Bronte's Wuthering Heights

Ian Brinton

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781847064578
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441192233
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A concise but comprehensive student guide to studying Emily Bronte's classic novel Wuthering Heights. It covers adaptations such as film and TV versions of the novel and student-friendly features include discussion points and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

CHAPTER 1

CONTEXTS

Emily Brontë was born in July 1818 at Thornton in the parish of the West Yorkshire industrial town of Bradford. Her father, Patrick, became curate of the church at Haworth, some 8 miles away, in 1820 and moved into the Parsonage with his wife and five young children. However, within 18 months of making the move a sixth child, Anne, had been born, and the children’s mother died in agonizing pain from uterine cancer, leaving the young family to be brought up under the eagle eye of their aunt, Miss Elizabeth Branwell, who transferred her home from Penzance to the bleak Yorkshire moors surrounding the black stone town of Haworth. Katherine Frank’s account of this moment in the lives of the Brontë children emphasizes the difficulties felt by the young children at this stage of life:

Isolated as they were, and intimidated too by the coldness of their aunt and their father, the six children had only each other to cling to. They knew death too young, they learned helplessness and emotional starvation too early. Despite the two grown-ups who saw to their physical and educational needs, they had become with Maria Brontë’s death permanent orphans. And here we glimpse already the origin of the themes of abandonment, victimization and exile which permeate all of Emily Brontë’s writing. (Frank p. 41)

In 1825, the two elder girls, Maria and Elizabeth, both died of tuberculosis contracted while at the grimly run school at Cowan Bridge. The harsh regime of training at this Clergy Daughters’ School became a central feature of the early parts of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, and the death of the gifted Maria, who had become almost like a surrogate mother to the younger children, left an indelible mark on the minds of the others. Maria was 11 years old when she died, and she was buried on Ascension Day next to her mother in the vault beneath Haworth Church. According to Winifred Gérin:

Branwell, a strong new influence on the sisters just returned from school, with his ghoulish imaginings, declared characteristically that he heard Maria’s voice crying outside the windows at night. (Gérin p. 10)

A haunting echo of this appears in Chapter 3 of Wuthering Heights when Lockwood dreams of breaking the windowpane so that he can stop the fir-bough knocking against it, only to discover that his fingers ‘closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!’ Trapped in the nightmare he has a sight of ‘a child’s face looking through the window’. It becomes clear that this image of existence outside the window was something shared by all three sisters 20 years after the deaths of the two elder children. Whereas Emily Brontë’s reference has an almost visceral nightmare Gothicism to it, Charlotte’s William Crimsworth in The Professor ‘often heard at night the tapping of branches against the panes’ in his Brussels boarding school. Unable to see into the garden where the ‘demoiselles’ play, he longed to tear down the dividing shutters in order to ‘get a glimpse of the green region which I imagined to lie beyond’. One of Jane Eyre’s water-colour paintings, which she shows to Mr. Rochester at Thornfield Hall, reveals ‘a drowned corpse glanced through the green water’. A little like Catherine Earnshaw reaching out to the social world of the inside as she gives her ‘doleful cry moaning on’ this corpse has ‘a fair arm’, which ‘was the only limb clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn’. The haunting prevalence of this image of the dead trying to break through the barrier which lies between past and present became evident to Mrs. Gaskell whose Life of Charlotte Bronte had been commissioned by Patrick, the patriarchal survivor, soon after the death of his sole remaining child in March 1855. Mrs. Gaskell described Charlotte Brontë’s feelings after the deaths of the remaining siblings, Branwell, Emily and Anne, as she herself concentrated upon writing the early chapters of Shirley:

She went on with her work steadily. But it was dreary to write without anyone to listen to the progress of her tale – to find fault or to sympathise – while pacing the length of the parlour in the evenings, as in the days that were no more. Three sisters had done this – then two, the other sister dropping off from the walk – and now one was left desolate, to listen for echoing steps that never came, and to hear the wind sobbing at the windows, with an almost articulate sound. (Gaskell p. 303)

Early on in her biography, Mrs. Gaskell gave an account of the life and society in Haworth, which provided the background for the growing Brontë children. She referred to the local inhabitants as possessing a ‘remarkable degree of self-sufficiency’, which gave them ‘an air of independence rather apt to repel a stranger’:

Indeed, there is little display of any of the amenities of life among this wild, rough population. Their accost is curt; their accent and tone of speech blunt and harsh. Something of this may, probably, be attributed to the freedom of mountain air and of isolated hill-side life . . . (Gaskell p. 8)

She also referred to the bearing of grudges, ‘in some cases amounting to hatred’, which could continue from one generation to the next:

I remember Miss Bronte once telling me that it was a saying round about Haworth, ‘Keep a stone in thy pocket seven year; turn it, and keep it seven year longer, that it may be ever ready to thine hand when thine enemy draws near.’ (Gaskell p. 9)

The deaths of the two elder girls, Maria and Elizabeth, in 1825 had a profound effect upon the remaining four children, and motherless children and orphans became a feature which haunted the novels of both Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Juliet Barker points out that not only does virtually every child in Wuthering Heights lose at least one parent, usually the mother, but also that ‘the relationship between the two cousins, Linton and Catherine, particularly, is essentially that of a mother surrogate and her child.’

The imaginative world of the Brontë children was intense and prompted both by their reading and their use of toy wooden soldiers they made up and acted out plays which became increasingly involved with a complex saga, the imaginary Glass Town Federation situated in the Ashantee country of West Africa. Charlotte and Branwell developed the plots into a story of the kingdom of Angria.

In January 1831, Charlotte left home to go to school at Roe Head, some 20 miles away near Huddersfield, leaving Emily to sleep on her own for the first time, and the younger girl’s growing sense of independence was further extended by her breaking away from the dominance of Charlotte and Branwell’s Angrian world to create her own imaginary world of Gondal along with her younger sister Anne. Whereas the earlier imaginary island had been dominated by the so-called Glass Town Chronicles, Emily’s new part of the fictional world was dominated by the moors surrounding Haworth. As Winifred Gérin points out, the two younger girls spent a considerable amount of time outside:

The poetry of Gondal, like Scott’s and the Border Ballads before it, was an essentially outdoor creation, depending on landscape for its major effects. The more closely Emily and Anne grew to know the changing aspects of the moors in all seasons, the vegetation with its brilliant annual return of blushing bilberry leaves, hare-bells, heath, and bracken; to watch for and closely observe the swift changes of clouds and wind-directions which their position high up on a spur of the Pennines, between two nearby coasts, provoked; the more they identified themselves with the reckless actions of their outlaws and rebels fleeing from justice, or from pursuing armies, and sheltering in the hollows of rocks or down in the glens which were their secret haunts – the more Gondal grew. (Gérin p. 26)

Emily was allowed exceptional liberty for the time, and the only stipulation about rambling on the moors was that she and Anne should be accompanied either by their elder brother, Branwell, or by Tabitha Aykroyd who had been employed since 1824 as servant in the Bronte household. ‘Tabby’ was 56 years old when she first joined the family and was well known for being a ‘joined Methodist’ whose own memories of the local area stretched back to the 1780s.

At the end of July 1835, Emily left home for the first time since her brief time at Cowan Bridge. Charlotte had accepted a teaching post at Roe Head, and Emily accompanied her to become a full-time student at the school. The arrangement only lasted a few months on account of Emily’s feelings of extreme homesickness. Charlotte expressed the sense of disjunction in her sister’s life in a ‘Prefatory Note to Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell’:

Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it, she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and inartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindliest auspices) was what she failed of enduring. Her nature here proved too strong for fortitude. Every morning when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me. I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction, obtained her recall.

For the next 2 years, Emily remained at home in Haworth with her aunt and father and Branwell whose own attempt at success in London had been doomed to ignominious failure. Having made the 2-day journey to the capital in order to start a career as an artist he appears to have spent about a week at the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row before returning home penniless and without either the letters of recommendation or the sketchbook of drawings he had taken with him.

During the time at home now, Emily began writing the poems which are associated with the world of Gondal, and her urgent need for freedom can be felt from the earliest drafts. A poem from December 1836 opens

High waving heather, ‘neath stormy blasts bending,

Midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars;

Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending,

Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending,

Man’s spirit away from its drear dongeon sending,

Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars.

