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JUDITH PASCOE
"The House Encore Me So" :
Emily Dickinson and Jenny Lind
On July 3, 1851, in what Thomas Johnson describes as the poet's only encounter with any "singer or instrumentalist of note," Emily Dickinson crossed paths for a moment with the most vaunted public female of nineteenth-century America, the singer Jenny Lind (Letters 122). Dickinson witnessed Lind perform in one of two concerts held near Amherst a year before Lind married and settled in Northampton for her honeymoon. News of the concerts and of Lind's marriage dominated the Springfield Daily Republican, the newspaper of choice in the Dickinson household. The concert Dickinson attended took place in a large church in Northampton on a night that in addition to being memorable for Lind's performance was remarkable for foul weather.1 Torrential rain apparently did little to deter the arrival of ticketholders who, according to the Republican, came from Brattleboro, Greenfield, Amherst, Easthampton, Holyoke, Deerfield, Springfield, and Chicopee. The Republican enthused:
The beauty, the gallantry, the grace and the sturdiness of the Connecticut Valley were there. Sixteen to seventeen hundred pairs of eyes beamed a welcome to the Swedish songstress, and she warbled back her richest tones. ("Jenny Lind at Northampton")
Surprisingly little attention has been paid to an event in Dickinson's life that rivals her famous encounter with Thomas Higginson in importance and suggestiveness. Given the fascination with Lind that Dickinson expresses in her letters and the fact that Dickinson witnessed the singer just as she was on the brink of her own poetic career, I am certain Lind made a decided impression on this singular member of her listening audience. Jenny Lind, as the most public of public women, served for Dickinson as both an intriguing and troubling example of the female artist in the marketplace.
The Jenny Lind phenomenon provides a rewarding context in which to place Dickinson's performance poems, suggesting a highly theatrical Dickinson whose refusal to place her poems before a broad audience had more to do with the vagaries of the marketplace than with a reluctance to perform. Lind provided Dickinson with an important -- if ultimately disappointing -- model of female self-fashioning. The several ways in which Lind's public persona and Dickinson's private and poetic ones coincide suggest that Dickinson's relatively brief encounter with Lind had a complex and enduring impact on her conception of herself as an artist.
Even disregarding Dickinson's firsthand experience with the singer, Jenny Lind was in the air to so great an extent in 1851 that Dickinson could not possibly have ignored her presence. To attempt to envision the frenzy created by Lind's tour of America, it may be necessary to imagine a contemporary Beatles tour with John Lennon restored to life -- and quite possibly even this impossible media event would not duplicate the hysteria wrought by Lind. Brought to America by P. T. Barnum, a man whose reputation up to then had rested on displays of such improbable creations as a "Feejie Mermaid" (made from a fish body and a monkey head) and an elderly woman he ballyhooed as "George Washington's one-hundred-and-sixty-one-year-old-nurse," Lind proved to be among the most successful of Barnum's commercial ventures (Hume 98-107). Adoring crowds greeted her at every American stop, and every branch of American mercantilism scrambled to make a profit from her name. Among the commodities a Jenny Lind devotee could hope to acquire at mid-century were Jenny Lind gloves, bonnets, riding hats, shawls, mantillas, robes, sofas, pianos, teakettles, water carafes, cigars, pancakes, and sausages. She received a vote for lieutenant governor in Massachusetts and several votes for mayor of New York. Newspapers all around the country devoted regular space to "The Movements of the Swedish Nightingale," and a vast mythology of Lind lore spread around the country. Among the more intriguing rumors was a widely held belief that she wore her hair in rolls on the sides of her head because she had no ears (Wagenknecht 4). Dickinson's New England, which received Lind fairly late in her American junket and after she had broken with Barnum to tour on her own, matched the rest of the country in its exuberant reception of the Swedish singer. Given Dickinson's enthusiasm for the Springfield Daily Republican -- "I read in it every night," she claimed (Letters 264) -- it is highly probable she read that paper's July 1, 1851, account of ticket sales for the Springfield concert:
The crowd was tremendous, the progress slow, the thermometer at 90, the sweating profuse, and the swearing (we are sorry to say) somewhat like that of the Army in Flanders. While the crowd was greatest at the front door, a few persons were discovered entering by a back entrance, and heading off the throng in the usual way. This touched off the inflammable material gathered together, and there was somewhat of an explosion during which the front windows of the store were partially broken in, and the whole sash threatened, unless the "fire in the rear" was withdrawn. The police were sent for and things soon restored to regularity. But it was a hot time, and those who went through the ordeal came out wet through and through with perspiration. ("Jenny Lind Excitement")
The Springfield Daily Republican published accounts of how many letters Lind received while in town: "They come from all quarters and are apparently the productions in most cases of her own sex. She has had 75 since she has been in Springfield" ("Jenny Lind"). The Republican also managed to put a Jenny Lind spin on even the most quotidian non-event. Its weather report for the day following the concert Dickinson attended blithely attests, "Two welcome personages have been in town, for two or three days, -- fair Jenny Lind, and fair weather. The influence of both is diffusive of happiness to a multitude of grateful hearts" ("The Weather").
