Was Emily Dickinson a lesbian?
by David Bianco, author of Modern Jewish History for Everyone.
Since the first publication of her poems four years after her death,
many
literary critics have painted Emily Dickinson as a passionless,
reclusive
spinster who pined away for an unidentified man she referred to in
several
verses as the "Master." But in recent years, feminist scholars have
suggested
that Dickinson's passionate friendship and creative collaboration with
her
sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert, may have been the most
significant
relationship of her life.
Dickinson and Gilbert were born within nine days of each other in
December
1830. The poet, who was from a prominent Massachusetts family, met
Gilbert,
the daughter of an Amherst innkeeper, in 1847 or 1848, probably while
attending Amherst Academy. Sharing a love of nature and literature, the
two
girls quickly became friends. The first known letter from Dickinson to
Gilbert, from 1850, shows an established intimacy between the two:
Dickinson
writes of wanting to "steal a kiss" from "Susie."
Over the years, Dickinson's letters to Gilbert were filled with
increasingly
passionate and homoerotic phrases, even after Gilbert married
Dickinson's
brother in 1856. Most critics have dismissed Dickinson's language in
these
letters as just a reflection of custom in the mid-19th century, when
female
friends routinely expressed their feelings for each other in ardent
terms.
Yet Dickinson's references to Sue as an "absent Lover" whom she wants
to hold
and kiss, and to herself as "Susan's Idolator [who] keeps a Shrine for
Susan"
suggest a deeper love. There haven't been many good friends, past or
present,
who get "hot and feverish" (in Dickinson's words) at the prospect of
seeing
each other again, or who express desperate grief at being separated.
The sheer volume of the correspondence hints at Gilbert's importance in
Dickinson's life. During almost 40 years of friendship, 30 of which
were
spent as next-door neighbors, Dickinson sent Gilbert 267 letters and
"letter-poems" (as Gilbert called them) -- three times the number she
gave to
any other friend or acquaintance. The worn folds of the paper on which
these
poems were written suggest that Gilbert read them again and again.
Besides being her muse, friend, and confidant, Gilbert also served as
Dickinson's primary reader. Dickinson gave Gilbert drafts of poems for
comments and suggestions, sending only finished poems to
others.
Gilbert repeatedly encouraged her friend to publish her poetry, but
Dickinson
was hesitant to do so.
The support that Gilbert gave to Dickinson's work stands in sharp
contrast to
the response her poems received from Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an
eminent
literary scholar whose name has been linked romantically with
Dickinson's. In
1862, after receiving some of Dickinson's work in a letter, Higginson
dissuaded her from publishing what he called her "remarkable, yet odd"
verses. "Thank you for your advice," Dickinson wrote back, "I shall
implicitly follow it."
Although Dickinson's work remained largely unpublished in her lifetime,
the
poet produced her own arrangements of verses, neatly stitched together
into
books, or fascicles. At the time of her death in 1886, Dickinson had
amassed
40 fascicles containing almost 1,800 poems.
Though it may be anachronistic to call Dickinson a lesbian, the fact
remains
that Gilbert played a major role in her life and art -- arguably a much
larger
role than any of Dickinson's male friends and admirers. It was Gilbert
who
prepared Dickinson's body for burial and who penned her friend's
obituary in
the Springfield Republican. "To her, life was rich," Gilbert
wrote,
leaving
a portrait of Dickinson very different from the more common one passed
down
in literary history -- that of a lonely, unfulfilled spinster.
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