‘Dickinson’ Creator Alena Smith Talks The Paradoxes of Emily Dickinson

There isn’t another show on television quite like Dickinson. It’s an exuberant celebration of creativity and young womanhood, and creator Alena Smith brings such a studied intelligence to the early life of the legendary poet.

Unlike portrayals of Dickinson when she was older (like Molly Shannon or Cynthia Nixon), Dickinson explores the beginnings of Emily, when she is very much a young teenager. She spars with her brother, Austin, and she dreams of meeting Death every night in a carriage to have angsty but ambitious conversations about destiny. Smith removes the dusty, buttoned-up idea of who Emily Dickinson was and gives her a new freedom by casting someone like the enchanting Hailee Steinfeld in the role.

When you give a literary giant such a retelling, you can’t help but think of how Emily’s plights relate to today’s issues. Dickinson grapples with femininity, privilege, and racism in a way that modern teenage soaps can’t handle, especially without the helpful tool of a rear view mirror. There is a joyous abandon that Dickinson brings, so remember: “Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”

Awards Daily: In the last few years, there have been several films about Emily Dickinson like Wild Nights with Emily and A Quiet Passion—she’s everywhere! What do you personally love about her and her work?

Alena Smith: It’s funny, because I started working on this project in 2013.

AD: Oh, I didn’t know that.

AS: Yeah, so both of those films [came out] while I was working on it. It definitely lit a fire under me. I called my agent and said, ‘Everyone is making movies about Emily Dickinson!’ I haven’t seen either of the films, because I felt like it would get in the way of my own characterization and personalization of the story. But I know enough about them to say that Wild Nights with Emily is inspired by a lot of the same scholarly research that inspired my project, which is all about a new interpretation of who Emily was. Taking this old idea that she was this very shy, modest, virginal spinster just scribbling away in her room and turning it on its head. She is a woman full of ambition and drive and convinced of her own greatness. She’s on a mission to write poems unlike that the world has ever seen with a very full love life that centered on her sister-in-law.

AD: Oh yeah.

AS: Emily wrote hundreds of passionate poems over the course of her life. One of the things I love about Emily Dickinson is all the paradoxes that she embodies and the fact that on the outside she has a life that is seemingly mundane and restrictive. Inside she is one of the boldest, most radical literary imaginations that has been seen in all of American literature. All of that is what drew me to her and continues to draw me to her.

AD: Even though it does have modern elements to it, the show is very lush and full of life. That’s what I really responded to it.

AS: Hmmm.

AD: Dickinson is very playful and funny. How do you know where to push and pull with the tone?

AS: I think that one of the things that I am learning with the actors of the show is that comedy can be as emotionally grounded as drama. We’re always coming from a place of truth. Emily’s poetry goes through wild shifts in tone, so you have a poem about her literally sitting in an outhouse and a spider is crawling up her butt. (Laughs) That’s a poem. And then there are poems that are struggling with the existence of god, so it runs the gamut. Her sense of humor and her sense of irony have been really underappreciated because of this perception of being this reserved woman. Perhaps the real Emily Dickinson was reserved, although I doubt that from the descriptions of her that have come from people who have met her.

AD: Right.

AS: Her poetic persona is not. I think that’s something that people needs to get their head around. I am much more engaged in the poetic persona that Emily built in her work than I am with the literal person. We don’t have so much access to the person. The remnants of her letters and the facts about her and her family are pretty fragmentary. What we do have are her 2,000 poems that provide so much scope for imaginative interpretation of the feisty person that created these gifts. There’s certainly a lot of biographical information about her coming of age. This show is concerned with her coming of age as opposed to her later years. It does seem like she was a smart aleck. This dry wit. She made fun of her family members, and she made fun of herself. I took all of that as my inspiration.

AD: You just mentioned comedy being as grounded as drama and I have to say that one of my favorite casting choices is Jane Krakowski as Mrs. Dickinson. The way she is able to slide back and forth between absurd comedy and this quiet drama is really impressive.

AS: Something that really surprised me in getting to work with Jane on this project is that she loves Emily Dickinson.

AD: Oh, really?

AS: She has a personal connection to her, because she would memorize Emily Dickinson poems and shared that with her mother. Jane brings to this project a real reverence to the material that we are presenting. Also, I just the biggest fan of Jane Krakowski—I love her on 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I am glad to have her here in a place where there is a lot of seriousness to explore along with the comedy.

AD: The most fascinating relationship, to me, has to be between Emily and her father. He gives her a lot of freedom but then he chastises her about ruining the family name and legacy.

AS: Yes.

AD: We see that in the first episode where he gets very angry when she announces that she is going to have a poem published. Can you tell me about developing the relationship between this father and daughter?

AS: Particularly, in this first season, I really do see that as the central relationship of the show. As much as we have this tragic love story between Emily and Sue—which I know the fans love—I thought this was more of a tragic love story between a father and daughter. That is because the show is very much about patriarchy and the idea of examining American patriarchy through one father and his very extraordinary daughter. Edward has, again, this paradox, because he knows that Emily is gifted and yet he is so afraid that she will do something to hurt the reputation of the family that he tries to keep her in a cage. The irony is that she is the only reason that any of us remember the name Dickinson.

AD: Yeah, and Death mentions something like that to her later on.

AS: I even called the show Dickinson because of that. I find it interesting that Emily takes her father’s name. We all, or most of us, do. I have my father’s last name. What happens when patriarchy gets passed down to an unmarried woman? That’s the other thing. If Emily was a normal girl, she would go through the normal thing of meeting these suitors and leaving her father’s name. Because she’s Emily, she subverts all of those opportunities for marriage and chooses to live in her childhood bedroom married to her work.

AD: Yeah.

AS: In order to do that, she has to negotiate this very complicated relationship with her father. She has to stand up to him enough to claim the artist that she is, but she has to appease him enough to get his blessing.

AD: There are certain moments where she may say something against him, but then it comes back to the idea that she has to listen to him because he is her dad.

AS: Hmmm.

AD: Because the world of the show is so modern, I kept thinking of privilege. In Episode 5, Emily and her friends are performing in their Shakespeare club, and she wants to bring in Henry since they are doing Othello. He later tells her something about her father always being there.

AS: He says, ‘You always have your father to keep you safe.’

AD: Yes, thank you! Is Emily not aware of her own privilege?

AS: Absolutely. That’s exactly what that episode is about. Part of Emily’s coming of age is recognizing her own privilege. What does it mean to be privileged and marginalized at the same time? As a woman in the 1850s and, dare I say, now, one experiences certain types of restriction or oppression. Or if you are a person whose sexuality doesn’t conform with the norm. Even in her day where she was not allowed to vote or not allowed to pursue higher education, she was still a person of privilege. Her family had money and she could afford to have a maid that did some work so she could have more time to write. And, of course, she was a person who was white in America on the eve of the Civil War. The show is more interested in looking at culture and what American life is like now. We take this trip into history to look back at ourselves. That’s why we kept the action of Episode 5 in this domestic, seemingly trivial experience of a Shakespeare club where racism is experienced because it could happen today.

AD: Maybe we should give this treatment to all of our legendary figures. We would learn a lot.

AS: Well, now we have one with Catherine the Great.

AD: And I love that show, too! I want to talk about Death. When the first images came out, there was a lot of talk about Death being an actual character.

AS: Of course, the original inspiration was Emily’s famous poem, “Because I could not stop for Death” and in that poem she talks about the trippy, imaginative experience of getting picked up by Death in a carriage. That is so beautiful and such a quintessential, classic, American narrative concocted in a poem by her. I wanted to make that real. I knew he was going to pick her up in a carriage. I think I felt that in order to really get that impact…I mean, this is Death. This not just another character—he’s outside the rules and boundaries of the show. He has to be larger than life and have a persona that fills us with an electricity, right?

AD: Yeah.

AS: I had a feeling that we had to cast someone very special and someone who already had their own cultural existence already. I wanted an icon and Death is an icon. At this time in the 1850s and who knew how relevant that this was going to be today since we didn’t know we were going to be in a global pandemic. But it felt like Death was everywhere. We made a vision board of the image of Death and I put an image of Wiz Khalifa covered in tattoos and exhaling smoke. I said, ‘You know something like this.’ Somebody happened to have a connection to his manager and got the script to him and he got it immediately and wanted to do it. He is everything and more that I could’ve hoped for the character.

AD: Who doesn’t want to play Death?

AS: (Laughs) Right?

AD: At the very end of the show, Emily is talking to her father in the doorway to her room, and she declares that she is a poet. Then she shuts the door and she stays within her room.

AS: Her closing the door is a gesture of who does Emily Dickinson ultimately become? We know Emily Dickinson is a person who almost never left her town and towards the end of her life rarely left her father’s house. And then she almost rarely ever left her own room. The question of the show is how does this rebellious, social, passionate young woman become that dedicated, reclusive artist? Another way of putting it is the only freedom that Emily could claim is the freedom of being locked in her room. It’s another interesting contradiction but I think that idea has been also historically important in female literary history of a room of one’s own. Emily embodies that. She might’ve only had this small room to experience freedom with a little desk and little pieces of paper. But that’s where she got to play.

Dickinson is streaming now on Apple TV+.