Everywhere, the arrival of Lind prompted an outpouring of poetic creativity, particularly by female poets. The Springfield Daily Republican devoted a sizable portion of a page to "Welcome to Jenny Lind," a poem written for the Republican by Lelia Mortimer ("Welcome"). Part of the brouhaha over Lind concocted by Barnum was a poetry contest which, according to one of the contest's officials, elicited 241 poems from "Boston, East Boston, Cambridge, and suburbs and New England in general" (Butler 7). Although no evidence survives of it, it seems quite likely that Dickinson took note of this competition without necessarily admiring the effusions it elicited. Certainly, the worshipful stanzas that characterize Jenny Lindverse tributes bear little resemblance to Dickinson's later work. Lelia Mortimer, of Republican fame, addresses Lind as "Thou bird of thrilling song," and Sophronia of the Southwest, an entrant in the contest, writes:
Oh sweet and serene is the Nightingale's song
Warbled out of his soft, downy, delicate throat,
As he sits on the tree top, and sings all night long,
With a gentle, seraphic, symphonious note.
Dickinson in 1851, however, was barely on the threshold of a poetic career. There were more immediate associations coloring her reception of Lind than the florid example of verse writers nationwide. The two most important people in Dickinson's life, Sue Gilbert and Austin Dickinson, provided alternate readings of the national celebrity in advance of Dickinson's observation of Lind performing. For Gilbert, Lind served as a passport to adventure, an excuse for escape. Gilbert wrote to her brother Dwight in January of 1851:
I have a very agreeable little plan about going to New York with you to hear the "Jenny" and have been trying to conjure up eloquence enough to give you a similar impression. It is the desire of my heart to hear the "Nightingale" and all my friends insist that my brother will take me. (qtd. in Longsworth 81)
When this plan failed to induce her brother's cooperation, Gilbert proceeded to an alternate and more daring plan, traveling alone to New York on the invitation of a married schoolmate. She wrote her brother:
You must know I have been on a visit to the great Gotham, alias New York and after such an elbowing as I received there, have just recovered my usual confused state. . . . I have always had an idea I should hear Jenny before she left the country . . . I went alone and you would have laughed could you have heard the advice given, and fears expressed for my safety. (qtd. in Longsworth 81)
Since Emily and Lavinia Dickinson saw Lind in Northampton at approximately the time Gilbert saw her in New York, it would seem that Gilbert's alleged desire to see Jenny Lind, although quite possibly sincere, also acted as a serviceable excuse for unsanctioned female travel.
Dickinson's introduction to Lind through her brother, Austin, defies straightforward interpretation, interwoven as it is by the complicated fretwork of Dickinson's family dynamic. Austin Dickinson, who was working in Boston at the time, repeatedly urged his family to come to Boston to see the singer, but he also dissented from the public enthusiasm. Emily Dickinson, the contrarian, claimed delight at her brother's critical assessment of the overly vaunted singer, writing, "We have all been rather piqued at Jennie's singing so well, and this first calumnious whisper pleases us so well" (Letters 115). But though Dickinson claimed to approve Austin's "combating the opinion of two civilized worlds" and to join her father in heartily celebrating Austin's dissenting opinion, she undercut her agreement by exaggerating the brilliance of Austin's letter, responding with a tinge of jealousy to her father's ecstatic reception of Austin's opinions. Describing her father's rapture, she wrote:
So soon as he was calm he began to proclaim your opinion -- the effect cannot be described -- encomium followed encomium -- applause deafened applause -- the whole town reeled and staggered as it were a drunken man -- rocks rent -- graves opened -- and the seeds which hadn't come up were heard to set up growing -- the sun went down in clouds -- the moon rose in glory -- Alpha Delta, All Hail! (Letters 115)
The arch tone of this passage makes one seriously suspect that her father's approbation of Austin's assessment could only have driven Dickinson to hold the opposite opinion. It at least increased her desire to see Lind and judge for herself. Although Dickinson claimed to be pleased with her brother's "calumnious whisper" and her father's sanctioning of this calumny, she ended her consideration of Austin's comments by writing, "We rejoice that we did not come [to Boston to see Jenny Lind] -- our visit is yet before us" (Letters 115).
The fact that Dickinson witnessed Jenny Lind in performance in the middle of 1851 is perhaps most interesting because of the model of the protean woman that Lind certainly provided. P. T. Barnum famously noted, "It is a mistake to say the fame of Jenny Lind rests solely upon her ability to sing. She was a woman who would have been adored if she had had the voice of a crow" (Wagenknecht 16). Dickinson corroborated this sentiment when she exclaimed after seeing Lind, "[H]ow we all loved Jennie Lind, but not accustomed oft to her manner of singing did'nt fancy that so well as we did her" (Letters 121). Although Lind's singing ability was exceptional, what was more extraordinary was her creation of a public persona that seemed to satisfy nearly everyone's exalted expectations of her.2 Lind was plain-featured if not homely, and she used this fact to explain her refusal to perform in France, claiming, "I am too ugly. With my potato nose, it is impossible for me to have any success in Paris" (Wagenknecht 8). But portraits and drawings that depicted her showed a much prettier, much more delicate face and figure. That Lind somehow managed to create a correspondence between these depictions and herself in concert is verified by Thomas Higginson's description of the Lind he saw perform as "tall, slender" with a "face like all the pictures" (M. T. Higginson 99).
Again and again, the testimonies of those who saw Lind perform emphasize the chameleon-like nature of her persona, her ability to project a quality of purity -- Heine dubbed her the "prima donna immaculata" -- as well as an otherworldly, unsettling aura (Hume 100). A writer for the Boston Semi-Weekly Advertiser attributed her charm to "an expression of countenance, residing chiefly in the eye, which amounts to absolute fascination, and almost to witchery in the primitive sense of the word." He continued, "[S]he seems like one possessed, as if some spirit more than human inspired her" (qtd. in Ware and Lockard vii). Lind herself displayed more confidence in her acting ability than in her singing gifts, claiming, "The power of dramatic declamation was with me such a free gift given with such liberality, that the spiritual only needed the opportunity, life (Leben) to come into expression" (Holmstrom 550). Dickinson, too, describes this transformation in Lind, writing, "[S]he has an air of exile in her mild blue eyes." Dickinson continues:
"Give me my thatched cottage" as she sang grew so earnest she seemed half lost in song and for a transient time I fancied she had found it and would be seen "na mair," and then her foreign accent made her again a wanderer. (Letters 121)
The performance Dickinson saw took place in a church in Northampton,and the singularity of a woman taking the place of a male minister at the head of the church was surely not lost on Dickinson, whose propensity for imaginative flights from the confines of church pews is a matter of record.3 The rhetoric of her description of Lind's performance suggests that for Dickinson (who was capable of imagining a female trinity composed of herself, Lavinia, and Sue), Lind provided a tantalizing vision of female religious power. Dickinson lends the Dickinson family entourage's entrance into the church a certain solemnity -- "We walked in silence" -- and she lapses into an anaphoral litany of events, writing, "What words express," "What fancy conceive," "how the stage . . . drew up," "how all of us alighted," "how Jennie came out," "how it thundered outside," "how we all loved Jennie Lind" (Letters 121). Her language seems derived from the Bible as she reports that it "thundered outside and inside with the thunder of God and of men" and intones to Austin: "judge ye which was the loudest" (Letters 121).4
But at the same time that Dickinson could have been conjuring up images of an alternative female-centered religion, she was also acutely aware of Lind as performer and her effect on her audience. In poem 1206, Dickinson writes:
In this poem, Dickinson positions herself as a performer for whom the spectacle is reversed with the viewer becoming "Fair play." Dickinson, sitting in Lind's audience, is as transfixed by Lind's effect on those around her as she is by Lind herself. She writes to Austin:
Father sat all the evening looking mad, and silly, and yet so much amused you would have died laughing -- when the performers bowed, he said "Good evening Sir" -- and when they retired, "very well -- that will do," it was'nt sarcasm exactly, nor it was'nt disdain, it was infinitely funnier than either of those virtues, as if old Abraham had come to see the show, and thought it was all very well, but a little excess of Monkey! (Letters 121)
Karl Keller, in his discussion of Dickinson's interest in British women writers, claims, "She was not so much looking for a female imagination and certainly not any feminine movement, as trying to learn how female self-consciousness confronted the marketplace" (328). A similar fascination might be posited as playing a significant role in Dickinson's impression of Lind. Dickinson's acute awareness of the market value held by Jenny Lind is evidenced in her written comment, "She took 4000$ / mistake arithmetical / for tickets at Northampton aside from all expenses" (Letters 121). Dickinson was reminded of the financial aspect of Lind's art every time she opened a newspaper in the days before the local concerts. Throughout her tour, Lind's success was consistently measured in terms of ticket sales. The July 4, 1851 Daily Republican reports:
The best of musical performances in this region rarely draw over 300 or 400 people at 25 cents a ticket. But in this case, the merited name and fame of one young woman crowds our most spacious edifices with thousands of admiring listeners, freely paying 2, 3 and $4 for the opportunity of drinking in her soul-inspiring music. ("Jenny Lind at Northampton")
The paper also advertises songbooks for the concerts selling for twenty-five cents each as well as tickets available from scalpers whose success was reported to be substantial: "Tickets to the Concert were sold in considerable numbers during Tuesday at a dollar advance, and the sharpers who bought on speculation must have realized clever little sums" ("Jenny Lind's Tuesday").
