The Mere Fact of Her

From her bedroom on the second floor of her family’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson reimagined the form and cadence of poetry in the United States. After her death in 1886, and particularly after the first posthumous edition of her poems appeared in 1890, she became a legend, magnetic in her draw but persistently and speculatively revised by both those who knew her and those lured to her enigma. With hindsight, her trajectory seems inevitable. The oft-withdrawn, colossally—albeit quietly—prolific Dickinson was a riddle to the handful of contemporaries who knew of her or, in rare instances, claimed a closer intimacy. Even then, her reputation as a reticent, well-cultivated wit enkindled feverish mythologies of eccentric spinster genius.

Today, Dickinson’s readers conjecture still. Her poetry is available, of course, as is a thicket of extant correspondence—Dickinson did not keep a diary, as far as historians know. But any grand historical legacy is bound to unfurl into the province of metaphor. Dickinson—who was inclined to speak figuratively and guarded the particulars of her emotional life—is especially susceptible to the overdetermined opacity rendered by such extraordinary cultural significance. Elevated to this symbolic echelon, she prevails as a proto-feminist icon of singular and uncompromising vision. Meanwhile, the unresolvable conundrums of her biography open a chasm between what can be known of the poet and the flush of her embodied reality—the “mere fact” of her, as Dickinson might have dismissively remarked. She would likely prefer her privacy safeguarded or at least be unimpressed by contemporary readers’ eagerness for material details, especially those that would settle questions about her romantic life. “You cannot even die / But Nature and Mankind must pause / To pay you scrutiny,” Dickinson wrote, as if anticipating our meddling.

The scope and endurance of Dickinson’s posthumous celebrity abides in tension with her recorded ambivalence toward fame and with her mystified personal history. Like the Amherst gossips who angled for an audience with their reclusive neighbor, our current preoccupation with Dickinson emerges from an alchemy of bafflement and curiosity. If it’s not Dickinson mania, then it's a committed, enthusiastic fixation—one that directs attention to the inscrutable landscape of the poet’s interiority and exposes contemporary readers’ uneasy assessments of what comprises a full life. Did Dickinson’s poetic pursuits overwhelm the domain of her desires? Whither Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, her sister-in-law; interlocutor; and, according to some, lifelong lover? Was the circumference of Dickinson’s existence enough?

Perplexity makes us productive, as if one might approach a truer sense of Dickinson through acts of hypothetical representation. Over the last seven years, a spate of film and TV productions envisioned potential and, in certain cases, boldly anachronistic versions of Dickinson, portraying her as either afflicted and solemn or bombastic and wisecracking. In Terence Davies’s biopic A Quiet Passion (2016), Dickinson, played by Cynthia Nixon, is oft-anguished, by turns timid and aggressive, and evidently heterosexual—over the course of the film, she and Susan share one chaste scene. Madeleine Olnek’s film Wild Nights with Emily (2018) assumes a more spirited tone—it reminds me of Drunk History without the boozy storytelling—and imagines Dickinson, this time portrayed by Molly Shannon, through the lens of scholar Martha Nell Smith’s research, which argues that Dickinson was queer, as the poet’s letters to Susan plainly indicate. Shannon’s Dickinson coheres with the actor’s reputation; she is not, herself, a comedienne, but warm and playful, attuned to the absurd.

My favorite contribution to the recent glut of Dickinsoniana, Alena Smith’s 2019 television series Dickinson, jettisons attempts at temporal fidelity and instead portrays the poet through an interplay of past and present aesthetics. (I’ve written about it elsewhere as one example of a phenomenon I termed the feminist anachronistic costume drama.) Like Wild Nights with Emily, the series interprets Dickinson as a sapphic goofball, and, dispensing with verisimilitude, it creates the conditions for depicting an exuberant queer sensuality. Hailee Steinfeld’s Emily and Sue (Ella Hunt) don male drag while they boogie to Lizzo’s “Boys”; Sue makes love to Emily in the latter’s narrow bed while the chorus of Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl” soars. These anachronisms befit the show’s thematic aims. To my mind, Dickinson portrays, with affective clarity, the fraught circumstances imposed on a woman seeking a queer literary life in mid-19th-century America. It also provokes new conversations about Dickinson and her mise-en-scène, most compellingly the podcast The Slave Is Gone, in which poets Jericho Brown and Brionne Janae join scholar Aífe Murray to consider and critique the show’s depiction of Dickinson and the racial politics of her milieu.

