Emily Dickinson’s 21st Century Makeover

Emily Dickinson fans… meet Emily Dickinson’s number 1 fan: Jerome Charyn, the author of the new book, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. In his work, Charyn has written about Dickinson in her own voice, with all its characteristic modulations that he learned from many years of studying her letters and poems. His goal was to remove Dickinson’s own mysterious mask and reveal the passions and heartbreak of the person that he considers to be America’s greatest poet. Through this process, he examines her struggles with her female status, her strength in the face of opposition, her androgynous nature, and he even touches on the question of whether or not the notorious recluse was a lesbian. Here, Cherry Grrl discusses The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson with its author and we learn more about the poet, her sexuality, her impact on feminism, and more.

Cherry Grrl (CG): What is your new book, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, all about?

Jerome Charyn (JC): It’s a novel told in Emily Dickinson’s voice.  I’m not trying to imitate Emily, but to re-imagine her for 21^st-century readers.

CG: How long have you been examining the life of Dickinson?

JC: I discovered Emily Dickinson when I was still in junior high and fell in love with her poems.  I didn’t think of them as male or female.  She spoke to me in her own wondrous voice—intimate and stark at the same time, as if she had a merciless power to hold me in her sway.  I never woke up from that spell.  I’m still in it right now.

CG: What is it about her and her life that interests you?

JC: The starkness, the fierce sense of her own vision.  We like to think of her as an old maid and a little mouse.  She was neither.  She had more strength than an entire century of men—men who disparaged women, robbed them of their sexuality and freedom of spirit in the name of protecting them.

CG: The question of whether or not she was gay is one that has been debated for a long time. What are your thoughts on that area of her life?

JC: It’s clear to me that she was androgynous—male and female at the same time, which makes her more and more modern.  As we move deeper into the 21^st century, gender is no longer as important as it seems.  Like Emily, most of us have male and female components, no matter what our sex is.  I’m not a ventriloquist.  I couldn’t have written a novel in Emily’s voice if I didn’t have some sense of the “female” inside me.

CG: What are some of the secrets about her life that your book reveals?

JC: The novel’s missing link is Emily’s lifelong fictional “romance” with Tom, a handyman at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she was a student in 1847-1848.  She will meet Tom again and again in different guises—as a burglar, a draft dodger, and a circus clown.  She also had an intense relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan, but this isn’t much of a secret.  What I try to reveal is how important Susan was to the crafting of Emily’s poems.  Susan was her real “Preceptor.”

CG: What is your research process like? How do you go about learning more about her?

JC: I read everything I could find about Emily, including her letters. I didn’t have to read her poems again.  They were already burnt into my skull.  But her letters overwhelmed me.  Her music here was just as authentic and forceful as in her poems.  I couldn’t have written the novel without Emily’s music playing and replaying in my ear, like a relentless drum.

CG: What do you think her impact was in terms of feminism and enhancing the visibility of female writers?

JC: I’m disturbed by [how] Emily is described in one anthology:  “Modern American poetry has for one of its founders and ancestral presences a woman”—as if this were some magnificent revelation.  She is the greatest poet we have ever had; she has given all women the courage to write, and has given the same courage to men.  She is a marvelous example of how one woman could push beyond the boundaries of her own time.  She didn’t have to become a schoolteacher or a wife—she could dance with the devil and become a creator.  We all owe a debt to her own stubborn will.

CG: What are some of your personal favorite works of hers?

JC: My favorite poem of hers begins:  “Because I could not stop for Death—”.   There’s a whole eternity and ten novels stitched into the poem.  We are on a carriage ride.  We can feel every bounce.  And we wish that ride would never, never end.

For more information about Jerome Charyn and his new book The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, visit http://jeromecharyn.ning.com.