‘Wild Nights with Emily’ Is The Truth’s Superb Surprise

There are few female poets so emblematic as Emily Dickinson, the spinster-poetess-recluse of Amherst, Massachusetts, whose work achieved enormous posthumous recognition and an indisputable spot in the American canon, yet whose life has been portrayed as tormented, lonely and timid. “Wild Nights with Emily,” screened as part of the inaugural 2018 Boston Women’s Film Festival, rewrites the entrenched narrative of Dickinson’s life in a radical and refreshing way while exposing the challenges faced by female creators, many of which seem especially resonant in the year of the #MeToo movement.

What is most remarkable about this film is not only the revelation of Emily Dickinson’s lifelong love affair with her next door neighbor, Susan Dickinson (Susan Ziegler), who — yes — was actually Emily’s sister-in-law, but particularly writer and director Madeleine Olnek’s roster of exceptionally nuanced female characters. The ambitious, unreliable narrator Mabel Todd (Amy Seimetz), lover of Dickinson’s brother’s husband and driving force behind the ultimate publication and success of Emily’s poetry after her death, is at once a paragon of female ambition and an example of the huge barriers faced by female authors in and after Dickinson’s time. Fabricating a more societally acceptable personal history for Emily — the spinster narrative with which we are all familiar — Mabel at last gets Emily Dickinson’s work into the spotlight, earning accolades from the very industry that rejected that poetry during the author’s life, but in so doing erases all evidence of Dickinson’s muse, Susan, from the poetry, even literally taking rubber to page to remove Susan’s name from poems in the moments after Dickinson’s death.

In a film with obvious heroines in both Dickinson and her childhood friend, Susan Gilbert, Mabel is a villain with the viewer’s sympathy when it would have been easy to paint her as just another mean girl. It is interesting how the film conveys the idea that when options are limited for one woman, they are limited for all women, as when Mabel must rely on Dickinson’s blundering-idiot of a brother as an entrée to publishers although she is clearly the more visionary of the pair.

The film is a wry comedy at times approaching absurdity, such as when the lovers race between their neighboring homes, clutching layer upon layer of petticoats and bloomers lest they be discovered. Yet the film is also punctuated by moments of poignancy, from the first bloom of love between the girls at a Ladies’ Shakespeare Society meeting to the myriad deliveries of half-inked love poems on scraps of paper sent from Emily to Susan.

The film, despite its hilarity, strikes a sober note about the losses Emily and Susan feel due to the clandestine nature of their relationship due to societal prejudice against gay people. Not knowing that Susan herself is grieving following Emily’s death, Dickinson’s siblings ask Susan to bathe Emily’s body as they are too aggrieved to take on the task. The arresting imagery of Susan cleaning Emily’s body, unable to lay claim to the secret grief that threatens to overwhelm her, effectively parallels the imagery of Mabel erasing Susan’s name from Emily’s private writings in a gut-wrenching way. Thankfully for Emily and Susan, their long-lost love story must no longer be hidden away, and Susan’s name has been replaced in the letters (many of which are now housed in Harvard’s Houghton Library) with the assistance of infrared technology to detect the original writing erased by Mabel Todd. Muse and poet, resigned to silence by the mores of a different age, are at last reunited in writing and history to encourage the love and lettering of a new generation of women.