Friday, November 22, 2013
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Painting the Bronte Sisters
Charlotte and Emily, based on French photo found recently.
Charlotte
Emily
Sunday, November 10, 2013
THOUGHTS……..
HEATHER, I've seen it bloom. Pick it. You can't keep it. The blossoms fall. Transplant it and it dies. Leave it to its windswept peat-bog and it flourishes. HEATHCLIFF- moorland native.
Still yet, the lark, in moorland skies
Skims the heather and lonely, cries
To itself. The song it sings
Of love and loss and sundry things
I feel that Emily Bronte should have been buried in the earth where heather blows in the wind and where the clouds race across the sky on the moors. Under the church floor, weighed down by cement, is not , in my mind, a proper place for such an earth loving spirit as Emily.
The Hill.....
There was a hill behind our house, not to wide and not too tall. A foot-path ran round the hill, diverging leftward to a tiny fir grove. Here in this fragrant green bower I idled away many summer days. The woodsy shelter gentled the ocean breeze and the sun, playing hide'n'seek with white fluffy clouds, warmed my face and arms.The fat headed grasses glowed as they whispered and bowed. Birds called out to each other...keep away. Berries blushed blue in the mosses while I watched. I was never lonely . In that sweet solitude I dreamed dreams.
The top of the hill was for loneliness. The top of the hill , in the full force of the biting ocean winds, was where I took heartbreak and agony. With my arms wrapped tightly round the fat warm body of my old dog, with my fingers clenched in and my face buried in his hair, I cried in unutterable pain; the pain that strangles the voice and stabs the throat. Under that grey scudding sky, with great fog banks mounting the bay and with the lament of the fog horn sounding eternal sorrow, I mourned to my dog. No one heard. No one came. I cried until I saw it was no use. I swallowed the sword and walked on.
HEATHER, I've seen it bloom. Pick it. You can't keep it. The blossoms fall. Transplant it and it dies. Leave it to its windswept peat-bog and it flourishes. HEATHCLIFF- moorland native.
Still yet, the lark, in moorland skies
Skims the heather and lonely, cries
To itself. The song it sings
Of love and loss and sundry things
I feel that Emily Bronte should have been buried in the earth where heather blows in the wind and where the clouds race across the sky on the moors. Under the church floor, weighed down by cement, is not , in my mind, a proper place for such an earth loving spirit as Emily.
The Hill.....
There was a hill behind our house, not to wide and not too tall. A foot-path ran round the hill, diverging leftward to a tiny fir grove. Here in this fragrant green bower I idled away many summer days. The woodsy shelter gentled the ocean breeze and the sun, playing hide'n'seek with white fluffy clouds, warmed my face and arms.The fat headed grasses glowed as they whispered and bowed. Birds called out to each other...keep away. Berries blushed blue in the mosses while I watched. I was never lonely . In that sweet solitude I dreamed dreams.
The top of the hill was for loneliness. The top of the hill , in the full force of the biting ocean winds, was where I took heartbreak and agony. With my arms wrapped tightly round the fat warm body of my old dog, with my fingers clenched in and my face buried in his hair, I cried in unutterable pain; the pain that strangles the voice and stabs the throat. Under that grey scudding sky, with great fog banks mounting the bay and with the lament of the fog horn sounding eternal sorrow, I mourned to my dog. No one heard. No one came. I cried until I saw it was no use. I swallowed the sword and walked on.
The Double Soul of Emily Bronte
I lov'd her, and destroy'd her!" Byron
Wuthering Heights is no simple love story. It is the anguished expression of the fractured double soul of Emily Bronte, the double soul of humanity and of the tragedy of life; the splitting of that soul by existence in the world; a world of strife and of competition. Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of double design; an expression of loss and desire; the desire to be whole, to be reunited with the original self that is always fractured by birth into the world. Wuthering Heights haunts its readers because it asks unanswerable questions; Who am I? Where do I belong? Where am I going? Whom do I love? How can I hold my love? What is now, the past, the future? Where is she? Where is he? How can I get in? How can I get out?
The soul of Wuthering Heights is universal and it yearns, it suffers, it seeks, it withholds mysteries, it is orphaned and crying. Emily herself was orphaned, her mother dead and her father, a representative of the Christian religion which Emily rejected, a religion that preached and oppressed, was aloof, leaving the orphaned children to themselves. Emily was orphaned again and again, by the death of her sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, the little mothers, and by the death of her Aunt and brother, Branwell. She clung to her Mother Earth, to the moors, the sky, the winds, the rocks, the heather, her animals, her kitchen, her home, to the path overgrown with weeds; and when torn from this great mother, she suffered, grieved and almost died.
In her great novel, orphans abound. Cathy is motherless and fatherless, being rejected by her father in life and deserted by her mother and father in death. Heathcliff is parent-less, almost origin-less and his adoptive father soon dies, leaving both Cathy and himself at the mercy of the vengeful, Hindley and to the persecution of the old hypocrite, Joseph.
Hindley, another suffering orphan has no mother and is rejected by his father in favour of Heathcliff, the stranger.
Hareton is orphaned at birth, his mother dead and his grieving father lost in drink. The younger Cathy enters the world as her mother leaves it. Young Cathy has a father but he is powerless to protect her from Heathcliff's revenge. As Edgar dies, Heathcliff, the avenger, walks his new daughter home. He is her jailer.
Young Linton, son of the dead Isabella, is sneered at by his father, Heathcliff. Linton is the most miserable of orphans, having no strength of his own.
Yet the need for love is great, the need for the boundless mother love. Cathy and Heathcliff protect their great love for each other, as two parts of a whole, as one being in two visible parts by hanging up their pinafores and making a sanctuary in the arch of the dresser, by sleeping together in the same bed, by scampering on the moors and by general rebellion.
