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Wuthering Heights
OVERVIEW OF EMILY BRONTË
Emily Brontë has become mythologized both as an individual and as one of the Brontë sisters. She has been cast as Absolute Individual, as Tormented Genius, and as Free Spirit Communing with Nature; the trio of sisters–Charlotte, Emily, and Anne–have been fashioned into Romantic Rebels, as well as Solitary Geniuses. Their lives have been sentimentalized, their psyches psychoanalyzed, and their home life demonized. In truth, their lives and home were strange and often unhappy. Their father was a withdrawn man who dined alone in his own room; their Aunt Branwell, who raised them after the early death of their mother, also dined alone in her room. The two oldest sisters died as children. For three years Emily supposedly spoke only to family members and servants. Their brother Branwell, an alcoholic and a drug addict, put the family through the hell of his ravings and threats of committing suicide or murdering their father, his physical and mental degradation, his bouts of delirium tremens, and, finally, his death.
As children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne had one another and books as companions; in their isolation, they created an imaginary kingdom called Angria and filled notebooks describing its turbulent history and character. Around 1831, thirteen-year old Emily and eleven-year old Anne broke from the Angrian fantasies which Branwell and Charlotte had dominated to create the alternate history of Gondal. Emily maintained her interest in Gondal and continued to spin out the fantasy with pleasure till the end of her life. Nothing of the Gondal history remains except Emily's poems, the references in the journal fragments by Anne and Emily, the birthday papers of 1841 and 1845, and Anne's list of the names of characters and locations.
Little is known directly of Emily Brontë. All that survives of Emily's own words about herself is two brief letters, two diary papers written when she was thirteen and sixteen, and two birthday papers, written when she was twenty-three and twenty-seven. Almost everything that is known about her comes from the writings of others, primarily Charlotte. Even Charlotte's novel, Shirley, has been used as a biographical source because Charlotte created Shirley, as she told her biographer and friend Elizabeth Gaskell, to be "what Emily Brontë would have been had she been placed in health and prosperity."
Often Wuthering Heights is used to construct a biography of Emily's life, personality, and beliefs. Edward Chitharn equates Emily, the well-read housekeeper of the family home, with Nelly based on the similarity of their roles and the similarity of their names, "Nelly" being short for "Ellen" which is similar to Emily's pseudonym "Ellis." The supposed anorexia of Catherine, who stops eating after Edgar's ultimatum, and of Heathcliff, who stops eating at the end, is used as proof of Emily's anorexia; support for this interpretation is found in the tendency of all four Brontë siblings not to eat when upset. Alternately, Emily's supposed anorexia is used to explain aspects of the novel. Katherine Frank characterizes Emily as a constantly hungry anorexic who denies her constant hunger; "Even more importantly," Frank asks, "how was this physical hunger related to a more pervasive hunger in her life–hunger for power and experience, for love and happiness, fame and fortune and fulfilment?" Well, one expression of these hungers is the intense focus on food, hunger, and starvation in Wuthering Heights . Furthermore, the kitchen is the main setting, and most of the passionate or violent scenes occur there.
Similarly, Emily's poems are used to interpret her novel, particularly those poems discussing isolation, rebellion, and freedom. Readings of Wuthering Heights as a mystical novel, a religious novel, or a visionary novel call on "No coward soul is mine," one of her best poems. The well known "Riches I hold in light esteem" is cited to explain her choice of a reclusive lifestyle, as is"A Chainless Life." The fact that many of these poems were written as part of the Gondal chronicles and are dramatic speeches of Gondal characters is blithely ignored or explained away. (In 1844 Emily went through her poems, destroying some, revising others, and writing new poems; she collected them and clearly labeled the Gondal poems.)
The poems and Wuthering Heights have also been connected. The editor of her poems, C.W. Hatfield, sees the same mind at work in both, and Charles Morgan perceives in them "the same unreality of this world, the same greater reality of another,... and a unique imagination."
PUBLICATION OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS AND ITS CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL RECEPTION
The publication history of and critical response to Wuthering Heights are intertwined with those of Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Anne's Agnes Grey. Wutheirng Heights and Agnes Grey were accepted for publication before Charlotte had finished writing Jane Eyre. However, their publisher delayed bringing their novels out, with the result that Jane Eyre was published first. It became a best seller. In an effort to cash in on the success of Jane Eyre, he implied that Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were written by "the author of Jane Eyre"–to the distress of all three sisters. The pseudonyms they had adopted unintentionally contributed to his deception.
Wanting their works to be judged for their literary merit and not on their sex, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily published their novels under names which were not obviously masculine, Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell. Preserving their male identities was so important to the Brontë sisters that Charlotte maintained that identity even in writing to her publishers; for instance she described the Bells' beliefs as "gentlemanlike..." and consistently referred to her sisters as "he." In addition, Emily had an intense sense of privacy which made hiding her identity especially important to her. In order to prove to Charlotte's publishers that Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell were not one person, Charlotte and Anne met with them in London; during the interview, Charlotte inadvertently revealed that they were three sisters; her admission enraged Emily.
Public debate about whether the Bells were one, two, or three persons and whether they were male or female continued until 1850, when Charlotte's "Biographical Notice" to a new edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey publically identified Anne and Emily as Acton and Ellis Bell, respectively. Before and after Charlotte's biographical essay, reviewers of Wuthering Heights consistently compared it to Jane Eyre, generally to its detriment. One reviewer believed that Jane Eyre helped "to ensure a favorable reception" for her sisters' novels (Atlas, January 1848).
CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S 1850 EDITION
In 1850, Charlotte edited her sisters' poems and novels; in a "Preface" and "Biographical Notice," she provided biographical details about her sisters and herself, characterized the novels and her sisters, and defended both. A second round of reviews appeared in response to this reissuing of Emily's and Anne's novels and Charlotte's introduction. In general, reviewers were moved by pity at the early deaths of Emily and Anne, as well as at the general hardship of the Brontë sisters' lives and were amazed at the discrepancy between their uneventful lives and the violence and passion portrayed in their novels. They also had a greater sense of Emily's achievement, which was increasingly compared to Shakespeare's.
However, Charlotte overemphasized the negativity of the original reviews of Wutheirng Heights when she charged that the original reviewers had not appreciated Wuthering Heights. In reality, its power and its author's ability had originally been acknowledged, along with censure for its violence, brutality, and "coarseness." (Click here for illustrative excerpts from the reviews). Charlotte's biased view that reviews had been overhwlemingly negative became fact in literary history and biography and continues to be repeated.
Perhaps more significant than her misperception were the characterizations which Charlotte promulgated about her sister; they are still being repeated. First, Charlotte presented her sister as "a child and nursling of the moors" through whom nature spoke; this explained the novel's being "moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath." Next Charlotte metamorphosed Emily into an accurate transcriber of the Yorkshire life and inhabitants. Then Charlotte transformed Emily, in turn, (1) into a Christian allegorist, with Heathliff representing the sinner; (2) into the passive receptor of the creative gift; and, finally, (3) into the visionary artist. It did not matter to Charlotte that some of her characterizations of Emily were contradictory. Thus, Emily was driven by a creative gift which "at times strangely wills and works for itself, " so that she was unaware of what she had created, and she was a controlled sculptor who saw how she could mold a granite block into "the vision of his meditations." She rarely spoke with the local people, and she knew them intimately, " knew their ways, their language, their family histories." Charlotte claimed that Emily was impervious to the influence of others and could grow only through time and experience by following the dictates of her own nature. In one form or another, all these characterizations continue to appear in critical discussions of Emily Brontë and her novel.
LATER CRITICAL RESPONSE TO WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Initially Jane Eyre was regarded as the best of the Brontë sisters' novels, a judgment which continued nearly to the end of the century. By the 1880s critics began to place Emily's achievement above Charlotte's; a major factor in this shift was Mary Robinson's book-length biography of Emily (1883). In 1926, Charles Percy Sanger worked out the chronology of Wuthering Heights by closely examining the text; though other critics have since worked out alternate chronologies, his work affirmed Emily's literary craft and meticulous planning of the novel and disproved Charlotte's presentation of her sister as an unconscious artist who "did not know what she had done." Critics are still arguing about the structure of Wuthering Heights: for Mark Schorer it is one of the most carefully constructed novels in English, but for Albert J. Guerard it is a splendid, imperfect novel which Brontë loses control over occasionally.
Despite the increasing critical admiration for Wuthering Heights, Lord David Cecil could write, in 1935, that Emily Brontë was not properly appreciated; even her admirers saw her as an "unequal genius." He countered this view by identifying the operation of cosmic forces as the central impetus and controlling force in the novel. He was not the first critic to perceive cosmic forces in the novel; Virginia Woolf, for one, had earlier written of Emily Brontë and her novel that
She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel–a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely "I love" or "I hate," but "we, the whole human race" and "you, the eternal powers..." the sentence remains unfinished.
Nevertheless, Cecil's theory that a principle of calm and storm informed the novel was a critical milestone because it provided a comprehensive interpretation which presented the novel as a unified whole. He introduced a reading which later critics have generally responded to, whether to build on or to reject. Cecil premised that, because Emily was concerned with what life means, she focused on her characters' place in the cosmos, in which everything–alive or not, intellectual or physical–was animated by one of two spiritual principles: the principle of the storm, which was harsh, ruthless, wild, dynamic and wild, and the principle of calm , which was gentle, merciful, passive, and tame. The usual distinction between human being and nature did not exist for her; rather, for her, they were alive in the same way, an angry man and an angry sky both literally manifesting the same spiritual principle of storm. Cecil cautioned that
in spite of their apparent opposition these principles are not conflicting. Either–Emily Brontë does not make clear which she thinks–each is the expression of a different aspect of a single pervading spirit; or they are the component parts of a harmony. They may not seem so to us. The world of our experience is, on the face of it, full of discord. But that is only because in the cramped condition of their earthly incarnation these principles are diverted from following the course that their nature dictates, and get in each other's way. They are changed from positive into negative forces; the calm becomes a source of weakness, not of harmony, in the natural scheme, the storm a source not of fruitful vigour, but of disturbance. But when they are free from fleshly bonds they flow unimpeded and unconflicting; and even in this world their discords are transitory. The single principle that ultimately directs them sooner or later imposes an equilibrium....
Because these principles were neither good nor evil but just were, the novel was not concerned with moral issues and judgments; rather, it presented, in Cecil's view, a pre-moral world.
Just as Brontë resolved the usual conflict between the principles of storm and calm into equilibrium, so she resolved the traditional opposition between life and death by allowing for the immorality of the soul in life as well as in the afterlife. Cecil extrapolated, "The spiritual principle of which the soul is a manifestation is active in this life: therefore, the disembodied soul continues to be active in this life. Its ruling preoccupations remain the same after death as before." In other words, the individual's nature and passions did not end with death; rather, death allowed their free expression and fulfillment and so held the promise of peace. This was why Catherine's spirit haunted Wutheirng Heights after her death.