Emily Dickinson Wants You to Go Slow
Emily Dickinson Wants You to Go Slow
The soapy Apple TV+ show is cheeky, charming, and features astounding performances by Hailee Steinfeld. It also goes a long way to challenge some of our ideas about the creative process.
If you had told middle-school me that there would be a saucy TV show about Emily Dickinson on the air one day, I would have told you that it was a ludicrous idea. But I might have held out a microscopic morsel of hope that you might be right.
Though it’s increasing in popularity, poetry has become a niche art form. Even though reading poetry is part of almost everyone’s education, that’s usually where people leave it: in classrooms, textbooks, and on stultifying worksheets. Though poetry continues to be written and read, the people doing the reading are mainly poets themselves, though again, that’s changing.
Pop culture engagements with the lives of poets have the power to vivify the art form for new generations. Films like Paterson, in which the protagonist is a poet with no real-life correspondence, are a bit easier to manage. As a filmmaker, your only expectations are the received ideas we have about who poets are and what they do. Biopics like Sylvia are, we know, much trickier because we’re dealing with someone’s real, lived experience.
The Apple TV+ show Dickinson gives famed 19th century poet the Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette treatment, decking Emily out with period garb and setting with a contemporary soundtrack and futuristic dialogue. While it would be easier to roll your eyes and hit skip, I urge you to give it a shot. If everyone else can sit around and watch Bridgerton and tell me how amazing it is, I’ll be damned if I don’t zap some popcorn and enjoy this literary treat.
The cast! Jane Krakowski as Emily’s mother, Emily Norcross! Toby Freaking Huss as Emily’s father, Edward Dickinson! Hailee Steinfeld, a jewel, in the titular role! Though Dickinson devotees might find themselves exhausted by the soapy treatment of the brilliant poet, I find much to admire, here, including the show’s depiction of slow creativity and art-making in the margins.
Words in the Air
One of the show’s innovations lies in the way it models the creative process of writing a poem. In Episode 1, we watch Emily invent and then meditate on the famous line “Because I could not stop for death.” It comes to her many times, and the words are visible on screen in a kind of shimmering, gold script. The 2013 Baz Luhrman-directed Great Gatsby makes memorable use of this technique in the film’s closing scene, but in a different way.
I admire the way the show has the words hover her near her, sometimes tying them to objects in the real world, like the well that Emily cranks to draw up water. The rhythm of that action helps her emphasize the four iambs, or groups of unstressed and stressed syllables, that compose the line:
beCAUSE i COULD not STOP for DEATH
In representations of writers on film or on television, a manic episode of frenzied creativity is more often represented than the slow, meditative creation that we see here. That huge outpouring of language is sometimes fruitful (think of the way Jo is depicted in the 1994 version of Little Women when she finally understands what she has to write about, or, in a dark mirror, the results of Jack’s typewriter tidal wave of nonsense in The Shining).
Here, Emily works over a line or two all day. Then, sitting down at night, she finally strings those two lines together with two more to form the first quatrain of her famous poem. Though we hear only the first four lines in Episode 1, here it is in its entirety:
Because I could not stop for Death – (479)
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –
One gripe I have is that in the episodes’s closing moments, Emily completes the first quatrain of the poem, looks up, and says “Nailed it!” It’s not the anachronistic language that I object to—on the contrary, I quite like it. It’s the idea that once a creative person lands on a brilliant idea they are immediately aware of it. Sometimes it’s true, but other times the sense that one has made something powerful grows slowly. Or one might think they’ve nailed it only to wake up the next day and re-appraise their creation in the light of day and think, “Oh shit. This is awful!”
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When it comes to creativity, all these outcomes are possible and good and normal. Just because your creative work doesn’t come together in a thunderclap of inspiration doesn’t mean you’re not inspired or creating powerful work. As Seamus Heaney once wrote, writing is like lowering a bucket only partway into a well and coming up with nothing again and again until, one day, “the chain draws unexpectedly tight and you have dipped into waters that will continue to entice you back. You’ll have broken the skin on the pool of yourself.”
I take the time to call out our cultural discussions of creativity because one of my passions is liberating us from the idea that creativity is an elusive horse made out of lightning that only white men can bridle. Dickinson does a good job of showing us slow creativity at first, but momentarily indulges the “thunderbolt” idea in its closing scene.
I take the time to call out our cultural discussions of creativity because one of my passions is liberating us from the idea that creativity is an elusive horse made out of lightning that only white men can bridle.
The slow pace of creativity that we see Emily engaging in has to do with the slow born of eroticism and the expectation that women in the 19th century would be wives and domestic laborers to the exclusion of everything else.
Erotic Death
Much has been made of the eroticism of Dickinson’s work, and “Because I could not stop for Death –” is often used as an example of the poet’s powerful engagement with female desire. Dickinson makes a truly inspired contemporary casting choice for Death: none other than Wiz Khalifa. I let out an audible gasp when he appeared on screen.
Now that I’ve recovered, let’s break down the perceived sexiness in the poem that Emily begins to draft in Episode 1 to see what we make of Dickinson’s representation of the erotic, here.
