Emily Dickinson in the Twenty-First Century

New Women’s Biopics: Performance and the Queering of Herstor/ies

“…Whereas The Favourite and Florence Foster Jenkins zero in on life stories that offer the required exceptionality in their subjects' distinctive lack of fit with biopic expectations (their spectacular failure to be or become 'great'), the Emily Dickinson biopic Wild Nights with Emily knowingly tackles the challenge of 'doing' the poet anew for each generation of readers, as Marianne Noble points out. 42 Television comedy actor Molly Shannon plays Dickinson without subtext: in the opening, pre-title scene Emily and her sister-in-law, Susan (Susan Ziegler) hold hands and kiss sisterly, then passionately, and then they roll on the floor. The two women's shared affection, in both their salad days and mature years plays out centre frame, and it is the blindness to their attachment exhibited by Emily's brother Austin, his mistress Mabel and other adult members of the household which, in a neatly queer reversal of historical readings, becomes the stuff of comedy.…”

“…In so doing, Wild Nights With Emily produces an embodied 'Emily Dickinson' that explicitly addresses the affective EJLW X (2021) demands of queer and feminist publics (cited by Noble as one of the key reasons for the reignited interest in Dickinson in the twenty-first century). 44 Colette benefitted from an advantageous launching pad at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, where queer film historian and critic B. Ruby Rich described it as 'a guilty EJLW X (2021) pleasure far from the pressures of the moment… downright delicious, sexy, full of verve and libido, and even believable'. 45 The promotion accompanying the international release carefully targeted different audiences and taste groups.…”