Wild Nights with Emily

I saw the new Emily Dickinson movie yesterday. While there are some funny, absurd moments, it's not really a comedy. Also they flit back and forth in time, between Mabel Loomis Todd narrating Emily's life at a book reading to Emily's real life that was covered up and erased by Todd. The movie effectively makes Todd the villain who was obsessed with meeting Emily, felt rejected and jealous of her writing talent, then got her revenge by editing Emily's poems and creating the myth of her as a lonely recluse forever pining for a mysterious man known as Master.

I've read Emily's poems and biography, and I've seen the previous film A Quiet Passion which also did not have a straightforward timeline. I remember being disappointed in that movie which focused on Emily's sister Lavinia and her friendships with other women, but hardly any on Susan Gilbert, her long-time friend, sister-in-law, and her neighbor. That film also emphasized the theory that Emily was pining away for some man, and felt self-pity about being a plain spinster. So yes, this Wild Nights movie is definitely an improvement by restoring Susan to Emily's life and counteracting the image of her never trying to get published during her lifetime.

However Wild Nights plays fast and loose with time, compressing it to include Mabel's husband David Peck Todd getting institutionalized, but this took place only in 1922, after the Todds moved away from Amherst (decades after Emily's death). In the 1880s, Mabel is kind of vague about Austin Dickinson being David's boss; David is an astronomer teaching at Amherst while Austin is treasurer of the college. In real life David was a philanderer and didn't care about Mabel's openly known affair with Austin; the movie is giving a weird, false impression that David was unaware of the affair or locked up and unable to interfere.


The movie also portrays Thomas Wentworth Higginson as a bumbling fool who doesn't understand Emily Dickinson's poetry, is insincere about his advocacy for women's rights, and keeps trying to "surgically" edit the poems to be more conventional. He will later help Mabel Loomis Todd edit the poems for posthumous publication, but according to Wikipedia, Higginson was the one defending the poems' original style from Todd, and eventually they disagreed enough that Higginson withdrew altogether from the project. Also, neither of them would have done any editing if Lavinia hadn't given it to them when she was dissatisfied with how slowly Susan was preparing the poems for publication; she apparently wanted to include the poems within the context of Emily's life and letters. The movie also depicts Susan's daughter Martha trying to correct Mabel Todd's portrayal of Emily as a recluse; as a child, Martha seems to love helping pass secret messages between Emily and Susan, and as a adult, she views their love as "romantic friendship" which was indeed a phenomenon in the 19th century, though I am not sure that Martha understands that there was a sexual component, and some friends were actually queer couples hiding their love under the disguise of passionate friendship.

Overall I'm glad I saw the film, but there are distortions of history in it. There's a definite agenda by the filmmaker, as much of an agenda as Mabel Loomis Todd had in editing the poems. I wish one of these days we could get a more straightforward film about Emily Dickinson, but I suppose nobody wants to do straightforward with her poems.