From all of these safe places they are sundered and split apart. Joseph tears down their privacy pinafore screen, he drives them out from the bed and Cathy is laid alone for the first time, as she will be for the second time in death, and Hindley bars Heathcliff out from the home, debasing him in body and spirit. The Lintons accept Cathy and reject Heathcliff. Cathy realizes she is " Heathcliff" at the same moment that she betrays both herself and him by marrying, Edgar.
Hareton seeks a father in his abuser, Heathcliff, and loves him, as Heathcliff does him, though he won't let himself show it. Young Cathy loves her father, young Linton and Hareton, all in spite of strife and anger. The need for love and to find the right love drives the story.
But to err is to die. Emily Bronte, if she had any religion at all, paints a religion of the self in Wuthering Heights. Like The Byronic Hero, she must be true to herself and be united as a whole soul with her mirror image, Heathcliff. Cathy betrays the code, marries Edgar, suffers and dies but does not find rest. She is cloven in two. Heathcliff is forever faithful and cloven in two by Cathy's rejection and death. Yet he is always true to Cathy and to himself. He regrets nothing he has done, as it is true to his code. He must be with and for Cathy. He seeks, suffers and dies. He believes he will attain his goal. He will dissolve with his love; his Cathy.
Emily Bronte leaves us with the mystery. Do they walk? Do they sleep in the quiet earth? Where are they? Not here? Not there? Not perished?
Wuthering Heights is Emily Bronte's great agony of joy. It cries, I love you. Don't leave me. My heart's bliss is here, on this earth, on this moor, under this sky, with you who are more myself than I am. Wuthering Heights pulses with the passion for life, for food, for work, for family, for home, for childhood; an eternal childhood, and for an all encompassing and unending Mother-love.
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights has a double structure throughout, echoing the double opposites of the soul.
It has two narrators, Lockwood, the stranger who blunders into the mysteries and Nellie, the intimate, who relates the everyday details.
It has two families, the Earnshaws, earthy and wild working people and the Lintons, upper class and refined gentry.
It has two houses, the Heights, solid and of stone, windswept and embattled by the elements, and the Grange, in the valley, in a walled in and pleasant park.
It has two Cathy's, the first drawn away from home to destruction and the second, going toward home and fulfillment.
It has two rivals, Heathcliff, strong, passionate and true, cruel and defiant, and Edgar, civilized, gentle, weak and moderate.
It has two grieving widowers, Hindley lost in the mire of weakness and drink, and Heathcliff, grieving for his true love, Cathy, driven by the strength of his desire.
It has two degraded sons, Heathcliff, the foster son of Mr Earnshaw and Hareton, the foster son of Heathcliff.
It has two mis-marriages; Cathy and Edgar and Heathcliff and Isabella.
It has two mismatched sons . Heathcliff's son Linton is pure Linton, showing nothing of Heathcliff about him. Hareton, a fine fellow, is hardly a reflection of the cowardly Hindley. Hareton adopts Heathcliff as his true father.
In fact, it is as though Heathcliff has two sons, his own, Linton, who he says is not worth a farthing, and his foster son, Hareton, who is worthy of his love.
In the previous generation, Mr Earnshaw had the same; Hindley whom he said was nothing and would amount to nothing, and Heathcliff, the foster son, whom he valued and loved.
Throughout both generations there is a double dose of rejection, adoption, love and hate.
Wuthering Heights has two religions; the self righteous and punishing Christian Creed as hurled about by Joseph and the Earthy Creed of the integrated self, as sought and suffered by Cathy and Heathcliff.
It has two places; the inside and the outside; the inside of the family and the outside of the family; the inside of society and the outside of the society; the inside of the house and the outside on the moors; the inside of religion and the outside of personal code; the here of the earth and the there of the after-place; the double places of heaven and hell, depending on the viewer; the inside of love and the outside of hate; the inside of being together and the outside of being apart.
It has two generations, the first destroyed in woe and the second raised up in joy.
It has two endings; Heathcliff and Cathy walk the moors in death or sleep in the quiet earth. Hareton and the second Cathy return to the Grange to renew the Earnshaw family.
Two phrases could illustrate the whole novel. " Where is She?" and " Heathcliff, Come back." They express the double passion, the double loss, the double longing, the double search, the Double Soul of Emily Bronte.
Souls born into the world have a dilemma; they have to earn a living. In Emily's time, marriage was a way to do that, a marriage to a stable man with money. She well knew the worries of the daughters of the house who must earn their way in the world by doing what their very souls hate. Emily, Charlotte and Ann suffered away from home, in company they found incompatible and even, hateful, doing work for which their souls were unsuited. Branwell fared even worse in his attempts to earn his way in a world too harsh for his soul.
In Wuthering Heights, Cathy looks for a solution for her problem. How will she live, how will she make do? She decides to marry Edgar but would not have thought of it had Hindley not degraded Heathcliff so. The naive Cathy thinks she can take a husband, use his money to raise up her true love, and keep Heathcliff as a soul-mate in the bargain. Little does she know of marriage and of men. Just as she realizes she is Heathcliff's soul-mate and that she is wrong to marry Edgar, she does so, compelled by the temporal world and its pressing needs.
Thus, the split and the tragedy. Thus the universal condition of the human creature who must be eternally himself to be happy, yet must compromise to make way in the here and now; in an indifferent world. Survival exacts a split for all of us between what we are and what we have to do to survive.
Heathcliff says nothing could have separated himself and Cathy, nothing from either God or Satan, nothing from either Heaven or Earth, nothing but free will: Cathy's free will. Heathcliff would have born with poverty and banishment to stay true to their love, their code of oneness, but Heathcliff was not a woman. A man could live where a woman could not. Cathy thinks of a roof over her head and respectability, all the while keeping her heart for her lover. The world had other ideas.
