
Discussed: Dickinson, Marie Antionette, American Humor: A Study of the National Character, 30 Rock, high school English teachers.
In so many writers’ lives, there’s a teacher who pushed them on their path. Usually it’s an English teacher. In some cases (like mine), this is a teacher who gets it, and slips a book into the school year that leaves us forever chasing magic in the world of words. In other cases, the teacher is a stern stick-in-the-mud who pushes such a narrow view of dense “classics” that an adventurous pupil has no choice but to rebel and spend their life turning out engaging prose as an act of spite. But of the writers I know, in all of our sharing of stories of classrooms past, no one recalls a teacher giving us an important lesson with regard to old literature: This stuff can be funny.
Sure there was Mark Twain or maybe Slaughterhouse Five, but it’s not until adulthood that we see the jokes in Moby Dick or Madame Bovary, and that’s if we choose to reread our high school homework. After graduation, many English class A-students only think about nineteenth century literature when prompted by a pub trivia question or crossword puzzle clue.
This is what makes Dickinson such a great watch, though you’d be forgiven for having ignored or dismissed it. Dickinson was the only comedy available at the launch of AppleTV+ in 2019, and the marketing sold it as a show where anachronism was the setup, punchline, and premise. It’s the story of Emily Dickinson, set in 1850s Massachusetts, but the characters speak and act like modern-day sitcom characters. Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) calls her brother’s male privilege “bullshit” while her mother (Jane Krakowski) insists “you’ll be a good housewife one day, Emily Dickinson.” From the trailer alone, it seemed like the kind of show Krakowski’s character from 30 Rock would’ve been cast in—a dreary slog that delivers a thin message of empowerment with the subtlety of a dubstep drop.
Trailers, however, don’t tell the whole story. Over three seasons, Dickinson displayed a well-researched and playfully realized understanding of its subject’s life, times, and work. And the most important detail it got right was that Dickinson herself made jokes.
“Emily Dickinson was not only a lyric poet; she was in a profound sense a comic poet in the American tradition,” writes Constance Rourke in American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Rourke published her assessment in 1931, long before a complete and unedited collection of Dickinson’s poems reached the public. Still, Rourke saw the jokes in the work that was available, and she connected Dickinson’s humor with the then-growing American literary tradition. Analyzing the poem Faith is a Fine Invention, Rourke notes that Dickinson used rhythm and irony with the precision of a traveling comic1.
Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency!
“Her elastic and irreverent rebellion broke forth again and again,” Rourke writes, citing Dickinson’s irreverence in matters of faith (“We apologize to Thee for Thine own Duplicity”) and society (“menagerie to me my neighbor be”). These lines may not split our sides today, but they reflect what Rourke describes as a comic energy in Dickinson’s “sudden flights to new verbal and tonal keys, in her careless assonances which still seemed half intentional, in the sudden muting of her rhymes.” This is the spirit of improvisation, of taking leave of an established pattern in search of something new and unexpected. It’s the spirit behind great American verse, music, and comedy.
The comedic potential in Dickinson’s work gets flattened on the way to many classrooms, where seriousness is the mark of importance and laughing is a sign of immaturity or poor reading comprehension (think of Beavis and Butthead laughing at their very earnest teacher’s reading of A Narrow Fellow in the Grass in the ‘90s). But the jokes are essential to understanding the work. The Poetry Foundation’s biography of Dickinson says the poet “created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized.” This same phrase could be used to describe jokes.
Dickinson is full of jokes that express the “possible but not yet realized.” Like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, the show uses its anachronisms to make the characters and the past feel parallel and, at times, relatable. But because it’s a comedy, Dickinson tiptoes closer to cartoonish territory. The characters obsess over serial installments of Bleak House as if they’re watching Netflix. Emily’s sister Lavinia (an excellent Anna Baryshnikov) seeks to fulfill society’s expectation that she marry with the horny zeal of a single friend using a dating app, but soon gets tired of Victorian Fboys. Social reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Gabriel Ebert) speaks with the telling self-consciousness of a man afraid of being accused of performative allyship.
“The whole intention of the show is to make us lose track of the difference between the present and the past,” creator Alena Smith told Vulture in 2019. This formula could quickly become corny, like a teacher sitting backwards in their chair and lecturing about how “Shakespeare was the original rapper.” But Dickinson plays its parallels for laughs, exaggerating them beyond anything that might be mistaken for an earnest lesson. This is clearest when guest stars show up as Dickinson’s contemporaries—each showing a researched but lighthearted take on their character. John Mulaney plays Henry David Thoreau as a savvy self-aggrandizer, inspired in equal parts by Walden and Kathryn Schulz’s 2015 New Yorker essay. Louisa May Alcott (Zosia Mamet) is blunt about the hustle required to publish (“have you tried using a man’s name?” she asks Emily when she learns the poet hasn’t yet appeared in print). And Walt Whitman (Billy Eichner) bursts with the improvisatory, musical spirit Rourke describes, espousing the glories of America (“Cosmos! Democracy! Manhattan!”) while caring for war wounded.
Like the show itself, Dickinson’s humor was easy to take for granted. The show is frank about the poet’s struggles—her obsession with death, the questions of legacy for a woman in the nineteenth century, and the challenges of her sexual attraction to another woman in 1850s New England. This earned the show an early reputation as a “dark and sexy” telling. But here too, Smith shows a combination of research and irreverence. Symbols buried in Dickinson’s poems and debated by scholars—honeybees, hummingbirds—appear in ways that clarify, but don’t define, her sexuality and mental health. The result is a show that’s consistently over-the-top but still nuanced.
Dickinson is modern, but there’s nothing in it that can’t be found somewhere in her poems or in the century-plus of analysis that came after. Smith’s embellishments are no more unlicensed than those of the writers who depict Dickinson as a sexless shut-in. To see Emily Dickinson dancing, making love, and laughing is at times shocking, but this isn’t not because the show is out of step with history. Instead, it’s out of step with our view of a humorless and dreary past. “Popular fantasies in familiar patterns still exist in America,” Rourke writes. And one of those fantasies is the idea that seriousness and importance are the same thing.
I’m quoting the poems as Rourke does, and as they would’ve been printed when she analyzed them. The version of this poem that is now widely collected has some slight differences in punctuation and capitalization.