#we queer people deserve better than distortions of our own ancestors

[marzipanandminutiae]

Marzi, I love you, but sometimes I feel like you pick stances on things just to be angry about something. Dickinson (the show staring Hailee Steinfeld) is a comedy. It's made with the general intention to not be /super/ historically accurate. At the very least Dickinson's relationship with Sue is depicted in actuality. The fact that the showrunners decided to make her family disapproving of her writing was a stylistic choice, and there are much worse interpretations of Emily to gripe about.

I appreciate your support, first of all. I really, really do.

I would love to be angry about fewer things, and especially this thing in particular. But making things up whole-cloth about a historical figure is not “a stylistic choice.” It’s lying. It’s misrepresenting the truth of a real person’s real life, in a setting where it’s not made entirely clear to be false. As far as I can tell, it’s not even played for laughs.

Look, if there was a Funny Or Die sketch or something that depicted Emily Dickinson stomping around in a Joan Jett “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation” way while her ogreish parents try to force her to be more ladylike by giving up everything she cares about, I wouldn’t be complaining. That is media that’s well and truly understood to not be historically accurate. Dickinson is different in that a lot of it is being played straight (no pun intended).

I think people know the twerking and modern music/slang aren’t accurate. The rest...people don’t go home and look things up, generally. Oh, they all say they know what isn’t real, but it still winds up shaping their perception of a historical figure. I spend my days at the museum listening to people bring up firmly held and totally incorrect beliefs about history they got from the media. Because like it or not, that’s where  a lot of our “common knowledge” about history comes from.

Everyone thinks they know that all Victorian parents would disapprove of a daughter who wrote poetry. Of course they would! It’s well-known that respectable women never did anything back then besides sit still in one place, unable to move because corsets and skirts, until they were married off to men 50 years older who beat them, and then died in childbirth. If they did anything else, well, they must have been Badly-Behaved Rebels Making History, scandalizing all around them with their shocking displays of agency.

Gods forbid audiences be forced to confront any reality more complicated than that. Gods forbid we be asked to realize oppression isn’t always being locked away for Hysteria(TM); that being happy and having societal approval doesn’t negate it.

Sometimes it’s someone removing an em dash, erasing a name from a dedication, banning Whitman while encouraging one to read Latin, spinning lies about "The Belle of Amherst” even while she happily fed the neighborhood children pastries and told them tales about the spices in her famous garden.

And sometimes rebellion is flying under the radar, keeping all the little rules while quietly breaking the big ones, to have your gingerbread and eat it too. Telling all the truth, but telling it slant.

After a century and more of “The Myth,” we owe her better than flying straight to the other extreme of stereotyping.