100 Favorite Shows: #65 — Dickinson
“So much for living a life of solitude.”
The Morning Show was the talk of Apple TV+ when the new streaming service came into the world at the beginning of November 2019. Many quickly realized, however, that there was a different series on the platform that deserved the main acclaim and attention: Dickinson. Created by Alena Smith, Dickinson tells the story of Emily Dickinson (Hailee Steinfeld) through a distinctly modern lens, complete with full period production and costume designs to boot. Before the show ever premiered, a second season was ordered by Apple (and now, a third is en route), showing that the literary-minded web series was the hidden gem of this fledgling endeavor into the streaming wars.
(I would say that the spoilers for Dickinson also pertain to real life, but they really don’t. So huge, so hopeless to conceive.)
On a rainy afternoon in the fall of 2016, one of my English classes in Amherst, Massachusetts left the classroom to take a tour of the nearby Emily Dickinson house, which was just down the road. I’d never been a big fan of poetry, having always found it more inaccessible when compared to short stories and novels, but from the second I stood in the waiting room of the Dickinson house (no different from any other New England home, but with an aura of importance and worldly significance), I was enamored. Traveling from room to room and learning about Dickinson’s life, as well as the impetus behind many of her most renowned poems, my English major mindset was delighted and a whole new side of poetry was unlocked. Four years later, Dickinson is still one of my favorite poets.
My favorite moment from the trip came in Dickinson’s bedroom when we saw the “certain slant of light” from her poem, “There’s a certain Slant of light (258),” which peaked out through the rain — seemingly just for our tour. The moment was so magical, so ethereal that the poem instantly skyrocketed to the top of my favorites list. (Only “My life closed twice before its close (96)” and “Hope is a strange invention” have challenged it.) So it’s no wonder that I was immediately drawn to the Apple TV+ series, Dickinson. Not just because it starred Emily Dickinson and promised to be a literary-minded series. Not just because it was set in a community I loved dearly (complete with local Amherst offices and the beige yellow of Emily’s home). But because there was an episode entitled, “There’s a certain Slant of light.” I didn’t care about the Silicon Valley-driven streaming service or the mixed critical reception; I was all in.
The episode in question takes place during Christmas at the Dickinson household. Emily is experiencing unnamed bouts of seasonal depression, worsened by her father, Edward (Toby Huss), departing right when the Christmas holiday begins. (Emily’s mother (Jane Krakowski in her most earnest television role yet) is also leveled by the sadness of Edward’s absence from the festivities.) It’s also framed through the poem, “There’s a certain Slant of light (258).”
However, this episode doesn’t serve as an origin story for that poem. (How delightful it would have been to see Steinfeld witness the slant of light and see its larger purpose for the first time, though.) Instead, it draws out the thematic core of the poem and infuses it into the episode. Each installment of Dickinson did this — with various Dickinson poems serving as the inspiration for each arc for the characters — and the most wonderful intersection came with this eighth episode. (I admit that I am biased towards the poem, though.)
The slant of light is depicted as a symbol of hope in Dickinson. Dreary Massachusetts winters, the bitter cold, early sunsets: they’re all enough to dim the spirit of Emily Dickinson through the season. In turn, it discourages her father (his relationship with Emily is the core of the show and its emotional anchor), who asks her if she will be happier when “life flourishes again” (the use of mockery over the vowel sounds in “again,” as they apply to older styles of poetry, is also a fun sect of literary satire) before he leaves the home.
Her sadness is pervasive and infectious within him, causing him to do what he can to bring a flourishing of life back to Emily’s world. For Christmas, he gifts her the promise of a conservatory, filled with flowers all year ‘round. Emily teeters on the notion of valuing roses over human beings, but she ultimately just cherishes life, as a whole. The slant of light gives her hope for sun and warmth during the darkest days of the year. So, too, do the flowers, which show that colors and vibrancy can still exist in the most punishing of conditions.
