Emily Dickinson, Social Butterfly?

Maybe not quite, but the popular image we learned in high school of the reclusive woman in white is giving way to a more socially engaged Emily Dickinson, as Daniel Larkin argues today at Hyperallergic. Both the recent exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson, and the recent Terence Davies film, A Quiet Passion, present a Dickinson among friends and with a robust social life. Even after her retreat from the public in her late-30s, Dickinson nevertheless maintained an extensive set of correspondences, or as Larkin writes, "Her famously preserved room was effectively a busy message dispatch center." Let's take a look from the top:

Never before have Emily Dickinson’s writings and belongings been brought together like this. Usually tucked away at various libraries and museums, the letters, daguerreotypes, and other ephemera are all under one roof for the first time at the Morgan Library & Museum. The constellation of objects in I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson forms a new understanding of the poet. Mainly, it reveals a far more socially engaged Emily Dickinson than the recluse we’ve believed her to be. In fact, it might even debunk that myth.

Why does high school English introduce the poet as a recluse? Yes, Dickinson chose to socially withdraw in her late 30s, and it’s hard to say exactly why. But she was social before then, and as the many documents on view attest, remained so in some critical ways after her so-called seclusion.

So let’s dig deeper into the story before deciding whether that label is worth keeping. And let’s not pull punches — misogyny has disfigured how Dickinson’s story is told. We’re missing out on a fierce mind when we reduce her to a spinster perseverating alone in her room writing poems to the ether.

The new movie on Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion, is also on a mission to rewrite the script. When Cynthia Nixon, playing Dickinson, waves her fan and laughs besides a friend, it’s dissonant with what many of us first learned about the poet. The film dramatizes the social web the Morgan exhibition documents with its letters and mementos. Viewing the film before exploring the exhibition is a great way to internalize that Dickinson did, in fact, have a life and — gasp — friends.

It's time to head to Hyperallergic to find out more!