Poetry woman

Melanie Jones does Emily Dickinson

by Bill Rodrgiguez

Who says American Puritanism's tradition of emotional repression was all that bad a thing? After all, 200 years of pent-up expression did finally burst forth in the form of Emily Dickinson the demure spinster for whom poetry, as she practiced it, "makes you feel that the top of your head has been taken off."

The daughter of an austere Yankee lawyer, who had the family up at dawn to pray together, the high-spirited girl was educated at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Despite her current reputation as virtually a hermit, she had an active social life well into her 20s. She became increasingly reclusive, after age 32 wearing only white, her symbol "of tribulation," withdrawing when guests arrived and communicating with friends mainly by letter. After her father's death, for her last dozen years until her death at age 55, she wasn't known to set foot outside her house. Locals referred to her as "Squire Edward Dickinson's half-cracked daughter." Having seen no more than 10 poems in print in her lifetime, her collected verse was not published until four years later -- to belated popularity -- after nearly 1800 poems were found in her room.

We will be invited into the parlor of Ms. Dickinson, as portrayed by former Trinity Rep company member Melanie Jones, from May 26-30 at Brown University's Leeds Theatre, where The Belle of Amherst, a one-person play by William Luce, will be staged. In 1977 Julie Harris won her fifth Tony for her performance in the play, which was written for her. (Luce has written other solo plays, about Lillian Hellman, Zelda Fitzgerald, Isak Dinesen and Charlotte Brontë.)

Jones, a 1974 Brown grad, hadn't ever made a study of Dickinson's poetry and had encountered the poems only in passing, she says. But when she did a portion of the Luce play 15 years ago for a showcase she was enthralled.

"I felt an immediate kinship with her. And I loved her poems. They're so modern. She's so modern. The things that she writes about -- at least the ones that I can understand -- are anchored in the details of a domesticated life, and yet they're about the arc of centuries and the creation of the universe and the mystery of death, these big subjects," the actress said, speaking from her home in San Pedro, just outside Los Angeles.

Jones joined the Trinity company right after graduation and stayed for 10 years. When her husband, a journalist, was offered a job at the Los Angeles Times, they moved.

In the past year, performing the play on three occasions, Jones has come to understand certain things about the poet. Her reclusiveness, for example.

"I don't think she saw much point in having casual relationships with people that you didn't really know," Jones said. "She talks about the other women of her town as being gossips, that she wasn't interested in that. And since she'd decided not to marry, she knew that she would never fit in, except in that very limited way that an unmarried woman was allowed to fit in in society in those days.

"So she just circumscribed her kingdom and said, I'll be the king of this."

This was quite an independent realm. It was as though Dickinson were devising the art of poetry from scratch -- or from the 20th century. Her short, iambic tetrameter and trimeter lines are filled with near rhymes, in one stanza "out" with "that," "by" with "boy," for a subtler unity than strict rhyme provides. Her imagery is largely drawn from nature and shows an acute eye. Her focus often is intensely emotional and examines the large issues of life and death as deeply and intensely as the metaphysical poets, such as John Donne, and even fierce mystics like William Blake.

Dickinson's poetry was so beyond its strait-laced time that one prominent editor who couldn't deny her talent nevertheless found the poems "spasmodic" and "uncontrolled." When after years of correspondence, Thomas Wentworth Higginson of The Atlantic Monthly finally showed up at her Amherst home for a visit, Dickinson assumed that he was there to discuss publishing a volume. As The Belle of Amherst shows, when it turned out to be merely a social call Dickinson was more than disappointed.

"She was flabbergasted. I think it totally destroyed her for a while," Jones said. "After the visit she was ill for three months and she didn't write. She was devastated. But she regrouped. She had her family, and she had her garden, and those things brought her back outside. And once she was out, she started writing, because that was her reaction to the world."

Independent Emily Dickinson, who chose not to marry, has been taken up as a heroine of closeted lesbianism. Suggested evidence is drawn mostly from her correspondence to sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, who had been a friend from their teen years. Dickinson wrote twice as many letters to her as to editor Higginson, although she lived next door. On the one hand, Victorian conventions allowed expression of passionate feelings between women friends to not be intended or taken as sexual. On the other hand, at least one letter appears to reveal a guilty self-consciousness, where after writing about wanting to touch and kiss Susan, Emily tells her to "have peaceful dreams, as if I had never written you all these ugly things."

Jones isn't convinced that the relationship was overtly sexual.

"I think she loved Susan dearly. I don't know if they ever actually consummated any kind of relationship -- I sincerely doubt that they did. But she was seriously attached to her too," she said.

Jones notes that Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson was probably far more passionate about being the grand hostess to Emerson and Whitman and other literary lights of the time.

"Sue wasn't interested in having any kind of relationship that would get in the way of her social ascension. Certainly a lesbian relationship with this unusual Emily Dickinson would not have done much for her around town!"

In any event, whether Emily Dickinson remained a spinster because her standards were strict, because she was attracted to women, or because she was wedded to her muse, we have been the better off for it.

"Her oeuvre would not be if she had married, for sure," Jones concluded.