Terence Davies’s Dickinson

Terence Davies’s film A Quiet Passion opens at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Emily Dickinson stands among her classmates before the college’s puritanical founder. “Do you wish to come to God and be saved?” the headmistress demands of the girls. Those who are already saved are sent to the right, and those hoping to be saved are sent to the left. The brazen 17-year-old Dickinson (played as a young woman by Emma Bell) remains by herself in the middle, for she says she is “not even awakened yet” and therefore, “How should I repent?” The headmistress admonishes her: “You are alone in your rebellion,” she warns. “I fear you are a no hoper.” “Yes, Miss Lyon,” Emily defers.

Some version of this “no hoper” business happened in real life—though Dickinson was one of 29 classmates deemed such. Still, Davies’s point is well-taken: Dickinson was one of a kind. Reclusive spinster, literary genius, wry observer of human folly: is there any poet with a stronger personal brand? But until now, we haven’t really seen her championed as a rebel outside literary circles—her popular reputation was sealed in the 1970s as the peculiarly shy, slightly addled Belle of Amherst. Truth be told, a moving, speaking, assertive Dickinson is a little hard to get used to. But this is Davies’s Dickinson and, as Susan Howe’s brilliant homage My Emily Dickinson made clear, we all have ours, pieced together for our own purposes.

As seen in the first scene, Davies’s Dickinson is beset with spiritual doubt. Even as an adult (played by Cynthia Nixon), she eschews conventional piety, refusing to attend church or kneel and pray with a pastor who visits the family. She also turns out to be (and arguably was) a proto-feminist, an abolitionist, and, of course, eventually a recluse. For those who know Dickinson’s life well, there is something slightly cartoonish about the way the film hits each highlight in Dickinson’s biography and uses what Variety calls “heavily mannered” dialogue to move the story along. Despite these shortcomings, Davies’s film captures the complexity of the poet’s interior character—her insecurity, pride, wit, coquettishness, and how she changed over time—by highlighting the poetry and treating it with extraordinary tenderness. 

The poems—19 of them, all read beautifully by Nixon—offer a glimpse into the poet’s thoughts and feelings at transitional moments in her life. Often the camera simply tracks across Nixon’s face or lingers quietly on a scene as we listen to a voiceover of the poem. Familiar poems that one might have read as abstractions suddenly take on very specific meaning in the context of a biographical film. Given the open-ended nature of Dickinson’s manuscripts and how many different versions exist, this could easily feel prescriptive, but it doesn’t, in part because the poems are treated with true sonic reverence. Davies essentially asks viewers to honor an artist who had little recognition while she was alive by listening carefully now and imagining the potential context for her work. “I am best heard and not seen,” Dickinson tells one suitor.

Just after the confrontation with Mount Holyoke’s headmistress, we hear the first poem. “For each ecstatic instant, / We must an anguish pay,” it begins, as the camera approaches the back of the young poet standing at a sunlit window. The spoken verse releases the tension of the previous scene and sets the tone for the next, an anguished visit that Emily endures with her stodgy Aunt Elizabeth, who keeps her from her poetry. The few scenes that depict the poet in the act of writing are not as successful as those that offer a less literal representation of the moment of inspiration. At other times, the poetic interludes remind us that for Dickinson, writing offered respite from despair. When Emily falls mortally ill, we listen to “This World is not Conclusion” (373) as the camera pans across the bedridden poet’s face and fades to black. (The film version of the poem differs slightly from the version R.W. Franklin chooses for his reading edition; Davies uses Dickinson’s variant word Sequel instead of Species.) 

This World is not Conclusion. 
A Species stands beyond - 
Invisible, as Music -
But positive, as Sound -

As musicals break into song and dance, A Quiet Passion breaks into poetry. 

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The film revolves around themes familiar to readers of Emily Dickinson: the safety and claustrophobia of the domestic sphere, the frustration of making art without recognition, the passage of time and art’s ability to help us escape it. These are Davies’s themes as well. The parallels between the two artists are more than thematic; they share a formal affinity for fragmentation and repetition. Both circle around their subjects with the cool distance of a curious intellect and the passionate attention of an obsessive mind. Twice in the film, we watch a carriage drive away at a moment of symbolic death, and twice we see a hearse in an actual funeral procession. This kind of visual syntax helps us experience the poems more deeply.

In characteristic Davies fashion, the passage of time is palpable. The oppressive ticking of clocks, the intimation of time, is heard throughout the film, from a foreboding footfall that begins the film to the pointed chiming of the living room clock to the silent, stopped clock in the room where Dickinson dies. “Watch the clock that ticks for us all,” warns her Aunt Elizabeth early on. And we do. But Davies, like Dickinson, knows time is elastic and complex; it bends in on itself, protracting and racing ahead. “In my beginning is my end,” Davies quotes T.S. Eliot in his poetry-filled documentary Of Time and the City, about the Liverpool of his youth. In A Quiet Passion, time speeds up as Dickinson and each member of her family sit for portraits in one magical scene and age ten years in two minutes before our eyes. Thanks to a trick of the camera, Bell, who plays the young Dickinson, morphs into Nixon.

Though A Quiet Passion follows a fairly conventional narrative arc and the last scene lingers over the poet’s fresh grave, the trajectory of the film represents anything but a straightforward march toward death. Instead, Davies allows us to experience two kinds of time, one belonging to the ecstatic, internal world of poetry and the other to the human realm. The former offers reprieve from the latter. As he does in some of his other films, Davies deploys poetry to warp time, forcing us to slow down and listen to the poems that rescued Dickinson from “the clock that ticks for us all” and made her immortal. If there’s a lesson in the film for students of Dickinson, it’s this: despite the disappointments she experienced in life—“I have become embittered,” she tells her sister—writing most likely saved her. The poems feel like fresh revelations. There is unmistakable linguistic joy in them.

After her brother Austin’s son Ned is born, Dickinson holds her nephew in her arms, reciting her playful “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (260). Though it’s usually read as a self-deprecating verse directed at readers, the poem makes sense whispered conspiratorially to an infant by his spinster aunt, who by all accounts grew quite close to the boy. Davies takes some liberties with the biography—although the poem was written in 1861 (the year Ned was born), scholars do not agree that it was written for him—but it’s a perfectly plausible reading in the context of the film. Sometimes the words and images are so well matched, it’s easy to forget that scholars still debate when many of Dickinson’s poems were first written or what they’re actually about. Fewer than a dozen of the extant 1,800 (or so) were published in her lifetime, and the manuscripts are full of word variants.

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In Davies’s telling, as Dickinson settles into family life at the Homestead, she visits with friends during the day, particularly the witty, protofeminist Vryling Buffam, whose name, she jokes to Dickinson, “sounds like an anagram.” Dickinson reserves her writing for the night. “It is the best time, when it feels as if the whole world is asleep and still,” she tells her sister-in-law, Susan. We might mistake her for happy, but she goes on: “Those of us who live minor lives, and are deprived of a particular kind of love, we know best how to starve. We deceive ourselves. And then others. It is the worst kind of lie.” “But in matters of the soul, you are rigorous,” consoles Susan. “Rigor is no substitute for happiness,” comes Emily’s dark reply.

Still, Davies has said that he believes Dickinson “never despairs.” As he explained to audiences at the 2016 New York Film Festival, “There’s always a little bit of hope somewhere, even in the darkest of poems.” We see glimmers of this hope in her love for the married Reverend Wadsworth. Davies imagines Dickinson writing to him at her desk:

If you were coming in the Fall,
I’d brush the Summer by
With half a smile, and half a spurn,
As Housewives do, a Fly.

The poet seems willing to wait, for love, for success, for salvation. “Ah, to be racked by success,” Dickinson exclaims to Reverend Wadsworth, and then admits, “I would like some approval before I die.” Dickinson’s poetry, we are reminded, is the product not only of a rebellious spirit but also of a fragile ego. 

At the New York Film Festival screening, Davies reported that the first Dickinson poem he ever read is “Because I could not stop for Death –” (479). It offers, among other things, a shrewd commentary on the elasticity of time and is the penultimate poem in the film:

Because I could not stop for Death – 
He kindly stopped for me – 
The Carriage held but just Ourselves – 
And Immortality. 

 

We slowly drove – He knew no haste 
And I had put away 
My labor and my leisure too, 
For His Civility – 

We passed the School, where Children strove 
At Recess – in the Ring – 
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – 
We passed the Setting Sun – 

Or rather – He passed Us – 
The Dews drew quivering and Chill – 
For only Gossamer, my Gown – 
My Tippet – only Tulle – 

We paused before a House that seemed 
A Swelling of the Ground – 
The Roof was scarcely visible – 
The Cornice – in the Ground – 

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet 
Feels shorter than the Day 
I first surmised the Horses' Heads 
Were toward Eternity –

There is always the risk that remembering an icon—creating a moving, visual representation of a woman we know only through words, one small daguerreotype, and a lock of red hair—changes her enough that it destroys her intrigue and mystery. We want to love Emily Dickinson, to heed Davies’s advice and listen to Dickinson’s letters to the world that never wrote to her, but we also want her to remain a myth. Under Davies’s empathic care, she does.