Emily Dickinson in 2020: "here we are, still living it"

February 22, 2020 2:18 PM

Lynne Feeley writes: "It is impossible to read representations of Dickinson across the decades without noticing that she is always partially created in our own image, or in the image of the day. The literary scholar Virginia Jackson has chronicled these changing faces of Dickinson (Princeton Univ. Press) and their effect on how her work is perceived and treated: there’s the “aesthetic model” of the 1890s: the modernist one of the 1920s; the “professional model” of the 1950s, when male editors such as Thomas Johnson set out to revert the poems to their “original” forms; the feminist model of the 1980s; the queer model of the 1990s—and so on. The Dickinson of 2020, at least as far as Smith and Ackmann have portrayed her, is driven." Emily Dickinson Escapes (Boston Review)

More from Feeley, who notes that in Love Poems by Emily Dickinson, published by Peter Pauper Press in 1950, included a biographical introduction that depicted her as a disappointed lover, having met a man who “ignited her like a sulphur match on sandpaper” but whom “could not or would not marry her,” goes on to say:

This is not my Emily Dickinson. My Emily Dickinson is the Emily Dickinson of Adrienne Rich’s 1976 “Vesuvius at Home.” Rich’s Dickinson was not a woman immobilized by the unrequited or forbidden love of a man. She was an artist who knew the full dimensions of her power—as “genius knows itself.”
[...]
My Emily Dickinson is also the Emily Dickinson of Susan Howe’s 1985 My Emily Dickinson (Amazon; Goodreads). Howe’s Dickinson was first and foremost a reader—of the Brownings, of the Brontës, of Charles Dickens. She was an artist who lived “eternally on intellectual borders” and whose “intellectual vigilance allowed very little to escape her notice.” An embroiderer of words, a “poet-scholar,” Howe’s Dickinson, like Rich’s, knew full well that her combinations represented a new poetic grammar. It was a grammar that drew from the male discursive forms that surrounded her, but which could not be reduced to these. My Emily Dickinson is, in this way, also the Emily Dickinson of Martha Nell Smith’s Rowing in Eden (1992) (digitized by the Dickinson Electronic Archive) and, with Ellen Louise Hart, Open Me Carefully (1998) (first chapter, via CNN) whose life and work was forged in her abiding love for other women.
[...]
Recently my Emily Dickinson showed up on television. The first season of Apple TV’s Dickinson (YT, 1 minute trailer), created by showrunner Alena Smith, portrays a Dickinson in her early twenties who has begun to discover her poetic power but whose life has been scripted by patriarchy. This script does not include genius.
[...]
To me, Dickinson is about the present in a slightly different way. It is not so much that Dickinson modernizes Dickinson, using the “real” person as an allegorical figure for the twenty-first-century female artist. What Dickinson captures is that the modern is not very modern at all. Those circumscriptions rendered in Dickinson, those structural oppressions of gender and genius that we see the protagonist hacking—those feel nauseatingly familiar. They feel current. If the “real” person of Dickinson is translated and refracted through a pop-cultural idiom of hip hop and teen genre fiction, so much of the “real” nineteenth century—of women’s domestic labor, of anti-immigrant electoral politics, of anti-black racism, of compulsory heterosexuality—can simply be imported. Because here we are, still living it.

A new book by Martha Ackmann, These Fevered Days (author's website, page on the book), is also an episodic look at the life of Emily Dickinson. Ackmann was a member of the Gender Studies Department at Mount Holyoke College until 2016, and for two decades taught a seminar about Dickinson in the poet’s historically preserved house in Amherst (the Emily Dickinson Museum). Ackmann writes that the structure of her book—not a “cradle-to-grave biography” but an illumination of key moments in the poet’s life—grew out of her teaching.

posted by filthy light thief (2 comments total)

She was so intense—she “drained [his] nerve power so much”—that[ [radical abolitionist] Higginson left Amherst “glad not to live near her.”

Is there Modern AU Emily Dickinson fanfic that imagines her as a reclusive Instagram semi-celebrity? I would go look myself right now, but I already spent my day in three different wormholes and getting onto AO3 surely would be a fourth.
posted by spamandkimchi at 9:22 PM on February 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

I can't speak to the fanfics, but I'm halfway through Dickinson, and it's definitely an interesting and updated re-imagining, while keeping much of the historic reality and context intact. As Feeley notes, there are some narrative edits in the name of artistic creativity, but a coming-of-age story of Dickinson as a locally known weirdo. That show is what we lead me to finding Feeley's article.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:19 AM on February 24, 2020