Emily's Confined Music

New Brontë scholarship just published:

Emily Brontë's Musical Appropriations: From Literary Inspiration to Performative Adaptation
Paula Guimarães
Via Panorâmica: Revista Electrónica de Estudos Anglo-Americanos /  An Anglo-American Studies Journal. 3rdseries. 1 (2012): 21-37.

Abstract

In comparison with the visual arts, the Brontës’ interactions with and depictions of music have received little critical attention. Besides their well-known skills in drawing and painting, all the Brontë children were competent and knowledgeable musicians; music played an important part both in their family life and in the Victorian public culture. Emily Brontë, in particular, not only possessed a collection of annotated sheet music but was also a virtuoso pianist, exhibiting a taste in both baroque and romantic styles of composition and a fondness for orchestral works. Her preferred composers included Handel, Mozart, Bach, Gluck, Schubert, Rossini, Mendelssohn and Beethoven. Critics such as Robert Wallace (1986) and Meg Williams (2008) have referred to Brontë’s ‘musical matrix’, not only her music-making but also the influence of musical ideas on her writing. The sounds of music release her imagination and she sees a transformative power in them; the music of the wind in her poems runs like a piece of organ-music between the registers of air and earth. Similarly, Wuthering Heights’s mesh of repetitions and variations and its overall rhythmic patterning recalls a ‘cosmic polyphony’. It is therefore no surprise that Emily Brontë’s work has been a source of inspiration for many musicians. As both Patsy Stoneman (1996) and Linda Lister (2008) have documented, Brontë’s only novel has inspired two major operatic realizations, several musical-theatre adaptations, and numerous songs settings by composers in the realms of both classical and popular music. The art song or aria strives to portray a particular emotional moment and Brontë’s intensely focused poetic expression suits it perfectly. On a grander scale, the high dramatic and emotional sense of Wuthering Heights and the utterances of its fiercely Romantic characters make the novel suitable for an operatic libretto.

Human Nature and Confinement in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
Jessica L Muller
Journal of Student Research, Vol 1 No 2, pp 75 (2012)

Abstract

Catherine Earnshaw’s famous statement, “I am Heathcliff” in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, has often been thought to signify the depth of the passionate love between Catherine and Heathcliff (73). It seems, however, that Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship may have more to do with symbolic possession and control than romance. In their famous feminist work, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar make a well-known assertion about the relationship between the characters of Jane Eyre, a novel written by Emily Brontë’s sister, Charlotte Brontë. They suggest that Bertha, the deranged and malicious wife of Edward Rochester, can be considered as a symbol of the rebellious spirit that rages inside the seemingly quiet female protagonist, Jane Eyre, against the constraints of her class and gender role in society (356-367). I suggest that, similarly, Heathcliff is not a “devil” that possesses Catherine and inflicts misery on her, but that like Jane Eyre’s Bertha, Heathcliff is a symbolic manifestation of the raging spirit trapped inside Wuthering Height’s (sic)socially confined protagonist—Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine’s statement, “I am Heathcliff” could be said to signify, not a passionate relationship of love, but rather a literal truth. After Edgar forces Heathcliff to leave Thrushcross Grange, Catherine confines herself to her room for 3 days without food or water, bringing on an illness which eventually becomes fatal. Catherine is unable to unite herself with her true nature in life, and she therefore seeks unity with him in death. Though she cannot be united with Heathcliff while she remains the civilized wife of Edgar Linton, she can achieve unity with him in death by imprisoning and then eradicating the symbol of her civilized identity—her physical body.

Insights Into Love in Charlotte Brontë's Fiction
Kaisa Rosalind
Rock Pebbles / July - Dec.’11 /P. 95

Writing in an age under Victorian restrictions and taboos of sex, Charlotte Brontë has defied her age and has expressed what her heart dictated.
She was often termed a revolutionary in her portrayal of human feelings.  The passionate intensity,  the romance, the undisguised sincerity and the fresh, powerful, often poetic style of Jane Eyre, were the qualities which own the heart fo her readers.  Hugh Walker rightly termed it as “the wedding of romance to realism”, a romance which was of “elemental human nature” (Walker 714). G.K.Chesterton remarked, “she reached the highest romance through the lowest realism” (Chesterton 71).