Emily Dickinson, as depicted in Dickinson, is more than a lover of nature, though. The plants and flowers are genuinely her friends and salves for her loneliness. One of the earlier episodes in the series, “Alone, I cannot be,” is anchored around Emily’s goal of saving a favorite tree from being uprooted in favor of a railway. Experiencing severity of emotion, Emily goes to great lengths to save the tree — partly because of her connection to it and partly because she sees much of herself in it.
Her success in rescuing it comes when she explains to her father the connection she bears with the tree. The roots underground are just as much a tree as the one we can see, she explains to Edward. Always looking for an opportunity to make Emily happy and curb her dulling sadness, he flexes his local status of importance to rescue the tree.
Considering that the Christmas installment comes four episodes later, it was only a temporary reprieve for Emily. Her loneliness stems far beyond the stoic trunk of a tree. As she rails to Henry David Thoreau (gleefully portrayed by John Mulaney), who has declined to help her rescue the tree, the fact that she shows no one her poetry is real loneliness. The most rife and debilitating of her emotions exist within the written words on her pages and she feels comfortable sharing them with no one — save for trees and flowers.
Obviously, one of the questions that naturally stems from these moments is, Did Emily Dickinson truly want her poems to be published or is this merely Alena Smith’s interpretation of the character? We don’t fully know the intent behind Dickinson’s writing, but the historical accuracy of the show is secondary to the feeling (as we see in more serious-minded historical narratives like Hamilton and more innocuously jovial like Drunk History). There’s still a ton to be learned about Emily Dickinson from Dickinson, just as there’s a ton to learn about Alexander Hamilton, even if you’re not getting the full, historically accurate picture. That’s not the artistic intent. We’re getting snippets of history, which allow us a deeper lens into their periods and contexts, as well as an emotional understanding of the “characters” and what drove them every day.
One thing that Dickinson makes clear is that, for as much as society has progressed since the mid-1800s, there are still many tribulations of yore that are still relevant today. Expectations of gender roles still manifest, even if they’re not as visibly reflected in daily society. (Ben’s (Matt Lauria) act of cooking is treated with shock from the women on Dickinson. Similarly, any pretensions of domesticity from Emily are met with doubt from her friends and family.)
The ways in which men have always set the narrative (both in the literary landscape and the larger world) is also emphasized in “There’s a certain Slant of light.” In this installment, Louisa May Alcott (brought to life by Zosia Mamet) turns up at the Dickinson household, having already proven herself to be a successful author. To do so, though, she bent to the will of the male-dominated industry she infiltrated. (This sentiment is most succinctly distilled (and paired with the show’s parody of 1800s lifestyle) when Louisa and Emily go for a run together in their massive dresses. While discussing the publishing industry and the most popular authors of the time, Louisa tells Emily, “Hawthorne can eat a dick, right?”)
It’s something you probably wouldn’t have heard Alcott say during her time, but it’s absolutely something that is likely to be heard by those railing against the current curriculum of English in the United States. Most of the assigned books we receive during high school are written by men (Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald). Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the only novels written by a woman I can remember being assigned with the others coming in the form of electives. The “eat a dick” moment is covertly uttered between Alcott and Dickinson, but it could apply to our current world, too. We still have a sexist syllabus.
Alcott’s Little Women, one of the seminal works of American literature, was not introduced to me all throughout grade school and I had to seek it out from my university library instead. What is there in The Old Man and the Sea that those who dictate education claim is more important than all of the rich themes at play in Little Women? Men have always set the narrative — whether Alcott wanted Hawthorne to eat a dick or not — and Dickinson admirably works to change the aspects of the narrative that it can.
Much of this comes through the characterization of Emily Dickinson. The intensity with which she connects her identity to her writing, compounded with the inner turmoil over whether or not she should be selling her writing, seems distinctly Jo March-esque. Of course, the feminism exuding through the character also projects a modern lens onto a historical figure far removed from our time. Smith threads that gap seamlessly in her writing, but a lot of the depiction rests upon Steinfeld’s expert portrayal.
Hailee Steinfeld has always been remarkably talented. (She is the best part of True Grit, the impeccable lead of The Edge of Seventeen, the singer of “Love Myself,” and only twenty-four years old. Holy shit.) As much as I’ve loved practically every Steinfeld role to date, I can’t help but feel like Dickinson is her greatest performance. The “plights” of Emily Dickinson could be so easily construed as melodramatic, if it were not for Steinfeld’s impeccably empathetic execution. She is not slavishly devoted to the well-trod historical and linguistic narratives surrounding Dickinson. Rather, Steinfeld treats Dickinson as an open-ended figure who is perfect for an artist’s interpretation. The depths of the real-life Emily Dickinson provide a canvas for so many feelings to be worked through and it often seems like Steinfeld knocks them all out at once with just one glance, one pained poetry reading, one railing monologue against society’s traditions, even when everyone else thinks she’s overreacting. Steinfeld does it all throughout Dickinson and it still makes me wish that they had billed her as the star of Apple TV+ over Jennifer Aniston.
The modernity with which Steinfeld and Smith revere Dickinson is also reflected in how many elements of today’s “cool” culture are infused into the world of the 1800s, which could have resulted in a stuffy period piece. Jason Mantzoukas plays a bee, Wiz Khalifa plays Death, and the aforementioned Mulaney portrays Thoreau.
Most English classes depict Thoreau as a staunch transcendentalist and a salt-of-the-earth type of man who was not swayed by any other person he encountered. (To many professors, Walden is a tome.) Dickinson rebukes these notions of Thoreau and, in so doing, becomes one of the most accurate portrayals of Thoreau, perhaps ever. Dickinson is vastly more apt for Thoreau than the Common Core ever was. Mulaney’s version of the author eats cookies made by his sister, encourages fake wisdom to be penned and published, and has his mother do his laundry for him. As George (Samuel Farnsworth) labels him, Thoreau is a dick.
He throws out quips about meeting one’s heroes to begin breaking down Dickinson’s pillars of reverence for the literary giants of her era. It’s funny to see Mulaney play the author and cruel to see how he treats Emily and George, but it’s a necessary step for Emily to carve out her own place in the literary world, rather than always seeing her own writing as inferior to the ones she believes have already accomplished so much. In the case of Thoreau, he’s actually accomplished very little.
Ultimately, Dickinson is about more than just the writing persona and tragedies of Emily Dickinson. It’s also an incredibly fun and anachronistic rom-com. Emily’s flirtations with the men in her life modernize the period piece even further by crafting the character in the same vein of other frazzled rom-com heroes on television, like Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City or Mindy Lahiri on The Mindy Project. (The style of texting with bubbles on screen in The Mindy Project is also present in Dickinson when the words of Emily’s poetry dance and glide across the screen in shimmering lettering.) On these shows, modern soundtracks are present (they are in Dickinson, too, with Lizzo’s tracks providing a fresh, Baz Luhrmann-esque backdrop to the older literary stories), the romances are between extremely attractive people, and the moments of comedy are quite raunchy, courtesy of Nora Ephron’s influence (on Dickinson, Vinnie (Anna Baryshnikov), has an orgasm at the dinner table on Christmas. Bet you didn’t see that in an Austen film).
It all blends together for one of the most original series I’ve ever seen, even though it’s based around one of the most prominent figures in the world of poetry. It only debuted about a year ago, but it still cracks the top one hundred because of how surprising it was in its craft and how lovely it was to engage with. Between the Amherst setting, the Dickinson portrayal, and an acting appearance from John Mulaney, it’s no wonder why I loved Dickinson so much and why it’s grown in my estimation since it debuted. One of the most underrated and best new shows of 2019, Dickinson should be the flagship series on Apple TV+. Even if it’s not featured above Aniston and Steve Carell on the front page, though, there’s a spot in Amherst, Massachusetts where you can see the Dickinson home in full. Take the tour, too. If you get to her bedroom at the right time of day, you’ll see a certain slant of light.