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
Death is classified as male here, as he so often is in the Western imagination. The idea that a single man would ask an unmarried woman to ride alone in his carriage with him alone is salacious in this time. And there’s nothing sexier than the forbidden.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –
The phrase “He knew no haste” is just sexy. Period. It’s what we all seek in a lover, yes? Someone who isn’t in a hurry. Oof. The speaker, too, is lost in time: if we understand all of life as either labor or leisure, she is out of time—suspended between activities. In other words, she also has all the time in the world.
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
It’s sunset. Very romantic. But how to interpret children at recess in a poem like this? I think we might understand the landscape that Dickinson paints as a kind of time lapse: we see the whole of life from childhood (“Children strove / At Recess”) to the maturity and readiness of the harvest (“Gazing Grain”) all the way to a symbol of endings (“the Setting Sun”) that we know will eventually break into a new beginning with sunrise. It’s almost as if they live a whole lifetime together in that carriage. Hot.
Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
The most erotic passage, by far. I mean, “quivering”? Come on. But the best part is the speaker’s description of her dress. Her gown is made of “Gossamer,” which is like spider threads, and her “Tippet,” a kind of scarf or shawl, is made of tulle, which is a translucent, stiff fabric, like that of a ballerina’s skirt.
In other words, she’s wearing a see-through dress. Eat your heart out, KK.
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –
I’ll leave “swelling” alone (!) and focus on the bizarre and beautiful description of the building that the speaker sees from the window of the carriage. The “House” is inside the land, buried deep. It creates an image of close, intimate quarters that are secret to the outside world. The perfect love nest for the speaker and Death that also calls to mind a coffin.
Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –
The day she met Death and climbed into his carriage seems endless to the speaker, but the centuries that have elapsed since seem fleeting by comparison—time seems to slow when we are held in the thrall of someone we love. Death is alluring to the speaker, and she goes with him willingly. The day of their meeting was so charged and powerful that she scarcely notices how long she has been dead.
The poem is bizarre in the best way, and is but one example of Dickinson’s genius. If I’m being picky, I would add that the show makes it seem as if Emily is merely recording events that she sees in order to write this poem—the carriage that Death drives appears to her as a hallucination.
This reduces Dickinson’s carefully made aesthetic and metaphorical choices to mere reportage. Unless, of course, the real-life Dickinson truly did perceive Death’s carriage in the living world or in her dreams. The sources of her inspiration, and perhaps all of our inspiration, are sometimes confoundingly opaque. But I would love for viewers to understand Dickinson as a craftsperson and artist rather than a lovestruck journaler.
Time & Space of One’s Own
Dickinson’s engagement with the erotic is headline-grabbing, but its quieter portrait of a woman’s struggle to create in a society where her value lies in her utility is even more important, to me.
At the close of the first episode, Emily is reeling from an argument with her father. He has forbidden her from publishing one of her poems. Late that night, an emotional, contrite Edward comes to Emily’s room in his dressing gown to speak to her more gently. He doesn’t apologize for their argument, but tells her that he worries very much about all his children and asks Emily to promise she’ll never move away from Amherst.
But most importantly, what Emily is asking for is time. For space. For what Virginia Woolf would call “a room of one’s own” more than 40 years after Dickinson’s death.
Emily agrees, but asks if he will promise her something in return. She might have asked her ultra-vulnerable father for anything in his moment of tenderness: promise me I won’t have to marry, promise me you’ll let me publish my poem… but what she asks for, instead, is this:
Promise me we can get a maid.
Though domestic labor was then and often still is exploitative, Emily is proposing an exchange of value for that labor. The woman who will serve as their maid will be paid, a stark contrast from the mammoth unpaid labor of Emily, her sister Lavinia, and their mother.
But most importantly, what Emily is asking for is time. For space. For what Virginia Woolf would call “a room of one’s own” more than 40 years after Dickinson’s death.
As I’ve written about before, the more things change, the more they stay the same when it comes to women and the expectation to perform domestic labor, engage in caretaking, and carry the mental load of the household. That labor is enormous, valuable in all senses of the word, and often unseen.
I’m currently doing a writer’s residency at Hambidge, and I’ve been watching episodes of Dickinson I downloaded before bed at night. (Very limited WiFi, out here in the mountains of North Georgia. It’s glorious.) I’m so honored to have been selected for this residency, and I’m acutely aware of the privilege it gives me. Here I am, with untold hours for writing and creating and plenty of “time to think,” what Steinfeld’s Emily cries out for on screen.
If you squint away the historical inaccuracies an exaggerations, there’s still plenty left to see in Dickinson: the predicament of the woman artist, the crush of domestic labor, the tension between love on the page (which is generative) and love in real life (which can be stifling and limiting for women in particular).
I want all creative people, and women in particular, to have the time and space to think and make and follow the slow burn of their own inspiration. Seeing that struggle represented on screen makes Dickinson required viewing whether you like to imagine Death smoking a blunt or not.