The latest issue of
Victorians. A Journal of Culture and Literature #134 (Winter 2018) is entirely devoted to Emily Brontë:
Greetings from the Editor
Deborah A. Logan
Introduction: Emily Brontë’s Bicentenary
Deborah Denenholz Morse and Amber Pouliot
An introduction to the collection of articles on Emily Brontë's work in celebration of the Bicentenary of her birth.
“Gold put to use of paving stones”: Internal Colonialism in Wuthering Heights
Margaret Markwick
Wuthering Heights is a northern writer's rebuttal of the colonizing tendencies of the south-east's metropolitan elite. Casting Wuthering Heights as the center and Thrushcross Grange the periphery, Emily Brontë presents the North as solid and without artifice, while the South represents imported and suspect values. Lockwood personifies all that is malign in the colonizing nexus, a subject Brontë had explored in her Gondal poems. But she was also a realist: Wuthering Heights both elegizes a way of life that is passing and unites the best of both worlds. Themselves the products of North / South parents, Hareton and Cathy, in their impending union, herald a new and stronger future, where Yorkshire values are invigorated by the influx of southern capital.
Wuthering Heights Must Be Defended!: Heathcliff and Necropolitics in the Yorkshire Moors
Eamon DeLacy
This article draws on the "necropolitics" of Achille Mbembe to reconsider the figurec of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. It explores the resonances between Heathcliff's depiction in the novel and the broader 19th century vision of the colony and the colonized subject while arguing for a centering of the corporeal in the analysis of Brontë's prose. Utilizing the concepts of bare life and homo sacer developed by Giorgio Agamben, the piece argues that Heathcliff must be read as a somatic inscription of the biopolitical regimes of power of the British Empire.
Emily Brontë’s Ars Moriendi
Carol Margaret Davison
Wuthering Heights, a generically hybrid, metaphysical work combining ghost story, Gothic, regional novel, ars moriendi, and spiritual autobiography, is a morally complex, post-Enlightenment meditation on loss and a Victorian social critique. Focusing on ghosts, corpses, four semiotically-loaded deathbed scenes, and Nelly Dean's narrative, this essay examines how Brontë's Christian and artistic agendas work in tandem to advance a unique engagement with the Death Question. This includes crafting a spiritual biography for Heathcliff who is dramatically transformed as a result of his experiences with death and grief; ambivalently employing ghosts and corpses to both sensational and Protestant ends; and manipulating the traditional Methodist deathbed formula for the purposes of rendering more realistic character portraits, and portraying the world beyond the grave as a realm of divine mystery.
Wuthering Heights and the Work of Loving One Dead
Sarah Ross
In 1847, two texts dealt with the subject Søren Kierkegaard terms "The Work of Love in Remembering One Dead." This essay reads Emily Brontë's sole novel, Wuthering Heights, through and with Kierkegaard's somewhat radical Christian text about the labor of remaining constant to the dead beloved. Whereas post-Freudian notions of melancholia and grief regard prolonged mourning as pathological, Brontë's Heathcliff performs the fitting work Kierkegaard describes. Combining mental creativity with Christian ontology, Brontë animates the test of love's selflessness as it struggles to live in a perpetual present, amidst interested parties and the continual passage of time.
Absent Emily: Ecstasy, Transgression, and Negative Space in Three Emily Brontë Poems
Lydia Brown
This paper examines three Emily Brontë poems—"Stars," "No coward soul," and "I am happiest when most away"—to argue that, formally and theoretically, Brontë's purposeful dissolution of poetic identity arrives at ecstasy, a paradoxical source of feminine power and ubiquity. The interpretation situates "ubiquity in absence" among writings by Anne Carson, Dutch mystic Hadewijhch II, and Jack Halberstam's queer theory to assert that sacred space, for Brontë, is interior, multiplicitous, dynamically transformable, and feminine. Furthermore, God, for Brontë, is an interior capacity for self-creation or self-immolation rather than an external force of morality. These re-envisionings of Brontëan poetics allow for increasingly complex understandings of the fluid gender and power dynamics within Brontëan identity.
Emily Brontë and Will
John Maynard
The essay explores certain poems by Emily Brontë, treating them rather as a canon within her poetry, wherein she asserts the power of will over external circumstance and offers a tentative conception of individual will that precedes and succeeds the universe itself. This discussion asserts that these are exceptional poems deserving greater recognition than they have had thus far. Will is especially associated in these poems with the power of imagination. Language is seen, as in Nietzsche, as a power to shape and control reality.
