Emily's Mother

How did her mother fit in... to her life and genius?

Emily Dickinson is one of the most mysterious writers in literary history. Although she was a literary genius, only eight of her poems were published in her life, and she lived a secluded existence. But, this quiet life at home can be compared to the isolated life her mother lived.

About Emily's Mother: Emily Norcross

Emily Norcross was born on July 3, 1804, and she married Edward Dickinson on May 6, 1828. The couple's first child, William Austin Dickinson, was born just 11 months later. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 and her sister, Lavinia Norcross Dickinson (Vinnie) was born several years later on February 28, 1833. From what we know of Emily Norcross, she seldom left home, only making brief visits to relatives.

Later, Dickinson would rarely leave home, spending most of her days in the same house.

She isolated herself more and more as she grew older, and she seemed to become more selective in whom she saw from her circle of family and friends.

Of course, one marked difference between Dickinson and her mother is that she never married. There has been a great deal of speculation about why Emiy Dickinson never married. In one of her poems, she writes, "I'm wife; I've finished that... " and "She rose to his requirement... / To take the honorable work / Of woman and of wife."

Perhaps she had a long-lost lover. Perhaps, she chose to live a different sort of life--without leaving home and without marrying. Whether it was a choice, or simply a matter of circumstance, her dreams came to fruition in her work. She could imagine herself--in and out of love and marriage. And, she was always free to spend her flood of words, with passionate intensity.

For whatever reason, Dickinson did not marry. And, even her relationship with her mother was troubled.

The Strain--Never Having Had a Mother

Dickinson once wrote to her mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "My Mother does not care for thought-—," which was foreign to the way Dickinson lived.

Later she wrote to Higginson: "Could you tell me what home is. I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled."

Dickinson's relationship with her mother may have been strained, especially during her earliest years. She could not look to her mother for support in her literary efforts, but none of the members of her family or friends saw her as a literary genius. Her father saw Austin as the genius, and never looked beyond. Higginson, while supportive, described her as "partially cracked." She had friends, but none of them really understood the true extent of her genius. They found her witty, and they enjoyed corresponding with her through letters. In many ways, though, she was completely alone.

On June 15, 1875, Emily Norcross Dickinson suffered a paralytic stroke, and suffered from a long period of illness thereafter. This period of time may have had more influence on her seclusion from society than any other, but it was also a way for the mother and daughter to become closer than ever before. For Dickinson, it was also just another small step away into her upper room—-into her writing.

Vinnie said that one of the "daughters must be constantly at home." She explains her sister's seculsion by saying that "Emily chose this part." Then, Vinnie said that Emily, "finding the life with her books and nature so congenial, continued to live it..."

An End

Dickinson cared for her mother for the final seven years of her life, until her mother died on November 14, 1882. In a letter to Mrs. J.C. Holland, she wrote: "The dear Mother that could not walk, has flown. It never occurred to us that she had not Limbs, she had Wings—-and she soared from us unexpectedly as a summoned Bird—-"

Dickinson could not understand what it meant: the death of her mother. She had experienced so much death in her life, not only with the deaths of friends and acquaintances, but the death of her father, and now her mother. She had wrestled with the idea of death; she had feared it; and she wrote many poems about it. In "'Tis so appalling," she wrote, "Looking at death is dying." So, her mother's final end was hard for her, especially after such a long illness.

Dickinson wrote to Maria Whitney: "All is faint indeed without our vanished mother, who achieved in sweetness what she lost in strength, though grief of wonder at her fate made the winter short, and each night I reach finds my lungs more breathless, seeking what it means."

Emily's mother might not have been the genius that her daughter was, but she influenced Dickinson's life in ways she probably didn't even realize. In total, Dickinson wrote 1,775 poems in her life. Would Emily have written so many, or would she have written any at all, if she had not lived that solitary existence at home? She lived for so many years alone--in the room of her own.

Source: About.com: Classic Literature

The Marlovian theory

The Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship holds, first, that Christopher Marlowe did not die on 30th May 1593 as the historical records show, his death having been faked; and second, that in fact he survived long enough to be the main author of the poems and plays typically attributed to William Shakespeare. These are the two things upon which all of those who subscribe to the theory ("Marlovians") would agree.

Against the suggestion that his death was faked are both the fact that it was accepted as genuine by no fewer than sixteen jurors at a coroner's inquest and that there is a complete lack of direct evidence supporting his survival beyond 1593. As for his writing Shakespeare's works, it is generally believed that Marlowe's style—and indeed his whole world-view—are too different to Shakespeare's for this to have been possible, and that all the direct evidence in any case points to William Shakespeare as being the true author. This means that the Marlovian theory is dismissed as nonsense by almost all professional Shakespearian scholars.

Source: Wikipedia

Text Comprehension and Memory Research

When a reader reads a text, an "understanding" of the text is created in the reader's mind. It is convenient to introduce the technical term "situation model" in order to refer to this understanding of a text which is created in the mind of a reader. The process of constructing a situation model is called the "comprehension process", while operations such as "text recall", "text summarization", and "text question-answering" generate scientifically observable events as a by-product of the interactions of the situation model and other knowledge structures in the reader's mind.

http://www.utdallas.edu/~golden/TextComp.html

How to spell

Let's begin with the bad news. If you're a bad speller, you probably think you always will be. There are exceptions to every spelling rule, and the rules themselves are easy to forget. George Bernard Shaw demonstrated how ridiculous some spelling rules are. By following the rules, he said, we could spell fish this way:ghoti. The f as it sounds in enough, the i as it sounds in women, and the sh as it sounds in fiction.

With such rules to follow, no one should feel stupid for being a bad speller. But there are ways to improve. Start by acknowledging the mess that English spelling is in - but have sympathy: English spelling changed with foreign influences. Chaucer wrote gesse, but guess, imported earlier by the Norman invaders, finally replaced it.

If you'd like to intimidate yourself - and remain a bad speller forever - just try to remember the 13 different ways the sound sh can be written:

shoe /suspicion

sugar /nauseous

ocean /conscious

issue /chaperone

nation /mansion

schist /fuchsia

pshaw

Now the good news

The good news is that 90% of all writing consists of 1,000 basic words. There is, also, a method to most English spelling and a great number of how-to-spell books. Remarkably, all these books propose learning the same rules! Not surprisingly, most of these books are humorless.

Just keep this in mind: if you're familiar with the words you use, you'll probably spell them correctly - and you shouldn't be writing words you're unfamiliar with anyway. USE a word - out loud, and more than once - before you try writing it, and make sure (with a new word) that you know what it means before you use it. This means you'll have to look it up in a dictionary, where you'll not only learn what it means, but you'll see how it's spelled. Choose a dictionary you enjoy browsing in, and guard it as you would a diary. You wouldn't lend a diary, would you?

A tip on looking it up

Beside every word I look up in the dictionary, I make a mark. Beside every word I look up more than once, I write a note to myself - about WHY I looked it up. I have looked up "strictly" 14 times since 1964. I prefer to spell it with a k as in "stricktly". I have looked up "ubiquitous" a dozen times. I can't remember what it means.

Another good way to use your dictionary: when you have to look up a word, for any reason, learn - and learn to spell - a new word at the same time. It can be any useful word on the same page as the word you looked up. Put the date beside this new word and see how quickly, or in what way, you forget it. Eventually, you'll learn it.

Some rules, exceptions and two tricks

Some spelling problems that seem hard are really quite easy. What about -ery and -ary? Just remember that there are only six common words in English that end in -ery:

cemetery /monastery

millinery /confectionery

distillery /stationery
(as in paper)

.
Memorize them and feel fairly secure that all the rest end in -ary.

Here's another easy rule. Only four words end in -efy. Most people misspell them with -ify, which is otherwise usually correct. Just memorize these, too, and use -ify for all the rest.

stupefy /putrefy

liquefy /rarefy

As a former bad speller, I have learned a few valuable tricks. Any good how-to-spell book will teach you more than these two, but these two are my favourites. Of the 800,000 words in the English language, the most frequently misspelled is alright.; just remember that alright is all wrong. You wouldn't write alwrong, would you? That's how you know you should write all right.

The other trick is for the truly worst spellers. I mean those of you who spell so badly that you can't get close enough to the right way to spell a word in order to even FIND it in the dictionary. The word you're looking for is there, of course, but you won't find it the way you're trying to spell it. What to do is look up a synonym - another word that means more or less the same thing. Chances are good you'll find the word you're looking for under the definition of the synonym.

Demon words and bugbears

Everyone has a few demon words - they never look right, even when they're spelled correctly. Three of my demons are medieval, ecstasy, and rhythm. I have learned to hate these words, but I have not learned to spell them: I have to look them up every time.

And everyone has a spelling rule that's a bugbear - it's either too difficult to learn or it's impossible to remember. My personal bugbear among the rules is the one governing whether you add -able or -ible. I can teach it to you, but I can't remember it myself.

You add -able to a full word: adapt, adaptable; work, workable. You add -able to words that end -e: just remember to drop the final -e: love, lovable. But if the word ends in -ee, like agree, you keep them both: agreeable.

You add -ible if the base is not a full word that can stand on its own: credible, tangible, horrible, terrible. You add -ible if the root word ends in -ns: responsible. You add -ible if the root word ends in -miss: permissible. You add -ible if the root word ends in a soft -c: (but remember to drop the final -e) force, forcible.

Got that? I don't have it, and I was introduced to that rule in prep school: with that rule I still learn one word at a time.

Originally published by the International Paper Company, 1983.

by John Irving

(author of The World According to Garp & The Hotel New Hampshire)