Increasing the fascination with Lind's income was a Barnum-masterminded publicity stunt (to which Lind called a halt before the Northampton concert) whereby tickets to each Lind concert were sold at public auction. The bidding reached its greatest heights in Boston where the first seat brought an astounding $625. The fact of these public auctionings of the opportunity to witness a woman's art casts new light on one of Dickinson's most famous poems. She writes:
Publication -- is the Auction
Of the Mind of Man --
Poverty -- be justifying
For so foul a thing
Possibly -- but We -- would rather
From Our Garret go
White -- Unto the White Creator --
Than invest -- Our Snow --
The poem seems to create a fairly straightforward antithesis between the foulness of publication and a purer alternative, presumably one that rejects public revelation. But the emphasis on whiteness in this poem as well as the figure of the auction suggests an oblique, perhaps even unconscious, nod to the figure of Jenny Lind. Dickinson's fascination with the color white has been well documented; Richard Chase and Albert Gelpi set the tone for discussions of the color in Dickinson's oeuvre early on by their alliance of white with the largest of existential unknowns: the Absolute, the transcendence of time, the final mystery (Chase 180; Gelpi, 115). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar provide the most comprehensive treatment of Dickinson and white, linking the color to "the whole metaphorical history of Emily Dickinson as a supposed person" (613-621, quote from 613). Lind's associations with the color provide yet another nuance to this rich area of speculation. Lind was known for dressing in white -- Higginson saw her perform in "a very unbecoming white dress, and white roses in her hair" -- and she was as much revered for a chaste and charitable persona as for her singing ability (M. T. Higginson 100). Complicating the dichotomy Dickinson sets up in the poem at hand between publication and whiteness is the figure of Lind, the most famously published and auctioned-off entity of the century, who also embodied a whiteness beyond reproach. It is worth questioning whether the "We" of the second stanza which one might, given Dickinson's affection for queenly stances, read as a royal "we," could possibly be a "we" that encompasses Dickinson and Lind in a practice off limits to the "Mind of Man." That is, the poem might be toying with an exalted female alternative to the vagaries of publication in a masculine marketplace.5
It is impossible to ascertain Dickinson's reaction to Lind's financial success and independence, but her importance as a model of female self-fashioning seems indisputable. The enormous popularity of "the Swedish Nightingale" perhaps accounts for the predominance of bird poems in nineteenth-century women's poetry.6 Lind certainly encouraged, if she did not create, her ornithological appellation, claiming, "I sing after no one's 'methode' -- only that of the birds (as far as I am able); for their Teacher was the only one who responded to my requirements for truth, clearness, and expression" (Wagenknecht 22). Obviously, Dickinson, too, was attracted to the bird as model and muse, but the nature of her adaptation of this image or persona is more ambiguous than Lind's.7 In one of Dickinson's early poems, "One Sister have I in our house," she figures Sue Gilbert as an "other" that
. . . as a bird her nest,
Builded our hearts among.
She did not sing as we did --
It was a different tune --
Herself to her a music
As Bumble bee of June.
In Dickinson's references to birds and their song, the emphasis is usually on difference, difficulty, and danger. Sue Gilbert Dickinson wrote to Emily Dickinson in 1861, "If a nightingale sings with her breast against a thorn, why not we?" (qtd. in Sewall 203). There is a similar sense of resistance in a variety of Dickinson's writings. Poem 248 begins, "Why -- do they shut Me out of Heaven? / Did I sing -- too loud?" (113). And a bird is at the center of the self-revealing allegory Dickinson creates in a letter to the Hollands. She writes:
I found a bird, this morning, down -- down -- on a little bush at the foot of the garden, and wherefore sing, I said, since nobody hears?
One sob in the throat, one flutter of bosom -- "My business is to sing" -- and away she rose! (Letters 413)
Dickinson's choice of the word "business" is significant. In referring to song -- and by implication her own songs -- as a business, she gives to female writing the serious professional dimension so lacking in her age's response to women's poetry.
If Lind made a deep impression on Dickinson, she only served to heighten Dickinson's fascination with performance and not to instigate it. If anything, Lind, who abandoned the opera stage (where she had her first success) for the more subdued occupation of the concert singer, might have been too tepid a persona for Dickinson's taste. Both anecdotal evidence and Dickinson's writings suggest that the poet whose gift lay in utilizing the most dramatic adjective or verb was quite prone to self-dramatization. Indeed, Dickinson's most carefully staged performance was probably reserved for her first meeting with Thomas Higginson. Dickinson's theatrical self-figuring was quite deliberate; she presented herself as an Ophelia-like figure who seemed to have wafted in from the nearest opera or ballet. Higginson recalls:
A step like a pattering child's in the entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a face a little like Belle Dove's; not plainer -- with no good feature -- in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue net worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said "These are my introduction" in a soft frightened breathless childlike voice. (Letters 473)
The costume, the stage prop lilies, the opening gambit -- all point to a studied effect. Dickinson's penchant for white dresses has elicited an interesting range of speculation ranging from the quotidian -- Kathryn Whitford's situating of Dickinson's preference in "the rigors of nineteenth-century housekeeping" (12) -- to the sublime -- Wendy Barker's identification (following the similar assertions of Richard Chase, John Cody, Jean McClure Mudge, and Jane Donahue Eberwein) of the dress as a "cryptic emblem for [Dickinson's] self-designated royalty" (80).8 Again, Gilbert and Gubar provide the most extensive and suggestive treatment (613-21). The affection for white dresses exhibited by Lind and also by Fanny Kemble, another performer in whom Dickinson indicated an interest,9 suggests that Dickinson's penchant for white may have been prompted by theatrical rather than practical or beatific inclinations, lending credence to Sandra Gilbert's view of the dress as an "extraordinary costume" (31).
