And now they’re dead.
No, wait, the apology did not cause death. Because they could not stop for death, but it kindly stopped for them anyway! As it is wont to do. The poetess was Emily Dickinson, neurasthenic homebody and possibly agoraphobic verse-slinger; the dude-feminist was Samuel Bowles, impressively bearded newspaper editor and superfan of equal rights for all.
Bowles was a friend to Dickinson’s family, a highly regarded, actively political anti-slavery activist who edited the Springfield Republican, which published poetry — including Dickinson’s — and short fiction as well as news. Some critics think he may also have been Dickinson’s unnamed crush object — the person she addresses as Master in her submissive “Master letters,” the Christian Grey to her Anastasia Steele (ish).
Regardless of whether she held a tendre for Bowles, she certainly liked and respected him. But he was more impassioned about feminism than she was. As the Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson notes, “Bowles would have made a sympathetic audience for any discussion of women’s rights, but Dickinson never availed herself of the opportunity. Instead, she ridiculed women who involved themselves in public affairs.”
Once, apparently, she went too far. In his book Effective Apology, John Kador (an expert on business apologies), notes that in 1860 Dickinson wrote Bowles a letter of apology after he came to dinner at her family’s house and she mocked Florence Nightingale (nurse and social reformer) and Elizabeth Fry (British Quaker prison reformer and founder of homeless shelters) over the meal.
Journalist in the streets, feminist in the sheets. Probably.
Dear Mr. Bowles,
I am much ashamed. I misbehaved tonight. I would like to sit in the dust. I fear I am your little friend no more, but Mrs. Jim Crow.
I am sorry I smiled at women.
Indeed, I revere holy ones, like Mrs. Fry and Miss Nightingale. I will never be giddy again. Pray forgive me now: Respect little Bob O’Lincoln again!
My friends are very few. I can count them upon my fingers, and besides, have fingers to spare.
I am gay to see you–because you come so scarcely, else I had been graver.
Good night. God will forgive me–Will you please to try?
Emily.
It’s a cute and winsome letter. She makes herself sound naive and harmless, using the word “little” twice and comparing herself to a bird (the Bob O’Lincoln is today called the bobolink and known for its repetitive four-note song — was she saying she didn’t know what was just parroting others or being birdbrained when she insulted women in public life?) and by comparing herself to Jim Crow, she was hyperbolically telling this abolitionist she worried she was his sworn enemy. She also guilts him a little — if you came to our house more often, I wouldn’t have been so giddy to see you and I wouldn’t have been such a goofball! She’s coyly confident that she has God’s forgiveness (hey, hope is the thing with feathers, amirite?), so how on earth could Bowles fail to forgive her too?
She was pretty explicit about not wanting to be a public figure herself.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one’s name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
Maybe her scorn about other women taking activist roles was a form of protesting too much. I’m not a psychologist, and I’m not an expert in Civil War era women’s writing. I’m sure to a degree the mannered quality of the note is a reflection of its era. Further, I imagine that as a single woman addressing a married man (she was around 30 and he was around 34 when this was written) she was deliberately being flirty but unthreatening, stressing her innocence. We don’t know Bowles’s response, but since he continued to publish her, we assume she was indeed forgiven. I’m willing to do the same. After all, she didn’t insult Fry and Nightingale to their faces. She snarked about them at a dinner party. If this is a sin, I’m in hell.
Gaze into my eyes. But come to my house because I can’t go out.
And hey, at least Dickinson didn’t call Nightingale “a bar rat whose name is written on the bathroom wall of every men’s room in Palo Alto.”
Apparently throughout her life Emily Dickinson bemoaned her natural “impertinence.” Indeed! Maybe being coy and cute got her through that. Or not.
This is splendid. You’re even nicer to her apology than I would be, but I guess you’re right to take into account the era. A little too much adorable-little-me for me.