Tea at Trianon: The Mystery of Emily Dickinson

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, December 20, 2013

The Mystery of Emily Dickinson

From New Republic:

Emily Dickinson is a conspicuous victim of a scholastic tendency to freeze our concepts of a writer's life, perhaps because a frozen concept is easier to grasp, and to pass on, than those more slippery and troublesome non-objects known as artists. There are music-listening courses that use the tags of "Papa Haydn" and "the charming Mozart," and courses in American literature have developed similar labels whose harm far outweighs their convenience. Our Emily is in much the same position as that “comical Mark Twain” before Van Wyck Brooks showed him, newly and darkly, to us. Our Emily, of course, unaware of community and nation, never sees anyone, never wears any color but white, never does a lick of work about the house beyond baking batches of cookies for secret delivery to favorite children and meditating majestically among her flowers—this is an Emily who remains hidden in her second-floor bedroom, jotting down little verses that help her to keep alive the great love that she renounced many, many years since. This is the image foisted on us for so long that we now accept it as fact; we not only suspect anything we hear that does not “fit,” but we criticize Miss Dickinson for being this absurd fiction. (Read more.)