Why Emily Dickinson Wore White

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Born on this day in 1830, Emily Dickinson eventually became not only one of the great American poets, but also one of the most elusive literary figures in the country’s history. While she published only 10 poems in her lifetime, she wrote over 1,800 of them. A contemporary thinker to Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, her work included meditations on nature, art, and spirituality, but also developed a new language with which to discuss them. Though her poems were not collected until after her death, they became an immediate and incredible success.

Beyond her words, there has been another unusual element of Dickinson’s life that has been the object of much speculation over the last 130 or so years: her famed white dress. As the legend goes, the writer began regularly wearing a white dress in her 30s. So often did she wear the ensemble that it became noteworthy to her neighbors, mythic to those who had never even met her. When writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson visited her home in 1870, he famously described her as “a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair…in a very plain [and] exquisitely white pique [and] a blue net worsted shawl.”

The dress itself was what was known at the time as a “wrapper,” this one of white cotton pique with mother of pearl buttons, and worn around the house to do chores or for other very informal activities only in a lady’s home. It was by no means a special garment at the time—white was much easier to clean than a printed or colored fabric—but with Dickinson it took on a storied quality, perhaps because she took to wearing it beyond the scope of its original intentions; that is, she would eschew traditional day dress with its corsets and petticoats to wear just the far more uncomplicated white dress. Though people of Dickinson’s town became used to it after a while, it was still considered unusual behavior at the time, causing Mabel Loomis Todd, who would later collect her poems, to notably quip, “she dresses wholly in white, [and] her mind is said to be perfectly wonderful.”

While the legend goes that Dickinson only wore white toward the end of her life, the idea has been proven untrue by her own writing, where she described a penchant for browns, wools, and calico prints. Even so, theories remain as to why she wore the white dress so often. One idea is that it was an homage to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem “Aurora Leigh,” in which Browning writes that the title character wears “a clean white morning gown,” while other literary inspirations may have been Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Snow Maiden in his story “The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle,” and even the Bible’s book of Revelations. The latter text leads to another theory, that Dickinson’s fondness of white signaled a spiritual choice; while Dickinson refused to join her family’s church, she may have been creating a devotional space in her own way, as Victorian novitiates and Dominican nuns at the time also wore white. Yet another idea is that it was a symbol of eternal life–the poet was also buried in a white dress and a white casket. There are even more theories, but the truth died with the poet, who was reclusive toward the end of her life. Only mysteries and her poems remain.

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