The Belle of Amherst
by Charles S. Dubin
List Price:
Our Price: $15.92
You Save: $14.03 (47%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Category: DVD
See more DVD details
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
DVD details
Actor: Julie HarrisDirector: Charles S. Dubin
Brand: Kino International
Editor: Terry M. Pickford
Producer: Don Gregory
Producer: Mike Merrick
Writer: William Luce
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 90 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-07-06
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Model: 3632
Studio: Kino Video
Product features:
- BELLE OF AMHERST, THE (DVD MOVIE)
DVD Reviews of The Belle of Amherst
DVD Review: Safe in her alabaster chamber; who was Emily Dickinson?
Summary: 5 Stars
THE BELLE OF AMHERST is one of those artistic gems that is no less brilliant for seeming somewhat imperfectly faceted. By this I mean that I disagree with the dramatist's interpretation of Emily Dickinson's personality, but love the play anyway for the sake of Julie Harris' star turn performance and for the script's being essentially a quiltwork of pithy quotes and juicy anecdotes drawn directly from The Divine Emily's life and works.
My problem is with the depiction of Emily as neurotically, almost pathologically, shy, nerdishly awkward, scatterbrained, giddily unsure of herself... none of which seems to match the historical Emily I have come over time to understand and love. Unfortunately, the play's interpretation is based mainly on the only extensive account of what the mature Emily was like, as recorded by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, literary style-and-form czar of his day, as a very conventional-minded authority who seemed to find the poetess and her creations about equally baffling. My cavil is that this was not the true Emily, but rather an Emily hopelessly unnerved and overwhelmed by her meeting, after years of futile poem submissions and correspondence, with this great literary eminence grise, as obtusely unsympathetic arbiter of the worldly fate of all that was most precious to Emily, namely her poetry.
Higginson was a well-schooled "expert" in matters of poetry. Emily was, by contrast, a genius, born with a magical ability to compose the stuff that Higginson was an expert in, but otherwise almost completely unschooled in it. The situation there was peculiarly American; America loves and trusts its experts, rewarding them for the work and dedication they have put into their life-business, but it neither understands nor loves nor trusts its geniuses, whose natural-born accomplishment in the same fields is so invidiously undemocratic as to set one man, the walk-on born genius, so strangely and unjustly above another, the schooled expert, thus threatening the very fabric of our whole received ideology of human equality and merit. It seems an irony that might otherwise have amused Emily that this great literary lion, only remembered today for his connection with her, should thus be given the last word on what sort of person she was. Paradoxically, it is partly the fault of Emily herself, whose will had called for her letters to be burnt after her death, that we know far too little about what the ordinary world made of her, for which the incidental testimony of a Higginson seems a peculiarly unhappy substitute.
A broader view of the essential living Emily persona, inferrable from the testimony of her own works taken together with the incidentally preserved scattered comments of people who knew her well, might seem to paint a different picture: Emily Dickinson was, albeit eccentric, eminently sane, for one thing. Her normal social personality was bubbly, outgoing, spontaneously improvisational and pawkishly witty, poised, "posed" and sharply and sensitively focused, rather than scatterbrained, and somewhat too puppyishly affectionate toward people she loved, which seemed to be, at least in her youth, practically every respectable and even sometimes disrespectable person she met. Her main flaw, if flaw it be, was the tendency of her natural precocity to make her personally overwhelming. As long as she was entertaining a crowd, such as with her storytelling fugues and singing and piano improvisations, Emily was fine. One-on-one with her natural energies and maxim-gun wit, on the other hand, for any length of time, could doubtless be, for the feebler sensibilities of most ordinary folks, a mentally and spiritually taxing experience, to say the least.
Emily, of course, came to understand this over time... which is why she
gradually withdrew from a world that she loved, yet came to feel born into by accident, on the wrong planet. People like to imagine Emily's reclusion as somehow pathological, inspired by a jilted love affair or some such ordinary soap-operatic trauma, because they forget that she was a genius, and that geniuses simply don't think or act or make choices like the rest of us. Emily was jilted alright... by the ordinary world she loved so much, despite its hopeless "common" ordinariness. The main culprit here seems to have been evangelical Christianity, which swept its frenzied waves through her world time and again, picking off her family and friends one by one and exerting such tremendous social pressures to accept Jesus and be saved. Emily, seeing through the maudlin hysterical banality of the whole business and already betrothed as bride to the Jesus of her genius, simply couldn't stoop, for mere social acceptance's sake, to chiming in on the same kinds of convenient hypocrisies as all those church-ladies with their "dimity convictions," or the platoons of ham-fisted preachers who "argued themselves narrow" and "made God's love seem like bears."