At least one of Dickinson's performance poems -- of which there are a surprising number10 -- seems to have been written with Lind in mind. When Dickinson describes in poem 283 a performer with "A Mien to move a Queen -- / Half Child -- Half Heroine -- / An Orleans in the Eye," she could well be describing the Swedish singer who dazzled Queen Victoria and whose greatest fascination lay in her "air of exile." Dickinson goes on to describe:
This poem, with its remarkable description of a voice "Like Let of Snow," would seem to support my suggestion that "Publication is the Auction" can be read in the light of auctions for Jenny Lind tickets. The unusual uses of the word "snow" in the two poems seem linked. In "Publication," which is dated later, Dickinson uses snow as an image of the creativity that she does not want to "invest," whereas here she uses it to describe the quality of a voice, Lind's artistic instrument. The final stanza in "A Mien to move a Queen -- " calls to mind the distanced figure of Jenny Lind, both as a tiny figure on a distant stage and (as I will discuss more fully later) as a public heroine half fallen from grace. In the double reading of the word "Compromise" -- men compromise merely in order to revere or, alternately, men compromise Lind, that is, Lind is compromised by her public -- the poem enacts concerns similar to those expressed in "Publication is the Auction."
Finally, it is quite possible that, for Dickinson, Lind's ability to elicit reverence rather than "fear" or endearment seemed inadequate. In the most exuberant of Dickinson's performance poems, the poem Elizabeth Phillips describes as the happiest poem Dickinson wrote, the poet envisions herself as a dancer (207). In "I cannot dance upon my Toes," she may be quite directly contrasting her creative powers with the likes of Lind when she imagines a capacity to perform that would "blanch a Troupe -- / Or lay a Prima, mad." She writes:
And though I had no Gown of Gauze --
No Ringlet, to my Hair,
Nor hopped to Audiences -- like Birds,
One claw upon the Air,
Nor tossed my shape in Eider Balls,
Nor rolled on wheels of snow
Till I was out of sight, in sound,
The House encore me so --
This passage calls to mind the Lind of the white dress, the sausage rolls of hair, and the nightingale nomer only to mock the singer for her absurd pose before an audience. It also rings yet another change on the curious snow image of the two poems I have already discussed. Dickinson defines herself against this lady singer persona, preferring to dance "like a Bomb, abroad" (Poems 250) over adopting the more servile pose of the chanteuse. In this poem, as in earlier poems, she insists on having things both ways. She imagines herself outdoing other female performers, but finally insists on the private nature of her talent, writing "Nor any know I know the Art / I mention -- easy -- Here." Dickinson's personal biography encourages one to read the "House" of the last line in more than one way, as the applauding occupants of a theatre and as the actual house to which Dickinson confined her literary performances.
Richard Sewall has chronicled Dickinson's fascination with Shakespeare; her father's eight-volume edition of Shakespeare is a likely candidate for Dickinson's Ur-text (700-705). Dickinson fashioned herself after Shakespeare's most theatrical heroine, naming herself "Amherst" in imitation of Antony's "Egypt." Writing to Louise Norcross, Dickinson describes herself in attic performance: "I read a few words since I came home -- John Talbot's parting with his son, and Margaret's with Suffolk. I read them in the garret, and the rafters wept" (Letters 440). Norcross leaves us the only account of a Dickinson declamation of her own poems, the most private of theatricals held behind the green slats of the pantry blinds. Norcross writes, "I know that Emily Dickinson wrote most emphatic things in the pantry, so cool and quiet, while she skimmed the milk, because I sat on the footstool behind the door in delight as she read them to me" (Scharnhorst 485).
