Queering Emily Dickinson for the Millennial Age

Abstract

Dickinson, the 2019 Apple TV+ series created by Alena Smith, is a very queer YA adaptation. As argued elsewhere, queer and adaptation are parallel terms, both shaping the ways that we approach or reflect on given texts. In other words, ‘To adapt is to modify … To queer something is to make it strange or odd … or transform it. To queer, then, may be to adapt’ (Demory 2019). Dickinson is queer in its representation of the poet as a passionate young woman sexually involved with her sister-in-law (reflecting recent scholarship on the misrepresentation of Dickinson and her manuscripts). But its queerness also queers the literary canon and destabilises conventional narrative forms; in its queer approach to history and time, Dickinson invites and encourages queer spectatorship. In other words, as a ‘revisionist adaptation’ (Stam 2017) the show works to reveal the queerness of the poet and her work that was already there, subverting the conventional biopic through what has been called a ‘dramatization of literary history’ (Lyall 1915) to represent Dickinson as an ordinary young woman. Dickinson’s treatment of time and history thus entreats its viewers to reexamine their preconceived ideas about nineteenth-century literature and culture.