Emily Dickinson’s White Dress
Posted in Emily Dickinson, Exhibitions on June 4 2010, by Plant Talk
Reclusive Poet’s Surviving Garment on Display in Library Gallery
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Jane Wald is Executive Director of the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. |
“A step like a pattering child’s in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair . . . in a very plain & exquisitely white pique & a blue net worsted shawl.” This description Thomas Wentworth Higginson sent to his wife in 1870 has been pinned to Emily Dickinson for nearly 150 years. Mabel Loomis Todd heard about “the character” of Amherst almost as soon as she set foot in town in 1881: She “seems to be the climax of all the family oddity. . . . She dresses wholly in white, & her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.” (Photo: Emily Dickinson dress, ca. 1878–82; white dress (reproduction), Emily Dickinson Museum Collection. Original, Amherst History Museum collection)
These contemporary accounts have fixed a compelling image through the decades of, well, oddity. Poetic genius is different from the norm. But odd, isn’t it, that the only full garment known to have belonged to Emily Dickinson and surviving to the present day is one white dress? This iconic garment belongs to the Amherst Historical Society, an exact replica is always on display at the Dickinson Homestead (now part of the Emily Dickinson Museum) in Amherst, and now one is on view in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library Gallery as part of the exhibition Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers.