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This is 95 percent fiction. Emily Dickinson was a sickly shut-in who spent most of her time in her room, died unmarried, and had almost none of her work published during her lifetime. There's zero evidence that she was a feminist or anything more than an eccentric agoraphobe.
The real Emily Dickinson was an autistic spinster whose best friend in the whole world was her dog. She was not some grrl-power figure. Hell, contrary to the claims in this trailer, there's little evidence she even wanted any fame as a poet. She was happy being alone and writing.
Also, what's with this bizarre trend of period piece movies having contemporary-style dialogue and plots? Is propaganda THIS inept or is Hollywood genuinely incapable of recreating past historical settings? It's off-putting and weird and makes the whole thing seem fake.
I first noticed this in GANGSTER SQUAD a few years back: a movie that was SUPPOSED to be a period piece about the late 1940's, but had bizarre incongruities like the main character's wife saying she married him because he was "good in the sack."
Not only are the characters in this Emily Dickinson movie speaking dialogue that sounds like modern-day Women's Studies majors, they aren't even making an ATTEMPT to imitate the accents and speech patterns of mid-1800's New England. Lazy! Cheap! Pathetic!
As a final note, why would you cast a racially mixed woman like Hailee Steinfeld to play a lily-white New England WASP like Emily Dickinson? I get why they cast her in TRUE GRIT (not many 14-year-olds have the acting chops to pull off Mattie Ross), but come ON!
Okay, okay, real final point. This movie is seriously taking the angle that people were resistant to women becoming writers during Emily Dickinson's lifetime? Have they never heard of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, all of whom came BEFORE Dickinson?
FFS, the leading playwright of the Glorious Revolution---TWO CENTURIES before Dickinson was even born---was a woman: Aphra Behn. Nobody ever oppressed women writers: not in America, Britain, France, nowhere.
yeah because young people in the 1850's went "wild" by saying "dude" and throwing raves, suuuuuurrrrrreeeeee
