‘Dickinson’ Boss, Hailee Steinfeld on “Female Agency” in Final Scene, “Fearless” Takeaways

[The following story contains spoilers from the third and final season of Apple TV+’s Dickinson.]

When Dickinson showrunner Alena Smith pitched her coming-of-age TV show about Emily Dickinson, she framed it as a three-season arc, ideally ending with her young poet in the Civil War, a time when she was at her most productive.

But when it came to crafting the final scene of the Apple TV+ show, Smith, as she has so many times throughout the series, turned to Dickinson’s poems, specifically the one Hailee Steinfeld’s version of the poet recites as she looks at a picture of a ship in her room.

“I started early, took my dog,” Steinfeld’s Emily muses before viewers see her on a beach where, as in the poem, she encounters mermaids.

“Like all of our visual surrealist moments on Dickinson, we are drawing from specific lines of poetry,” Smith tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I was sort of haunted by that line ‘The mermaids in the basement / Came out to look at me,’ and I see the mermaids as a symbol of female creativity and also as a symbol of something that can never quite be reached but is always calling to you. Similarly the act of rowing, that is something that you hear in different poems of Emily’s. I think it’s hopefully a visual statement about female agency and female creativity and the sort of siren call of all the poems that she has yet to write.”

Smith adds that had she wanted to keep writing her portrayal of Dickinson and produce additional seasons, she feels confident that Apple would have let her do that, but she felt like by the end of season three, this particular story was done.

“For me, the Civil War is the moment when Emily steps into her full power as an artist, and I feel like once you get her there, you’re kind of done with the project that this show wanted to do,” Smith explains. “There’s definitely a lot more material to be mined in Emily Dickinson’s life, but this show was always meant to tell her coming of age, so I felt like we got there. I felt good about it; I didn’t need to keep going, and I have an overall deal with Apple, so I felt like what I really wanted to do was move on and develop something new.”

Though Smith knew the Civil War would be Dickinson‘s end point, she didn’t know that she would be working on the series’ final episodes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current situation “completely infused the proceedings and added all of these new layers of meaning to what we were doing,” Smith says, adding that the Civil War “was a time when there was mass death in America and really American consciousness was being transformed by this ubiquity of seemingly senseless death.”

She adds, “There were lines that were ripped from group chats as we were all surviving [the pandemic]. It’s not as if it changed the plot, but it definitely suffused the atmosphere.”

Dickinson‘s final season finds Emily wrestling with whether poetry can indeed provide hope. While Emily declares in the final episode that she’ll keep writing for herself even if her work doesn’t move anyone else, Steinfeld argues that Emily ultimately does believe poetry can provide hope.

“Although she’s told differently throughout this season — she’s told that words don’t matter, and it’s about being out there and on the front lines and doing what you can physically to be there and be active and help — I think she realizes she didn’t necessarily have to be on the front lines to be affected by what was going on and to channel the loss and the pain that the nation was feeling,” Steinfeld says. “In feeling that and in being able to write about it, she was able to connect with people and be that source of hope that she so desperately strived to be for everyone this season.”

The end of the third season also offers the latest manifestation of Emily’s strained relationship with her father when she’s horrified that he refuses to overcome the patriarchal societal norms of the time and plans to have his son inherit his property, including his unmarried daughters.

Steinfeld calls Emily’s realization that she isn’t and doesn’t want to be like her father a “heartbreakingly beautiful moment.”

“It’s this moment that a lot of us have at some point in our young lives where we realize that our parents are human; they’re not superheroes,” Steinfeld says. “Emily has put her father on this pedestal, he has put himself on this pedestal and that is all she has ever known him to be is on the highest of them all, and she has lived her life to please him and to make him proud and to make sure he is approving of who she is. But he ultimately hasn’t been for much of her life. He is nowhere near as forward-thinking as she is.”

In terms of where they end up, after the finale shows Emily isolated from the rest of her family, Steinfeld calls the dynamic between father and daughter “a very push-and-pull, up-and-down, complicated relationship.”

She adds, “I think she ends up in a place where she’ll always love him as her father, of course, but she has gotten to a place where she realizes that he is not who she believed he was her whole life.”

Steinfeld says she also knew from the beginning that Smith envisioned Dickinson‘s story as a three-season journey and that despite her limited time playing the great American poet, she’s personally “experienced so much growth” through her work on the show.

Going forward, Steinfeld hopes to be inspired by Dickinson’s “fearless” nature.

“She lived during a time where she got away with so much. She really stopped at nothing to do what made her feel most alive, and that was her writing. That was being creative, that was being in nature, that was being herself unapologetically. She found ways to do that in a time that was very complicated,” Steinfeld says. “I think to myself, ‘If she could do it then, then I could do it now.’ I also love the fact that she did what she did not for the acclaim and the validation but because it made her feel like she could feel her feet on the ground. I’ll take that with me as well. I’ll keep going and keep at it and doing what I do for me because it makes me feel good.”