A lock of what is supposedly Emily Dickinson’s hair is currently for sale on eBay, the result of a weird story investigated by Jen DeGregorio for LitHub. The winding tale of this lock of hair raises as many questions as it answers, interrogating literary legacy, historical stewardship, fame and profit, and historical authenticity, among other concerns. The TV show Dickinson, created by Alena Smith, prompts much the same set of questions.1 Drawing on historical media to conjure an aura of authenticity, the show opens with a series of reproductions of nineteenth-century photographs overlaid with the clicking whirr of a slide projector. The opening narration uses the photographs to illustrate what is “known” about Emily Dickinson, reiterating one of the most widely repeated points of Dickinson’s biography: that her work was relatively unknown during her lifetime. But what does it mean to be “known”?

While undoubtedly a tale about the vagaries of fame, Dickinson is also fundamentally a show about media—and more precisely the media, as shorthand for journalism and entertainment. The show is a collage of references to historical events and their media representations, a fact made abundantly clear in an animated short narrated by creator Alena Smith to accompany the show. Speaking over an animated film made of reproductions and imitations of nineteenth-century media—newspapers, photographs, and prints—Smith argues that the newspaper boom in the mid-nineteenth century contributed to the development of a nascent “celebrity culture.” It was “almost like a Victorian internet,” says Smith, describing the development of the telegraph system and laying bare the analogy that structures much of the show. Seconds later, a hand scrolls through a gilt-framed newspaper as if it was an iPad and it “feels like time is speeding up with the whirring of the printing press and this constant stream of news and information.” This short supplement to the show reveals almost too much about the creator’s aspirations to animate history. Textured surface and graphic form—the visible grain of an engraving or the movable type of a newspaper—are cut up and rearranged to make perfect analogies to the present.

It appears as though the characters’ experience of rapidly changing historical circumstances is intended to trouble our own sense of contemporary newness, particularly in relation to information technology. Meme-like moments of similitude provide the viewer with little a-ha moments of recognition—paralleling contemporary media experiences, political movements, or cultural fascinations. The siblings “mainline” and “binge” Charles Dickens’ 20-episode serial novel Bleak House. Emily’s sister Lavinia flirts with a young unnamed Indigenous man in town and her boyfriend warns him to “not steal his girl,” which provokes the sharp reply “you stole my land.” In search of inner truths and self-actualization, Emily and friends hold a séance—undoubtedly a reference both to the nineteenth-century development of spiritualism and celebrity mediumship and the more recent revival of mainstream interest in witchcraft. These historical one-liners point at a question that haunts all representations of the past: what is history for? Education? Entertainment? Political consciousness-raising?

In The Slave is Gone, a new podcast that “talks back” to Dickinson hosts (and poets) Jericho Brown and Brionne Janae (in collaboration with scholar Aífe Murray) walk through what is “historically true” and what is “emotionally true” about the show. The series has only published one episode so far but promises to flesh out the structural realities of race and class that shaped the world in which Dickinson’s lived, which as they note, is dealt with unevenly across the show. Brown and Janae’s discussion of what is “historically” or “emotionally true” is a particularly useful way to think about this show, which has been primarily discussed in terms of its intentional anachronisms—a common, though not always intentional, stylistic trope in period dramas.

Anachronism in period drama can sometimes represent an attempt at historical accuracy through mediation, with narratives avowedly abandon the goal of depicting history “as it really was” and instead collaging aesthetic and narrative structures in resonant combination. Sometimes, “it turns out that the farther one strays from the record, the more clear and accessible the window into their character,” as Adrian Horton writes in The Guardian. In Dickinson, anachronism is often at its most pointed when used to make historical arguments, to try and educate the viewer—where the aforementioned one-liners are deployed to catchily draw attention to a historical fact or undermine an assumption. This is especially the case in terms of the younger characters, whose manner of speech is in conflict with the period setting of the story but also with the older generation. Anachronism is therefore not simply a stylistic device but also a plot point that signals the character’s own observations on the rapidly changing social and material conditions all around them. “Anachronism is integral to their architectures, to their modes of world-building,” writes Rachel Vorona Cote of a recent spate of shows that figure anachronism as a central feature, including Dickinson.

The biggest “truth” the show tries to confront is the nature of Dickinson’s infamous reluctance to be seen. Though scholars have debated the finer points of her biography and the nature of her relationships, Emily Dickinson has often been remembered as a reclusive artist. In the show, however, Emily, played rather brilliantly by Haylee Steinfeld, is decidedly in, and of, the world. Moving through Emily’s life chronologically, each episode of the show roughly interprets a single poem through a slice of Emily’s life. Refusing to rest on a clichéd narrative of Dickinson’s reclusive life, Emily is a lively and passionate character whose life is shown as it inevitably “was,” profoundly woven into the social and material conditions of the period, and the family, in which she was raised.

In the first season of the show, this question of who Emily “was” is framed primarily in terms of Dickinson’s struggle to get her family to recognize her as a writer and let her publish her poems under her own name. In this, the show foregrounds the structural conditions that restricted the ability of Emily and other non-male (and as the show will later touch upon, non-white) writers to publish. The flip side of this more official side of being “known” via publication is being “seen” through intimate relationships. This season tenderly explores Emily’s queer relationship with her friend and lover Sue, who eventually marries Emily’s brother Austin. Sue is Emily’s main creative sounding board, and their intense connection is the show’s (and perhaps history’s) first retort to the idea that Emily’s poems were “unknown” or “unappreciated” during her lifetime. As Emily sends baskets of poems addressed to Sue across the yard, it hardly seems fair to claim that Emily’s poetry was unappreciated. For Sue, the intensity of Emily’s creativity will become an emotional burden that causes her to push Emily towards more public-facing venues—to Emily’s simultaneous excitement and dismay.

The recognition that “fame is a fickle food,” is the central conceit of the second season. Haunted by the ghost of her brother’s friend who will die in the fast-approaching American Civil war, Emily is confronted by the perils of exposure wrought by publication. Emily is introduced to Samuel Bowles, editor, and owner of the Springfield Republican, one of New England’s most prominent newspapers in the mid-nineteenth century. Bowles was one of the few editors to publish Dickinson’s work during her lifetime and in the show, his character stands in for the allure of publication more broadly, seductive yet capricious. The second season really comes into its own in terms of how fame is constructed in relation to media. Two contrasting episodes of Emily’s fame are recounted: winning first prize at an Amherst baking contest for her black cake and the publication of one of her poems in the Springfield Republican. In differing ways, each only partly explored in the show, both prize-winning cake and published poem show Dickinson’s intimate imbrications in the structures of U. S. history.

In an essay, “Making Black Cake in Combustible Spaces,” in the Harvard Review the poet M. NourbeSe Philip describes how her mother would make a black cake every year for Christmas, wrapped carefully and sent from the poet’s native Tobago to Canada.2 The essay follows the place of black cake in the poet’s own writing, entangled with her lifelong exploration of the Caribbean demotic. After buying a black cake for the first time, NourbeSe Philip describes how in the car on the way home a podcast came on about Emily Dickinson’s black cake. Though the podcast in question does establish a connection to the Caribbean origin of some of the ingredients, NourbeSe Philip notes that the narrator euphemistically describes the cake’s appearance in New England as a result of the “sugar trade,” rather than the transatlantic slave trade and centuries of colonization that formed the preconditions for the appearance of sugar and spices in Dickinson’s cake in 1850s Massachusetts. Writing that her mother, “Emily Dickinson, and I are all connected to in the creation and consumption of Blackness rooted in certain brute, historical facts.” While Dickinson made her cake black with molasses, a refined sugar product produced in Emily’s time in a plantation economy using enslaved labour, the Caribbean black cake that NourbeSe Philip describes her mother making involved burning the white sugar, “make blackness from whiteness,” bitterness from sweetness.

I bring in NourbeSe Philip’s description of her own experiences of black cake, and her response to hearing of Emily’s, to get at a part of the show that relies heavily on the discourse of “visibility” outside of any substantive discussions of politics. Instead, the media would appear to structure social relations. Historical context is delivered in the form of the newspaper, often carefully delivered by one of the Dickinson’s domestic servants. In one representative scene in the second season, Emily becomes invisible to those around her after the publication of her first poem in the Springfield Republican. Under the guise of her invisibility, she wanders into the Dickinson family barn where Henry, an African-American employee of the Dickinson family, has organized a meeting of a local Black abolitionist group. The group is celebrating the publication of their newspaper, subscriptions to which raised funds to support those fighting against slavery in the Southern U.S. The scene shows a complex situation simply: Emily feels that she is unable to be understood on a creative level since the publication of her poem—and Henry and the group are celebrating the ways that their ability to self-publish has resulted in tangible political gains in the abolitionist cause. Paradoxically, because she is invisible, Emily can find “freedom”—tellingly epitomized here through getting drunk and dancing—amongst a group of men and women who are risking their personal safety to organize against the horrors of slavery. This subject had been broached earlier in a conversation between Henry and Emily where Emily learns that Henry has been publishing abolitionist articles anonymously. She asks him whether he would put his name to the articles if he could and he says he would. Whereas, Emily would write that “publication – is the Auction/ Of the Mind of Man –”, Henry was publishing to argue against the auction of human beings. The chasm between the stakes of publishing in each of their positions is affirmed when later Henry must flee Amherst because of revelations surrounding the group’s support of the Abolitionist John Brown and the raid on Harpers ferry in 1859—an event that foreshadowed the imminent outbreak of the American Civil War. The third season of the show, set to launch in November, will undoubtedly reckon with the war.

Blurring historical narratives, the show frequently collapses distinctions between states of being known, seen, visible, free, or not free, which, given the time period, are not so easily collapsed, nor should we be particularly comfortable with these formations as easy analogies to the present. But what the show does most sincerely, if a bit unconsciously, is reckon with the ways that media determinism—the belief that “media determine our situation,” as Friedrich Kittler put it—has structured not only understandings of history but also, supposedly, our ability to relate to it. This is precisely the kind of truth that is told slant throughout Dickinson.

This short story by Brandon Taylor had me at “From the way the sommelier sat back on the lawn chair and crossed his legs, Carson sensed that he was a socialist.”

Speaking of the history of reality, Spectacle: An Unscripted History of Reality-TV is just great.

This newsletter was written while listening to Song[s] of the Sleeping Forest on repeat.