Still, each film or TV series is an assemblage that imposes Dickinson’s verse and correspondence on theoretical collisions between the poet and those in her orbit. One might even conceive of these works as contributing to a speculative brand of new historicist criticism, hypothesizing the contexts through which Dickinson’s poems might have emerged. I think, for instance, of an incisive conversation between Brown and Janae in their first episode, in which they remark on Dickinson’s slim paper supply and the labor of composing verse while completing domestic chores. How differently might one read “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” if one knows that Dickinson mulled over the verses while fetching water, as the series premiere of Dickinson suggests? Indeed, the poem’s first line implies a ceaselessness from which the speaker is mercifully delivered unto an immortal realm where one “[knows] no haste.” Finally—all the time one could wish, with nary an interruption from worldly detritus.

One might glean from Dickinson’s poetry her patient endurance of an unfulfilling, ephemeral world. She was often preoccupied with the boundary of mortal comprehension, that membrane between lived experience and an immense yet shrouded hereafter. “This World is not Conclusion,” begins one poem written circa 1862, in the midst of her most prolific period: “A Species stands beyond - / Invisible, as Music - / But positive, as Sound - .” Ensconced in this quest for a truth beyond materiality, watching for signs only she could recognize, she might have missed the gazes of those who watched her. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the minister who mentored Dickinson’s literary ambitions, once wrote to her in frustration: “[P]erhaps if I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you, but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light.” The rickety contradiction of that metaphor—“fiery mist”—betrays some linguistic struggle: Dickinson’s disposition was not easily summarized.

Others fared better in the task. Emily Dickinson Face to Face, a memoir by Dickinson’s niece, Martha “Matty” Dickinson Bianchi, originally published in 1932 and newly reissued by McNally Editions, harbors none of Higginson’s exasperation. Bianchi, the second of Susan and Austin Dickinson’s three children, lived next door to the poet, but despite this proximity, she resorts to ethereal descriptions of Dickinson as an otherworldly, “elfin” spirit who bides her time alongside mortal kin. “[Dickinson’s] impatience with detail and what she termed ‘mere fact’ grew upon her, in her search for truth,” Bianchi writes. But neither was the truth sufficient, for it, too, had an essential underpinning: “It was the principle beyond the truth that she was after, the source of light beyond the pine trees; and not only the principle, but its ultimate significance.”

For Bianchi, Dickinson was not merely a magical and beloved aunt but also a metric for her own evolution. She assessed her maturation by the nuance with which she perceives the poet. “Our immature pity for her self-imposed rigors, the narrow confines of her straitened life, deepened,” Bianchi wrote. Over the years, as she and her brothers witnessed their aunt’s proclivity for solitude, “[t]he perspective … changed. We were those hemmed in. Aunt Emily was free to her chosen horizon.” The affectionate tone of these recollections sometimes stiffened into reverent near-hagiography. Throughout the memoir, Bianchi established a hierarchical opposition between the fairy-like Aunt Emily who “flits” through the house and the earthbound members of the Dickinson family, rather remarkably described as “the dead weight in the scale” that “balanced [the poet’s] life.”

These dramatic flourishes insinuated Bianchi’s own literary aspirations. She, too, wrote poetry—and was more inclined than Dickinson to publish it, in venues such as Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly. She also cultivated a career as a novelist. But Bianchi’s reputation is inextricable from her position as sentinel of her aunt’s legacy. She both edited and published editions of Dickinson’s poetry and, according to scholar Julie Dobrow, fostered renewed interest in her aunt as Dickinson’s centenary approached in 1930.

Bianchi was acutely conscious of her custodial role. The title of her memoir—Emily Dickinson Face to Face—implies some tension between authority and tip-of-one’s-toes defensiveness. By 1932, Bianchi was the poet’s last living relative, and she established herself as the rare specimen whom Dickinson welcomed into her company. “She probably cuddled with her. Gotta be only six or seven people in the history of the universe who cuddled with Emily Dickinson,” Anthony Madrid writes in the book’s jarringly colloquial foreword. Cuddles aside, it is clear that Dickinson’s peculiarities were elemental to her niece’s childhood. “We had been born into her life,” Bianchi wrote of herself and her two brothers. Her reflections on Dickinson’s seclusion nod at early readers who were incredulous at its perceived severity: “It never seemed to us that it should have been any other than it was.”

In Bianchi’s telling, Dickinson’s reputation—and the sanctity of her solitude—were challenged by gawking locals confounded by such reserved behavior. Although instructed by her parents never to speak of her aunt “with outsiders,” Bianchi and her older brother “were often ‘pumped’ and subjected to close questioning by curious acquaintances—or even strangers.” If her memoir conveys an eagerness to authoritatively settle the mystery of her aunt for “the inquisitive outsider of today,” it simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically insists upon her family’s efforts to safeguard the privacy of Dickinson’s bower from trespasses both physical and rhetorical.

“Of course she was a romantic figure,” Bianchi acknowledged—and indeed, the Dickinsons participated in that romance, not by egging on the gossip but because they seemed to believe in its validity. They ensured that the figure who inspired Amherst’s fervent legends could live by her own terms, her serenity unbroken except by the tumult of her intellect. “We never asked her questions about herself. We never tried to pry into the secret of her life or its power over us,” explained Bianchi. On the contrary, they offered their complicity, for Bianchi claimed, “instinctively we wanted everything to be as she wanted it, her ‘polar privacy’ preserved.” The Dickinson of Emily Dickinson Face to Face thrives on her own cosmic force but relies on those traveling in her orbit to ensure her asylum from the wider world.

But after the poet’s death—and after her younger sister, Lavinia Dickinson, discovered the 1,800-poem oeuvre secreted in her room—that familial orbit reversed its efforts and sought a public for her work. The imbroglio that followed, which Madrid hastily addresses in his foreword, inheres in Bianchi’s assertions of authority on the matter of her aunt’s personal history. Before Bianchi published collections of her aunt’s poems and letters in the 1910s and 1920s, Austin Dickinson’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, assumed editorial duties with the assistance of Higginson. But when Todd published Dickinson’s letters in 1894, she erased all signs of Sue, whom she surely considered an adversary and an obstruction to her own happiness. The flagrant bias of Todd’s interventions and Bianchi’s certain anger over her mother’s being struck from Dickinson’s narrative furnish significant vitriol to an even larger Dickinson-Todd quarrel. The pell-mell affair involved a court case, the ruling of which deprived Todd of a strip of land that Austin Dickinson, by then deceased, had promised her. After the suit, Todd ceased all endeavors to edit or publish Dickinson’s work.

Bianchi resumed those efforts, but—unsurprisingly—without any intention of collaborating with Todd. Instead, she committed her own textual transgressions: Bianchi’s published versions of Dickinson’s letters and poems relied heavily on Todd and Higginson’s edits; however, Bianchi neglected to give either credit. Dobrow, whose book After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet (2018) traced these interfamilial disputes, explained that Bianchi sought to invalidate the latter’s depiction of her aunt and present her own as a corrective. In The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1924), Bianchi took aim—although it bears mentioning that this edition was rather incomplete; at the time, Todd withheld more than 600 of Dickinson’s poems in a camphorwood chest. Bianchi, it seems, was no less determined in her crusade:

A high exigence constrains the sole survivor of [Dickinson’s] family to state her simply and truthfully, in view of a public which has, doubtless without intention, misunderstood and exaggerated her seclusion—amassing a really voluminous stock of quite lurid misinformation of irrelevant personalities. She has been taught in colleges as a weird recluse, rehearsed to women’s clubs as a lovelorn sentimentalist.