The curse of Christianity of this sort is that it is an importuning ideology of the sort that poorer souls seem to thrive on but which Emily's keener instinct found most gratuitously repulsive, much the way a dog's keener hearing will find insufferable sounds that we humans can't even hear. Ideologies systematically exclude and shun the unwashed, which is what happened to Emily, as Salvation wrapped its tentacles around her social circles, costing her one "love" after another in a dizzying succession of spiritual alienations. This circumstance seems too underappreciated by critics, most likely because Emily, the farthest thing from a whiner or complainer, says so little about it directly herself. Her work, however, says a great deal about it indirectly, artistically, subversively, accumulating to a damning mass of seemingly dispositive evidence, once one knows to start looking for it.
In her art, Emily often manages to reinvent the English language. In her lifestyle, she managed to retreat to an artistically reinvented world where she could "tell all the truth but tell it slant." Pathological? only to the extent that eyesight might be considered "pathological" in a world of the blind, or in a world that includes, in our tally of human pathologies, such syndromes as uncanny instinct and towering eldritch genius.
Description of The Belle of Amherst
BELLE OF AMHERST - DVD MovieBestsellers in DVD
![The Story of Jeremiah [VHS] Image](/images/noimg.gif)
The Story of Jeremiah [VHS]Vision Video; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Wresting With God [VHS]by Vision Video
Vision Video; Published: 1990-10-01; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Price in other shops:
Study Bible Video with Workbook [VHS]Spring Arbor Distributors; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $7.95
Price in other shops:
Tempo:Childrens TV Favourites Video [VHS]HarperCollins Audio; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $9.17
Price in other shops:
Tempo.Herbs:Parseley'Sb/ Party Video [VHS]HarperCollins Audio; VHS Tape; VHS Video
![Strike the Original Match [VHS] Image](/images/Strike-the-Original-Match-VHS-0001374079-X.jpg)
Strike the Original Match [VHS]New Liberty Films; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Price in other shops:
![Medjugorje The Miracles and the Message [VHS] Image](/images/Medjugorje-The-Miracles-and-the-Message-VHS-0001373293-X.jpg)
Medjugorje The Miracles and the Message [VHS]JPN Film Production; Release date: 1995-12-15; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $29.99
Mayo Clinic Echocardiography Review Course for Boards and Recertification DVD 2008by Mayo
DVD
Price in other shops:
Pediatric Diagnostic Imaging DVD: Single Userby Oakstone
DVD
Price in other shops:
Cost Accounting [VHS]by Charles T. Horngren, George Foster, Srikant M. Datar, Howard Teall
Pearson Canada, Toronto; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Similar DVDs, VHS Video, Audio CDs
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinsonby Emily Dickinson
Little, Brown and Company; Published: 1960-01-30; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $18.74
Price in other shops:
Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie (Broadway Theatre Archive)Image Entertainment; Release date: 2003-02-11; DVD
Best price: $10.50
Price in other shops:
Emerson: The Ideal in AmericaRelease date: 2007-03-23; DVD
Best price: $29.95
The DeadLionsgate Home Entertainment; Release date: 2009-11-03; DVD
Best price: $7.18
Price in other shops:
Mark Twain - A Film Directed by Ken BurnsParamount; Release date: 2004-09-28; DVD
Best price: $11.95
Price in other shops:
Mark Twain TonightKultur; Release date: 1999-11-30; DVD
Best price: $16.72
Price in other shops:
The Last of Mrs. Lincoln (Broadway Theatre Archive)Release date: 2002-06-25; DVD
Best price: $12.38
Price in other shops:
American Experience: Walt WhitmanPBS; Release date: 2008-05-27; DVD
Best price: $11.46
Price in other shops:
The Belle of Amherst: A One-Woman Playby Luce William
Samuel French, Inc.; Published: 2011-01-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.35
Price in other shops:
Emily Dickinson: A Certain Slant of LightMonterey Home Video; Release date: 2006-08-22; DVD
Best price: $17.99
Price in other shops: