When you think of Emily Dickinson, what comes to mind? If you’re like me, you think of a childhood of field trips to her home in Amherst, a Spotify playlist titled “RIP Emily Dickinson you would have loved these songs,” and a lifetime spent thinking about women who are ahead of their time. If you’re like most people, however, you probably think of a couple of descriptive phrases: the eccentric recluse, the archetype of the tortured artist who only achieved fame in the afterlife. Over the years, society has constructed a legacy of its own for Dickinson, one that is steeped only in these ideas of her as a reclusive, death-obsessed spinster. It is this legacy that showrunner Alena Smith is looking to dismantle with her Apple TV+ show Dickinson. Dickinson employs a unique blend of fact and fiction, along with the poet’s own words, to construct the most captivating exploration of Emily Dickinson yet. The use of modern language and music, while jarring to those expecting a traditional biographical period piece, serves to highlight the poet’s modernistic work. If audiences can adjust to a version of the 19th century that feels more like the 21st, they’ll get an emotional, fascinating interpretation of a person we know so little about.
Dickinson is, above all else, a coming-of-age story. The dark comedy places Dickinson (Hailee Steinfeld) in her early twenties throughout its two seasons, a time of her life rarely explored by other pieces of media. In her younger years, Emily often attended social events throughout town, even claiming in one of her letters that she would be the “Belle of Amherst.” Dickinson doesn’t show Emily as a wild child, but it doesn’t shy away from depicting her as a social person either. The third episode of the show, “Wild Nights,” centers around a house party the Dickinson children throw while their parents are out of town. They do typical young adult things: they laugh, dance, and drink, and Emily and her brother Austin (Adrian Blake Enscoe) fight over Sue (Ella Hunt), Austin’s new fiancée (and Emily’s best friend and love interest). Episode five, “I am afraid to own a Body,” shows the audience that Emily is the leader of a Shakespeare club that is filled with the same friends shown at Emily’s party, all of whom are based on Dickinson’s real-life friends. While Dickinson may have emotionally felt alone, she was not physically alone during her young adulthood.
This is part of the brilliance of depicting Emily at this age. One hallmark of a coming-of-age story is the feeling of isolation that often accompanies adolescence, even if the central figure has a social life and friends who care for them. Whether she is intentionally doing so or not, Smith is making Emily Dickinson a relatable and accessible figure for younger generations. When we watch Emily sneak out of the house at night while the music of Billie Eilish plays, dance with Sue to Lizzo, or stitch an embroidery that states “F- My Life,” Emily Dickinson becomes a person we know. Maybe we can even see ourselves in her and her struggles and triumphs. It’s in these moments that Alena Smith finally chips away at the ice. Smith isn’t rewriting Emily’s history, as some critics of the show have said; she’s using modern elements of film, television, and everyday society to chip away at the rigid legacy that has been given to Emily by those who romanticized the more difficult and complex parts of her later life.
This argument that Smith is rewriting Dickinson’s history may be the one that bothers me above any other. As with every piece of media, there are, of course, aspects to critique. The use of modern language and music will certainly not be for everyone, and there are moments throughout both seasons where the tonal shifts can be disorienting, but the point of this show was never to be a fact-for-fact reenactment of Dickinson’s life. The show IS based in fact, and many Dickinson scholars have defended the historical accuracy, but fact isn’t what is important to Dickinson. At the beginning of season two, the opening narration states: “The records of Emily Dickinson’s life, up to and including Sue and Austin’s marriage, are full and factual compared to what lies ahead. Over the next few years, only a handful of letters survive. The truth, perhaps, is hidden in her poems.” This is what Dickinson has been getting at over the course of 20 episodes: the truth in Emily Dickinson’s world did not exist until she put it down on paper; until she filtered it through the surreal, vivid, humorous universe in her mind. What better way to tell Emily’s story than in her own words? Every episode is titled after one of her poems and proceeds to follow a plot taken from the text. The season one finale “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” for example, depicts a nightmarish funeral that Emily imagines for herself. Dickinson’s writings are used in the show to depict everything from her struggle with the idea of fame to her romantic relationship with her best friend and sister-in-law, Sue — a relationship that existed in real life and was likely omitted by early editors of her work. In Dickinson, Alena Smith not only provides audiences with an entertaining few hours of television; she also finally gives Emily Dickinson the chance to tell her story in her own words on screen, and that might be the most compelling part of the show.
Dickinson isn’t a perfect television show, but for me, it’s a perfect portrayal of Emily Dickinson. The show is campy and bombastic and over the top, because that’s who Emily was. Her poems are soaked in a smart sense of humor and vividness that few of her contemporaries contained. Scholars have long said that Emily was ahead of her time; perhaps letting her exist in a world that resembles the 21st century is the best choice you could make for a biopic about one of history’s greatest poets.
