We know so little about poet Emily Dickenson and she is so renowned for her work that she’s like a blank glass on which we can project our own image. The latest imagination so to “read her” is British filmmaker Terence Davies. Not surprisingly, the sensitive gay British outsider finds a kindred spirit in the reclusive 19th Century New England outsider poet. Davies and Dickenson grew up in opposite situations but with the same predicaments.
In Davies’ early films a sensitive young man struggles to survive in a brutishly abusive working class British family. His new work shifts to the American privileged class but again the central figure struggles to preserve her independence and quirkiness against an abrasive social order, specifically the regimen of a stultifying Christian faith and repressive patriarchy.
In the opening scene young Emily opts out of the school’s two narrow options: having found God already or intent upon seeking Him. The Her option is inconceivable. The headmistress condemns Emily’s independence of faith — or her faith in her own independence.
Emily’s prominent father is independent enough to resist his visiting minister — “I come as myself!” — but forces Emily into more submission than she’s inclined. Dickenson pere is independent enough to make his children’s free-thinking plausible but still largely constrained by his own conventionality and the narrow thinking of his times. He rejects a gifted soprano’s self-display in recital.
Mr Dickenson’s wilfulness proves problematic when he thwarts son Austin’s determination to join the Civil War. Out of selfish concern, he doesn’t want his son to die in war. Austin submits to his father’s will but is broken for it. He considers himself now compromised in integrity, honour and manliness. Though Austin survives the period of the war he settles into a sexless marriage and later a shameful adultery that alienates him from Emily.
Davies provides an apparently unnecessary montage of war scenes and the horrendous body count for two effects. Along with the school scene and the scenes with visiting ministers the war characterizes the rigid ethos against which Emily’s humanity, intuition and sensitivity compel her to rebel. Emily cites the pointlessness of the war’s horrendous toll from a broader perspective than her father’s sole concern for his family.
As well, the father and brother speak of the war from selfish perspectives, respectively warding off and embracing the possibility of death in narrow terms. This contrasts to Emily’s philosophic conception of death as the governing shadow across our life and choices. Where everyone else thinks about their individual lives and how to bend themselves to conformity, Emily nourishes her individuality in order to live fully in the face of mortality. “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.” When she mourns her father’s death she wears white — antithetic to the conventional black — because her mourning has to be personal not prescribed.
With Emily Davies steps beyond his earlier lead characters’ flourishing into sensitive survivors. Emily’s courage, poetic nature and rigorous individuality turn against her when she isolates herself from the world and turns bitter judgmental recluse.
As a girl Emily is influenced by her pretty, outspoken and individualistic girl-friend. But for all the friend’s sass and cynicism, she settles into normality, for better or worse, even marrying. No such compromise for our Emily. She eventually drives off a suitor by refusing to come downstairs to join him and by railing at him from above. Her motives are mixed, her own feeling that she is ugly and her uncompromising fear of moral compromise in manners and beliefs.
We see two characters with whom Emily may have had romantic relationships — her potentially lesbian sister-in-law next door and the new young minister whose sermons plumb ecstasy and who himself loves Emily’s poetry. But the film gives no sense of Emily’s physical engagement with either, except for her grief when the minister moves away. Without even the Catholic woman’s outlet for passion in the nunnery, Emily is condemned by puritanism to purity. She has no physical release or expression, nothing like an orgasm, until her deathbed paroxysms which work like a bleak parody of her neglected sensual life. There she releases the energies she has laboured to repress.
The other women embody the compromises Emily rejected. Her sister lives an obedient life, serving parents and siblings without — at least in the narrative — connecting beyond. Their mother seems to have lived a 50-year post-natal depression, silent and joyless. We don’t see Emily’s girlhood friend in her married life but we can assume she restrained her sass to sustain the marriage. Austin’s wife bears a child — to meet the contract, so to speak — but then retreats to a celibacy her husband will pop outside to relieve.
In two parallel scenes of a salon musical recital, over the plush singing the camera pans across the salon walls and furnishings for an extended time, long enough for the music to grip us too. In the first, Emily is in the scene though sitting apart from the others, and she shivers at the experience of the song. In the second the music has brought her down from her upstairs retreat but she stays outside the room, behind the door. She closes it to return to her isolation. The music brings Emily out of herself briefly, into the outside world, but not enough to connect to other people.
Not for Emily the community and shared comfort the art brings the others, however briefly. Bathetically, the accompanist in the second salon concert finds sexual harmony with Austin that she can’t with her syphilitic husband. Emily can’t accept that, though, for her principles extend so far as to poison her sense. To Cynthia Nixon’s credit, there are shots where Emily’s anger and bitterness make her look ugly. For the Belle of Amherst became something of a beast. That is what's so disquieting about her "quiet passion" for poetry.
Nor does Emily’s own art save her. She lives and dies an unknown poet. Her sparse publications were under pseudonyms. Her considerable fame was exclusively posthumous. As she early explains her poetic impulse, “This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me.” But because she refused to accommodate her vision to any social community, she lost her relationships with even her few appreciative readers.
"Poems are my solace for the eternity which surrounds us all,” she wrote. But because her poetry did not establish her in her lifetime it provided insufficient solace. Within the narrative frame she dies imprisoned by her poetic discipline not released or fulfillled by it. After one convulsion she facially resembles the woman who was everything Emily strived to avoid becoming — the animated young minister’s wife, steel-girdled into the model of Abstinence. As Emily dreaded, she became what she rejected.
Davies gives his Emily a harrowing, tormented death scene which in its extremity turns a New England housebound poet’s life into tragedy. People do die like that, you know, in real life if not in consoling films.
In long shot — i.e., from where we sit now —this Davies hero is his most successful, a universally revered poet whose vision, discipline and deceptive simplicity of language haunt us still. But in close-up her genius curtailed her contentment because she found no way for it to enrich her day to day life. In that respect she was as diminished and abused by her times as Davies’ younger characters were by theirs. In a humane world, without the bigotry of the faithful, without the harsh restrictions of the patriarchal and conformist, Emily might have been able better to reconcile her independence with community and perhaps come to know the non-familial love.
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