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1These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

Martha Ackmann’s These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson is an important addition to the short list of essential Emily Dickinson (1830–86) biographies. This is due to solid, painstaking scholarship and Ackmann’s ability to vitalize the facts of Dickinson’s life in a manner that casts new light on even the most well-known events. As Ackmann states in her “Author’s Note,” “[T]his is a work of narrative nonfiction that seeks to animate Dickinson and bring her story to life” (xxi). Ackmann achieves this goal in large part due to her skill as a storyteller who aims “to convey the shape and texture of [Dickinson’s] world” (xxi). Having spent much of her life in the vicinity of Amherst and having taught for many years at Mount Holyoke College, Ackmann is uniquely qualified to communicate the texture of Dickinson’s world, and she does so with grace and gusto. Readers familiar with previous Dickinson biographies will be delighted by Ackmann’s stimulating and fresh recreations of Dickinson’s early friendships and home life, her experience at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and her relationships with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson (1830–1913); her trusted reader and advisor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911); and her most determined fan, Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–85). Those new to Dickinson will also be enchanted with these, and with the additional strands of Dickinson’s life that Ackmann includes among her ten pivotal moments, as Ackmann knows not only how to find the story in the facts but also how to present it in accessible, even captivating language.The field of Dickinson biography is blessed by major works that complement rather than displace one another. Richard B. Sewall’s 1974 The Life of Emily Dickinson remains a standard biography, as does Alfred Habegger’s 2001 The Life of Emily Dickinson: My Wars Are Laid Away in Books. Scholars tend to draw equally from both these sources, often in conjunction with Jay Leyda’s 1960 The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson. There are several reasons These Fevered Days should be considered equally indispensable. Foremost is Ackmann’s presentation of a very human Dickinson with whom readers can easily identify. Ackmann’s is for this reason the best biography for beginners. Sewall’s biography touches on all the major events and addresses scholarly concerns, but his presentation jumps around in time and can be disorienting. Habegger provides a straightforward chronological narrative that proceeds from an analytical perspective, but his dedication to providing a comprehensive account of the life means including the less interesting moments as well as the riveting. Leyda’s work, in contrast, is strictly chronological and richly detailed, but it does not provide an overall narrative structure. Ackmann’s decision to focus on ten pivotal moments enables her to offer a consistent chronological narrative that does not attempt to be comprehensive; rather, it concentrates on select moments that Ackmann deems crucial to Dickinson’s development. Ackmann describes her narrative structure this way: “While each chapter circles around a specific day, it also spools back through time to past thoughts and events informing that moment” (xix). The result is a book composed of ten high points that span the poet’s life, beginning with her initial recognition of her calling to be a poet at age fourteen and ending with her death.A representative example of Ackmann’s narrative approach is her description of Dickinson’s February 6, 1848, meeting with Mary Lyon (1797–1849), the founder and president of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Lyon wanted to meet privately with the seventeen-year-old student to discuss her spiritual well-being, in particular, her willingness to accept Christ and join the ranks of recently converted. As with all her chapters, Ackmann sets the stage with a chapter title that incorporates language from the chapter climax; in this case, “It Is Hard for Me to Give Up the World” (26). Ackmann then follows the chapter title with a specific date and the meteorological entry made for that day by Ebenezer Snell (1801–76), a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Amherst College. This, too, is a practice Ackmann follows with each chapter. Such meteorological specificity is possible because after Snell’s death in 1876, his daughter Sabra (1845–1932) continued to make daily entries so that the Snell record is continuous for all of Dickinson’s life. This minor-seeming detail contributes significantly to Ackmann’s success at communicating the “texture” of Dickinson’s world. As it turns out, February 6, 1848, was a still, twenty-six degrees. Ackmann tells us that when Dickinson entered Lyon’s private rooms on this chill winter day, “her keen eye took in everything: a worn copy of Gorham’s Chemistry, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Miss Lyon’s Bible—the pages smooth and bare without a single mark from her hand” (46). The details are important: “The shuffled surface of her desk was like a map of her mind: a searching intellect, insatiable, and alive with ideas” (46). We learn that “Mary Lyon and Emily were alike in so many ways, and