tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/wuthering-heights-23554/articles
Wuthering Heights – The Conversation
2022-12-19T12:21:03Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/196743
2022-12-19T12:21:03Z
2022-12-19T12:21:03Z
Emily Brontë’s death needs to be radically reimagined – an expert explains
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501569/original/file-20221216-21-sd6cbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=26%2C23%2C922%2C800&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Emily Brontë as portrayed by Emma Mackey in Emily, (2022). </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://mediapass.warnerbros.com/#/movies/Nzg4Nw%3D%3D?cdrid=MA%3D%3D">Warner Bros</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Novelist Charlotte Brontë was devastated when her sister Emily died from tuberculosis on December 19, 1848.</p>
<p>Emily’s only novel, <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiA-d3Qrv77AhVPTUEAHdCEC7QQFnoECAoQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheconversation.com%2Fwhy-emily-brontes-wuthering-heights-is-a-cult-classic-100748&usg=AOvVaw37_67-GmyOgxMZZcyhIpTd">Wuthering Heights</a>, had been published just a year earlier. In a letter to her publisher, composed on Christmas Day, Charlotte wrote that Emily was: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Rooted up in the prime of her own days, in the promise of her powers … sweet is rest after labour and calm after tempest.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The popular account of Emily’s last day envisions her dying on the sofa in the family’s dining room (now the home of the <a href="https://www.bronte.org.uk/">Brontë Parsonage Museum</a> in Haworth, Yorkshire), stubbornly refusing to take to her bed. But ambiguity surrounds the precise details of her death.</p>
<p>Because there is no writing by Emily about her illness, Charlotte’s account has become the dominant one. In <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Letters_of_Charlotte_Bront%C3%AB_1848_18/ESH22a2yaWoC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=charlotte+bronte+letters&printsec=frontcover">letters</a> from October to December that year, she documented Emily’s decline in detail.</p>
<p>Accepted at face value, they suggest that Emily was stubborn in sickness. Charlotte describes trying to persuade her sister to permit medical assessment and treatment and writes of Emily’s consistent refusal.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501523/original/file-20221216-7450-in8c48.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="From left to right: Anne, Emily and Charlotte. Branwell used to be between Emily and Charlotte, but subsequently painted himself out." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501523/original/file-20221216-7450-in8c48.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501523/original/file-20221216-7450-in8c48.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501523/original/file-20221216-7450-in8c48.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501523/original/file-20221216-7450-in8c48.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501523/original/file-20221216-7450-in8c48.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1082&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501523/original/file-20221216-7450-in8c48.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1082&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501523/original/file-20221216-7450-in8c48.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1082&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A portrait of (L-R) Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë sisters by their brother Branwell, (1834).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait.php?mkey=mw00797">© National Portrait Gallery, London</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
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<p>Besides a “mild aperient – and Locock’s cough wafers” (a product that claimed to offer “instant relief” to “all disorders of the breath and lungs”), Emily rejected all other forms of medical intervention, dismissing at least one proposed treatment (homeopathy) as a <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/five-letters-from-charlotte-bront-to-ellen-nussey-and-w-s-williams-1848-1854-mainly-concerned-with-the-death-of-her-siblings">“form of Quackery”</a>. She declared that “no poisoning doctor” should come near her.</p>
<p>To many biographers, Emily’s behaviour has not only been interpreted as stubborn, but as evidence of a “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/221872/charlotte-bronte-by-claire-harman/">violent display of denial</a>” about her illness and as “<a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=A+Life+of+Emily+Bront%C3%AB+amberley&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8">brittle contempt</a>” for her sister tantamount to “a subtle emotional blackmail”.</p>
<p>But there is another way to understand Emily’s resistance to aid and refusal to speak with Charlotte.</p>
<h2>Tuberculosis and the Victorians</h2>
<p>Today <a href="https://theconversation.com/tb-is-once-again-the-deadliest-disease-in-africa-what-went-wrong-195996">tuberculosis</a> is understood as a highly contagious disease of the lungs that attacks the body’s organs and circulatory system. But in the 1840s, medical knowledge of the disease was speculative.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501534/original/file-20221216-19457-432u6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black and white photograph of scientist Robert Koch, wearing spectacles and a large moustache." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501534/original/file-20221216-19457-432u6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501534/original/file-20221216-19457-432u6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501534/original/file-20221216-19457-432u6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501534/original/file-20221216-19457-432u6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501534/original/file-20221216-19457-432u6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501534/original/file-20221216-19457-432u6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501534/original/file-20221216-19457-432u6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Robert Koch won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of the tuberculosis bacterium in 1905.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101420783-img">The National Library of Medicine</a></span>
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<p>It was only in 1882, many years after Emily’s death, that <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1905/koch/biographical/">Robert Koch</a> showed that tuberculosis was caused by infection by a virulent bacterium.</p>
<p>By late 1848, tuberculosis had claimed the lives of three Brontë children: Branwell, Maria and Elizabeth. </p>
<p>Through the fictional figure of Helen Burns, Charlotte immortalised her older siblings in <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1260/1260-h/1260-h.htm">Jane Eyre</a>. Helen tells Jane: “We all must die one day, and the illness which is removing me is not painful: it is gentle and gradual; my mind is at rest.”</p>
<p>When Emily began displaying symptoms she, like Charlotte, had access to their father’s copy of <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/modern-domestic-medicine-annotated-by-the-brontes">Graham’s Domestic Modern Medicine</a>. The book describes in graphic detail the stages of the disease and the patient’s prognosis.</p>
<p>From the book Emily would also have known that, despite Charlotte’s suggestions, there was no cure.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-stigma-of-contagion-keeps-alive-romantic-notions-of-how-the-brontes-died-105083">How the stigma of contagion keeps alive Romantic notions of how the Brontës died</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>As historian of medicine <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/consumptive-chic-9781350009400/">Carolyn A. Day</a> notes: “Once the disease was plainly evident, the patient had passed the stage at which medical authorities believed they could affect any alteration.”</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/768/768-h/768-h.htm">Wuthering Heights</a>, Emily writes of a similar tubercular situation. Dr Kenneth warns Hindley that he can no longer help his sick wife, as “his medicines were useless at that stage of the malady”.</p>
<h2>Brontë sibling tensions</h2>
<p>Charlotte does not explain why Emily refused to speak of her illness.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501527/original/file-20221216-26-9b00op.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A watercolour painting of the sleeping head of Emily's dog Keeper." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501527/original/file-20221216-26-9b00op.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501527/original/file-20221216-26-9b00op.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501527/original/file-20221216-26-9b00op.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501527/original/file-20221216-26-9b00op.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501527/original/file-20221216-26-9b00op.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=633&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501527/original/file-20221216-26-9b00op.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=633&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501527/original/file-20221216-26-9b00op.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=633&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Emily’s painting of her dog, Keeper, (1838).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.bronte.org.uk/">© The Brontë Society</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One reason could be that, as <a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL16827818M/The_letters_of_Charlotte_Bront%C3%AB">Charlotte’s letters</a> show, she was revealing intimate details of her sister’s ill health without Emily’s consent.</p>
<p>Intrusion into Emily’s privacy was a pattern for Charlotte and suggests a logical reason for Emily’s resistance to sharing with her older sister. Charlotte had previously invaded Emily’s privacy when she had read her private notebook containing the poems that inspired the 1846 collection <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1019/1019-h/1019-h.htm">Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell</a>. </p>
<p>The letters also reveal tension about Emily’s behaviour. In Charlotte’s mind, Emily was “unfit” to maintain her normal routines (sitting up late and insisting on feeding her dog <a href="https://www.bronte.org.uk/bronte-shop/bronte-society-images/344/poster-keeper-from-life">Keeper</a> and their sister Anne’s dog Flossy). Charlotte was keen to make herself the nurse and her sister the patient – Emily did not want that.</p>
<h2>Rewriting Emily’s death</h2>
<p>The trauma Charlotte suffered from Emily’s passing was compounded by Anne’s subsequent tuberculosis diagnosis.</p>
<p>Anne accepted her elder sister’s “remedies”, but a letter from a specialist to Charlotte advises her not to indulge false hope about a recovery. Anne died in May 1849.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501532/original/file-20221216-18-5a54mv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A chalk drawing of Emily Brontë, her hair pulled back and a ribbon round her neck." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501532/original/file-20221216-18-5a54mv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/501532/original/file-20221216-18-5a54mv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501532/original/file-20221216-18-5a54mv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501532/original/file-20221216-18-5a54mv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501532/original/file-20221216-18-5a54mv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501532/original/file-20221216-18-5a54mv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/501532/original/file-20221216-18-5a54mv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charlotte Brontë by George Richmond, (1850).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw00798/Charlotte-Bront?LinkID=mp00572&role=sit&rNo=1">© National Portrait Gallery, London</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>The loss of three siblings within nine months (their only brother, Branwell, had died just three months before Emily) must have been overwhelming for Charlotte.</p>
<p>Still, in the aftermath of Emily’s death she knowingly misrepresented her sister’s final months. </p>
<p>Charlotte misdated and edited Emily’s poetry in the posthumously published <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1019/1019-h/1019-h.htm#link2H_4_0064">Literary Remains of Ellis and Acton Bell</a>, falsely presenting the poem <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43712/no-coward-soul-is-mine">No Coward Soul is Mine</a> as “the last lines my sister ever wrote” when she <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Last_Things/WvoTDAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=janet+gezari+last+things&printsec=frontcover">“knew it was not”</a>.</p>
<p>Emily’s behaviour during her illness may have been (as novelist <a href="https://www.steviedavies.com/sd_nf_eb_heretic.html">Stevie Davies</a> puts it) “lacerating to those who loved and cared for her”, but she was perfectly within her rights to behave the way she did. Neither Emily nor Victorian medicine could control how tuberculosis ravaged her body. But rather than judging her behaviour as selfish or stubborn, we should view Emily’s suffering with more compassion, appreciating her strength of character in the face of her own mortality.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/196743/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Claire O'Callaghan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
An expert in the lives and works Brontës argues that it’s time for a radical change in the way we think about Emily Brontë’s death.
Claire O'Callaghan, Lecturer in English, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/192230
2022-10-13T07:44:48Z
2022-10-13T07:44:48Z
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë and the truth about the ‘real-life Heathcliff’
<p>When Emily Brontë published <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wuthering-Heights">Wuthering Heights</a> in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, outraged Victorian critics deemed it savage, indecent and immoral. One <a href="https://wuthering-heights.co.uk/reviews.php">described</a> it as “a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors”.</p>
<p>After Brontë’s death, when the novel began to find success, many were surprised to find that such a tempestuous gothic romance had been written by a quiet parson’s daughter. But did a real-life romance inspire Emily Brontë’s only novel? According to Frances O’Connor’s new film, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaL90sMAzbY">Emily</a>, the answer is yes. But the historical picture is far more murky.</p>
<p>The film presents a romantic origin story to account for Brontë’s iconic novel. While reclaiming Emily as a rebel, misfit and the weirdest of the “weird sisters”, as Ted Hughes memorably called them, the film departs knowingly from historical fact, mixing biography with Brontë mythology and dramatic invention to present a very different picture. Australian-British <a href="https://www.empireonline.com/people/frances-oconnor/">director O'Connor</a> has described her film as putting Emily at the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/09/frances-oconnor-emily-film-bronte-emma-mackey-interview">centre of her own story</a>.</p>
<p>This Emily is a rum-and-gin-drinking, opium-fuelled young woman, whose life was, in O'Connor’s vision, a version of Wuthering Heights. As <a href="https://www.shortlist.com/news/oliver-jackson-cohen-talks-emily-bronte-country-and-gothic-horror-403405">one reviewer</a> put it, “Emily isn’t a biopic of Emily Brontë but a fantastical retelling of her life.”</p>
<p>Because the bond between the novel’s Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff is widely considered one of the most passionate stories in English Literature, people doubt whether an unmarried clergyman’s daughter could have written it without experiencing romance first hand.</p>
<p>O'Connor’s film suggests that a passionate but tragic affair between Brontë and the local curate, William Weightman, is the source for Cathy and Heathcliff’s bond. Their romance is portrayed as a heated one, with the couple’s sexual intimacy troubling Weightman’s religious beliefs.</p>
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<h2>Who was William Weightman?</h2>
<p>Weightman has featured prominently in stories of the Brontës’ romantic lives. He was assistant curate to their father, Patrick Brontë, at Haworth’s St Michael and All Angels’ church between 1839 and 1842, and a friend to all the Brontë siblings. </p>
<p>But despite the fervent story in O’Connor’s film, there is no factual evidence to support the idea that Emily had an illicit liaison with Weightman. If anything, she is the one Brontë sister who is not associated with Weightman romantically. Both Anne, Emily’s younger sister, and Charlotte, her older sister, are said to have been infatuated with him, particularly as he charmed them and played with their affections. </p>
<p>As the film shows, in February 1840, Weightman discovered that neither the sisters nor Charlotte’s best friend, Ellen Nussey, had ever received a Valentine’s card, so he playfully sent them all one, walking ten miles to post the anonymously written tributes.</p>
<p>Historically, Weightman is remembered for being both extremely popular and exceedingly handsome. Thankfully, because Charlotte drew his portrait, his likeness is preserved. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/8xUim1QAIC","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>It is Anne Brontë who is most associated with Weightman romantically. Charlotte wrote in her letters that he sat “opposite Anne at church sighing softly and looking out of the corners of his eyes to win her affection – and Anne is so quiet, her looks so downcast – they are a picture”.</p>
<p>Following Weightman’s early death from cholera in September 1842, Anne wrote the poem <a href="https://www.themorgan.org/collection/anne-bronte-poems/81293/4">I will not mourn thee, lovely one</a>. Some biographers have speculated wildly that, along with Anne’s representation of curate Edward Weston in <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/767/767-h/767-h.htm">Agnes Grey</a> (1847), the poem is proof that Anne was in love with Weightman and that he returned her affections.</p>
<h2>Emily’s imaginary lovers</h2>
<p>O’Connor’s biopic, however, is not the first source to suggest that Emily Brontë had a lover, and several other figures have been proposed over the years as candidates. For example, because Emily liked to visit the library at Ponden Hall, a site claimed as the inspiration for Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights, it has been suggested that she shared a bond with resident Robert Heaton and that he even planted a pear tree in the Hall’s garden in her honour. A Heaton descendent claimed that the connection between the lovers was widely known but that family differences forbade a union.</p>
<p>Likewise, in 1936, scholar <a href="https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/moore-virginia-1903-1993/">Virginia Moore</a> stated that a close reading of Emily’s poetic manuscripts identified a mystery lover: one Louis Parensell. Sadly, not only is there no historical evidence for the existence of any such person, but Moore had misread the manuscript. “Louis Parensell” was actually the words “<a href="https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/song-j-brenzaida-gs">Love’s Farewell</a>” and it was a title for a poem proposed by Charlotte when she was editing her sister’s verse for publication in 1850, following Emily’s death in 1848.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A painting of a Victorian woman from 1833." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489202/original/file-20221011-16-fwha6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/489202/original/file-20221011-16-fwha6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489202/original/file-20221011-16-fwha6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489202/original/file-20221011-16-fwha6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489202/original/file-20221011-16-fwha6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489202/original/file-20221011-16-fwha6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/489202/original/file-20221011-16-fwha6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Emily Brontë, painted by her brother Branwell in 1833.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Bront%C3%AB#/media/File:Emily_Bront%C3%AB_cropped.jpg">Wikipedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Moore also claimed that Emily Brontë was a lesbian, an idea later explored by both feminist academic <a href="https://www.city-journal.org/camille-paglia">Camille Paglia</a> and Brontë biographer <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Emily_Bront%C3%AB/v1taAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=stevie+davies+heretic&dq=stevie+davies+heretic&printsec=frontcover">Stevie Davies</a>, even though there is, again, no evidence to support any firm conclusion on the matter.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, others have misinterpreted the close bond between Emily and her brother, Branwell, suggesting that they had an <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-incest-became-part-of-the-bronte-family-story-100059">incestuous relationship</a> and that this informed the representation of Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.</p>
<p>Beyond written texts, the new film is not the first screen biopic to offer a possible lover for Emily. Curtis Bernhardt’s 1946 film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM9GEgb9ngg">Devotion</a>, starring <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/03/ida-lupino-hollywood-renaissance-woman">Ida Lupino</a> as Emily, proposed that another curate stole the author’s heart: Arthur Bell Nicholls, the man who would go on to marry Emily’s sister, Charlotte Brontë, in 1854.</p>
<p>The origins of Wuthering Heights can actually be found in Emily’s <a href="https://poets.org/poem/remembrance">poetry</a>, particularly her verse emerging from Gondal, the imaginary world she co-created with Anne. But even in the absence of evidence, many persist to attribute the novel’s magnetism to an imaginary lover for Emily Brontë rather than to her own powerful imagination. William Weightman may be the current candidate in the frame, but he will not be the last.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192230/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Claire O'Callaghan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A new film about the author mixes biography with mythology and some dramatic reinvention.
