Was emily dickinson gay
The Secret, Daring, and Queer Life of Poet Emily Dickinson
When Wild Nights With Emily came out last year, some critics questioned the poet’s portrayal as a vibrant chick, who loved other women to boot. In this story from our archives, the film’s director, Madeleine Olnek, tells us about her take on Emily Dickinson—and how she was anything but dreary.
Before she began researching the being of Emily Dickinson, Madeleine Olnek didn’t think much of the famous Modern England poet.
“I mind she was a miserable drudge,” the writer/director confesses.
“Everything I heard about her in college—she had agoraphobia, she was a recluse who didn’t want people to see her work—created such a creepy, morbid image of her, I honestly had no desire to study her poems.”
There’s not a scrap of that nervy recluse in Wild Nights With Emily, Olnek’s peppy and funny biopic of Dickinson. In its stead is a series of surprises: this Dickinson is witty, eager to be published—and a lesbian.
Dickinson, it turns out, conducted a life-long affair with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. The two passed endless letters back and forth (often delivered by Susan’s children), sharing brief kisses in the pant
On Choosing the Poems
On the basic level of homoerotics, Dickinson writes love and longing poems explicitly addressed to women. For example, “Ourselves were wed one summer– dear” (F596A, J631) dated 1863 and explored in the earlier share on Marriage, can be read as a marriage between two “Queens,” who have to deliver each other up. Or “The morning undressed herself” (F495A, J716), which we discussed in the post on Mothers because it was sent in a letter to Elizabeth Holland, the female Dickinson regarded as her mother figure. Dickinson augments the homoerotic sensuality of this poem, a detailed description of a strip-tease, by sending it to be read by a woman.
Dickinson also writes poems that play with gender roles, what scholars call “gender-bending.” We will consider one of several poems Dickinson wrote in which, according to biographer Alfred Habegger, the
tricky speaker … is not male, but a gal who as once a boy.
But in sketching out what she sees as Dickinson’s three-part “drama of dominance and submission” through metaphors of electricity, Susan Juhasz finds,
Dickinson’s queerness sometimes moves beyond gender-bending to gender-transforming. In the sublime and in masoc
Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert
Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest — an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior. Throughout the poet’s life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her “Only Girl in the World.”
I devote more than one hundred pages of Figuring to their beautiful, heartbreaking, unclassifiable relationship that fomented some of the greatest, most original and paradigm-shifting poetry humanity has ever produced. (This essay is drawn from my book.)
Susan Gilbert had settled in Amherst, to be nearby her sister, after graduating from the Utica Female Academy — one of a handful of academically rigorous educational institutions free to women at the time. She entered Dickinson’s life in the summer of 1850, which the poet would later keep in mind as the season “when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens.”
Poised and serious at twenty,
~by Michaela Hayes
To wrap up CSU English’s celebration of LGBT history month, today we are taking a look at arguably two of the greatest poets of American history, and certainly the most formative of the 19th century– Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Despite very different poetic styles, the two have a few things in common: they both originate from the East Coast, both were born in the early 1800s, and both are suspected by contemporary readers to be some variation of queer. Though homosexuality in and of itself has never been “new,” the word “homosexuality” was not actually coined until 1868. Even then and after, there were consequences from social to legal to being “out,” so it’s understandable that conversations around their sexuality are recent. Neither Dickinson’s nor Whitman’s sexual persona is confirmed, and most of the questions about the topic are modern concerns, based primarily on their poetry (and some letters), but one thing is for sure — they are both considered founders of a uniquely American poetic voice.
A synonyms is dead when it is said, some say. I speak it just begins to stay that day. ~Emily Dickinson