Because I could not stop for Death —
Because I could not stop for Death —
On the final frame of Wild Nights with Emily.
The final image of Wild Nights with Emily is a diptych of deaths — both of Emily Dickinson, but one portrays the expiration of her physical body, and the other of her truth. On the left of the frame sits Susan Huntington Gilbert, best friend, sister-in-law, and lover, her head bowed over Emily’s deathbed. We can’t see her face, but the bent arch of her back denotes a grief too deep to depict. To the right is Mabel Todd, entrusted with ushering Emily’s poems into the world despite having never met her, who is busy at work removing Susan’s name from all of the poet’s letters and dedications: literal queer erasure. She does so without shame, believing truly that it is her duty to mold Emily into a poet more marketable. A picture of loss twice over.
For years, Dickinson’s legacy would be dominated by what Todd and editor Thomas Higginson dictated what it should be, her poems heavily edited down in both punctuation and diction to match the literary standards of the time. Her refusal to conform was thus constrained for public consumption, as if she were a tonic needing dilution. Though it’s a comedy, Wild Nights makes it devastatingly clear how unfair this is arrangement is. Flighty socialite Mabel is shown giving lectures on who Emily was as a person, only to be contradicted by immediately following scenes of the real Emily. Mabel, the film suggests, has her own designs on grandeur, one that is not concerned with authenticity, but with her own posterity. She has little artistic ability herself, so she fashions herself artist through the work of someone else. And Higginson is no better. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” Emily asks of a man she holds in high respect. He repays her by vivisecting her poem in front of her, too in love with literary tradition to recognize a brilliant mind centuries ahead of her time. It’s a comedy, and these scenes are funny when they happen, until the very last frame, when the sham comes crashing down upon its viewer.
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Emily Dickinson seems to me to be among the most misunderstood American poets. Certainly, I admit to misunderstanding her until about a year ago, when I dreamt of writing a poem about her, and subsequently stumbled down a rabbit hole learning about her in order to bring that poem into waking life. What we know of her is a sketch made from reputation and hearsay: so we know her hermitage, her twee verses, her oddity, her posthumous collection of poems. A woman, we learn in our English classes, too afraid of outer life, unconfident of her poetic talents, and destined for the obscure corners of history had it not been for her intrepid sister Lavinia. One thinks of Max Brod defying Kafka’s orders to burn his work. A close slip for the field of American poetry.
You will discover that you have not read much of Dickinson’s impressive 1,800-entry oeuvre; in fact, if I may so venture, you have not even read her best work. You know “Hope is the thing with feathers” and “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” and that she frequently personified Death — did the Thing with dashes and capitalized Nouns — but you do not know, for example, the loss that visited her house on repeated occasion, nor that her published poems were often stripped of their dashes and Nouns and precise wording, and that kind of editorial affront would discourage anyone from publishing again. You do not know the simple genius of “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (because she wrote in slant rhyme! Clever woman) nor the raw horror of “He put the Belt around my life,” nor her complicated relationship with religion. Neither have you read her letters, full of wit and verve and sting, and often sent to her recipients with flowers from her garden, which was a known horticultural wonder in Amherst at the time. Disembodied and stripped of all her power, Emily Dickinson arrives on our high school palates sterilized and blanched, so that we may never recognize female genius when it sits so alluringly in front of us.
In her essay “Vesuvius at Home,” fellow poet Adrienne Rich writes, “I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed.” This defiant stance is mirrored in Wild Nights with Emily, which too sought Emily out alive, three-dimensional, and conscious of her choices. She’s played adeptly by Molly Shannon as a strong-willed woman, far from eccentric or misanthropic or strange, and leagues smarter than everyone else around her. Behind her sharp, dark brown eyes lies an artist “determined to survive, to use her powers, to practice necessary economics” in the withering environment that surrounds her.
Then and now, it’s hard being an artist. The trick is knowing the balancing act, how to conserve your energy for when you need it most.
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The more you know about artists, the more you might understand Dickinson’s instinct to seclude herself. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott famously said, “Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.” It’s a deeply paradoxical thing to be, an artist. So many of us are intensely private, and yet art — by nature, by necessity, by temperament — is the most deeply vulnerable act a person can do. It requires laying bare what the sane, civilian parts of a population would rather keep to themselves — like parading your intimates down a crowded street. Which is why the misunderstanding of an artist is tantamount to death. To misunderstand our work is to misunderstand us as human beings, and vice versa.
Though I can’t presume to know how other artists feel; I can only report from personal experience. I am terrified of the stories other people tell of me, I confess in an Instagram post, a self-fulfilling gambit to set things straight about myself. I am an honest person to a fault: I used to start every therapy session with a laundry list of things I’d done wrong that week (I would have made a spectacular Catholic in confessional), I tell a hotel employee that I’m not a resident when I’m attempting to broker use of their bathroom (I should’ve lied, a friend later revealed to me as an option), and my face has always been a dead giveaway of what’s in my heart (my mother had always warned me of this, convinced that others would take advantage of my open wounds, and perhaps she was right). So even the slightest whiff — imagined or otherwise — of misinformation, rumors, and lies sets me in a mood of anxious paranoia. I write pages upon pages of personal essays, and myself into my own fictional characters, as if to capture my identity in stone and say, here, this is the person I am, my demarcations and borders, everything outside of me irrelevant, and everything inside pertinent.