in so many ways they were not” (46). More precisely, “While Miss Lyon wanted to wrestle down the unknown and tame it with lists and order and systems, Emily wanted to stare it down and walk straight into the abyss” (46). Lyon’s crucial religious question and Dickinson’s response climax the chapter: “Are you willing to give up the world for everlasting life? Emily knew her answer. No, she thought. Amherst, her family, and the deep mud of March were more sacred to her than any religious doctrine. . . . It is hard for me to give up the world, she thought” (47). Ackmann does exercise authorial liberty in giving us Dickinson’s innermost thoughts, but she does so as a scholar in command of her subject. Here, as elsewhere, Ackmann amply notes her sources, the majority of which are Dickinson’s letters.Ackmann generously credits Suzanne Juhasz for having opened her eyes to how she might blend scholarship and imagination to create Dickinson’s inner life (Juhasz, “The Landscape of the Spirit,” Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Judith Farr, Prentice Hall, 1996, pp. 130–40). Acknowledging that “Dickinson’s life was not filled with action, at least not in the conventional sense of the word” (xviii), Ackmann draws on Juhasz’s argument that “Dickinson did indeed have an active life, a life that was lived in her mind” (xix). Most significant for Ackmann is Juhasz’s conviction that “the poet did not retreat and run away from the world” (xix). Instead, she “‘capitaliz[ed] upon a technique that women have always known and used, for survival, using the imagination as a space in which to create some life other than their external situation’” (Juhasz, qtd. in Ackmann xix). Turning specifically to the letters, Ackmann applies Juhasz’s insight: “[I]f we read the letters for what the poet thought, her interior world opens” (xix). “Reading Dickinson’s letters in this alternative way,” Ackmann discloses, “was a revolutionary shift for me” (xix). This shift enabled her to write These Fevered Days, a book that in her words “attempts to crack open that interior world, re-creating the landscape of Dickinson’s consciousness” (xix).A prime example of Ackmann’s skill at utilizing this technique is her description of Dickinson’s thoughts immediately following Thomas Went-worth Higginson’s momentous 1870 meeting with the poet. Ackmann uses Dickinson’s reflections to explain why in a letter immediately preceding Higginson’s visit Dickinson had told him, “‘You were not aware that you saved my Life’” (Dickinson, Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward, Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1958, qtd. in Ackmann 165). Ackmann concentrates on Dickinson’s sense of gratitude: “[A]s exhilarated as she felt, it was gratitude that lingered” (178). Descending further into Dickinson’s thoughts, Ackmann continues: “It was not only that he had read her poems—although she was thankful for that. It was that he had been constant” (178). Searching for the right metaphor to express her gratitude, Dickinson “reached not for metaphors from nature or images of planets and dreams that she had been working with. She went deeper. She chose anatomy. ‘The Vein cannot thank the Artery,’ she told him, ‘but her solemn indebtedness to him, even the stolidest admit’” (Dickinson qtd. in Ackmann 178). This most intimate metaphor proves crucial to Ackmann’s staging of Dickinson’s indebtedness to Higginson: “That’s what Emily meant by saying Higginson had saved her life: her connection to him was vital and sustaining. Emily gave poetry to herself,” Ackmann concludes, “but Higginson had affirmed her choice, and that to her was salvation” (178–79).Readers will of course differ in their responses to Ackmann’s accounts of Dickinson’s inner life, but they must agree that Ackmann makes a significant contribution to current and ongoing scholarship related to primary events in the poet’s life and the questions they provoke. Explaining why Dickinson said that Higginson saved her life is just one of these. Other questions include: Why did Dickinson place such a premium on privacy? Why did she not seek publication? To what extent did she understand her greatness? How was she affected by the Civil War? Ackmann provides responses to these questions and more. She also weaves significant themes through multiple chapters that gather weight and momentum as they surface in varied contexts and at different stages of Dickinson’s life. One of these is Dickinson’s attitude toward fame. Another is her at times vexed relationship with Helen Hunt Jackson. Ackmann effectively addresses the questions and themes that have come to characterize Dickinson’s life through prose that is at all times engaging and grounded in the storyteller’s art. A singular joy this book affords readers is the sense of intimacy Ackmann conveys though her attention to detail that begins with daily meteorological observations and extends to personal reflections on art and the brevity of human life. Scholars and general readers alike will delight in Ackmann’s richly textured excursions into ten pivotal days that give us the exterior world Dickinson shared with others and her interior experience of that world. Many will discover that they have read this book so quickly that they will immediately read it again.

2021Resources for American Literary Study（2021）引用：1

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