It is time to recast the "I'm Nobody" poet in light of her fascination with performers and performance. The concept of an enormously theatrical Dickinson, who staged appearances in her poems, letters, and daily life, suggests that her reticence in submitting her poems to a public market was more a response to the conditions of the marketplace than any inherent unwillingness to perform. The end of the Jenny Lind story illuminates two of the more frequently discussed aspects of Dickinson's biography: her reluctance to publish and her "failure" to marry. Lind married Otto Goldschmidt in February of 1852 in Boston and spent a three-month honeymoon in Northampton. The marriage brought about an abrupt turn-around in the media's attitude toward Lind. Thomas Higginson, in a letter to his mother, describes a letter some acquaintances of his received from Jenny Lind which she signed "Jenny Goldschmidt -- doesn't it look prettier?" (40). The newspapers and magazines emphatically disagreed. In an article that was republished in the Springfield Daily Republican, Harper's New Monthly Magazine asked, "Why is Madame Goldschmidt so much less than Jenny Lind?" and then went on to answer its own question: "Because she who has conquered the world by song and goodness, has herself been conquered" ("Editor's Easy Chair"). The record of public perception of Jenny Lind Goldschmidt provided by the Springfield Daily Republican is a revealing one. The first article published after Lind's marriage was preoccupied with her housekeeping: "Her kitchen utensils comprise an elegant little tea-kettle, a toaster, and a flat-iron." And the Republican, on later dates, gave glad tidings of the happiness of Otto Goldschmidt's parents and of Otto Goldschmidt's wealth ("Jenny Goldschmidt"; SDR 31 Mar. 1852). In a front-page article entitled "A New Glory for Jenny Lind Goldschmidt," the Republican joyously reported, "Otto's father is one of the richest men in Hamburger. He has three immense Silk Merchant's Houses, one in London, one in Hamburgh, and one in Leipsic." Although Jenny Goldschmidt, in Dickinson's region, remained an object of admiration, she was increasingly featured in news accounts as her husband's wife. On reporting of a man who asked Lind for $10,000 to save him from bankruptcy, the Republican sputtered, "We should like to be Mr. Goldschmidt, about an hour and a half -- we should -- just long enough to flog a dozen such lubbers" (SDR 11 Mar. 1852). Dickinson's conception of herself was too grandiose to permit such an eclipsing of her creative powers. Although the appeal of applause was great, the fear of the end of this applause proved to be an equally strong deterrent.
Walt Whitman wrote of the actor "walking, gesticulating, singing, reciting his or her part -- But then sooner or later inevitably wending to the flies or exit door -- vanishing to sight and ear -- and never materializing on this earth's stage again!" (699). With Lind's experience serving as cautionary tale, Dickinson could only concur with that "disgraceful" poet, envisioning a public death that the private theatricals she staged in her poems and letters did not require. In fiercely maintaining control over the venues in which she would perform, as well as the ticketholders for her performances, Dickinson created for herself as hospitable a stage as a nineteenth-century female performer could attain, a stage on which her most flamboyant private persona could try out new and daring lines.
Notes
I wish to thank Betsy Erkkila and Alan Filreis who helped to foster this essay at various stages in its development. I presented an abbreviated version of this paper at the 1990 NEMLA Convention in Toronto.
1. Dickinson reports in a letter that she went to see Lind on a Friday evening, but no concert took place in Dickinson's area on a Friday (Letters 120-121). There was a concert in Northampton on Thursday evening and a concert in Hartford on Saturday, but since Dickinson's report of the weather on the night she attended the concert closely parallels the Republican's report of the weather on the night of the Northampton concert, it is most likely she misidentified the day of the Northampton concert.