But of course, this is an exercise doomed to failure. Every person is an unknowable universe, and as much as I can try to show you the starmap of my insides, the telescope’s lens is a narrow one. Ludwig Wittgenstein once likened a conversation to a “game of words” — imagine, he said, you and I both hold a box, the contents of which only the holder can see, and we each have to describe to the other what is in our own box. The inefficacy of language means that however much we try, what the listener envisions will never be exactly the same as what’s actually in the box.
It’s the supreme tragedy of humanity, he suggested, that we would never fully know each other. That he knew all too well — Wittgenstein himself had a hard time being understood by others.
Rich again: “It is an extremely painful and dangerous way to live — split between a publicly acceptable persona, and a part of yourself that you perceive as the essential, the creative and powerful self, yet also as possible unacceptable, perhaps even monstrous.”
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Why is it always women’s work that is minimized and subject to misunderstanding? Robert Lowell and John Berryman can earn respect as confessional poets, but talk about Sylvia Plath, and the main thing anyone knows about her is that she put her head in the oven. An entire artist and human being, defined solely by her death. Even Björk, who built her whole career on defying boundaries, has spoken out about being boxed in on the sole basis of her gender. “Women in music,” she wrote in a 2016 Facebook post, “are allowed to be singer songwriters singing about their boyfriends… On the pedagogic Biophilia I sang about galaxies and atoms but it wasn't until Vulnicura where I shared a heartbreak [that] I got full acceptance from the media. Men are allowed to go from subject to subject, do sci fi, period pieces, be slapstick and humorous, be music nerds getting lost in sculpting soundscapes but not women.”
I don’t have to ask why to know why — it’s because women aren’t allowed to be complex or multi-dimensional people. Women feel too much, so we complain when their art is about feeling. But neither do we trust a woman’s pure intellect. Men, who preside over every artistic institution, don’t want to do the work of understanding women, so they cut them down to size until they fit the boxes men want them to occupy. And much of this seems to be done posthumously, when a woman can’t even speak for herself. Cowards, the lot of them.
It’s a disservice not just to the women themselves, but those of us whose lives might have been enriched by a better understanding of their art. As a teen I avoided Sylvia Plath because a middle school English teacher (a woman, at that!) used to scoff at her — boring suicide glorification. That her struggles with depression featured frequently in her poetry rendered it unimportant — it wasn’t “real” art, was the implication. Plath, whose deft and enervating language is now a constant inspiration to me, might have remained a literary stranger had I not chanced upon “Lady Lazarus” at 19 and felt, as Dickinson described, “physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
In fact, I saw so much of myself in “Lady Lazarus” that it might have saved my life at that age. Sometimes I think about that: how many young girls and women can we save if we don’t constrain the legacies of female artists — if we let their work stand on their own, define themselves, create their own reputation?
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I saw myself reflected in Dickinson as well: the (occasional) reclusiveness, the bread baker and the gardener, her difficult and sorrowful relationship with her mother. And, of course, the queerness. Before me flourished a more complete portrait of her, opened up to me by the writers and researchers who cared to know it.
Wild Nights with Emily is just one of the many efforts over the years to restore Dickinson’s agency over her own story. Even with all the resurrection the film achieves, it still, amazingly, only serves to simplify such a complex person, such a wild, wild woman as Emily Dickinson. It’s this contradiction that the last frame of Wild Nights tugs at — the story that is true, juxtaposed with the story being told. The film itself is a simulacrum: just director and screenwriter Madeleine Olnek’s best guess at history. It’s what makes the last frame so unbelievably tragic — that whatever beautiful life Emily led was destroyed in active carelessness, and we may never know the whole of it.
But, despite that, there’s also hope in this image. We know of Emily and Susan’s story, and were able to see a version of it onscreen — an optimistic suggestion that their love was so strong that it survived all of Mabel’s efforts to excise it. After all, we have this movie to show for it. Wild Nights is concrete proof that truth — and whatever queerness or womanhood is concealed — prevails.
Despite everything, we remember Emily and Susan, the impressions that persist on the page long after the pencil marks have been erased.
Hope you enjoyed reading this essay as much as I liked writing it! My next Dickinson-related project should be a comparison between A Quiet Passion and Wild Nights with Emily, a cinema-poetic duke-out. I’ve already given up on that poem I mentioned earlier in the essay — Emily’s voice is simply too unique for me to comfortably replicate. (Emily, I said, as if we were on a first name basis.)
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