My Turn: The image of Emily Dickinson

Even though I have lived in the Pioneer Valley for almost 40 years and have long been a student of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, yesterday was my first visit to the Dickinson Homestead in Amherst. It’s a wonderful resource, and the museum has done a great job of restoration to give us an idea of the environment from which Dickinson drew much of her inspiration. The tour guides were excellent, and I especially enjoyed the tour of The Evergreens, where our guide Thackeray’s encyclopedic knowledge and deep love for the place made the tour the highlight of my visit.

Only one thing was lacking. According to the Dickinson Electronic Archives, a daguerreotype was discovered in 1995 that appears to show Emily Dickinson and her friend Catherine (Kate) Scott Turner; the Emily in this picture is a grown woman of 29, healthy, strong, and confident, dressed slightly unfashionably for her time, in a dark color — not the legendary white of her reclusive years — with her arm around her companion. This image is so different from one we have all seen, of a 16-year-old, skinny, pimpled teenage girl, it gives us a much better idea of the woman we know from her work: eccentric, yes, but empowered by her eccentricity to transform the poetic canon for centuries after her death in 1886, when nearly all of her more than 1,700 poems were still unpublished.

According to the Amherst College Library website, the newly discovered image became known to Archives and Special Collections staff in 2007; it is now in the possession of the New York State Historical Society. There is much evidence to support the identification of Emily Dickinson in the daguerreotype, especially the Susan Pepin Report, which compares the new image to the known image of Emily as a girl. The report, relating details of the unique asymmetries of the facial features shared by the pictures from 1847 and 1859, concludes convincingly that these women “are the same people.”

I asked why the only image available at the Dickinson museum is of the sickly teenage Emily, whose poetry was still unwritten. I was told that they are not permitted to use the image because it has not been authenticated. A video about this discovery was posted on YouTube 12 years ago, and I would like to know why this authentication has not yet taken place. It seems to me that the biometrics alone — measurements acceptable by American courts as evidence in criminal cases — should make the case for its inclusion in the historical record. Is there some reason — perhaps financial? — for the conservators of this literary estate not to make this image public at the museum itself? If it is a lack of funds, why have donors not been enlisted to conclude the process? Or might there be some investment in keeping Emily pathetic and tragic, permanently trapped in the equivalent of a high-school yearbook picture?

I would like more details from Amherst College. Would the people in charge of this project want to be remembered forever as high school sophomores? Can’t the grown up Emily, in the full flower of adulthood, be the one we think of when we read her powerful words?

Skian McGuire lives in Warwick.