And still Emily sat for her Mold as she called the making of the image. Emerson had called it a kind of rigor mortis when he was daguerreotyped in 1841, keeping “every finger in place with such energy that your hands became clenched for fight or despair, and in your resolution to keep your face still, did you feel every muscle becoming every moment more rigid, the brows contracted into a Tartarean frown, and the eyes fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death?” She wasn’t enthralled by the tinted ghostly double that stared back at her from the copper plate, and neither was anyone else among the Dickinsons. “It was too solemn, too heavy. It had none of the play of light and shade in Emily’s face,” the future poet’s brother and sister believed. “To capture the flow of movement and grace in a single photograph of the dance” [would be no less impossible] “than it was to produce by any means then known a satisfactory likeness of Emily Dickinson,” according to Millicent Todd Bingham.