Claire O'Callaghan, Lecturer in English, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/101913
2018-08-22T14:22:50Z
2018-08-22T14:22:50Z
The real Emily Brontë was red in tooth and claw, forget the on-screen romance
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233083/original/file-20180822-149490-1ns34tc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847, at a time when writing was largely the preserve of men. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/PBS</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>With their fierce, independent heroines, brooding anti-heroes and all sorts of dastardly plots, it’s no surprise the Brontë sisters and their novels occupy a special place in screen adaptations of literature.</p>
<p>Emily Brontë’s <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/18836/wuthering-heights-by-emily-bronte/9780307455185/">Wuthering Heights</a> (1847) tends to attract different kinds of film and TV adaptations to the usual polite drawing-room dramas. This is partly because Wuthering Heights is a brutal novel, despite all the romance associated with it. But it’s also down to how Brontë is remembered as an author. In this, <a href="https://www.bronte.org.uk/bronte-200/events/548/emily-bronte-a-peculiar-music/561">her bicentenary year</a>, her enduring appeal as a romanticised figure is much discussed.</p>
<p>This can be traced back to her older sister Charlotte’s own myth-making around Emily following her death in 1848. The myth of Emily relies on her image as a noble savage: a child-like innocent who had little contact with the world beyond her Yorkshire village and beloved moors. Charlotte’s defence relied on the idea that Emily didn’t really know what she was doing when she wrote this extraordinary novel.</p>
<p>It’s easy to understand why Charlotte felt compelled to defend her sister. In the 19th century, writing was still considered a masculine creative act, and taking up the pen as a woman brought accusations of being “unfeminine”. The Brontës existed in the real world and had to navigate their social reputations within it, especially if one of the aims of their writing was economic independence. But Charlotte’s defence of her sister set the scene for how adapters would later approach Emily and her work.</p>
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<h2>Bringing out Emily</h2>
<p>A good example is the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104181/">1992 film adaptation</a> of Wuthering Heights starring Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff and Juliette Binoche as Cathy. This version neatly does away with the novel’s complicated story-within-a-story structure and its two main narrators – housekeeper <a href="http://www.pfspublishing.com/character_analysis/2012/11/character-analysis-wuthering-heights-nelly-dean.html">Nelly Dean</a> and the pompous visitor <a href="http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=403">Lockwood</a> – and instead casts Emily herself as the storyteller.</p>
<p>Played by the waif-like Irish singer <a href="http://www.sinead-oconnor.com/">Sinéad O’Connor</a>, Emily stumbles upon the ruins of a real house while wandering the moors and, under a mysterious hooded cloak, tells the viewer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>First I found the place … something whispered to my mind, and I began to write.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Emily as a mystical medium is the ultimate visual symbol of how authors are commonly conjured up – as divine geniuses, inspired from above. Of course this is far more attractive than showing the blood, sweat and tears that come with the real craft of writing. But there is something more going on here – something which is representative of wider cultural politics and what often happens with authors like Emily Brontë: they are turned into easily consumable, harmless, generic figures.</p>
<p>Western culture tends to invest in ideas of transcendence around well-known writers. People like to think of them as unique beings who move above and beyond their own cultural and social moments. But when it comes to Emily Brontë, perhaps there is also an unspoken desire to neutralise her complex and subversive engagement with her own world.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233080/original/file-20180822-149463-dqa3bj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hollywood’s 1939 version of Wuthering Heights is a strongly romantic interpretation that ignores much of the novel’s original plot.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">United Artists</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>An explosive tale, Wuthering Heights is unflinching in its depiction of domestic abuse, racism, women as property and the abuse of social power. The direct, unromantic way in which this is explored in the novel is itself threatening to the social order it portrays, and seems like a subversive act for a female author. Adapting the story as romance sells better, and plays down the book’s uncomfortable brutality, as does the idea of Emily Brontë as an “unworldly” young woman who existed outside of conventional society. </p>
<p>This results in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/aug/21/classic-novels-film-tv-eyre-wuthering">constant adaptations</a> of her novel that rely on almost identical images of natural transcendence, beginning with an image from William Wyler’s hugely popular <a href="http://www.filmsite.org/wuth.html">1939 Hollywood version</a> starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. It shows Cathy and Heathcliff together on the moors, which seems to encapsulate for many people what the novel is about. Most adaptations <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9780230294042">repeat this imagery</a>, but you’d have to search hard to find it in the novel, as Cathy and Heathcliff aren’t really depicted as adult lovers frolicking on the moors.</p>
<p>This iconic imagery is not just due to Hollywood creating a visual “template” for the novel through romance; it’s also the product of how adapters have woven the myth of Emily as a transcendent noble savage into her own characters.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_VaandgFXcw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<h2>A more realistic Emily</h2>
<p>A notable and recent exception is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/dec/30/to-walk-invisible-review-a-bleak-and-brilliant-portrayal-of-the-bronte-family">To Walk Invisible</a>, the 2016 BBC biopic of the Brontës, in which the sisters are shown discussing the economic necessity of becoming writers. When debating whether to take up male pseudonyms, Emily, played by a straight-talking Chloe Pirrie, says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When a man writes something it’s what he’s written that’s judged. When a woman writes something it’s her that’s judged.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This blunt assertion seems to summarise how authors of the past – particularly female authors – are dealt with: who they are as human beings and their specific cultural environment are often ignored. They are rendered harmless and powerless to speak to us in a politicised way about the past we’ve inherited, and about our own world. With Emily, the emphasis is instead on romanticising the female author as a child-mystic, rather than focusing on her fiction as informed adult social critique.</p>
<p>Mythologising an author like Emily Brontë may provide a consistent and comfortable way to “consume” famous writers in contemporary culture, but it does a disservice to the potential for a more complex dialogue between past and present – after all, the realities of power, race, gender and class that Brontë wrote about in the 19th century are still issues being tackled today. </p>
<p>The question is, in 2018, should adaptations continue to collude in the screen legacy of a “safe” Emily Brontë, viewed from a transcending distance, or could they consider a more dangerous, unpredictable Emily who compels the reader to examine forms of power and powerlessness in contemporary times? It’s time to shed the romance for the reality.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101913/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hila Shachar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Cast as some unworldly young woman who wrote a 19th-century romance, Emily Brontë is more powerful and relevant than she is given credit for.
Hila Shachar, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, De Montfort University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/100748
2018-07-30T23:57:47Z
2018-07-30T23:57:47Z
Why Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a cult classic
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229778/original/file-20180730-106511-uw6vf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Kaya Scodelario as Catherine Earnshaw in the 2011 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1181614/mediaviewer/rm3312363520">Film 4 and UK Film Council/IMDB</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series, Guide to the classics, experts explain key works of literature.</em></p>
<p>Nothing about the reception of Emily Brontë’s first and only published novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6185.Wuthering_Heights">Wuthering Heights</a>, in 1847 suggested that it would grow to achieve its now-cult status. While contemporary critics often admitted its power, even unwillingly responding to the clarity of its psychological realism, the overwhelming response was one of disgust at its brutish and brooding Byronic hero, Heathcliff, and his beloved Catherine, whose rebellion against the norms of Victorian femininity neutered her of any claim to womanly attraction. </p>
<p>The characters speak in tongues heavily inflected with expletives, hurling words like weapons of affliction, and indulging throughout in a gleeful schadenfreude as they attempt to exact revenge on each other. It is all rather like a relentless chess game in hell. One of its early reviewers wrote that the novel “strongly shows the brutalising influence of unchecked passion”.</p>
<p>Moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum claims, however, that “we must ourselves confront the shocking in Wuthering Heights, or we will have no chance of understanding what Emily Brontë is setting out to do”. The reader must give herself over to the horror of Brontë’s inverted world. </p>
<p>She must jump, as it were, without looking to see if there is water below. It is a Paradise Lost of a novel: its poetry Miltonic, its style hyperbolic, and its cruelty relentless. It has left readers and scholars alike stumbling to locate its seemingly Delphic meaning, as we try to make sense of the Hobbesian world it portrays.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229732/original/file-20180730-106508-18h6rud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229732/original/file-20180730-106508-18h6rud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229732/original/file-20180730-106508-18h6rud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229732/original/file-20180730-106508-18h6rud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229732/original/file-20180730-106508-18h6rud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229732/original/file-20180730-106508-18h6rud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229732/original/file-20180730-106508-18h6rud.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sir Laurence Olivier (Heathcliff) and Merle Oberon (Cathy) from the 1939 film adaptation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wuthering_Heights_scene_2.jpg">Photoplay/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>The author remains as elusive as her enigmatic masterpiece. As new critical appraisals emerge in this, Emily Brontë’s bicentenary year, the scant traces she left of her personal life beyond her poetry and several extant diary papers, are re-fashioned accordingly. </p>
<p>Described as the “sphinx of the moors”, her obstinate mystery has lured countless pilgrims to the<a href="http://www.bronte.org.uk/the-brontes-and-haworth/haworth"> Haworth home</a> in which she passed almost all of her life, and the surrounding moorlands that were the landscape of her daily walks and the inspiration for her writing. Brontë relinquished her jealous hold of the manuscript only after considerable pressure from her sister Charlotte, who insisted that it be published.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229908/original/file-20180731-102488-nzsmvn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229908/original/file-20180731-102488-nzsmvn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229908/original/file-20180731-102488-nzsmvn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229908/original/file-20180731-102488-nzsmvn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229908/original/file-20180731-102488-nzsmvn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229908/original/file-20180731-102488-nzsmvn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1082&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229908/original/file-20180731-102488-nzsmvn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1082&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229908/original/file-20180731-102488-nzsmvn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1082&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Bronte sisters painted by their brother Branwell: from left to right, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wuthering Heights was released pseudonymously under the name Ellis Bell, published in an edition that included her sister Anne’s lesser known work, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/298230.Agnes_Grey?from_search=true">Agnes Grey</a>. Emily was to die just 12 months later, in December 1848. </p>
<p>As Brontë biographer Juliet Barker writes, the writer stubbornly maintained the pretence of health even in the final stages of consumption, insisting on getting out of bed to take care of her much loved dog, Keeper. She resisted death with remarkable self-discipline but, “her unbending spirit finally broken”, she acquiesced to a doctor’s attendance. It was by then too late; she was just 30.</p>
<p>After her sister’s death, Charlotte Brontë wrote two biographical prefaces to accompany a new edition of Wuthering Heights, instantiating the mythology both of her sister – “stronger than a man, simpler than a child” – and her infamous novel: “It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as the root of heath.” </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-charlotte-bronte-still-speaks-to-us-200-years-after-her-birth-57802">Why Charlotte Brontë still speaks to us – 200 years after her birth</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A feminist icon</h2>
<p>It is that property of wildness that has compelled artists from Sylvia Plath to Kate Bush, whose 1978 hit single, Wuthering Heights, was representative of the magnetic pull of Brontë’s fierce heroine, Catherine. The novel has maintained its relevance in popular culture, and its author has risen to a feminist icon. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Wuthering Heights has maintained currency in pop culture, most famously in Kate Bush’s haunting 1978 hit of the same name.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The elusiveness of the woman and the book that now seems an extension of her subjectivity, gives both a malleability that has seen Wuthering Heights transformed into various mediums: several Hollywood films, theatre, a ballet and, perhaps most incongruously, a detective novel. Brontë’s name is used to sell everything from food to dry-cleaning products. </p>
<p>Film versions have tended to indulge in a surfeit of romanticism, offering up visions of the lovers swooning atop windswept hills, most famously in the 1939 movie, with Laurence Olivier as a dashing Heathcliff, a heavily sanitised re-telling of what the promotional material billed as “the greatest love story of our time - or any time!” Andrea Arnold’s gritty, pared-back <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1181614/">2011 film</a> is the notable exception; bleak and darkly violent, the actors speak in an at times unintelligible dialect, scrambling across a blasted wilderness as though they are animals.</p>
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<p>Contrary to Charlotte Brontë’s revisioning, however, Wuthering Heights was not purely the product of a terrible divine inspiration, emerging partially formed from the granite rock of the Yorkshire landscape, to be hewn from Emily’s simple materials. </p>
<p>Instead, it is the work of a writer looking back to past Romantic forms, specifically the German incarnation of that aesthetic, infused with folkloric taboos and primal longings. Her tale of domestic gothic is housed in an intricately complex narrative architecture that works by repetition and doubling, at the fulcrum of which stands Catherine, the supremely defiant object of Heathcliff’s obsession.</p>
<p>At the novel’s core is the corrosiveness of love, with the titanic power of Shakespearean tragedy and the dialogic form of a Greek morality play. Two families, locked in internecine war and bound together by patrilineal inheritance, stage their abject conflict across the small geographical space that separates their respective households: the luxury and insipidity of the Grange, versus the shabby gentility, decay, and violence of the Heights. </p>
<h2>A claustrophobic novel</h2>
<p>It is a distinctly claustrophobic novel: although we read with a vague sense of the vastness of the moors that is its setting, the action unfolds, with few exceptions, in domestic interiors. Despite countless readings, I can conjure no distinct image of the Grange. But the outline of the Heights, with each room unfolding into yet another set of rooms, labyrinthine and imprisoning, has settled into my mind. The deeper you enter into the space of the Heights - the space of the text - the more bewildering the effect.</p>
<p>The love between Heathcliff and Catherine exists now as a myth operative outside any substantial relationship to the novel from which the lovers spring. It is shorthand in popular culture for doomed passion. Much of this hyper-romance gathers around Catherine’s declaration of Platonic unity with her would-be lover: “I am Heathcliff – he’s always, always in my mind.” Yet their relationship is never less than brutal. </p>
<p>What is it about their unearthly union, with its overtones of necrophilia and incestuous desire, that so captivates us, and why does Emily Brontë privilege this form of explicitly masochistic, irrevocable and unattainable love?</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-incest-became-part-of-the-bronte-family-story-100059">How incest became part of the Brontë family story</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Brontë’s great theme was transcendence, and I would suggest that it is the metaphysical affinity that solders these two lovers that so beguiles us. The greediness of their feeling for each other resembles nothing in reality. It is hyperreal, as Catherine and Heathcliff do not aspire so much as to be together, as to be each other. Twinned in that shared commitment and to the natural world that was the hunting-ground of their childhood play, they try, with increasing desperation, to get at each other’s souls.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229737/original/file-20180730-106499-blvz5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229737/original/file-20180730-106499-blvz5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229737/original/file-20180730-106499-blvz5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229737/original/file-20180730-106499-blvz5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229737/original/file-20180730-106499-blvz5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229737/original/file-20180730-106499-blvz5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229737/original/file-20180730-106499-blvz5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Penistone Crag - a rock at the top of Ponden Kirk - is believed to have been Emily Brontë’s inspiration for the place where Cathy and Heathcliff went to be alone.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ponden_Kirk_%27Penistone_Cragg%27_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1023867.jpg">Aaron Collis/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is not a physically erotic coupling: the body is immaterial to their love. It is a very different notion of desire to that of Jane Eyre and Rochester, for instance, in Charlotte Brontë’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10210.Jane_Eyre?from_search=true">Jane Eyre</a>, which is very fleshy indeed. Both Catherine and Heathcliff want to get under each other’s skin, quite literally, to join and become that singular body of their childhood fantasies. It is a dream, then, of total union, of an impossible return to origins. It is not heavenly in its transcendence, but decidedly earthly. “I cannot express it”, Catherine tells her nurse Nelly Dean, who is our homely, yet not so benign, narrator:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries … my great thought in living is himself. I all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This notion of the self eclipsing its selfish form seems impossible for us to conceive in an age where one’s individuality is sacred. It is, however, the essence of Catherine’s tragedy: her search for her self’s home among the men who circle her is futile. Nevertheless, Emily Brontë’s radical statement of a shared ontology grounds the eroticism between the pair so that we cannot look away; and neither it seems, can the other characters in the novel.</p>
<p>The book’s structure is famously complex, with multiple narrators and a fluid style that results in one focalising voice shading into another. The story proper begins with Lockwood, a stranger to the rugged moorlands, a gentleman accustomed to urban life and its polite civilisations. </p>
<p>The terrifying nightmare he endures on his first night under Heathcliff’s roof, and the gruesomely violent outcome of his fear sets in motion the central love story that pulls all else irresistibly to it. Heathcliff’s thrice-repeated invocation of Catherine’s name, which Lockwood finds written in the margins of a book and mistakenly believes to be “nothing but a name”, works as an incantation, summoning the ghost of the woman who haunts this book.</p>
<p>Emily Brontë speaks of dreams, dreams that pass through the mind “like wine through water, and alter the colour” of thoughts. If the experience of reading Wuthering Heights feels like a suspension in a state of waking nightmare, what a richly-hued vision of the fantastical it is.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100748/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sophie Alexandra Frazer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
This week is the 200th anniversary of Emily Bronte’s birth. If reading Wuthering Heights - her only published novel - feels like a suspension in a state of waking nightmare, what a richly-hued vision of the fantastical it is.