References to winds, breezes and blasts occur in more than half of Emily’s poems, and on 17 occasions they appear in the first line.

In the autumn of 1838, Emily took up the post of resident teacher at Law Hill, 8 miles away from Haworth. The school, owned and run by Miss Patchett, stood some 1,000 feet up under the summit of Beacon Hill, and it looked out over open moorland. The curious history of the house itself became part of the thematic background to Wuthering Heights. The long hours and the uncongenial work prompted Charlotte to write:

Emily is gone into a situation as a teacher in a large school of near forty pupils, near Halifax. I have had one letter from her since her departure; it gives an appalling account of her duties – hard labour from six in the morning until near eleven at night, with only one half-hour of exercise between. This is slavery. I fear she will never stand it.

Her homesickness and the unyielding responsibilities of full-time teaching led to a breakdown of health, and Emily returned to Haworth in March – April 1839. During her time at Law Hill, she had continued to find some relief by keeping the world of Gondal alive and, in the winter of 1838, had written one of her most moving records of loss and yearning:

A little while, a little while,

The noisy crowd are barred away;

And I can sing and I can smile –

A little while I’ve holyday!

Where wilt thou go my harassed heart?

Full many a land invites thee now;

And places near, and far apart

Have rest for thee, my weary brow –

There is a spot mid barren hills

Where winter howls and driving rain

But if the dreary tempest chills

There is a light that warms again

The house is old, the trees are bare

And moonless bends the misty dome

But what on earth is half so dear –

So longed for as the hearth of home?

Between her return to Haworth in the spring of 1839 and her enthusiastic embracing of her sisters’ scheme in July 1841 to set up their own school, Emily wrote upwards of 50 poems and verse fragments, which have survived, as well as Gondal prose works, which are lost. Katherine Frank describes the method of working at her writing as ‘piecemeal but careful’:

She would scribble first drafts on any scraps of paper which came to hand, while in the midst of tidying the parlour or peeling potatoes or kneading bread in the kitchen, for her head was often full of phrases of verse, metaphors, images, scenes or Gondal events. In the evenings, after her father and aunt retired, Emily would take out her lap desk and systematically rework and revise the fragments of verse she had jotted down in the course of the day. (Frank p. 145–6)

One aspect of this manner of working finds a counterpart in the young Catherine Earnshaw’s jotting down of notes in the margins of her small library of books discovered by Lockwood in his room within a room when he spends the night at Wuthering Heights:

Catherine’s library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it to have been well used, though not altogether for a legitimate purpose; scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary – at least, the appearance of one – covering every morsel of blank that the printer had left. (p. 20)

Of this writing, ‘some were detached sentences; other parts took the form of a regular diary.’

To further the scheme of opening their own school, Charlotte’s friend, Mary Taylor, suggested that the sisters should spend some time improving their languages by studying in Brussels. There would be the added advantage of widening their cultural education as a preparation for opening their own Boarding establishment. Aunt Branwell put up the money, and Emily was persuaded to join Charlotte in their departure for Brussels in February 1842 accompanied by Patrick Brontë.

While in Brussels, Emily wrote only two poems, which perhaps is a reflection upon the amount of time she had to use in order to cope with the learning of lessons in French. Her forthright, even stubborn, character became evident in her reaction to her teacher’s suggestion that she should write some imitative composition exercises, which she saw as resulting in the loss of originality in thought and expression. In this light, M. Heger’s assessment of her character is revealing:

She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong, imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have given way but with life. (Barker p. 392)

Juliet Barker comments on her intractable nature in Brussels where ‘She not only seems to have set out with absolutely no intention of making friends, but was so uncompromisingly self-centred that she incurred positive dislike.’ In the essays she wrote for M. Heger, there is a sharp-edged directness, which ignores any Victorian sentimentality, and in ‘The Butterfly’, she can conclude with an eloquent statement of Christian belief having written earlier that ‘Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction’ where ‘everything must be a tireless instrume...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• 1. Contexts
• 2. Language, Style and Form
• 3. Reading Wuthering Heights
• 4. Critical Reception and Publishing History
• 5. Adaptation, Interpretation and Influence
• 6. Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright