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"I—Pay—in Satin Cash—": Commerce, Gender, and Display in Emily Dickinson's Poetry

The court case pitting Lavinia Dickinson against the family of Mabel Loomis Todd, which came to trial on 1 March 1898, was ostensibly a dispute over the rightful ownership of a strip of meadow. Vinnie Dickinson was trying to reclaim land that had been given over to the Todds at the instigation of her brother Austin, who had been Mrs. Todd’s lover. But as a spectacle, the trial offered the people of Amherst a great deal more. It dramatized, in particularly stark form, tensions that had pervaded this community and others for some time. Accounts both of the litigants’ styles of dress and of the lawyers’ arguments make it clear that the trial became a struggle between different types of womanhood. Vinnie presented herself in court in strikingly poor clothes: an old blue flannel dress, yellow shoes, and a long black veil. She was accompanied by her long-time servant, Maggie Maher, and a friend, Miss Buffum. Her female adversary was the much younger Mabel Loomis Todd. Mrs. Todd had always displayed a subtle sense of style, exceptional in the relatively provincial milieu of Amherst. She was later pleased to remember that on this occasion she had worn a black hat with white wings. It may be that Vinnie did not have other, smarter clothes. But her ignorance of the imperatives of fashion also conveyed meanings having to do with the entitlements of class. Whether calculatedly or not, Vinnie presented herself as a gentlewoman of the old school, unconcerned about making a showy appearance. One contemporary observed that Vinnie was dressed in such a way as to suggest her ‘‘unworldliness.’’ 1 Her lawyer exploited this notion of her as a woman out of time, portraying her as a relic of a more venerable social order