Sublimity and the Brontë Men

 A new Brontë-related thesis:

Sublimity & The Brontë Men: An Exploration of Heathcliff & Rochester Through Edmund Burke's Sublime

by Madeline Weiland

Thesis Director: Rebecca Soares

Arizona State University, 2024

The Brontë sisters, inadvertently, created two characters overwhelmingly offensive to the modern reader. However, I think it is time that we as readers diverge from the well-trodden path of literary analyses concerning Rochester and Heathcliff. By limiting these two characters to only their most surface-level qualities, and passing moral judgments on them as if they are somehow failing some expectation of moral behavior, these two characters are denigrated to the titles of “bad characters” or “bad men.” I propose a reading of Heathcliff and Rochester that transcends the confining rhetoric of good vs. bad and looks to Heathcliff and Rochester as agents of the sublime as defined by Edmund Burke in his foundational text A Philosophical Inquiry Into The Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful.