Beyond the Farm by Opal J. M.;

Author:Opal, J. M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Suitors and Strangers

Just as he turned twenty-one in 1814, Edward Hitchcock lost his health. A severe case of the mumps nearly killed him, and a secondary immune response almost blinded him. The aspiring scholar could no longer read without feeling intense pain in his eyes, which meant that he could not prepare for Harvard’s entry exams. No college, no professional future. The sequential disaster turned his “high hopes for distinction” to idle fancy, and he fell into a paralyzing anxiety about what would become of his life. His friends from the academy and the Adelphi were moving away or marrying, and the upcoming wedding of one such peer reduced him to mournful poetry. Laid up at his parents’ home—“down the old lane”—he asked if his friend could spare “one sigh of pure pity” for him before leaving, “with her by your side, Your will be fair bride.” The failure of his health and plans underlined his modest origins, which his mentor, Epaphras Hoyt, inadvertently captured in an 1815 recommendation letter. Edward was “a pretty good astronomer for the Country” Epaphras noted. Yet Hoyt identified the young man not as his student, his nephew, or as a playwright and orator from the Adelphi and academy, but simply as “a son of Deacon Hitchcock of this Town.”34

While doing odd jobs around town, Edward had little choice but to reconsider the honest living of his father and older brothers. (One of them had left town for a time and then returned; he would later confide to Edward that he had not enjoyed “the feelings of a stranger in a strange place”) The unpretending quality of the family business—its basis in productivity rather than reputation, autonomous labors rather than approving looks—carried a well-established claim to manly virtue in rural New England. It also mirrored and reinforced the demanding nature of the family faith. Now that pride had led Edward to ambition, and ambition to disappointment, Calvinism began to make more sense to him. Perhaps he was a sinner, just as his father had always said everyone was. Perhaps Unitarianism was but an “opiate to the conscience,” a device by which the prideful forgot their depravity. The death of another close friend in 1815 deepened Edward’s spiritual and personal crisis.35

He shared his traumatic passage with Orra White, a preceptress at the academy whom he had earlier cast in The Emancipation of Europe. (She had played the Empress of France, opposite Edward, the noble Emperor of Russia.) The daughter of a wealthy farmer from nearby Amherst, Orra had studied at two academies, including one near Boston. Even her early writings reveal her polish and erudition, her brilliance and creativity. She was also pious. Edward recalls her as the “Christian friend” with whom he shared his feelings of guilt and experience of rebirth. In contrast to the occasionally hedonistic Silas Felton, Edward never wrote (that is, never preserved) an irreverent word about women, least of all about Orra White. She was his soulmate. She had saved him from himself.

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