I might say that Wuthering Heights is not a love story at all, although needy pairs of lovers appear on every page: Hindley has only one idol, his wife Frances; the younger Cathy clings only to Linton who becomes her all and all after her father dies; Isabella runs to Heathcliff, tossing away family in the process; Heathcliff and Cathy become each other; Hareton and the younger Cathy merge, reuniting the family.
I might say Wuthering Heights is a story of joy and anguish - the joy of the united soul and the anguish of the split soul. Wuthering Heights is the story of Emily Bronte's very soul. It is a book written by a woman and about a woman. Cathy is the hero of Wuthering Heights. It is all about her. It is about her united self, born and bred on the moors, "a wicked , wild slip" of a girl who lords it over her family and her home. She is nourished by the sky, the wind, the rocks, the heather, the solitude, the freedom. It is about that same girl grown up and trapped by decisions forced on her by the realities of life. She must marry. She must marry money to be secure and to be respectable. She must give up her name, her home, herself and become a wife; a nobody, a face in the mirror, changed.
When Cathy says " I am Heathcliff" she could also have said, " Heathcliff is me". Here are personified, the two parts of Emily Bronte's soul. Cathy is the wicked wild joy of wholeness and Heathcliff, the faithful agony of the fractured spirit. Emily Bronte was both of these. At home, with her household duties, her rambles on the moors, her pets, her writing, her solitude and privacy, she was whole. Away from home, that broken agony of longing erupted with so much force as to threaten her life.
Like Cathy, Emily protested. She refused to eat and refused to talk to anyone away from home. Cathy rampages, has tantrums, gets sick and even dies to get her wish - to return to her original whole self. And that self is rooted in rock, in earth, in the place of her birth.
Heathcliff sees evidence of Cathy's existence everywhere, evidence that she existed and that he has lost her. Cathy infuses everything, even the flagstones on the floor tell of her existence. Heathcliff struggles to find her in a long and terrible fight. Here stands Emily Bronte revealed. Here stands her vision of life on this earth; a life that has full knowledge of the united source and a life that suffers the full agony of the outcast soul struggling to regain oneness.
Wuthering Heights is a story of a lover - of a woman. No man could love like that; with his entire body and his very soul. Wuthering Heights reflects in mirrors after mirrors, the Double Soul of Emily Bronte- celebrated in solitudes and exclusiveness - in the soul's chosen place and with the soul's chosen person.
( Rosi ) Postscript.." Nelly' I am Heathcliff!" Emily says she is heath and cliff...she is the earth of her home. To take her away from herself is death......for Emily in life....for Cathy in the book. Heathcliff.....the heath and cliff of the Haworth moors.
Note: I am reading "Sunset Song" by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. The mother says to her daughter, " Oh, Chris, my lass, there are better things than your books or studies or loving or bedding, there's the countryside your own, you its, in the days when you're neither bairn nor woman".
Emily, the moors, her own and she, theirs.........the heath and the cliff.......the eternal rocks, the bones of life itself.
I lov'd her, and destroy'd her!" Byron
Wuthering Heights is no simple love story. It is the anguished expression of the fractured double soul of Emily Bronte, the double soul of humanity and of the tragedy of life; the splitting of that soul by existence in the world; a world of strife and of competition. Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of double design; an expression of loss and desire; the desire to be whole, to be reunited with the original self that is always fractured by birth into the world. Wuthering Heights haunts its readers because it asks unanswerable questions; Who am I? Where do I belong? Where am I going? Whom do I love? How can I hold my love? What is now, the past, the future? Where is she? Where is he? How can I get in? How can I get out?
The soul of Wuthering Heights is universal and it yearns, it suffers, it seeks, it withholds mysteries, it is orphaned and crying. Emily herself was orphaned, her mother dead and her father, a representative of the Christian religion which Emily rejected, a religion that preached and oppressed, was aloof, leaving the orphaned children to themselves. Emily was orphaned again and again, by the death of her sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, the little mothers, and by the death of her Aunt and brother, Branwell. She clung to her Mother Earth, to the moors, the sky, the winds, the rocks, the heather, her animals, her kitchen, her home, to the path overgrown with weeds; and when torn from this great mother, she suffered, grieved and almost died.
In her great novel, orphans abound. Cathy is motherless and fatherless, being rejected by her father in life and deserted by her mother and father in death. Heathcliff is parent-less, almost origin-less and his adoptive father soon dies, leaving both Cathy and himself at the mercy of the vengeful, Hindley and to the persecution of the old hypocrite, Joseph.
Hindley, another suffering orphan has no mother and is rejected by his father in favour of Heathcliff, the stranger.
Hareton is orphaned at birth, his mother dead and his grieving father lost in drink. The younger Cathy enters the world as her mother leaves it. Young Cathy has a father but he is powerless to protect her from Heathcliff's revenge. As Edgar dies, Heathcliff, the avenger, walks his new daughter home. He is her jailer.
Young Linton, son of the dead Isabella, is sneered at by his father, Heathcliff. Linton is the most miserable of orphans, having no strength of his own.
Yet the need for love is great, the need for the boundless mother love. Cathy and Heathcliff protect their great love for each other, as two parts of a whole, as one being in two visible parts by hanging up their pinafores and making a sanctuary in the arch of the dresser, by sleeping together in the same bed, by scampering on the moors and by general rebellion.
From all of these safe places they are sundered and split apart. Joseph tears down their privacy pinafore screen, he drives them out from the bed and Cathy is laid alone for the first time, as she will be for the second time in death, and Hindley bars Heathcliff out from the home, debasing him in body and spirit. The Lintons accept Cathy and reject Heathcliff. Cathy realizes she is " Heathcliff" at the same moment that she betrays both herself and him by marrying, Edgar.
Hareton seeks a father in his abuser, Heathcliff, and loves him, as Heathcliff does him, though he won't let himself show it. Young Cathy loves her father, young Linton and Hareton, all in spite of strife and anger. The need for love and to find the right love drives the story.
But to err is to die. Emily Bronte, if she had any religion at all, paints a religion of the self in Wuthering Heights. Like The Byronic Hero, she must be true to herself and be united as a whole soul with her mirror image, Heathcliff. Cathy betrays the code, marries Edgar, suffers and dies but does not find rest. She is cloven in two. Heathcliff is forever faithful and cloven in two by Cathy's rejection and death. Yet he is always true to Cathy and to himself. He regrets nothing he has done, as it is true to his code. He must be with and for Cathy. He seeks, suffers and dies. He believes he will attain his goal. He will dissolve with his love; his Cathy.
Emily Bronte leaves us with the mystery. Do they walk? Do they sleep in the quiet earth? Where are they? Not here? Not there? Not perished?
Wuthering Heights is Emily Bronte's great agony of joy. It cries, I love you. Don't leave me. My heart's bliss is here, on this earth, on this moor, under this sky, with you who are more myself than I am. Wuthering Heights pulses with the passion for life, for food, for work, for family, for home, for childhood; an eternal childhood, and for an all encompassing and unending Mother-love.
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights has a double structure throughout, echoing the double opposites of the soul.
It has two narrators, Lockwood, the stranger who blunders into the mysteries and Nellie, the intimate, who relates the everyday details.
It has two families, the Earnshaws, earthy and wild working people and the Lintons, upper class and refined gentry.
It has two houses, the Heights, solid and of stone, windswept and embattled by the elements, and the Grange, in the valley, in a walled in and pleasant park.
It has two Cathy's, the first drawn away from home to destruction and the second, going toward home and fulfillment.
It has two rivals, Heathcliff, strong, passionate and true, cruel and defiant, and Edgar, civilized, gentle, weak and moderate.
It has two grieving widowers, Hindley lost in the mire of weakness and drink, and Heathcliff, grieving for his true love, Cathy, driven by the strength of his desire.
It has two degraded sons, Heathcliff, the foster son of Mr Earnshaw and Hareton, the foster son of Heathcliff.
It has two mis-marriages; Cathy and Edgar and Heathcliff and Isabella.
It has two mismatched sons . Heathcliff's son Linton is pure Linton, showing nothing of Heathcliff about him. Hareton, a fine fellow, is hardly a reflection of the cowardly Hindley. Hareton adopts Heathcliff as his true father.
In fact, it is as though Heathcliff has two sons, his own, Linton, who he says is not worth a farthing, and his foster son, Hareton, who is worthy of his love.
In the previous generation, Mr Earnshaw had the same; Hindley whom he said was nothing and would amount to nothing, and Heathcliff, the foster son, whom he valued and loved.
Throughout both generations there is a double dose of rejection, adoption, love and hate.
Wuthering Heights has two religions; the self righteous and punishing Christian Creed as hurled about by Joseph and the Earthy Creed of the integrated self, as sought and suffered by Cathy and Heathcliff.
It has two places; the inside and the outside; the inside of the family and the outside of the family; the inside of society and the outside of the society; the inside of the house and the outside on the moors; the inside of religion and the outside of personal code; the here of the earth and the there of the after-place; the double places of heaven and hell, depending on the viewer; the inside of love and the outside of hate; the inside of being together and the outside of being apart.
It has two generations, the first destroyed in woe and the second raised up in joy.
It has two endings; Heathcliff and Cathy walk the moors in death or sleep in the quiet earth. Hareton and the second Cathy return to the Grange to renew the Earnshaw family.
Two phrases could illustrate the whole novel. " Where is She?" and " Heathcliff, Come back." They express the double passion, the double loss, the double longing, the double search, the Double Soul of Emily Bronte.
Souls born into the world have a dilemma; they have to earn a living. In Emily's time, marriage was a way to do that, a marriage to a stable man with money. She well knew the worries of the daughters of the house who must earn their way in the world by doing what their very souls hate. Emily, Charlotte and Ann suffered away from home, in company they found incompatible and even, hateful, doing work for which their souls were unsuited. Branwell fared even worse in his attempts to earn his way in a world too harsh for his soul.
In Wuthering Heights, Cathy looks for a solution for her problem. How will she live, how will she make do? She decides to marry Edgar but would not have thought of it had Hindley not degraded Heathcliff so. The naive Cathy thinks she can take a husband, use his money to raise up her true love, and keep Heathcliff as a soul-mate in the bargain. Little does she know of marriage and of men. Just as she realizes she is Heathcliff's soul-mate and that she is wrong to marry Edgar, she does so, compelled by the temporal world and its pressing needs.
Thus, the split and the tragedy. Thus the universal condition of the human creature who must be eternally himself to be happy, yet must compromise to make way in the here and now; in an indifferent world. Survival exacts a split for all of us between what we are and what we have to do to survive.
Heathcliff says nothing could have separated himself and Cathy, nothing from either God or Satan, nothing from either Heaven or Earth, nothing but free will: Cathy's free will. Heathcliff would have born with poverty and banishment to stay true to their love, their code of oneness, but Heathcliff was not a woman. A man could live where a woman could not. Cathy thinks of a roof over her head and respectability, all the while keeping her heart for her lover. The world had other ideas.
I might say that Wuthering Heights is not a love story at all, although needy pairs of lovers appear on every page: Hindley has only one idol, his wife Frances; the younger Cathy clings only to Linton who becomes her all and all after her father dies; Isabella runs to Heathcliff, tossing away family in the process; Heathcliff and Cathy become each other; Hareton and the younger Cathy merge, reuniting the family.
I might say Wuthering Heights is a story of joy and anguish - the joy of the united soul and the anguish of the split soul. Wuthering Heights is the story of Emily Bronte's very soul. It is a book written by a woman and about a woman. Cathy is the hero of Wuthering Heights. It is all about her. It is about her united self, born and bred on the moors, "a wicked , wild slip" of a girl who lords it over her family and her home. She is nourished by the sky, the wind, the rocks, the heather, the solitude, the freedom. It is about that same girl grown up and trapped by decisions forced on her by the realities of life. She must marry. She must marry money to be secure and to be respectable. She must give up her name, her home, herself and become a wife; a nobody, a face in the mirror, changed.
When Cathy says " I am Heathcliff" she could also have said, " Heathcliff is me". Here are personified, the two parts of Emily Bronte's soul. Cathy is the wicked wild joy of wholeness and Heathcliff, the faithful agony of the fractured spirit. Emily Bronte was both of these. At home, with her household duties, her rambles on the moors, her pets, her writing, her solitude and privacy, she was whole. Away from home, that broken agony of longing erupted with so much force as to threaten her life.
Like Cathy, Emily protested. She refused to eat and refused to talk to anyone away from home. Cathy rampages, has tantrums, gets sick and even dies to get her wish - to return to her original whole self. And that self is rooted in rock, in earth, in the place of her birth.
Heathcliff sees evidence of Cathy's existence everywhere, evidence that she existed and that he has lost her. Cathy infuses everything, even the flagstones on the floor tell of her existence. Heathcliff struggles to find her in a long and terrible fight. Here stands Emily Bronte revealed. Here stands her vision of life on this earth; a life that has full knowledge of the united source and a life that suffers the full agony of the outcast soul struggling to regain oneness.
Wuthering Heights is a story of a lover - of a woman. No man could love like that; with his entire body and his very soul. Wuthering Heights reflects in mirrors after mirrors, the Double Soul of Emily Bronte- celebrated in solitudes and exclusiveness - in the soul's chosen place and with the soul's chosen person.
( Rosi ) Postscript.." Nelly' I am Heathcliff!" Emily says she is heath and cliff...she is the earth of her home. To take her away from herself is death......for Emily in life....for Cathy in the book. Heathcliff.....the heath and cliff of the Haworth moors.
Note: I am reading "Sunset Song" by Lewis Grassic Gibbon. The mother says to her daughter, " Oh, Chris, my lass, there are better things than your books or studies or loving or bedding, there's the countryside your own, you its, in the days when you're neither bairn nor woman".
Emily, the moors, her own and she, theirs.........the heath and the cliff.......the eternal rocks, the bones of life itself.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Emily's Beliefs
Emily's beliefs, I feel. are expressed in Wuthering Heights... fragment from my essay "The Double Soul of Emily "...."I lov'd her, and destroy'd her!" Byron
Wuthering Heights is no simple love story. It is the anguished expression of the fractured double soul of Emily Bronte, the double soul of humanity and of the tragedy of life; the splitting of that soul by existence in the world; a world of strife and of competition. Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of double design; an expression of loss and desire; the desire to be whole, to be reunited with the original self that is always fractured by birth into the world. Wuthering Heights haunts its readers because it asks unanswerable questions; Who am I? Where do I belong? Where am I going? Whom do I love? How can I hold my love? What is now, the past, the future? Where is she? Where is he? How can I get in? How can I get out?
another fragment on Emily's beliefs....Emily Bronte, if she had any religion at all, paints a religion of the self in Wuthering Heights. Like The Byronic Hero, she must be true to herself and be united as a whole soul with her mirror image, Heathcliff. Cathy betrays the code, marries Edgar, suffers and dies but does not find rest. She is cloven in two. Heathcliff is forever faithful and cloven in two by Cathy's rejection and death. Yet he is always true to Cathy and to himself. He regrets nothing he has done, as it is true to his code. He must be with and for Cathy. He seeks, suffers and dies. He believes he will attain his goal. He will dissolve with his love; his Cathy.
Emily Bronte leaves us with the mystery. Do they walk? Do they sleep in the quiet earth? Where are they? Not here? Not there? Not perished?
Wuthering Heights is Emily Bronte's great agony of joy. It cries, I love you. Don't leave me. My heart's bliss is here, on this earth, on this moor, under this sky, with you who are more myself than I am. Wuthering Heights pulses with the passion for life, for food, for work, for family, for home, for childhood; an eternal childhood, and for an all encompassing and unending Mother-love.
and.... Wuthering Heights has two religions; the self righteous and punishing Christian Creed as hurled about by Joseph and the Earthy Creed of the integrated self, as sought and suffered by Cathy and Heathcliff....
Two phrases could illustrate the whole novel. " Where is She?" and " Heathcliff, Come back." They express the double passion, the double loss, the double longing, the double search, the Double Soul of Emily Bronte.
Wuthering Heights is no simple love story. It is the anguished expression of the fractured double soul of Emily Bronte, the double soul of humanity and of the tragedy of life; the splitting of that soul by existence in the world; a world of strife and of competition. Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of double design; an expression of loss and desire; the desire to be whole, to be reunited with the original self that is always fractured by birth into the world. Wuthering Heights haunts its readers because it asks unanswerable questions; Who am I? Where do I belong? Where am I going? Whom do I love? How can I hold my love? What is now, the past, the future? Where is she? Where is he? How can I get in? How can I get out?
another fragment on Emily's beliefs....Emily Bronte, if she had any religion at all, paints a religion of the self in Wuthering Heights. Like The Byronic Hero, she must be true to herself and be united as a whole soul with her mirror image, Heathcliff. Cathy betrays the code, marries Edgar, suffers and dies but does not find rest. She is cloven in two. Heathcliff is forever faithful and cloven in two by Cathy's rejection and death. Yet he is always true to Cathy and to himself. He regrets nothing he has done, as it is true to his code. He must be with and for Cathy. He seeks, suffers and dies. He believes he will attain his goal. He will dissolve with his love; his Cathy.
