Trade Publication Article

Eccentric Sensibilities: A Quiet Passion, a film on Emily Dickinson by Terence Davies

Garrett, Daniel

2019

Overview

(Scholar Helen Vendler has noted how Dickinson’s work can echo hymns and liturgy with reverence or mockery, and discussed the poem “In the name of the Bee,” for which Dickinson replaced the holy trinity with a bee, a butterfly, and a breeze.) Meanwhile Emily’s brother Austin is away and courting; and Austin sends his family photos of himself and his fiancée, Susan Gilbert, a teacher who had been a tavern owner’s daughter reared by an aunt and older sister in different locations, and educated, like Emily, at Amherst Academy. Emily Dickinson is discussed as a celibate woman in literature and gender studies professor Benjamin Kahan’s Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life, published by Duke University Press in 2013: “Despite its allergy to celibacy, modernist scholarship has always charted figures who were sexually recalcitrant, indifferent, alienated, unattached, lonely, and lifelong or periodic celibates—a partial list of whom might include Gustave Flaubert, Emily Dickinson, Baron Corvo, George Santayana, Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry, Rainer Maria Rilke, E.M. Forster, Franz Kafka, Edna Ferber, Edith Sitwell, T. E. Lawrence, Henry Darger, Josef Sudek, J. R. Ackerley, Jorge Luis Borges, Langston Hughes, Joseph Cornell, Eudora Welty, and May Sarton” (page 9). Often people are disappointed in cinema portraits of great artists: a complex person, life, and work are summarized in a fragmentary, short audio-visual statement; and while the great artist was committed to transformation and transcendence, much of the cinema world and its audience want to know what the artist wanted to transcend: the conformities of dull days, the love affairs and drinking tastes, the dirty laundry and gossip of neighbors, the ordinary faults and questionable habits. Daniel moved to New York and became a graduate of the New School for Social Research, was an intern at Africa Report, poetry editor for the male feminist magazine Changing Men, founded and acted as principal organizer of the Cultural Politics Discussion Group at ABC No Rio and Poets House, wrote about painter Henry Tanner for Art & Antiques, and organized the first interdepartmental environmental justice meeting at Audubon.

• Publisher: Donald Totaro
• Subject: Allergies / American literature / Biographies / Davies, Terence (1945-2023) / Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886) / Environmental justice / Fiction / Motion pictures / Novels / Pain / Poetry / Poets / Siblings / Visual artists / Women / Writers