'That you will not betray me'

Rebecca Watts reviews A Quiet Passion

Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion depressingly renders the life of Emily Dickinson as a claustrophobic costume drama. Elsewhere Davies has been praised for his depictions of feminine independence and community. For the real Emily Dickinson these were invisible concerns, played out passionately in writing but not manifest in outward action. ‘Should you ask what had happened here,’ she wrote to her close friend Mrs Holland in 1879, ‘I should say nothing perceptible. Sweet latent events – too shy to confide – ’. Hence from the filmmaker some creative interpretation is required to show how Dickinson’s various concerns – authority, eternity, poetry – preoccupied, tortured and fuelled her imagination.

Unfortunately creative interpretation is lacking. The one attempt to dramatise Dickinson’s vision is a brief interlude in which a blurred, dark-suited man ascends the stairs towards her bedroom (it’s not clear what this is supposed to signify). Even on a literal level, the film tells rather than shows; we hear that she writes at night, and that she likes to write letters, but there are hardly any shots of Dickinson actually writing.

Echoes of phrasing from Dickinson’s correspondence are shoehorned into the dialogue, resulting in numerous exchanges on the soul (its uses, whose is more beautiful, and where it is to go). The effect is affectedness; no one really talks the way they write, and in any case it’s hard to believe that, even in the fervently Puritanical communities of nineteenth-century New England, the soul was the primary topic of discussion when friends and sisters rendezvoused in the garden or bedroom.

A major failing is the script’s reliance on bickering, in place of the deeper conflict that underpins compelling drama. For the most part the female characters speak aphoristically; one friend deals almost exclusively in quips, like the annoying cousin of an Oscar Wilde creation. At times the combination of gossipy banter and flapping fans make the piece indistinguishable from a Jane Austen adaptation.

Photo © Music Box Films

There are also questionable misapplications of the facts. A notable example occurs during a visit from the Reverend Charles Wadsworth and his wife. In this scene Dickinson flagrantly steals the man away into the garden, gives him a booklet of her poems, hovers nervously while he skim-reads it, then begs him to say whether they are “any good” – suggesting that her burning desire is the general approval of this forbidden love interest. Her actual desire, stated boldly in an unsolicited letter to the editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862, was to know ‘if my Verse is alive’. She hated the dead language of dogma, official rhetoric and cliché; her poetic project was to make words ‘breathe’. Her motivation? As she explained it to Higginson: ‘I had a terror – since September – I could tell to none – and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground – because I am afraid – ’ Here is a person who experienced every moment intensely and vividly; for whom ‘a sudden light on Orchards, or a new fashion in the wind’ induced ‘a palsy’ that ‘the Verses just relieve – ’.

The film presents a handful of the poems, by way of voiceover, but again the approach lacks imagination; no one’s appreciation of Dickinson’s originality will be deepened by hearing Cynthia Nixon read ‘Because I could not stop for Death’ as her character’s coffin is loaded into the hearse. Anyone who knows a bit about Dickinson’s life will be perplexed by the treatment of Susan Gilbert, who is relegated to the insignificant role of near-mute sister-in-law, unknown to Dickinson prior to marrying her brother. In reality Susan was one of Dickinson’s most intimate correspondents (a relationship that preceded the marriage by several years) and the recipient of almost 500 manuscripts – more than double the number received by Dickinson’s next most frequently addressed correspondent (Higginson, her poetical mentor, who does not feature in the film).

One pleasing detail is the audible buzzing of bees in the outdoor scenes. Along with the sun, snow, birds, frogs and flowers, bees were a staple feature of the sensory environment to which Dickinson, in her self-elected immurement, was minutely attuned. These atmospheric aspects could – should – have been granted more significance, to create a sense of the lived experiences of a writer who referenced the season or the weather in almost every letter (she wrote thousands) and frequently personified them (to Susan: ‘There is a tall – pale snow storm stalking through the fields, and bowing here, at my window – shant let the fellow in!’).

Leaving the cinema I recalled Pedro Almodovar’s 2006 film Volver, in which past, present, superstition and fantasy are delicately entangled, and the wind is a character whose presence charges the atmosphere and intensifies the plot. The insurmountable problem with Terence Davies’s approach to one of the most original poets in the English language is its fundamental disengagement from metaphor – following which the only clear impression we’re given is that life was frustrating for difficult women in the nineteenth century.

Photo credit: Alice Archer, 2015

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Rebecca Watts was born in Suffolk in 1983 and currently lives in Cambridge. In 2014 she was one of the Poetry Trust’s Aldeburgh Eight, and in 2015 a selection of her work was included in Carcanet’s New Poetries VI anthology. The Met Office Advises Caution is her first collection.

Rebecca Watts' debut collection The Met Office Advises Caution (2016) is available to buy here.