2. Walt Whitman and Henry Lewes were notable exceptions. Whitman wrote, "The Swedish Swan, with all her blandishments, never touched my heart in the least," while Lewes claimed to have "always felt an instinctive antipathy to her." For Whitman's comments, see Gay Wilson Allen 112. For Henry Lewes's opinion of Lind, see The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight 6:155.
3. Dickinson wrote to Sue in April, 1851: "[W]hen I was gone to meeting it filled my mind so full, I could not find a chink to put the worthy pastor; when he said 'Our Heavenly Father,' I said 'Oh Darling Sue'; when he read the 100th Psalm, I kept saying your precious letter all over to myself" (Letters 201).
4. Dickinson's rhetorical consecration of Lind's performance is echoed and amplified in the description written by another female witness to that performance. Mrs. Samuel G. Ward was moved to write the following hymn of praise immediately upon arriving home from the concert:
How the old church was filled with melody and worship! How the congregation responded to the preacher! Those walls hitherto sacred to the voice of man were suddenly consecrated to that noble woman. There she stood in simplicity and calm dignity, and made us acknowledge that all sects might worship there. (qtd. in Marsh 397)
5. The poem also begs to be read in the light of a pair of lines from Dickinson's correspondence with Sue, to whom she writes, "Dreamed of your meeting Tennyson in Ticknor and Fields -- where the Treasure is, there the Brain is also" (Letters 455). The mere fact of Dickinson's having and/or writing about such a dream suggests a mixed fascination with and fear of the specifics of publishing -- in the dream, she sends Sue to act as her surrogate in this encounter between female creativity and the male publishing realm.
6. See Walker.
7. Ellen Moers's Literary Women provides a suggestive starting point for discussions of bird imagery in women's writing (245-251). The use of bird imagery by Dickinson, in particular, has been interestingly, although far from exhaustively, discussed by a number of critics. See, for example, Barton Levi St. Armand's brief discussion of "For Every Bird a Nest" which is complemented by George Monteiro's comments on the same poem. See also Darryl Hattenhauer's "Feminism in Dickinson's Bird Imagery," which argues that Dickinson uses the image of the bird to symbolize males, and Jane Donahue Eberwein's association of Dickinson's birds with challenge and ascent in Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation (19). Wendy Barker uses Moers's comments to align Dickinson's use of birds with her poetic determination (124).
8. In his fascinating examination of Dickinson's cultural milieu, Barton Levi St. Armand, using a scrapbook of newspaper clippings accumulated by one of Dickinson's friends, points to an article describing Balzac's habit of writing while wearing a loose white robe as another possible source of inspiration for Dickinson's costume.
9. Fanny Kemble, whom Dickinson mentions in a letter, was a popular British stage actress who late in her career renounced acting for the more dignified theatrical genre of dramatic reading. According to Philip Collins, she "for several decades read in rotation twenty-five of Shakespeare's plays, in Britain and America, with great sensitivity and passion, dressing in black velvet for tragedy and white satin for comedy" (11). Dickinson's mention of Kemble in an 1859 letter to Louise Norcross is prefaced by a discussion of "greatness," her ongoing preoccupation. She writes:
It's a great thing to be "great," Loo, and you and I might tug for a life, and never accomplish it, but no one can stop our looking on, and you know some cannot sing, but the orchard is full of birds, and we all can listen. What if we learn, ourselves, some day! Who indeed knows?
She continues:
Do you still attend Fanny Kemble? "Aaron Burr" and father think her an "animal," but I fear zoology has few such instances. I have heard many notedly bad readers, and a fine one would be almost a fairy surprise. (Letters 345)
One suspects that Edward Dickinson's opprobium only increased his daughter's interest in Kemble.
10. For example, "You said that I "was Great" -- one Day" (Poems 362) can easily be read as the oratory of an actress, and in "The Way I read a Letter's -- this" (Poems 314), a poem purportedly providing instructions on how to avoid being observed, Dickinson's narrator conjures up two separate audiences for her "infinite" self.
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