Sophie Alexandra Frazer, Doctoral candidate in English, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/100744
2018-07-30T13:18:20Z
2018-07-30T13:18:20Z
Emily Brontë’s fierce, flawed women: not your usual Gothic female characters
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229731/original/file-20180729-106521-1d0041s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">BBC Cymru's To Walk Invisible, the story of the Brontë sisters.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Domestic violence, alcoholism, child abuse, neglect, sexual obsession and torture: <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emily-Bronte">Emily Brontë’s</a> 1847 novel <a href="https://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/wh/summary.php">Wuthering Heights</a> is nothing if not graphic in its depiction of the messy, frightening and chaotic lives of unhappy families. No wonder critics at the time were repelled by its “shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity” and its “details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance”. But the women in the novel, trapped in these toxic, inter-generational cycles of abuse, are not passive but remain resolute and resistant.</p>
<p>“Whether it is right or advisable to create things like <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/who-is-heathcliff">Heathcliff</a>, I do not know,” wrote <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charlotte-Bronte">Charlotte Brontë</a> in her apologetic preface to the 1850 posthumous edition of her sister’s novel. But despite her misgivings, Heathcliff remains one of the most memorable and enduring characters in Victorian literature.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=642&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=642&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=642&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis the age of 30. Wuthering Heights was her only novel.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The boy adopted by the Earnshaws as a gypsy child grows up to hang his fiancée’s dog. He refuses a nurse or doctor to his dying son – crying: “Lock him up and leave him.” And he frequently assaults and threatens others – “I’ll crush his ribs in like a rotten hazel-nut” he says of Edgar Linton. Later he also threatens to rip out his wife Isabella fingernails and digs up his great love Catherine Earnshaw’s coffin with necrophiliac fervour.</p>
<p>In Brontë’s description of a fight between Heathcliff and Hindley, Catherine Earnshaw’s elder brother, who has just tried to shoot him, the choreography is cool and exact:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The knife, in springing back, closed into its owner’s wrist. Heathcliff pulled it away by main force, slitting up the flesh as it passed on… His adversary had fallen senseless with excessive pain and the flow of blood that gushed from an artery or a large vein. The ruffian kicked and trampled on him, and dashed his head repeatedly against the flags.“ </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Violence and abuse</h2>
<p>Charlotte Brontë’s preface famously excuses the book as the "rugged” outpouring of her sister’s untutored imagination as a “nursling of the moors” and suggests that Heathcliff is the focus of all the villainy in the book. But Heathcliff is not the only perpetrator of violence and abuse in a novel which bristles with attacks and injuries, both mental and physical.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ImqD5e2_4OE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>At one point Hindley orders the servant (and principal narrator) Nelly Dean to: “‘Open your mouth.’ He held the knife in his hand, and pushed its point between my teeth”. In an alcoholic rage Hindley grabs his own baby son and shouts, “‘I’ll break the brat’s neck.’ Poor Hareton was squalling and kicking in his father’s arms with all his might, and redoubled his yells when he carried him up-stairs and lifted him over the banister.” The father then drunkenly drops him, and baby Hareton’s life is only saved because Heathcliff manages to catch him.</p>
<p>Wuthering Heights is, in the words of the novel, “a string of abuse or complainings” – and worse. Brontë trains a singularly cool and unflinching gaze on the violent behaviour that can explode in the intimate spaces of the “home”.</p>
<p>Early critics saw this clearly, but more recent critics have noticed it less. Perhaps the attention given to Brontë as a woman writer by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s, hugely important as it was, pushed readings of the novel away from the representation of violence and towards ideas of female repression.</p>
<h2>Loathsome women</h2>
<p>In her <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/365579.Desire_and_Domestic_Fiction">famous 1987 analysis</a>, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, literary scholar <a href="https://english.duke.edu/people/nancy-armstrong">Nancy Armstrong</a> reads the double-generation plot as resolved by the middle-class female (Catherine’s daughter Cathy) who disrupts and transforms the old order with her domestic rule. Armstrong says: “Where there had always been brambles at Wuthering Heights, Catherine has Hareton put in her ‘choice of a flower bed in the midst of them’.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The ruins of Top Withens on Haworth Moor, scene of the fictional Wuthering Heights.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/derelict-farmhouse-top-withens-associated-wuthering-1079376671?src=fBA3uhM7ti0oF7P9c43YCg-1-10">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But such readings perhaps underestimate the manipulative, violent and obsessive behaviour of the female characters and both their complicity and their agency in abuse. Balanced against the “painful appearance of mental tension” in Heathcliff, is what is described by Nelly Dean as the “mental illness” of Catherine.</p>
<p>Catherine pinches Nelly’s arm “spitefully” and slaps her face with “a stinging blow”. She forces Nelly to lie to her husband Edgar and say she is very ill in order to frighten him. Edgar’s sister Isabella scratches Catherine with her “talons” and draws blood. And Heathcliff describes Isabella – his fiancée – as “that pitiful, slavish, mean-minded… abject thing”, despising her for they way she is obsessed with him even though he treats her with appalling cruelty.</p>
<p>“Even the female characters excite something of loathing and much of contempt,” remarked one reviewer at the time. That Brontë dared to make her women loathsome is important. The violence against women in Gothic fiction (as in the novels of genre pioneer <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/30/ann-radcliffe-gothic-fiction-mother-in-law">Ann Radcliffe</a>) generally sees them depicted as beautiful victims. In other words the females characters suffer beautifully but passively, such as the terror endured by Emily St Aubert in Radcliffe’s <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-mysteries-of-udolpho">Mysteries of Udolpho</a> or the strangulation of the exquisite Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/1831-edition-of-frankenstein-or-the-modern-prometheus">Frankenstein</a>.</p>
<p>But Brontë’s female characters are not victims. They remain locked in a perpetual struggle both inside the home and with the forces of nature and fate beyond the home. From their girlhoods, when “half savage and hardy” they run free on the moors, neither of the Catherines in Wuthering Heights ever lose their hardiness or give in to any of the men around them. Even Isabella manages to escape her abusive marriage to Heathcliff, and moves away with her baby son. And narrator Nelly Dean is stoic and always protective of her charges, even in the face of simmering violence.</p>
<p>A different feminist argument can be made that Emily Brontë shows us how vital is the tenacious defence of self in a violent world. Catherine, Isabella, Nelly, Cathy: Brontë’s women are fierce and active in their own stories. These women are not passively resilient, but resolute, resistant and strong-willed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100744/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clare Pettitt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
By refusing to idealise or victimise the women in Wuthering Heights, Brontë reveals herself as an early feminist.
Clare Pettitt, Professor of 19th Century Literature and Culture, King's College London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/100059
2018-07-26T10:37:19Z
2018-07-26T10:37:19Z
How incest became part of the Brontë family story
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228600/original/file-20180720-142414-14rpktq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Brontë family, by Branwell, who painted over himself after realising the 'composition was too cramped'.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Bront%C3%AB_Sisters_by_Patrick_Branwell_Bront%C3%AB_restored.jpg">National Portrait Gallery/Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>To this day, Emily Brontë’s life story and literature continue to exert a powerful hold on the imaginations of audiences worldwide. One reason for the longevity of this fascination is the air of mystery that envelops the author and her work. Who was Emily Brontë? What does her famous novel, <a href="https://archive.org/details/wutheringheight09brongoog">Wuthering Heights</a>, mean? And how could a reclusive curate’s daughter, living on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, have written this mysterious tale of passion and revenge? </p>
<p>In 1896, literary critic Clement Shorter <a href="https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.3275">dubbed Emily</a> “the sphinx of our modern literature”. She died early, leaving behind only a few diary papers and letters, in addition to her novel and poetry. By contrast, we have volumes of <a href="http://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2015/12/charlotte-bront%C3%ABs-letters-to-constantin-heger.html">letters from her sister Charlotte</a>, telling us about her life in her own words. Emily was private, reclusive, and difficult to understand. But the strength of collective desire to uncover who she really was, and how she came to create her masterpiece, inadvertently also gave rise to one of the coarsest and most curious legends to have attached itself to the Brontë family – the myth that Wuthering Heights was the product <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3044351.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">of incestuous longings</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228557/original/file-20180720-142426-1t42ncv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228557/original/file-20180720-142426-1t42ncv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228557/original/file-20180720-142426-1t42ncv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228557/original/file-20180720-142426-1t42ncv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228557/original/file-20180720-142426-1t42ncv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=947&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228557/original/file-20180720-142426-1t42ncv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228557/original/file-20180720-142426-1t42ncv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228557/original/file-20180720-142426-1t42ncv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1190&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Emily Brontë, painted by her brother Branwell c.1833.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/emily-bronte-155305">National Portrait Gallery, London</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Wuthering Heights, the relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy defies easy labels. Adopted by old Mr Earnshaw, Heathcliff is raised alongside Cathy, sharing her lessons, games, and even her bed. It’s no wonder, then, that Cathy’s desire to marry Heathcliff and her declaration of love and affinity – “he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” – sometimes throws readers. Are they siblings? Are they lovers? Are they both? Cathy and Heathcliff might be “kin”, but as academic <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Family_Likeness.html?id=P5XMnntdpRUC">Mary Jean Corbett explains</a>, there is no indication in the text that their relationship is prohibited on the grounds of brother-sister incest.</p>
<p>Still, seeming to take their cue from Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship, biographers and creative writers have characterised the relationship between Emily and her brother Branwell as particularly close. As early as 1883, A. Mary F. Robinson <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25789/25789-h/25789-h.htm">argued</a> that Wuthering Heights could be explained if one looked into Emily’s relationship with Branwell. Later, during the interwar period, as the Brontës’ lives became the subject of acknowledged works of fiction and drama, that sibling bond was sexualised and offered as an explanation for the novel. </p>
<p>In some of these texts, Branwell and Emily’s relationship is sexually abusive. In Ella Moorhouse’s <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stone-Walls-Play-About-Brontes/dp/B000SBLIGQ">Stone Walls (1936)</a>, for instance, Branwell tries to force a knife and bottle of liquor into Emily’s mouth. In others, it is loving and supportive. Clemence Dane’s play, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Wild_Decembers.html?id=wQctAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Wild Decembers (1932)</a>, features a fictional Branwell indulging in masturbatory fantasies while looking at his sister. But he also supports Emily’s writing and collaborates with her to bring Wuthering Heights – their symbolic child – into the world. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228559/original/file-20180720-142408-jprybb.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228559/original/file-20180720-142408-jprybb.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=694&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228559/original/file-20180720-142408-jprybb.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=694&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228559/original/file-20180720-142408-jprybb.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=694&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228559/original/file-20180720-142408-jprybb.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228559/original/file-20180720-142408-jprybb.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228559/original/file-20180720-142408-jprybb.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Branwell Brontë - a self portrait.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Branwell.gif">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There are a number of texts that simply revel in the salaciousness of imagining sibling love, too. In Kathryn Jean MacFarlane’s <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Divide_the_Desolation.html?id=LzNDnQAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Divide the Desolation (1936)</a>, Emily and Branwell engage in a form of childhood S&M play, with Emily delighting in the fact that her brother cares enough to hurt her. While Emilie and Georges Romieu’s <a href="http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/7th-march-1931/38/the-brontes-through-french-eyes-the-bront-sisters-">The Brontë Sisters (1931)</a> features an extended erotic fantasy in which Emily pulls Branwell from his burning bed and against her body while wearing a translucent, wet night gown. </p>
<p>In each of these texts, Emily’s relationship with Branwell is presented as the catalyst for Wuthering Heights. Sexually charged moments between the siblings are often followed by scenes in which Emily commits her brother’s words and actions to paper. Some of these texts even dramatise the siblings writing the novel together, and Branwell is often given Heathcliff’s lines. </p>
<p>But why did this incestuous idea enter the minds of other writers in the first place? Many of the Brontës’ first readers characterised their writing as coarse, which isn’t surprising. Heathcliff abuses wives and animals, uses brutal language, and digs up the body of his dead lover, after all. When Elizabeth Gaskell approached the task of writing <a href="https://archive.org/details/lifecharlottebr00unkngoog">The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) </a>, she needed to excuse this perceived coarseness, to stress the sisters’ respectability, but also explain how they created characters like Heathcliff. </p>
<p>Gaskell resolved her difficulties by claiming the sisters misguidedly recorded the coarse behaviour of their brother, Branwell, a man who suffered from <a href="https://theconversation.com/brontes-under-the-influence-the-legacy-of-branwells-drinking-85649">addiction and mental illness</a> following the end of a disastrous relationship. Branwell, according to Gaskell, was the model for Heathcliff, Rochester, Huntingdon. During the interwar period, in the heyday of psychoanalysis, some writers took Gaskell at her word. If the brutal but sexually alluring Heathcliff was Emily’s portrait of her brother, then perhaps their relationship was the model for Cathy and Heathcliff’s.</p>
<p>Quite apart from the fact that we have no evidence for incest in the Brontë family, the incest myth is problematic because it makes Branwell ultimately responsible for Wuthering Heights. It reduces Emily from a spontaneous genius or deliberate artist to a woman grappling with forbidden desires or subject to sexual abuse. Let’s hope that in the year of her bicentenary, Emily’s genius will finally be allowed to stand on its own.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100059/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This article is based on a talk originally given at a Cardiff BookTalk event (<a href="https://cardiffbooktalk.org/">https://cardiffbooktalk.org/</a>).</span></em></p>
Since the 1930s, Wuthering Heights has been used to claim the Brontë family had an incestuous secret.
Amber Pouliot, Teaching fellow, British Studies, Harlaxton College
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/100062
2018-07-25T08:42:17Z
2018-07-25T08:42:17Z
Emily Brontë at 200: Wuthering Heights has had readers going round in circles for 170 years
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228580/original/file-20180720-142432-1ib6tin.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sir Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the 1939 film Wuthering Heights.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Laurence_Olivier_Merle_Oberon_Wuthering_Heights.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Though she is famed as one of England’s greatest writers, Emily Brontë – whose 200th birthday would have fallen on July 30, 2018 – probably only ever wrote one novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6185.Wuthering_Heights">Wuthering Heights</a>, first published in 1847. </p>
<p>Wuthering Heights might now be synonymous with Cathy and Heathcliff, but their love affair is not the whole story. They exist within an elaborate web of semi-incestous relationships between the Earnshaw, Linton and Heathcliff families. Through its multigenerational story, the book examines whether grand but destructive passion is preferable to companionship and domesticity. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229042/original/file-20180724-194134-l65lh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229042/original/file-20180724-194134-l65lh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229042/original/file-20180724-194134-l65lh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229042/original/file-20180724-194134-l65lh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229042/original/file-20180724-194134-l65lh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229042/original/file-20180724-194134-l65lh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229042/original/file-20180724-194134-l65lh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229042/original/file-20180724-194134-l65lh7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wuthering Heights family tree.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wuthering_Heights_family_tree.jpg">shakko/Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The novel’s first half relates the love between Cathy and Heathcliff, but the latter part is devoted to their descendants, especially Cathy’s daughter, Catherine Linton, and her nephew, Hareton Earnshaw. Ever since Wuthering Heights was first printed, the contrast between the two generations has prompted readers to ask the same questions. Does Brontë ultimately critique Cathy and Heathcliff’s exciting but tortured affair by comparing them with Catherine and Hareton? Or do the younger couple, after their transgressive predecessors, represent the restoration of boring convention? </p>
<h2>Generations of patterns</h2>
<p>From the very start, Wuthering Heights encourages readers to look at the generations in relation to one other. Brontë employs an intricate pattern of repeating names, a pattern made explicit by the bumbling narrator Lockwood. In an early chapter, Lockwood spends a night at the gothic Heights where he discovers those names graffitied onto a window ledge. He recounts:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small – Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton.</p>
<p>In vapid listlessness I leant my head against the window, and continued spelling over Catherine Earnshaw—Heathcliff—Linton, till my eyes closed; but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres – the air swarmed with Catherines…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This Catherine soup foreshadows major events to come. The first Catherine, Cathy, begins the novel as “Catherine Earnshaw” before taking the surname Linton after marrying Edgar. Her daughter is born “Catherine Linton” then becomes “Catherine Heathcliff” through a forced marriage to Linton Heathcliff, Heathcliff’s son. In the final chapter, the second Catherine is engaged to Hareton and is on the verge of being renamed “Catherine Earnshaw”. As the names reveal, the novel gives one version of the story and then tells the same tale in reverse.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228578/original/file-20180720-142435-1qgrl32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228578/original/file-20180720-142435-1qgrl32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/228578/original/file-20180720-142435-1qgrl32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=240&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228578/original/file-20180720-142435-1qgrl32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=240&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228578/original/file-20180720-142435-1qgrl32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=240&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228578/original/file-20180720-142435-1qgrl32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=302&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228578/original/file-20180720-142435-1qgrl32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=302&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/228578/original/file-20180720-142435-1qgrl32.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=302&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Relationships of Wuthering Heights.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wuthering_Heights_relationships_chart.jpg">MichaelMaggs/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Lockwood’s visions suggest that these names and their attached identities are floating free, ready to be claimed or disregarded at will. Indeed, names and identities within Wuthering Heights appear interchangeable. The novel keeps swapping the characters and their names around in order to imagine them in new combinations. In the process, the distinctions between the generations and their attached symbolism start to dissolve. </p>
<h2>Circling the story</h2>
<p>The pattern of names also suggest that Wuthering Heights is a cyclical tale rather than a linear one. The repetitions introduce all sorts of complications into how we read the two halves of the narrative in relation to each other. From one perspective, the circular structure prevents us from assuming that Wuthering Heights is a tale of doomed passion being eventually superseded and replaced by mature love. From another, the first generation can be interpreted as triumphantly returning. We start with a Catherine Earnshaw and end up looping back to a Catherine Earnshaw. </p>
<p>Of course, Wuthering Heights is too sophisticated to give us an either/or answer as to whether passion or companionship is preferable. On closer inspection, Catherine and Hareton possess many of the same qualities as their forebears but in less extreme and more domesticated forms. In the final chapter, the pair is described as reading together in a recently replanted garden, a detail that suggests the violence and chaos of the Heights has been tamed. They symbolise a harmonious synthesis of the many oppositions – especially nature/culture and passion/companionship – that abound in the novel. In this hybrid setting, the younger Catherine’s taking of her mother’s maiden name creates the impression of a simultaneous return and renewal. </p>
<p>The novel’s recurring names and its overall design suggests other possibilities. In particular, that Brontë was more interested in weaving a complex narrative than answering the very questions raised by her own novel. In so doing, she crafted a literary and philosophical puzzle that continues to ignite the imaginations of many authors, filmmakers and artists to this day.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100062/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This article is based on a talk originally given at a Cardiff BookTalk event (<a href="https://cardiffbooktalk.org/">https://cardiffbooktalk.org/</a>).</span></em></p>
Wuthering Heights is anything but a straightforward love story.
Catherine Han, Teacher, Cardiff University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/85341
2017-10-25T13:05:51Z
2017-10-25T13:05:51Z
Was Emily Brontё’s Heathcliff black?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191833/original/file-20171025-25540-19inv27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Film4/</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Did Emily Brontё envisage her most famous fictional protagonist, Heathcliff, as a black man? In recent years there has been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/13/how-heathcliff-got-a-racelift">extensive debate</a> about whether Heathcliff is <a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-possible-ethnic-background-of-Heathcliff-in-Wuthering-Heights">supposed to be black</a>. Much of this discussion centres on the proximity of the action in her most famous novel, Wuthering Heights, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030265?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">to Liverpool</a> – which was a world centre for slave-trading during the period in which the novel is set. </p>
<p>Critics have also focused on the way in which Heathcliff is portrayed in Brontё’s novel. Much has been made of the words of the novel’s main narrator, Nelly, to Heathcliff: “If you were a regular black …” she says. There has been a <a href="https://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/wh/faq.php">great deal of discussion</a> of what this might mean. </p>
<p>The novel’s most famous action takes place on the moorlands surrounding the quaint Yorkshire village of Haworth – and moorlands are traditionally associated with uncivilised regions. Heathcliff embodies this idea – he is depicted as the quintessential “savage” whose foreignness establishes his position at civilisation’s periphery. </p>
<p>But historians have found abundant evidence to suggest that Heathcliff’s foreignness is not merely symbolic – it makes historical sense. The novel is set in 1801, when Liverpool <a href="http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/slavery/europe/liverpool.aspx">handled most of Britain’s transatlantic trade in enslaved people</a>. Evidence of this terrible trade could be seen everywhere – the Brontё critic <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/1474893213Z.00000000082?journalCode=ybst20">Humphrey Gawthrop</a> records <a href="https://lra.le.ac.uk/bitstream/2381/40108/6/Postcolonial%20Literary%20Inquiry%20Submission%203.3.17.pdf">that</a>: “[William] Wilberforce’s colleague, Thomas Clarkson … saw in the windows of a Liverpool shop leg-shackles, handcuffs, thumbscrews and mouth-openers for force-feeding used on board the slavers.” </p>
<p>So if Heathcliff was not a black African or descendant of one, historians have comprehensively demonstrated that he very easily might have been. And while the recurrent critical question has been whether Brontё meant him to be black, research on <a href="http://www.blackhistorymonth.org.uk/listings/region/yorkshire/">Yorkshire’s black histories</a> makes it more pertinent to ask why was he not depicted as black until as recently as 2012? </p>
<p>In the late 1970s, a Latin American television adaptation of Wuthering Heights, entitled Cumbres Borrascosas portrayed Heathcliff as the mixed-race son of Mr Earnshaw. When he brings the boy home, his wife berates him for sleeping with a black woman. This act of cultural translation is likely to have made sense to Latin American audiences, for whom slavery looms large in the collective historical memory. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BdmiPC1TPW8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Slavery in Yorkshire</h2>
<p>Until recently, however, generations of Anglophone literary critics overlooked the impact of slave-trading and slave-produced wealth on Yorkshire. Literary critic Terry Eagleton <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/174582212X13279217752787?journalCode=ybst20">said</a>: “Heathcliff disturbs the heights because he … has no defined place within its … economic system.” This flies in the face of a large body of evidence that Heathcliff’s enslaved contemporaries were once central to the region’s economy.</p>
<p>It has been left to Caryl Phillips’s recent novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/18/the-lost-child-caryl-phillips-review-wuthering-heights-emily-bronte">The Lost Child</a> to finally explore the region’s forgotten colonial connections. In his account, Heathcliff is the illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw, born of a formerly enslaved woman who is brought to Liverpool docks from the Caribbean. The significance of this was lost on reviewers, who overwhelmingly implied that Phillips’ novel gave Brontё’s story the multicultural treatment and his choice of a black Heathcliff was an exercise of artistic licence rather than basing his depiction of the character on any historical foundation. But Phillips’s knowledge of history clearly trumps theirs. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XmuMd4FnnYo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Phillips was interviewed in <a href="http://www.lonestarproductions.co.uk/wutheringheights.html">Adam Low’s documentary</a>, A Regular Black (2009), and pointed out that gentlemen like Mr Earnshaw went to Liverpool on business – and the city’s main business was slave-trading or slave-produced sugar, tobacco and coffee. Low’s documentary also highlighted the significance of Heathcliff’s name – a single moniker which serves as forename and surname, as with enslaved people. </p>
<h2>Black history</h2>
<p>The Brontё sisters’ school was just a few miles from the Dentdale home of a notorious slave-owning family <a href="http://www.northcravenheritage.org.uk/NCHTJto2009/Journals/2000/J00A17.html">called the Sills</a>. The Brontё sisters knew about the Sills family, who worked more than 30 enslaved Africans on the grounds of their estate. <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/1287751141">The Legacies of British Slave Ownership</a> database confirms that the Sills family had a large number of Jamaican slaves. The database shows that Ann Sill was posthumously compensated with £3,783 in 1876 for the loss of 174 enslaved people from the family’s Providence Estate. Emily Brontё was aware of local debates about abolition and she knew about the impact of sugar wealth on her neighbourhood through a host of personal associations.</p>
<p>Historians have uncovered many more compelling details of how <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2007/02/15/west_yorkshire_slave_trade_feature.shtml">slave-produced wealth shaped the region</a>. These details combine to suggest that, when Nelly says that Heathcliff is not “a regular black”, she is not being merely metaphorical – she is clearly saying that while Heathcliff may not be like most black people she was aware of, he was indeed black. </p>
<p>Wuthering Heights was published in 1847. It was written in the shadow of two formative international political events which alarmed the British public: the late 18th century French and Haitian Revolutions. Many of Brontё’s readers would have known that the violent Haitian Revolution ended in independent rule and led to the <a href="https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/20330/Final%20Thesis-McKey.pdf?sequence=1">decline of the plantation economy</a>. Christopher Heywood <a href="http://www.academicroom.com/article/yorkshire-slavery-wuthering-heights">details</a> the ways in which the Dales were shaped by the “plantation economy”, with well-known local families making their money from the slave-trade and slave-produced goods, also lobbying parliament against abolition.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3-b0DBepmgo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The Heathcliff of Andrea Arnold’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/10/wuthering-heights-film-review">2011 remake of Wuthering Heights</a> is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/13/how-heathcliff-got-a-racelift">also black</a>. Arnold makes no reference to Yorkshire’s real black histories in interviews about the film. Indeed, her choice of actor happened almost by chance – Arnold does not herself challenge the idea that Heathcliff is not really black. Instead she alludes to “five or six clear descriptions of him in the novel” as a lascar, as “Chinese-Indian” and as a gypsy. Without referring to Yorkshire’s slavery connections, she simply said: “I wanted to honour … his difference.” Philip French’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/13/wuthering-heights-andrea-arnold-review">review in the Guardian</a>, for example, contained no suggestion that it might be historically legitimate to foreground a black presence in Brontё’s world. Instead, he concluded that the film’s depiction of a black Heathcliff is rather “a puzzle”.</p>
<p>But as the historical evidence builds up, writers and filmmakers are busily uncovering Yorkshire’s obscured histories of immigration and slave-produced wealth. Whether by accident or design, Arnold may well have got it right when she cast Solomon Glave and James Howson as Heathcliff.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85341/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>I previously received Arts Council funding and AHRC funding. I do not hold any grants at present. </span></em></p>
All the evidence points to Brontё’s most famous outcast being a product of the British slave trade.
