My new laptop came with a subscription to Apple TV, so this month I decided to take “Dickinson,” the comedy/drama that premiered last November, out for a spin. The series is based—very loosely—on Alfred Habegger’s 2002 biography, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books. Reviewers noted how his book “analyzes his subject’s experiences from a modern perspective,” and modern perspective is all what “Dickinson” is about (to be clear, I’ll refer to the TV character as Emily, and the poet as Dickinson).
Here are Austin and Sue, Lavinia and her parents, plus the law clerks, friends, servants and suitors who crowd the Amherst family’s parlor. Although the characters are older, the ensemble’s milieu feels more like high school than either college, as portrayed in comedies like “Dear White People,” or the adult life of “Friends.” One episode involves Lavinia penciling a nude self-portrait for her bad boyfriend, who shares it, like a selfie, with their art class. Another has Emily throwing a house party while her parents are away, squirting drops of opium onto tongues of the willing. Think of how “Clueless” transposes Jane Austen’s Emma to Beverly Hills High, and you get the feel of “Dickinson.”
“Dickinson” also represents a more recent genre: Real Life Fiction, or RLF. A subgenre of fan fiction, RLF authors script tales about celebrities, often placing them together in romantic relationships, known as “shipping.” No reason why RLF shouldn’t include those dead a hundred years, especially when one character has been “shipped” by her biographers with a minister, a newspaper editor, and her sister-in-law. “Dickinson” extends this to a forlorn George Gould, whose proposals Emily spurns, and Benjamin Newton, her father’s law clerk. Called by Dickinson “tutor,” and “preceptor,” Newton in the series becomes her soulmate, even though—or because—he’s gay.
RLF enjoys yanking characters out of chronology and setting, awarding Dylan a football scholarship or matching him with a Kardashian. “Dickinson” sets up the poet with Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott. Both are disappointments; Thoreau, no solitary, enjoys fame, and Walden Pond’s thronged like the public beach it is today. Alcott tries to school Emily on how to sell her work—sadly, poetry’s not worth much in the marketplace. Both caricatures rely on truth: while at Walden, Thoreau often walked home for dinner, and Alcott’s writing was driven by family penury. Such slivers, along with quotations from Dickinson’s poetry and letters, intrigued this viewer into clicking on the next episode, and the next.
Habegger’s scholarship underlies the series’ poignancy. Dickinson’s mother really didn’t want servants, preferring to do her own housework. Her father expressed constant fear for his daughters’ safety. Dickinson was forced, at Mt. Holyoke, to contemplate a dead classmate in her coffin. Susan Gilbert, poor and without family, probably did find her rich friends’ emotional demands indulgent and overwhelming. But sometimes, while promoting Dickinson as a feminist, the series restricts her life in ways her father didn’t. In one episode Emily and Sue sneak into a lecture dressed as men while in fact, Dickinson freely attended several on geology and botany at all-male Amherst. Shaping Dickinson into an activist is a stretch; her battles remain more intimate than public.
Still, the speculation in “Dickinson” is very much in the tradition of Dickinson scholarship–even if the playfulness is not. Did I mention that Emily hangs out with rapper Death in his coach? That the steampunk opening titles are jagged as gear teeth, the accompanying music an industrial screech? That Emily writes poems on scraps of envelope, and addresses a letter to Sue, “Open Me Carefully”? The latter details are catnip to those who know more than something of Dickinson’s life, and informative for those who don’t. I’ll tune in when the second season of “Dickinson” premieres next month; a third season, I hear, will follow.