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with Edward’s siblings, and she was like a sibling herself. She didn’t get along with Lucretia Gunn Dickinson; no one did. And on December 10, 1830, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in Squire Dickinson’s former house, presumably at five o’clock in the morning. Whatever gifts she had or developed with such tenacity didn’t come from that stilted language revealed in her father’s courtship letters. She inherited his red hair, not his writing voice.
    â€œLanguage is first made in the mother’s body,” writes Aífe Murray in Maid as Muse. For Emily Dickinson, it may have been a very sad song. Her mother was plaintive most of her life. And, says Murray,“No language acquisition will ever be so sensate as the learning of our mother tongue.” But that mother tongue was shaped by the sounds and movements of a young wife in a house that must have sometimes felt like half a prison—and a morgue. Her melancholy didn’t come out of nowhere. Less than a month after she gave birth to Emily Elizabeth, her father, Joel Norcross, married again, to Sarah Vaill, a much younger woman. Lavinia was perturbed by her father’s decisionto remarry so soon after her mother’s death. She would write to her sister on December 6, 1830:
    I know of no one that I should prefer to her      [Sarah Vaill] from what I have heard of her character & I hope it will be for Father’s happiness & the happiness of his family—but we can not tell—what shall I call her? Can I say Mother.
    We have no written record or reaction of how Emily Sr. felt. But she must have continued to grieve for her mother, and locked that grief inside herself. That hardly means she abandoned Austin and little Emily. Yet Dickinson’s psychoanalytic biographer, John Cody, makes this wildly reductive remark.“A warmer relationship with her mother would probably have made her a housewife,” as if Cody had found the dynamics of Dickinson’s art. But I suspect another dynamic was at play here, that Dickinson absorbed her mother’s pain, and was her own little mourner—that mourner would become Vesuvius at Home, a poet filled with a crackling rage.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  The soul has moments of escape—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  When bursting all the doors—
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  She dances like a Bomb, abroad . . .      [Fr360]
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    E MILY S R . SUFFERED THE WAY most other women suffered in nineteenth-century New England, however rich or poor. If she wanted to marry, she had to leave her parents’ home like a vagabond in a bridal gown, shelve herself inside her husband’s surname, learn to live with this man who was little more than a stranger, no matter what courtship rites were followed, and become subservient to this stranger’s kin and to all his sexual needs and desires. Women were trained by their mothers and older sisters to give in to “a man’s requirements” and “the low practices” of sexual intercourse. They were told to lie still and to seekno pleasure for themselves. There was no pleasure to be had in this kind of ritualized rape. They were harlots if they ever moved or groaned with delight. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule—women who were a bit more adventurous, and husbands who were gentler and more feminized. Women and men were both trapped within the same Calvinist culture, and were often victims of an identical patriarchy. If they didn’t profess their faith, they would rot in hell—husbands might be separated forever from their wives and children. And so there were constant religious revivals, mass professions of faith. But there were no female pastors. Men ruled the church, just as they ruled the banks and the law courts, and ruled Amherst College. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary wasn’t founded until 1837; even if Emily Norcross had been a better student, she would