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 Their father was a withdrawn man who dined alone in his own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."
Brontë: Table of Contents
March 9, 2011
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