Credibility, always an imprecise measure, registers as uniquely fraught in Bianchi’s case. Her affectionate proximity to Dickinson—a proximity Todd did not share—must influence one’s reading of Emily Dickinson Face to Face. If Bianchi, too, mythologized her aunt, it is nonetheless a mythology spun from lived interactions with the woman at their center. Readers accept, and must also assess, both the illuminations and the occlusions one vantage point renders. The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974), a biography by the scholar Richard B. Sewall, characterizes Bianchi’s editorial work as “unprofessionally” administered and claims that she “so sentimentalized” her aunt’s “life and character … as to obscure for decades their stern and powerful reality.” But Dobrow acknowledges that a number of Dickinson scholars admonish against “dismiss[ing]” Bianchi’s editorial interventions, arguing that they follow an assignment of their own that merits consideration.

That assignment might, at times, be rehabilitative. Sewall particularly discerned Bianchi’s softening strokes in her depiction of her mother’s relationship with Dickinson: “Their love never faltered or waned,” Bianchi wrote in The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. I take his point: whatever Bianchi knew of her mother’s intimacy with Dickinson, this rosy summation portrays the relationship in benign terms—somewhat recalling the sanitizing final stanza of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” Emily Dickinson Face to Face consigned the subject of Dickinson’s romantic life to a lengthy footnote, positing that she fell in love with a young, married clergyman while visiting Philadelphia in 1855, a much disputed theory. Sewall’s biography acknowledged speculations surrounding the intensely homosocial bond Dickinson and Sue shared, but by his lights, Bianchi represented it as “a girlish infatuation that developed … with no rifts or seams” rather than a site of tumult and perhaps, on Dickinson’s part, unfulfilled—even insatiable—need.

Where does this havoc over Dickinson’s biography and Bianchi’s elliptic motivations leave readers? It leaves them, at least, with one more piece of Dickinsoniana supplying its own theses on the poet’s inclinations and literary ambitions. The most striking feature of Bianchi’s memoir is her effort to see her inscrutable aunt clearly yet often—despite her enviable nearness—submitting to bewilderment. Aunt Emily is “quicksilver,” “a fixed entity” with “exquisite self-containment.” In “A Hedge Away,” a chapter from The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson also included in the McNally edition reissue, Dickinson eschewed the human race and was instead “a magical creature.” “She often moved about in a sort of revery of her own—flitting always—and quick as a trout if disturbed,” Bianchi wrote. She cast a metaphorical net, straining toward some linguistic approximation of Dickinson’s essence and falling haplessly on symbolism’s oblique suggestions. “We see – Comparatively,” begins one poem written circa 1862, likely expressing Dickinson’s own perspective on modes of human understanding. But if she drove toward precise meaning, she knew too that any comparison elides definition. Perhaps, despite her insistent secrecy, Dickinson believed every person to be as ultimately unknowable as she.

Bianchi, of course, saw it differently. One gets the sense that from the earliest years of her recollections, she was unable to square her experience of her aunt with what she understood people to be. But this puzzle affords bragging rights: “The unconscious psychology of all my various feelings about Aunt Emily as a child was summed up when, avenging myself upon a small neighbor for some wrong, I cried with all the scorn I could command: ‘Anyway—you haven’t got an Aunt Emily! Your aunts are just common ant-heap ants!” The memoir pulled Dickinson’s own language into its tapestry, through lines of poetry and remembered remarks—“Going to a wake, I take it, dear?” Dickinson asked Bianchi when she spotted her niece’s red-heeled slippers—in tacit acknowledgment that every attempt to speak on her behalf was a failed one.

In the last pages of her memoir, Bianchi recalled Dickinson’s habit of pantomiming the turning of a key, an act that bespoke her preference for remaining in her room, undisturbed: “She would stand looking down, one hand raised, thumb and forefinger closed on an imaginary key, and say, with a quick turn of her wrist, ‘It’s just a turn—and freedom, Matty!’” Here’s another metaphor, one from Dickinson herself, that lands curiously amid her colossal celebrity. Mythology knows no doors. But neither, now, does Dickinson. This world is not conclusion; while others feverishly rewrote and reiterated her pale imitations, she moved on to the light beyond the pine trees, to the metaphysical significance she chased and trusted herself to find.