrey

In her 20 years old, 1855, once again, her respectful honored master and faithful friend has gone. That is Leonard Humphrey. Leonard Humphrey is the young principal of the Amherst Academy, who had been a tutor and friend to Emily Dickinson. He was died because of brain congestion. However, in her desperation of the death of Humphrey, she made that poem to pour her feelings.

In 1855, Emily Dickinson met with a priest of Presbyterian Church, Charles Wadsworth. He became a lifelong consultant for Emily regarding the matter of life and death. The next year, her brother, Austin, was married with her best friend and correspondence, Susan Huntington Gilbert. In addition, they become much closer in friendship, because Susan was a writer. She often asks Emily as her editor and so Emily. Both of them have changing mail in hundreds time.

It isn’t that Emily wanted to live alone until her death. Unfortunately, her love-life isn’t very good and so the sister, Lavinia. Emily met Henry Emmons, an Amherst College friend of her cousin John Graves. Emmons was a charismatic, intelligent young man and she greatly enjoyed his company. The two had romantic moments by taking regular carriage rides and spending a great deal of time together. Like Emily, Emmons enjoyed writing poetry, and the two of them swapped poems regularly. Lavinia had just said goodbye to her boyfriend Joseph Lyman, who had gone South to complete his schooling. Both of the sisters' relationships ended in sadness. In 1854, Emily discovered that Emmons had become engaged to someone else. In 1856, after five years of waiting, Lavinia found out that Joseph Lyman had become engaged to a Southern girl.

In 1874, Edward F. Dickinson, left for Boston for a while. The night before he left, he and Dickinson shared a quiet evening together. She played the piano for him. Although he and Emily had their differences, he loved her immensely, and she was his favorite child. The day after Mr. Dickinson left, Austin appeared in the doorway holding a telegram in his hand. It was a note from a doctor in Boston, asking the family to hurry to Tremont House where Edward Dickinson was staying. Edward was heavily ill. As Lavinia and Austin were to prepare the journey, Austin received another telegram saying that Mr. Dickinson was dead.

Emily started writing in public with the push from her old friend, Helen Fiske Hunt. In fact, Helen asked her to write in anonymously. Of course Emily was rejected the proposal from Helen. However, when she asked Thomas Wentworth Higginson, he support Helen’s proposal. In the end, Emily is finally contributed a poem called "Success is Counted Sweetest!" The book was published in 1878.

In April 1884, Emily often says that she is feeling unwell, and so the doctors diagnosed an inflammation on the kidney. After that, Emily received the news that Otis Lord had died. For the next two years, she was madly in desperation. She rarely left her bed and never wrote poetry anymore. In the winter of 1885, she chose to refuse more medical examinations. As she lay weak and sick, she composed her last poem, "So give me back death."

So give me back to Death—

The Death I never feared

Except that it deprived of thee—

And now, by Life deprived,

In my own Grave I breathe

And estimate its size—

Its size is all that Hell can guess—

And all that Heaven was—

Then, on May 1886, Emily complained to Lavinia that she feels very ill and hard to breath. The next day, she was laying in coma. On 16^th of May, 1886, Emily Dickinson is died. Emily’s funeral was held in the Dickinson’s home. As she had requested, she was buried in a robe of white flannel. Her siblings placed her white coffin in the library and allowed only a select number of her friends to view her in the casket. Among the chosen ones, there was Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

After the funeral, Emily’s sister, Lavinia, was going to do the will of Emily. Later on, while cleaning Emily’s room, Lavinia found a locked box with no label. It was the Emily's works–all of her poetry. Lavinia was astonished, and could not burn the poems. As time passed, Lavinia happened upon many secret stashes of poetry and envelopes filled with scraps of paper covered front and back with verse. She immediately felt a deep, intense need to see the poems published. Lavinia would be the first to introduce the world to Dickinson's poetry. The publication of the poems, Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1960, finally completed Emily Dickinson's name known as one of the best female poetry. Her innovations and her technical have made an impact on modern poetry that is difficult to overestimate.

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