“A poet, a solitary”: Emily Brontë—Queerness, Quietness, and Solitude
Claire O’Callaghan
Emily Brontë is often remembered for her extreme reserve and was clearly an atypical woman for her time. A figure who struggled within the conventional social fabric, rarely does empathy find a place in writings about her. This paper revisits some of the popular and dominant conceptions of Emily's reserve and seeks to find a more productive—even compassionate—way of understanding her preference for solitude. Emily's writings, especially her poems, provide such an opportunity to do so. While recognizing the negative and undoubtedly painful expressions of emotion in Emily's oeuvre, the analysis argues that more positive insights into Emily's desire for solitude can equally be found in her writing. Accordingly, drawing on queer theoretical sources, the paper posits a revised reading of this "difficult" Brontë that seeks to open alternative possibilities for understanding Emily's introverted nature.
The Last Bluebell: Anthropocenic Mourning in the Brontës’ Flower Imagery
Shawna Ross
Bluebells flourish in the Brontës' poetry and novels, including Charlotte's Shirley, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's Agnes Grey. Emphasizing Emily's novel and poems, this article explores how bluebells function serially both as reminders of the cyclical rebirth of spring and as inspiration for mourning. Used to negotiate mortality and homesickness, bluebells represent a temporality of loss that chafes against the rhythms of seasonality. To explore this temporality, Anna Tsing's work on the matsutake mushroom and Alexis Shotwell's on ecological purity discourses are discussed to reveal how Emily Brontë's bluebells offer synecdoches of human and ecosystemic loss and rebirth. Further, Charlotte's editing of Emily's works reveal how she purifies them into a conventional pastoral, unwittingly recapitulating both the loss of her sisters and the loss of moorland biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Ultimately, these synecdoches allow the texts to acknowledge loss, but the digressive temporal and spatial repetitions of mourning they engender simultaneously redirect readers' attention to rebirth, memory, and stewardship.
The Devastating Impact of Lord Wharton’s Bible Charity in Wuthering Heights
Lydia Craig
Since 1695, the Lord Wharton Bible Charity has bestowed distinctive Bibles and two religious books to Yorkshire children able to recite certain Psalms and the catechism. Evidence for the Brontë' siblings' familiarity with the charity's project includes their respective literary criticism of the misuse of rote Scriptural memorization and quoting and the presence of two Wharton Bibles owned by the Brontës in the Brontë Parsonage Museum Library. Descriptions of the charity's project appear in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), representing the catalyst for Catherine and Heathcliff's growing alienation and resistance to Christianity.
Restored by God, Restored as God: An Exploration of the Genesis Myth in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre
Clara Poteet
This essay argues that Emily and Charlotte Brontë remapped the Genesis creation myth onto Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, casting Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester and Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff as two very different Adam and Eves, who restore themselves to the Garden. Catherine and Heathcliff reject the Christian God and replace Him with a triune god of their own making, consisting of themselves and the moors. Alternatively, Jane and Rochester's initial love, idolization, separation, and restoration under God is explored in direct relationship to Genesis. Despite their shared Anglican upbringing, Emily and Charlotte's personal differences in relating to an internal or external God intrinsically affected how their Creations were restored.
Women and Landscape in Wuthering Heights
Amy R. Possidente
While many critics discuss Catherine as being representative of nature and her daughter Cathy in terms of culture, this paper shows that Brontë stages much of young Cathy's coming of age outdoors in nature. The scenes of Cathy's development reveal a constant tension between the domestic and safe parks of Thrushcross Grange and the wild, sexualized moorland. Ultimately, it is Cathy's ability to unite nature and culture or the domestic and wild in a way her mother could not that allows for the daughter's more traditional happy ending.
Preternatural to Paranormal: Wuthering Heights in the Twilight Universe
Judith Wilt
Stephenie Meyer's blockbuster paranormal quartet of Twilight novels both echoes and queries the legacy of Wuthering Heights, its lovers reading / debating the thrust of Brontë's novel while they too struggle with the gift / burden of soul, of change, of mortality. Concentrating on the female quest for a heroic self-actualization in these two stories, this essay looks at the trope of reading itself, and consider the authors' similar deployments of the romantic triangle, as the self / soul seeks housing, or resists it, in the concepts of tribe, clan, and family.
The Neo-Victorian Presence(s) of Emily Brontë
Sarah E. Maier
Since the arrival of "Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell" on the literary scene in 1847, the intense desire to unmask them—even after they were revealed as Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë—has led to much guesswork and fictionalizing about their lives and their works. This investigation will consider how the re-visioning of Emily Brontë's personal history in recent neo-Victorian biofictions of her character(s) allows for a reconsideration of the intensity of her literary life and of her personal life as an unconventional young woman.
For the Use of Such Ghosts as Choose to Inhabit It
Alexandra Lewis
A short story using characters from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
Book Reviews by Amber Pouliot
Review of Helen MacEwan, Through Belgian Eyes: Charlotte Brontë’s Troubled Brussels Legacy (Eastbourne: Sussex University Press, 2018), 258 pages, ISBN 978-1-84519-910-4
Christine Alexander and Sara L. Pearson, Celebrating Charlotte Brontë: Transforming Life into Literature in Jane Eyre (The Brontë Society, 2016), 204 pages, ISBN 978-0-9505829-0-0
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