The Queer Case of Emily Dickinson
What right do you have to take another person’s life and completely remake it?
Perhaps that question is moot. Perhaps I should be asking: if a person is dead, and especially if she is long dead, what is there to stop you?
There is certainly no legal impediment. The reputations of the dead have no legal defense, and we Americans have a bad habit of thinking anything that is legal is permissible, and anything permissible ought to be sanctioned. Lord Moulton’s “obedience to the unenforceable”—the idea that behavior should be governed by social mores of honor, civility, and temperance beyond what the law can impose—is a concept almost as long-buried as the lord himself.
I grew up with the image of Emily Dickinson the recluse in her virginal white, and have a pleasant memory of seeing Julie Harris as an older Emily in the long-running one-woman play The Belle of Amherst. But that was ages ago, when chastity was better tolerated than homosexuality. Today it is chastity that is questionable, and if Apple TV+ wants to run a series depicting a young Emily Dickinson as a lesbian who cuckolded her own brother, among other acts of self-actualization and social courage, there is no cultural bar to the producers—nothing but the inattention of the viewing public. And the viewing public gave Dickinson three seasons.
Though the series ended in 2021, it lives on as an internet source. If I type “Emily Dickinson” into a search engine today, the first question I read is, “Is Emily Dickinson LGBTQ?” You will find plenty of academic citations for her lesbianism or bisexuality, and see her celebrated during queer history month.
No one can usefully argue with either television writers or AI data-mining; the first are unfettered by history, and as for the second, terrifying as it is in many respects, for things like general knowledge it’s garbage in, garbage out. (My husband recently queried AI for a list of the Ten Commandments and was told there were Nine.) But surely the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, holds to a higher standard than this. Surely a historic house is responsible for being historically accurate about the person whose life is remembered there, and will confine itself to the known, and be cautious even with the plausible, much more with the implausible.
No Help from the House
So I ask you: when TV-watching poetry lovers come to Amherst for a house tour, and wonder if Emily had an affair with her childhood friend Sue, what should they hear for an answer?
I stopped to see the house a while ago and found out. I had not then seen Dickinson and was unaware that, in it, the characters Emily and Sue, still girls, begin having their affair in the very first episode, or that they are later caught kissing by Emily’s brother, Austin, who marries Sue anyway, or that they hold a wild laudanum-dosing party in the Dickinson house.
The show is full of social anachronisms and absurdities, all intentional. The series’ creator, Alana Smith, told an interviewer, “I am much more engaged with the poetic persona that Emily built in her work than I am with the literal person.” I would say the poetic Emily is not much in evidence either, but the key point is that mere facts are not going to hobble Ms. Smith’s writing team. The result is a series whose young heroine’s sexual life, drug experimentation, and racial sensitivity reflects 2020’s Malibu much more than 1840’s Amherst.
The implausibilities and anachronisms are precisely the point: Ms. Smith created an Emily she wishes the real Emily to have been. But as for demonstrable truthfulness, even a cursory reader of Emily Dickinson’s letters and poems would say—no.
And yet, when the Dickinson house’s professional tour guide was asked about the affair and about other unlikely events depicted in the show, her answer was equivocal. Asked twice, she gave the same answer twice, in the same few words. Because guides at historic homes generally undergo hours of training, including how to respond to sensitive questions, she was probably giving an agreed-upon answer the staff had all discussed. She said that “the creator of that series asked all the right questions, and then chose her own answers.”
Of the affair in particular this guide did not say, “Yes, it is true, or almost certainly true, and here is why we think so.” She also did not say, “Emily Dickinson loved her sister-in-law very much, but there is no real evidence of a lesbian affair, and at the house of a historic person we are most interested in what we actually know.”
Instead, she implied that in this patchwork world of my-truth and your-truth there are many possible answers, and Apple TV+ has given one, and it was not her job to judge its improbability. I would presume that we the house-touring public are likewise free to make up our minds on the subject and settle on our own answers. But we will do so without any clear direction from the staff at the Dickinson Museum.
Chinks & Biases
Behind this series (and an equally unlikely 2018 movie billed as a comedy, Wild Nights with Emily) lie decades of hints and assertions, made persistently in recent years by Martha Nell Smith of the University of Maryland. Her belief that Emily had romantic love for her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, rests chiefly on the existence of a few ardently affectionate letters to Sue; a few poems that may or may not express physical desire; and on the fact that Sue’s husband, Austin, and/or his lover, Mabel Loomis Todd, who was Emily’s first literary executor, cut out or erased Sue’s name in various places among Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts.
It is really the letters that are the chink through which this bus has been driven. A few of them express great love and longing and a desire to embrace and kiss Sue, and they use language I would not use myself unless I were writing either to a sweetheart or a child. But the conventions of the mid-nineteenth century were different—and Miss Dickinson herself was different, and wrote other highly convoluted and strange letters, along with many charming and straightforward ones. We hear her with our modern ears at some peril of misunderstanding.
Even when most broadly interpreted, these letters are still uncertain. Martha Nell Smith expresses her belief as a certainty, but nowhere can she prove it, and even she, unlike the screenwriters, argues for the emotion but not the act. In claiming Emily Dickinson as one of her own, as a point on what she calls the “lesbian continuum,” Prof. Smith makes no bones about her bias. And while it is a common and understandable human wish to want to claim a great poet as “one of us,” bias is not evidence.
There are other holes in Prof. Smith’s arguments. Emily Dickinson used similarly passionate language with other women friends besides Sue. After Sue’s marriage to Austin, Emily regularly called her “Sister,” as unusual an epithet for a lover then as it would be now. One of the ardent poems Prof. Smith cites was originally sent to a man (though we cannot know whether it was intended as a personal message or sent simply as a poem). And then there are the drafts of the “Master” letters (scholars can only guess at the recipient) and those few fragments of the mostly destroyed love letters she wrote to Judge Otis Lord, which are not equivocal in the least.
Too Improbable to Believe
To read Emily Dickinson is to find a strictly raised, highly intelligent, morally self-examining, religiously nonconforming, witty and occasionally acerbic woman of the nineteenth century struggling with joys and sorrows. She suffered the losses of many early deaths, seems to have felt both faith and doubt, and she had some great and never-to-be-understood (by us) trouble. She possessed an intellectual and emotional fastidiousness that led to her living a life that was strangely retired, even for her era. Writing appears to have been necessary to her, and she longed for her poems to be understood and to be printed as she had written them. That this odd, loving, self-sequestered, and remarkable woman would have had an affair that her family, her neighbors, and her own self would have regarded as grossly immoral simply doesn’t scan.
Unless you are The New Yorker. “Rather than focusing on an actual woman,” Kate Walden wrote in a 2021 article, “Smith’s show wonders: can we make of our inheritance something elastic, elegant, useful? How do we create within the caress and assault of this material?”
She is right about the assault. These days, we have created a more useful Emily by stealing her life—an act that is all the worse given the sadly predictable confusion the TV-viewing public is going to have about what parts of the on-screen story are true, and what parts are not.
But if Apple and its AI-inheritors have concocted an absurdity that goes well beyond even Prof. Smith’s most radical arguments, it is also true that neither I nor anyone else can prove a negative. I can’t prove Emily Dickinson did not have a lesbian affair any more than I can prove she never ran naked through the streets of Amherst on a midsummer’s night. Still, it is material to my argument that neither is very likely to have happened. Like G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, I can believe the impossible, but not the improbable.
Overshadowed but Untouched
Unfortunately, the improbable life of Emily Dickinson has overtaken her actual genius. With a poet, it is the poetry that matters, and the person intrigues us only because we love what she has written. But given that today’s popular culture is more concerned with identity than with anything else, Miss Dickinson’s reputed love life has overshadowed the real reason we remember her. That, too, is an injustice.
The study of history is by necessity interpretive. To tell someone’s story is to interpret it, if only in what we choose to emphasize, and each age reinterprets its heroes to some degree. But we ought to be conservative as to evidence, in simple fairness to the person whose life we are describing. We should not give a free pass to screenplays that might as well have put Emily Dickinson on another planet, and we should be cautious with an academic thesis that is highly speculative. To do otherwise is to argue that the real Emily Dickinson has no right to her actual life, and to collude in the warped understanding or even the erasure of the person she really was, imperfectly as we can know her.
It is ironic that Miss Dickinson should be so resolutely claimed when she was, of all poets, the most private and the most unclubbable. But we live in a significantly Godless age, in which our highest good is not Love or Mercy or even Justice, but only Pleasure, by which we mean (first and foremost) sexual pleasure. And so, as my friend Tom once said, the Belle of Amherst must be saved from her virginity.
Thank goodness all this cannot really touch her poems. If I will just close my computer and open my book—
Let me not thirst with this Hock at my Lip,
Nor beg, with domains in my pocket—
Katherine Dalton has worked as an editor at Harper’s and Chronicles magazines, written for publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the University Bookman, and contributed to Wendell Berry: Life and Work and Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto. She lives in her native Kentucky.
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