Corinne Fowler, Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature, University of Leicester
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/52470
2015-12-24T08:22:08Z
2015-12-24T08:22:08Z
Five dark literary Christmases that don’t involve Ebeneezer Scrooge
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106491/original/image-20151217-8097-107iz8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'On yer bike, Ebeneezer.'</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>When we think of literature with festive themes, many will think first of Charles Dickens’ The Christmas Carol (1843). Ebeneezer Scrooge’s journey from capitalist miser to lover of humanity, via the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, is as much a part of the festive season as turkey and crackers. </p>
<p>But not all texts involving Christmas are quite as effusive about human redemption and kindness. Here are my top five festive scenes for those that appreciate the darker side of Christmas. </p>
<h2>1. Sylvia Plath: Balloons</h2>
<p>“Since Christmas they have lived with us,” writes Plath of the leftover balloons in <a href="https://www.internal.org/Sylvia_Plath/Balloons">this poem</a>. Christmas is not always a time of the year that she cherishes. In <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3094683-the-unabridged-journals-of-sylvia-plath">her diary</a>, she refers to one December 25 that left her “overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas”. </p>
<p>In Balloons, Plath is speaking to her daughter. She writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Your small</p>
<p>Brother is making<br>
His balloon squeak like a cat. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She describes her son biting the balloon and sitting with “A red/ Shred in his little fist”. Alongside the red symbolism that is <a href="http://chhsadvancedmodc.weebly.com/red.html">so prominent</a> in Plath’s poetry, the gesture feels hauntingly violent.</p>
<p>The poem was written on February 3 1963, six days before Plath <a href="http://www.imitatio.org/mimetic-theory/mark-anspach/sylvia-plaths-suicide-and-the-shadow-of-her-father.html">took her own life</a>, leaving behind those two children to one of the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-10-worst-british-winters-ever-8945584.html">coldest English winters</a> of the century. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106496/original/image-20151217-8104-strxw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Squeak like a cat.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&search_tracking_id=QiIFgFdYqluyC-sOibEW1Q&searchterm=burst%20red%20balloon&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=224626726">Africa Studio</a></span>
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<h2>2. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights</h2>
<p>Chapter seven of <a href="http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/index.php">Wuthering Heights</a> presents a rural homely Christmas – before all is ruined. The housekeeper-narrator Nelly Dean sets the scene:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[After] putting my cakes in the oven, and making the house and kitchen cheerful with great fires, befitting Christmas Eve, I prepared to sit down and amuse myself by singing carols, all alone … I smelt the rich scent of heating spices; and admired the shining kitchen utensils, the polished clock, decked in holly, the silver mugs ranged on a tray ready to be filled with mulled ale for supper; and above all, the speckless purity of my particular care – the scoured and well-swept floor. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The context is that Hindley Earnshaw, the master of Wuthering Heights, is bent on making his adoptive brother Heathcliff’s life a misery. Heathcliff was taken in as a homeless gypsy boy by Hindley’s father, who grew more fond of him than his son. Now that the father is dead, Hindley is finally able to take revenge. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=683&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106493/original/image-20151217-8097-1lpbur8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=858&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Oh Heathcliff!’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/scottliddle/2245557197/in/photolist-4qr4Vp-5avFwa-pRw6u2-6FcyeJ-2LtD49-dcuLf2-dcuMps-6V54dd-LHG6u-6LS6UV-dcuMjN-dcuLjv-dcuMuo-dcuMwY-dcuLFd-dcuKzn-dcuKFx-uT5Dwh-6D7u8W-dcuLDf-dcuLz7-dcuKHx-dcuKLg-dcuLRb-dcuKUT-dcuLwD-9ZbH6a-dcuLQc-6D7Cph-Ez8KL-6D7srG-dcuL8n-6KU5ZA-dcuLS8-4TsLa4-dcuM3E-dcuMFh-6F8ruc-962eRM-a1vgmT-9Zbirx-dcuLN8-dcuLcP-dcuKWT-dcuMdL-dcuKuz-doxnMk-dcuLKB-dcuLH8-dcuMDh">Scott MacLeod Liddle</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Hindley’s sister Catherine, with whom Heathcliff is in love, has just returned from five weeks away. After Hindley tells her she may treat him as a servant, she greets him haughtily, identifying how dirty he looks. Nelly fears this has deeply wounded Heathcliff and persuades him to become more presentable. Her efforts are thwarted when Edgar Linton, Catherine’s rich suitor, laughs at Heathcliff’s long hair. Heathcliff seizes “a hot tureen of Apple sauce” and throws it at him, resulting in a sound flogging from Hindley. </p>
<h2>3. James Joyce: The Dead</h2>
<p>Joyce said the short stories in Dubliners were a portrait of his home city as “the centre of paralysis”. The final story, The Dead, features Gabriel Conroy, an aspirational journalist visiting his ageing aunts on a snowy Feast of the Epiphany. It’s a very subtle story that deals with disappointment, betrayal, lost love, social class and Irish nationalism. Here is Joyce’s description of the dinner table:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the centre of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one with port and the other dark sherry. On the closed piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colour of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Notice how eerily military everything is in this scene, reflecting the status of colonial Ireland in the early 20th century. </p>
<p>By the end of the story, we have a moving account of snow falling across the country, <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/re-joyce-john-brannigan/?k=9780333683828&loc=uk">just as it</a> did during the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/famine_01.shtml">Great Famine</a> of 1845-52. In many ways, this renders the dinner table even more unreal. Nobody actually eats very much, it seems. </p>
<h2>4. Nikolai Gogol: The Night Before Christmas</h2>
<p>This short story comes from <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195680.Village_Evenings_Near_Dikanka_Mirgorod">Village Evenings Near Dikanka</a>, a Ukrainian-themed collection. It is ostensibly for children, but there is nothing conventionally merry about the narrative. Christmas is very quickly disrupted by the Devil and a witch on a broomstick. </p>
<p>The Devil wants revenge over our lovelorn hero, the devout blacksmith Vakula, for making grotesque portraits of him for the church. He creates a blizzard, so that “the air became white and thick with hurtling snow”. He steals the moon, and hides in a coal sack. </p>
<p>Vakula triumphs in the end, but not before we’ve been taken to St Petersburg in search of Catherine the Great’s slippers, which Oksana, Vakula’s intended, is demanding before she will marry him. When Vakula meets the empress, she agrees to give them to him: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you want shoes like mine, that’s easy to arrange. Right away there, bring him my most expensive pair, the ones with gold embroidery.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106494/original/image-20151217-8086-11k4ep1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lock up your slippers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=&searchterm=russia%20devil&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=305940647">volkovslava</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<h2>5. Thomas Hardy: A Christmas Ghost Story</h2>
<p>This poem, dated Christmas Eve 1899, is an acerbic reflection on the nature of war and the ineffectiveness of Christianity. The speaker is a British soldier, killed in South Africa during the <a href="http://www.angloboerwar.com/boer-war">Boer War</a>. It’s a highly combative poem, featuring a series of accusatory questions, culminating in this devastating statement: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>But tarries yet the Cause for which He died.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The cause in question is peace on earth and goodwill to all men. Hardy republished the poem during World War I, as a statement of pacifism. Alas, 100 years later, it is a lesson which still goes unheeded.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Claire has received funding from AHRC. </span></em></p>
Dicken’s great anti-hero has monopolised festive literature for too long. Here are the alternative takes on the season of goodwill that you have been missing.
Claire Nally, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century English Literature, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.