I See The Million Dollars," in _The Complete Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Manuscripts, Typescripts, and Facsimile,_ ed. R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 755. _Moby Dick,_ ed. Hershel Parker (New York, 2002), 1056. Robert S. Levine, _Pursuit of God: The Story of an Atheist who became a Rabbi_ (New York, 1995), 66–69. Elias Canetti, _Crowds and Power,_ trans. Carol Stewart (Harmondsworth, 1962), 14. A. E. Douglas-Hamilton, _The Theory of Committees,_ rev. 2nd ed. (London, 1964), 6–7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, _The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson,_ ed. William H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), vol. 9, p. 39. ## 2 **_"I shall write a poem and it will make her cry._** **_"I shall write a poem and it will make her smile._** **_"I shall write a poem and it will break her heart._** **_"I shall write a poem and it will make her laugh._** **_"I shall write a poem and it will make her weep._** **_"I shall write a poem and it will not make her breathe.**"** **_—Elizabeth Barrett Browning_** # "MADISON'S MADNESS" _Moby Dick_ was inspired by and based on a true story—a story as much stranger and more tragic than anything in the book. Like _Moby Dick_ 's Captain Ahab, the narrator of "Madison's Madness" was obsessed with and had lost all faith in God. The story begins with a ship called the _Jane_ , and then shifts back and forth in time to focus on two main characters—Henry A. Loomis (the "Madison of the story") and his granddaughter, Elizabeth, an "angelic" eight-year-old girl. Loomis, a scientist and religious skeptic, is an amateur historian and sailor who becomes an "autocrat of the sea" after marrying an English noblewoman. Elizabeth was about seven when her parents died on a transatlantic voyage. Loomis adopted the child, who was a favorite of the crew and thus well loved by all aboard. As she grows up, the narrator explains, Elizabeth is a "paragon" who is "everybody's pet." (Perhaps it is a little too easy to read today the description of "everyone's pet" as an early indication of our "everyone's child" language of the '90s, which will be discussed in chapter 7, on the "Limits of Parenthood".) She is "pure and innocent, beautiful and beautiful, wise and intelligent," although a woman of "strong will, of delicate sensibility, of a certain and rare spirituality." Because she is the epitome of a "modern child," the narrator describes her character as having much in common with her own and that of all young readers, no matter their social class or race. But there is one thing in particular she does not like about herself or other children: It is the "inherent incapability of their nature... to enjoy life at all." Children are "only human," the narrator explains; they can only "laugh and play." If children, as children, are not seen and heard as they really are—if they are not able to be seen and heard in the pure truth, then their character cannot be built, their "minds cannot grow strong." And if they are not seen and heard as they really are, then they cannot be helped or changed or healed, and if they cannot be helped or changed or healed, they cannot become wise. "Wisdom," the narrator says, "is only a name for that which the little children of men can give, for that which they can do, that which they can share, their joy, their gladness." And yet one day the narrator asks herself, "What was the secret of her love? What was the secret of her life?" She concludes it was her mother, who was "all the earth to [Elizabeth]." Elizabeth had an "unconscious and instinctive worship of the spirit in everything and in every one." There was no thought in her of "the body, and such thoughts as were concerned with it.... All her being expressed itself in her intense tenderness toward others—all her impulses led to self-abnegation." This sounds like the sort of spiritual experience John Wesley—whose church this particular young girl was part of—was discussing in the 18th-century New England. But it is one thing to have this sort of experience in the context of a religious community and quite another to have it as an integral part of one's life, all one's life, as the narrator was experiencing it. Loomis, who is deeply committed to science, does not believe in God. He tries to explain away the phenomenon he witnesses over and over again, the child's love and affection: She is in "a kind of ecstasy," he says, "an unnatural state," and she will outgrow this "state" when she is older. All the children in the family are "excellent," he says. "There was... no _harm_ in them, no _disease_ in them.... There was, indeed, a wonderful _harmlessness_ about them all." Even Elizabeth, who is always so helpful to others, will grow out of her "excess of kindness" and will be able to be an equal to her future husband. But Loomis's daughter, as it turns out, does not grow out of her love and devotion and selflessness. After the ship that was carrying them all across the Atlantic sinks, leaving all of them except Loomis and the child lost at sea, the latter stays on the island they are stranded on to tend to the bodies of the deceased shipmates. And after her death, she leaves to Loomis an orphaned baby, a child whose name is an obvious "nod" to the one she was called when she was in the care of her parents: "Madison." In the novel's most powerful and poignant scene, when Elizabeth, who never even gave birth, is on her deathbed and cannot talk, Loomis says to the child, "Speak to me of your mother," but Elizabeth says only, "I shall see her again." The story ends there. And although _Moby Dick_ was not based on the life of the child Elizabeth, both _Moby Dick_ and this story about her have an implicit "warning" about the fate of the modern child, which is also a "warning" about the way that future generations of children will become parents. Loomis knows that the child is "in love with" her foster father, and the narrator tells us that this is "what he longed for" more than anything else. But the Loomis family cannot keep the child forever, and when the family begins to "grow old and feeble" and Loomis becomes the "custodian" of his own family, he is forced to abandon the girl when she is only thirteen, leaving her to fend for herself and dying without her. The narrator's last words in the story are an implicit cry for mercy: "Madison, oh Madison." Madison's real name was Sarah Ann Lyman, and in the late 1850s her story was printed in the _Harper's Magazine_ and inspired Emily Dickinson's poem "A Grave—by Madison's" (the poem with the same title as Dickinson's poem "The Grave at Washington"). Both Dickinson and the unnamed writer of "Madison's Madness" have given us a haunting image of a young girl in her thirties, dressed in white and looking like a miniature ghost, a living ghost: "Her veil was black as her long lank hair / And she dropped on us soft blue tears / Of heaven's dew." The title of the poem is ironic, "a grave," because in the end she dies, and her "grave" is, as the title suggests, "at Washington." But there is another meaning to the title—as is revealed at the end of Dickinson's poem. In a remarkable "afterthought," the poet has written in the margin, "A Grave—by Madison's," but this phrase actually appears in the last line of the poem and is not the poet's revision but the original words that she originally wrote. _Moby Dick_ , with its story about Loomis, the Loomis family, the fate of "Madison" after she has grown up, may be seen as the book that Dickinson was writing when she wrote "A Grave by Madison's" and that Dickinson "afterthought" reveals. In a similar way, one could easily see Melville's "Madison's Madness" as the poem that Dickinson might have written had she ever had a poem like that within herself. And like Dickinson, Melville is "telling all" and revealing himself to be—not so much a writer but rather a psychotherapist, a "spiritual adviser," which is what a lot of those involved in the 18th-century "revival movement" were. _Moby Dick_ is a tale