Free A Loaded Gun by Jerome Charyn

usual provider of emotional nourishment, is strangely absent.”
    Sewall himself relented a bit in a letter to Jay Leyda:
    Even Mrs. Dickinson’s distaste for writing letters is blown up to account (in part) for Emily Dickinson’s scorn of her mother, her taking over the mother’s role with Austin and writing the letters for her, etc. Whereas she seems to me to be much like many people I know (including my wife) who express themselves in non-literary ways. They hate to write letters (Til would rather be hanged by the thumbs). Mrs. Dickinson sent flowers & fruit & food to her friends and made pies for her family.
    But she was a little more fiery and independent than that. There’s an apocryphal tale about Emily Sr., who, having hired a paperhanger, Lafayette Stebbins, against her husband’s wishes,“went secretly to the paper hanger and asked him to come and paper her bedroom. This he did, while Emily was being born.”
    Of course it never happened, at least not in that way. But it’s fun to imagine Emily Dickinson, who at times liked to think of herself as a mermaid, coming out of her mother’s waters while Lafayette Stebbins was papering the walls. And it does reveal a stubborn streak in Mrs. Dickinson, who found her own way to defy Edward before and after their marriage. He was the invisible bridegroom at his own wedding, because the bride was so ambivalent about abandoning her family. And if she didn’t have the intellectual curiosity of the rest of the Dickinson clan—even Vinnie was a religious reader of The Atlantic Monthly —it’s partly because Edward managed to stifle whatever native rebellion shemight have had. He couldn’t control her while she was still in Monson, though he tried to smother her in a constant barrage of instructions, telling her how she ought to behave and whom she ought to see. Once she was married and the mother of three small children, she had very little maneuverability. He stifled her and his children, insisting that they avoid the cold weather and dark streets of Amherst while he was away—and it seems he was away a good part of the time, either as a member of the legislature or on some urgent errand. And his wife did rebel, a little.“I attended church all day yesterday,” she wrote on March 13, 1838. “I felt quite like a widow.”
    Little Emily Elizabeth also rebelled. In that same year, while Edward was politicking somewhere on Beacon Hill, his wife wrote:
    And I do indeed truly rejoice that the time is so near at hand when I hope to embrace my husband. . . . [Emily] sais she is tired of living without a father . . .
    Mrs. Dickinson may have suffered from bouts of melancholy, like her poet daughter, but we trivialize her and distort her life if we consider her a chronic invalid, or someone who spent half her days dusting the stairs. She was probably up and about by 4:00 A . M ., as Aífe Murray suggests, dealing with stove ash, and firing up a stove that had come with her all the way from Monson; attending that stove was“primitive, complex, and continuous.” Murray also suggests that the kitchen was the most creative room in the house; it was her mother who taught the poet various household witcheries—baking, gardening, and sewing would become“key silent texts, a place for words to pour into and disappear from,” just as “needlework, brooms, and spider webs” would appear and reappear like witchcraft in Dickinson’s poems.
    Dickinson was a redhead, and she didn’t have her mother’s gray eyes. But she might not have become a poet without her mother’s magical stove; she baked words with the same intensity that she baked her father’s bread.
    In 1864, two years after she lured Higginson into her spiderweb with that first letter of hers— “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” —she wrote a poem that could have been the