A Loaded Gun by Jerome Charyn

Author:Jerome Charyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781934137994
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2016-01-20T05:00:00+00:00

SIX

Phantom Lady

1

IT WAS A RUDE PROCESS THAT FRACTURED the face, revealed your mirror image, so that your cheeks were reversed on the silvered copper plate, and your left eye was where your right eye ought to be—the daguerreotype, invented by some French lunatic in 1839. And still Emily sat for her Mold as she called the making of the image. Emerson had called it a kind of rigor mortis when he was daguerreotyped in 1841, keeping “every finger in place with such energy that your hands became clenched for fight or despair, and in your resolution to keep your face still, did you feel every muscle becoming every moment more rigid, the brows contracted into a Tartarean frown, and the eyes fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death?”

She wasn’t enthralled by the tinted ghostly double that stared back at her from the copper plate, and neither was anyone else among the Dickinsons. “It was too solemn, too heavy. It had none of the play of light and shade in Emily’s face,” the future poet’s brother and sister believed. “To capture the flow of movement and grace in a single photograph of the dance” [would be no less impossible] “than it was to produce by any means then known a satisfactory likeness of Emily Dickinson,” according to Millicent Todd Bingham. Dickinson posed for the daguerreotype in 1847; she was sixteen years old, an adolescent with a long neck and beautiful long hands. She looks serious and slightly cockeyed, and reminds me of Emmeline Grangerford, the graveyard poet in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face, but there were so many arms it made her look spidery, seemed to me,” Huck tells us in his own sympathetic and bemused portrait of Emmeline.

Dickinson has no extra arms in the daguerreotype, but she does have a spidery design in her dark cotton dress and her ribbon bracelets and the dark ribbon around her neck. We can imagine how uncomfortable she must have been before this “Daguerrian Artist,” whoever he was. Polly Longsworth and most other critics believe he was Otis H. Cooley, who had his own studio in Springfield, Massachusetts, from 1844 to 1855, whereas Millicent Todd Bingham informed her loyal readers in Emily Dickinson’s Home (1955) that the daguerreotype had been taken by some unremembered wisp of an itinerant photographer who visited Mount Holyoke near the end of 1847 and photographed as many seminarians as he could. But Dickinson declined his overtures—possibly. “With Dickinson the story is never finished,” writes Polly Longsworth.

And Mary Elizabeth Kromer Bernhard, in “Lost and Found: Emily Dickinson’s Unknown Daguerreotypist,” has another story to tell. She’s convinced that the two Emilys—the poet and her mother—sat for William C. North, “Daguerrian Artist,” at Amherst House sometime between December 1846 and March 1847. Advertising in the Hampshire and Franklin Express, North noted that he had taken rooms at the Amherst House for the sole purpose of executing “Daguerreotype Miniatures” in his superior and substantial style.

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