I continue reading Emily Dickinson’s Imagery by Rebecca Patterson, published back in 1979. This strikes me as a disconcertingly long time ago, especially because I was in grade school back then (having just traded in my bell-bottoms for baggy pants). The end of bell bottoms, more than any other change, tolled the end of the 60s and 70s.
But…
Other things stay the same. The problem with women having ambition, for example. As the Republican Party’s Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates will angrily tell you, women need to be told how to live. They are making themselves miserable with their ambition. Not only would women be happier at home, but government should have the right to dictate women’s reproductive choices. Freedom, after all, means having the freedom to impose your beliefs on others. Which brings me back to Dickinson. The opening chapter of Patterson’s book is a discussion of Dickinson’s own ambition and the road blocks (and rhetoric) faced by ambitious women in her day.
As before, let’s let the author speak for herself:
Amid the trash accumulated in the mental attics of her neighbors, one legend about Emily Dickinson has the look of truth. A woman who in her early years sewed for the Dickinsons heard the young Emily say she was afraid of death, the dead were so soon forgotten—”But when I die, they’ll have to remember me.” Whether the words were ever spoken or not, she undertook to live by them. An intelligent, talented, extremely ambitious girl, she wanted to make her mark (in the beginning she scarcely knew how) for the same reason that an ambitious man wants to make his—to affirm in the face of death that she at least was. But here she came in conflict with her age, which was inhospitable to gifted men and flinty toward the woman who did not know her place. Woman’s place was narrowly defined and did not include a literary career.
An increasing number of women, it is true, were entering the literary marketplace and sometimes doing well—”a damned mob of scribbling women,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote bitingly—probably because an increasing number of women were receiving some education, and then as now they were the principle audience for fiction. But women could not write for this audience of their own without dragging a heavy weight of apology. In the late 1840s Lydia Maria Child began to think it was no longer absolutely disreputable for a woman to write, but she would have found scant comfort in a Mrs. S.C. Hall, whose article in the September Harper’s made such defense as seemed possible for erring Jane Porter, author of Thaddeus of Warsaw and Scottish Chiefs. “Happy is the country where the laws of God and nature are held in reverence,” Mrs. Hall wrote darkly. Her tone implied that Miss Porter had prospered at the expense of the “strength and glory of England,” which “Are in the keeping of the wives and mothers of its men,” or that “when we are questioned touching our ‘celebrated women,’ we may in general terms refer to those who have watched over, moulded and inspired our ‘celebrated’ men.” There might be a few women who achieved fame without neglecting their “domestic and social duties,” yet in her individual capacity “the woman would have been happier had she continued enshrined in the privacy of domestic love and domestic duty.” Mrs. Child may not have seen this ponderous put-down but Emily Dickinson read it. [pp.4-5]
What struck me was how the Republican Vice Presidential Candidate’s rhetoric parallels that of gender discrimination almost two hundred years before. Hall states that “Happy is the country where the laws of God and nature are held in reverence” and argues that “traditional” womanhood is defined by “the laws of God”. In describing why Vance converted to Catholicism, Elizabeth Dias of the New York Times, writes:
“Becoming Catholic for Vance, who was loosely raised as an evangelical, was a practical way to counter what he saw as elite values, especially secularism. He was drawn not just to the church’s theological ideas but to its teachings on family and social order…” [Italics mine.]
Like Hall, who flatly states that ambition in women is a threat to the “strength and glory” of their country, Vance also considers female ambition a threat to national identity and cohesion:
“I needed to speak DIRECTLY to patriots like you about the serious issue of radical childless leaders in this country. We can’t have people who don’t have a direct stake in this country making our most important decisions.“
Or:
“We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths – they’re invested in NOTHING because they’re not invested in this country’s children. Fighting back won’t be easy – our childless opponents have a lot of free time.“
Flatly stated in both these quotes is the idea that women who trade children for ambition are sociopaths and (with a nod to fascism) “opponents” of the motherland (read, enemies within). Vance, like Hall, implicitly asserts that a woman’s purpose is to raise, mould and celebrate men. If the purpose of raising children, as Hall puts it, is to glorify the country, then the corollary is that childlessness undermines the country by making it “less mentally stable”. In other words, according to Vance, those women who do not subscribe to his theocratic ideas of social order are not just mentally unstable but also a threat to other children.
“…I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids, trying to brainwash the minds of our children.”
Like Hall, who writes “that the woman would have been happier had she continued enshrined in the privacy of domestic love and domestic duty”, Vance also sees female ambition as, literally, “a path to misery”:
“You have women who think that truly the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working…instead of starting a family and having children… They don’t realize…that that is actually a path to misery.”
So, in case it’s not obvious, I won’t be voting for any Republican who endorses their Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidates—let alone the candidates themselves. Their politics are bigoted, ignorant, fascistic and anti-democratic. I find it fascinating how reading a book of criticism, written almost fifty years ago, about Emily Dickinson, who was born over two hundred years ago, is bitingly current and relevant despite not being an overtly political book. If you have any love for Emily Dickinson, her life and poetry, don’t vote for the kind of people who would have sneered at her in her own day (and all but label the next Dickinson the ‘enemy within’). Would the nation really have been better off if Dickinson had been married off to raise children instead of writing poetry?