Emily Bronte leaves us with the mystery. Do they walk? Do they sleep in the quiet earth? Where are they? Not here? Not there? Not perished?
Wuthering Heights is Emily Bronte's great agony of joy. It cries, I love you. Don't leave me. My heart's bliss is here, on this earth, on this moor, under this sky, with you who are more myself than I am. Wuthering Heights pulses with the passion for life, for food, for work, for family, for home, for childhood; an eternal childhood, and for an all encompassing and unending Mother-love.
and.... Wuthering Heights has two religions; the self righteous and punishing Christian Creed as hurled about by Joseph and the Earthy Creed of the integrated self, as sought and suffered by Cathy and Heathcliff....
Two phrases could illustrate the whole novel. " Where is She?" and " Heathcliff, Come back." They express the double passion, the double loss, the double longing, the double search, the Double Soul of Emily Bronte.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Let Me In
'Heathcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his hair, and kept him down. --"I wish I could hold you," she continued bitterly, "till we were both death! I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, 'That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I've loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them! Will you say so, Heatcliff?"
--"Don't torture me till I am as mad as yourself," cried he, wrenching his head free, and grinding his teeth."'
(from Wuthering Heights)
"Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes..."- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
"Last night, I was on the threshold of hell. To-day, I am within sight of my heaven. I have my eyes on it: hardly three feet to sever me!" Wuthering Heights
Seeking Emily
"Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. ""He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine..."
"I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of creation if I were entirely contained here?"
- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
" ....may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you — haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe — I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth."
- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
"No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
......
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main…
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main…
Though earth and moon were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee."
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee."
- Emily Bronte
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
The Bronte family originated in beautiful county Down in Northern Ireland, the Bronte Homeland. Their father Patrick Brontë had been a preacher and a teacher at the tiny village of Drumballyroney.
Patrick Brontë was born Patrick Brunty in 1777. He later moved to England and changed his name to Brontë.
Remains of Bronte cottage.
No one knows for sure why. Some suggest that he might have wanted to hide his humble origins while others point out that, being a man of letters, he might have chosen the name because of classical Greek influence, since in Greek mythology Brontes means “thunder” and was the name of one of the cyclops.
Patrick spelled his name with a dieresis over the “e” (Brontë) to stress that two syllables are pronounced (and highlight the second syllable as the one accented as in the Greek?).
The school where Patrick taught still stands and has been restored and functions as a little museum. Next to it the old Church of Ireland church where his family attended and where he later preached. From the church grounds you have a beautiful view over the surrounding green rolling hills of Co Down, though on in winter it can be very cold and windy up there.
Patrick as a young man.
The old church, Haworth.
The Brontë sisters (Anne, Emily and Charlotte, aged about 15, 17 and 19 respectively) painted by Branwell in 1834Emily only wrote the one novel, Wuthering Heights, although she was working on a second when she died. However, no trace of this book remains. We only know she was writing it because her publisher, T C Newby, sent her a letter dated 15 February 1848 which said:
I am much obliged by your kind note and shall have great pleasure in making arrangements for your next novel. I would not hurry its completion, for I think you are quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it, for much depends on your new work. If it be an improvement on your first, you will have established yourself as a first rate novelist, but if it fall short the Critics will be too apt to say that you have expended your talent in your first novel. I shall therefore have pleasure in accepting it upon the understanding that its completion be in your own time.
Description
Emily had an unusual character, extremely unsocial and reserved, with few friends outside her family. She preferred the company of animals to people and rarely travelled, forever yearning for the freedom of Haworth and the moors. She had a will of iron – a well known story about her is that she was bitten by a (possibly) rabid dog which resulted in her walking calmly into the kitchen and cauterising the wound herself with a hot iron.
She had unconventional religious beliefs, rarely attending church services and, unlike the other children, never teaching in the Sunday School.
In appearance, she was lithesome and graceful, the tallest of the Brontë children (her coffin measured five feet seven inches – 1.7 meters) but ate sparingly and would starve herself when unhappy or unable to get her own way. As her literary works suggest, she was highly intelligent, teaching herself German while working in the kitchen (her favourite place outside of the moors) and playing the piano well enough to teach it in Brussels. Her stubbornness lasted to the end where she refused to see a doctor or rest while she was dying of tuberculosis.
In 1871, Ellen Nussey, a lifelong friend of the Brontës, wrote of her first impressions of the fifteen-year-old Emily in Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë:
Charlotte famously said of her sister:
Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Remembrance by Emily Bronte
Cold in the earth - and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave?
Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern leaves cover
Thy noble heart forever, ever more?
Cold in the earth - and fifteen wild Decembers,
From those brown hills, have melted into spring;
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!
Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,
While the world's tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!
No later light has lightened up my heaven,
No second morn has ever shone for me;
All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.
But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.
Then did I check the tears of useless passion -
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.
And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?
Why Did Emily Write Wuthering Heights
EMILY BRONTË: A THEORY
By Sarah Fermi
Keywords: Emily Brontë, Robert Clayton (of Haworth)
Why did Emily Jane Brontë write Wuthering Heights? And how was she able to do it? In
spite of the massive amount of material published about the Brontë sisters over the past
one hundred and fifty years, these two questions still remain unanswered. Yet given the
autobiographical nature of much of the material in the novels of Charlotte and Anne
Brontë, it is almost unthinkable that Emily would not also have used her own experience
in the creation of her great book. How could she write so vividly about love, grief, and
hatred without having known these emotions in her own life?
Many Brontë biographers have puzzled over these questions, and some have even
suggested as a possible answer that Emily had a serious romantic attachment at some
point in her life, but they have been daunted by the scarcity of facts about Emily’s life
and left the question open.1 In his A Life of Emily Brontë Edward Chitham has gone a
step further and proposed a possible relationship with an offspring of the Heaton family
— the child of Elizabeth Heaton and John Bakes. The suggestion that perhaps the object
of Emily’s affections was connected with the Heatons of Ponden, an old local family well
known to the Brontës, whose home, Ponden House, certainly appears to be connected
with Wuthering Heights, seemed to be very promising.
This was the starting point of a quest which brought me to the West Yorkshire
Archives in Bradford in the spring of 1989. One afternoon’s research there with the
Heaton Papers quickly dispelled this hope — the child in question was little Eliza
Matilda Bakes, who died in 1817 aged two, and is buried with her mother in Haworth
churchyard. Nevertheless, the idea of an early love interest in Emily’s life struck me as
worth pursuing. For the next few years I worked on learning more about the important
Haworth families, particularly the Heatons, and also the most significant local family,
the Greenwoods. In parallel with this study, I learned all I could about Emily, and
carefully examined the chronological development of her poetry.
There are quite a few aspects of her life which present interesting questions. Why did Emily change from a charming and outgoing child to a solitary and reserved young woman? Why was she sent away to Roe Head School in 1835 at the relatively advanced age of 17, for what
appears to be no good reason, and when Mr Brontë’s finances were likely to be stretched
by the plan to send Branwell to the Royal Academy Schools? Why did he write a warning
letter to his old friend, Mrs Franks, hinting at possible trouble ahead? What was the
real reason for Emily’s near-fatal illness at Roe Head? Why is there a striking change in
the tone of her poetry between 1836 and 1837? It occurred to me that all these questions
could be answered if one assumed the following theory:
1) When Charlotte goes away to Roe Head School in January 1831, Emily and Anne
begin to create their own private world of Gondal, which they act out on the moors.
2) They enlist the help of a local boy to play with them.
3) This boy is working-class and therefore an unsuitable playmate, and the meetings
are kept a secret from Mr Brontë and Aunt Branwell. A romance develops.
4) The secret is somehow discovered in the summer of 1835, and Emily is sent off to
Roe Head School to break up the relationship between her and the young man. The
collapse of Emily’s health, requiring her return home, is partly due to her despair at
this separation from the young man.
5) In the winter of 1836–37 the young man dies, leaving Emily deeply affected. Her
poetry strongly suggests that she experienced a traumatic event at this time: all the
poems of 1836 (the earliest that exist) are cheerful or thoughtful, or, in one case,
exuberant. There are no poems in January, 1837, and in February she begins, almost
obsessively, to write poetry about death, grief, and nightmare.
Using this rudimentary theory as a beginning, I then examined the Haworth Parish
Records to see if, in fact, there had been a working-class lad who died at the suggested
time. I found one candidate: Robert Clayton. He was the second son of a local weaver,
Nathan Clayton. Robert was born in July 1818, the same month and year as Emily, and
he died in December 1836.
I also learned that there once existed a group of letters
from Emily Brontë in the possession of a lady named Fanny Clayton, but which were
destroyed many years ago. Sadly, I was unable to learn any more about these letters.
However, I did discover many interesting bits of information relating to the Clayton
family. They were descendents of an important (and persecuted) Quaker family, stalwarts
of the Stanbury Quaker Meeting in the seventeenth century. At the time of the
Brontës, the Claytons were friendly with the Heatons of Ponden, a fact evidenced by
their inclusion in lists of friends invited to several Heaton family funerals. Robert and his
family lived for some time at Far Slack, an old house on the edge of the moors across the
valley of Ponden Beck from Ponden House. The family moved away from the area
shortly after Robert’s death, but returned to Haworth about 1842. One of the most
suggestive facts I uncovered was the death of Robert’s older brother, John, in May
1833. Emily wrote two poems, both of which concern two deaths: the first, written
19 December 1839, reads:
Heaven’s glory shone where he was laid
In life’s decline.
I turned me from that young saint’s bed
To gaze on thine.
It was a summer day that saw
His spirit’s flight;
Thine parted in a time of awe,
A winter-night.
The other poem is the strange and beautiful ‘Death that struck when I was most
confiding. . .’ written in April 1845, which also speaks, albeit metaphorically, of two
deaths — one which barely moved her (‘little mourned I. . .’), and a second which ruined
her life (‘Time for me must never blossom more. . .’). It is possible that both of these poems
refer to the deaths of John in late spring, 1833, and then Robert in mid-December, 1836.
Finally, there is one tiny piece of possible documentary evidence for the connection
between Emily and Robert: the Gondal poem ‘Heavy hangs the raindrop. . .’, written in
May 1845, about a ‘melancholy boy’, is accompanied by the initials A.E. and R.C.
The first set is very likely to stand for Alexander Elbë, an early character in the Gondal
stories (who is already dead before Emily and Anne begin to write these stories down
in about 1837), and the second set is, perhaps, for Robert Clayton, who, in my theory,
played the part of Alexander Elbë in the girls’ early Gondal games on the moors. Emily
wrote two of her sad early poems (March and August 1837) about the death of
Alexander Elbë and she returned to the subject again in December 1844. The initials
R.C. do not correspond to any known Gondal character.
My research into another local family, the Greenwoods of Bridgehouse, Springhead,
and Woodlands, has suggested an addition to the theory. It seemed to me highly likely
that when Emily was sent home from Roe Head after less than three months, Aunt
Branwell might well have considered it her duty to find a more respectable suitor for
Emily. A close friend of Patrick Brontë’s, Joseph Greenwood, Esq., of Springhead, had
three daughters exactly the same ages as Charlotte, Emily, and Anne (and there is
written evidence that the girls were friendly) and, as it happens, he also had two eligible
sons, William and James, several years older than the girls. This is all very speculative,
but the parallel between a Greenwood boy and Edgar Linton, Catherine Earnshaw’s
suitor in Wuthering Heights, seemed too good to ignore: Joseph Greenwood was, like
Mr Linton, the local magistrate; he was also the Lord of the Manor of Oxenhope. Like
the Lintons, the Greenwoods were at the top of the social tree in the area — marriage to
one of the boys would be a big step up the social ladder for the Brontës. In my theory,
Emily is courted by young James Greenwood, and for a few months she enjoys his
attentions. But when Robert Clayton learns of her betrayal, he is deeply hurt and in
his despair he dies in a careless accident on the moors in the winter of 1836. Robert’s
death puts paid to any ideas Emily might have had of ‘marrying up’; she feels partly
responsible for his death and is left with life-long feelings of guilt and isolation.
Because I am not able to prove this theory beyond the circumstantial evidence
outlined above, I have never tried to publish it as conventional ‘academic’ paper. But I
thought it would be interesting to see if the story could be told in another form, so
several years ago I suggested this theory to the BBC with the idea that it would make an
intriguing drama-cum-documentary. The producers were enthusiastic, but decided it
would work best as straight drama. They obtained development funds for the idea, and
the services of a well-known screen writer to write the script — Sally Wainwright, whose
television drama ‘Sparkhouse’ was loosely based on Wuthering Heights. Sally has
written a dramatic and moving script, but unfortunately it was not commissioned for
production, though its time may yet come.
Since then I have written a fictionalized biography of Emily Brontë in the form of her
own private journal; this work includes not only the theory outlined above, which covers
the years 1831 to 1837, but also Emily’s life after Robert’s death right up to her own
death in 1848.
My theory is unlikely to be true in every detail, but I believe that something very like
it must have happened. I have found nothing to contradict the speculative sequence of
events outlined above, and the discovery of Robert and John Clayton, whose deaths ma
have been obliquely recorded in Emily Brontë’s poetry, seems to me to confirm the original
idea, and perhaps bring us a step closer to an answer to the questions of how and
why Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights.
BBC Radio has published the play
Cold in the Earth and Fifteen Wild Decembers
By Sally Wainwright, based on a theory by Sarah Fermi.
Why did Emily Jane Bronte write Wuthering Heights? And how was she able to do it? In spite of the massive amount of material published about the Brontë sisters over the last 150 years, these two questions still remain unanswered. Yet given the large amount of autobiographical material in the novels of Charlotte and Anne Bronte, it is almost unthinkable that Emily would not have also used her own experience in the creation of her great book. How could she write so vividly about love, grief and hatred without having known these emotions in her own life?
This is a compelling drama about the story of Emily Bronte's socially transgressive love affair with a weaver's son.
By Sally Wainwright, based on a theory by Sarah Fermi.
Why did Emily Jane Bronte write Wuthering Heights? And how was she able to do it? In spite of the massive amount of material published about the Brontë sisters over the last 150 years, these two questions still remain unanswered. Yet given the large amount of autobiographical material in the novels of Charlotte and Anne Bronte, it is almost unthinkable that Emily would not have also used her own experience in the creation of her great book. How could she write so vividly about love, grief and hatred without having known these emotions in her own life?
This is a compelling drama about the story of Emily Bronte's socially transgressive love affair with a weaver's son.
Emily Bronte...Author
Emily Jane Brontë was the most solitary member of a unique, tightly-knit, English provincial family. Born in 1818, she shared the parsonage of the town of Haworth, Yorkshire, with her older sister, Charlotte, her brother, Branwell, her younger sister, Anne, and her father, The Reverend Patrick Brontë. All five were poets and writers; all but Branwell would publish at least one book.
Fantasy was the Brontë children’s one relief from the rigors of religion and the bleakness of life in an impoverished region. They invented a series of imaginary kingdoms and constructed a whole library of journals, stories, poems, and plays around their inhabitants. Emily’s special province was a kingdom she called Gondal, whose romantic heroes and exiles owed much to the poems of Byron.
Brief stays at several boarding schools were the sum of her experiences outside Haworth until 1842, when she entered a school in Brussels with her sister Charlotte. After a year of study and teaching there, they felt qualified to announce the opening of a school in their own home, but could not attract a single pupil.
In 1845 Charlotte Brontë came across a manuscript volume of her sister’s poems. She knew at once, she later wrote, that they were “not at all like poetry women generally write…they had a peculiar music–wild, melancholy, and elevating.” At her sister’s urging, Emily’s poems, along with Anne’s and Charlotte’s, were published pseudonymously in 1846. An almost complete silence greeted this volume, but the three sisters, buoyed by the fact of publication, immediately began to write novels. Emily’s effort was Wuthering Heights; appearing in 1847 it was treated at first as a lesser work by Charlotte, whose Jane Eyre had already been published to great acclaim. Emily Brontë’s name did not emerge from behind her pseudonym of Ellis Bell until the second edition of her novel appeared in 1850.
In the meantime, tragedy had struck the Brontë family. In September of 1848 Branwell had succumbed to a life of dissipation. By December, after a brief illness, Emily too was dead; her sister Anne would die the next year. Wuthering Heights, Emily’s only novel, was just beginning to be understood as the wild and singular work of genius that it is. “Stronger than a man,” wrote Charlotte, “Simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.”
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