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Revision as of 21:11, 28 November 2003 by 12.223.87.232 (talk)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Emily Brontë (July 30, 1818 - December 19, 1848) was a British novelist.
Emily was born at Thornton in Yorkshire, the younger sister of Charlotte Brontë. In 1820, the family moved to Haworth, where Emily's father was rector, and it was in these surroundings that their literary talent flourished. In childhood, the three sisters created imaginary lands (Gondal, Angria, Gaaldine), which featured in stories they wrote. Few of Emily's work from this period survives, except for poems spoken by characters (The Brontë's Web of Childhood, Fannie Ratchford, 1941).
In 1837, Emily commenced work as a governess. Later, with her sister Charlotte, she attended college in Brussels.
It was the discovery of Emily's poetic talent by her family that led her and her sisters, Charlotte and Anne to publish a joint collection of their poetry in 1845. All three used male pseudonyms, Emily's being "Ellis Bell".
She subsequently published her only novel, Wuthering Heights, in 1847. It became an English literary classic.
Like her sisters, Emily's constitution had been weakened by their harsh life at home and at school. She died on December 19, 1848 and was interred in the Church of St. Michael and All Angels Cemetery, Haworth, West Yorkshire, England.
I, Herr Witten, wrote this paper:
Emily Brontë was born as the fifth child of the family on 30 July 1818 in Thornton, England (Guzzetti 17). Shortly after the birth of the youngest child Anne, the Brontë family moved to the parsonage at Haworth, Yorkshire in England in April of 1820, because the father, Patrick Brontë, had accepted a position as its perpetual curate. After a little more than a year in the new home, Mrs. Maria Brontë died on 15 September 1821 due to an illness (Knapp 11), leaving Patrick Brontë and her sister to look after the six children. The eldest child Maria, who at the time had only just acquired seven years of age, assumed the maternal duties, and the children grew on each other’s support (Masson 19-23). The six young Brontës passed long days reading in the "children's study.” Since they had no children's books they would read the newspaper and their father's books. This led to conversations concerning politics and the "comparative merits" of Wellington, Bonaparte, and Hannibal. Sometimes the arguments became so involved that their father was summoned to adjudicate. Sadly though, Maria and the second eldest child Elizabeth both died within months of each other after attending a boarding school and contracting illnesses that were diagnosed at the time as “rapid decline” (Masson 19-23). Charlotte and Emily were immediately taken out of the same boarding school and taught at home by their father and aunt. They and the other children were given lessons in literature, history, geography, grammar, religion, painting, and drawing. They also acquired skill in playing such instruments as the piano, organ, and flute (Guzzetti 29). Emily possessed the most gifts of any other member of her family in that she was capable both artistically and practically: She could sketch well, play the piano expertly, cook and clean and sew well, and she eventually took control of the family’s financial investments (Peters 55). The remaining four children banded even closer together (Guzzetti 29); Emily Brontë remained self-contained, and as a result she remained pensive in reticence (Benvenuto 1-2). A woman named Tabitha Aykroyd was employed in 1825 as a housekeeper and nanny. Her tales of folklore influenced the children's literary careers that they developed in the following four years (Guzzetti 30): One night Patrick Brontë brought them gifts upon his return from a trip, and included in these toys was a box of miniature soldiers for his son Branwell (Benvenuto 5). When the children discovered them in the morning, each child adopted an appealing character, and with these soldiers they began formulating military adventures that they recorded in writing. The story was of "The Twelves" or "Our Fellows," the names they gave the soldiers (Peters 24), and it included histories, essays, songs, illustrations, and maps of the story's setting, the make-believe Kingdom of Glasstown (Guzzetti 32). As the creativity abounded, Emily and Anne began to break away from the games with Charlotte and Branwell, and in 1831 they began writing the story of Gondal together (Knapp 11). At the age of sixteen, Charlotte returned home from schooling at Roe Head, and she proceeded to teach her siblings the knowledge that she had acquired (Benvenuto 7). Afterwards, they walked the moors (Masson 32), and it is likely that these diurnal adventures gave Emily the material with which she formed the setting for many of her works; though her writing was intense, much unlike her physical life, Emily Brontë seems to have used her personal experiences to create some of the scenes of her novel: the moor on which she lived provided the overriding setting. Also, she had been punished for climbing out of a window to break off a tree branch (Peters 54-55), and in the Wuthering Heights a character named Lockwood dreams that he opens his bedroom window to break from a tree a branch that unceasingly knocks against the pane (Bloom 11). At the age of seventeen, Emily Brontë left home for Roe Head (Hewish 37) where she was able to attend classes as a perquisite since her sister Charlotte had been invited to return as a teacher (Guzzetti 48). For three months Emily forged her way through a most gruelingly estranged routine. She longed so much to return to the moors that she became physically ill, so Charlotte convinced her father to extricate Emily from her misery. This was exceedingly stressful for a family that had already experienced deaths owing to the same homesickness (Masson 39). Charlotte reminisced about the wretched disposition of her sister: "The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices) was what she failed in enduring. Her nature proved too strong for her fortitude. Every morning, when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but I knew only to well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken, her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die, if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall." (Peters 54) The next year Emily left Haworth to teach at Miss Patchett's Academy at Law Hill, Halifax, which was either a deliberate or persuaded attempt to surmount her homesickness. Regardless of the intrinsic impetus, she survived for six months (Knapp 12), purportedly working long hours from six in the morning until eleven at night each day (Peters 58). She wrote nearly thirty poems during her free time in that year of 1836, and after she returned home she wrote almost two-thirds of her extant poetry (Knapp 39). In 1842, Emily and Charlotte attended, in preparation for establishing their own institution of erudition, the Pensionnat Héger, a boarding school for girls in Brussels. While in Brussels, Emily remained reserved, speaking only to Charlotte, and she studied French, German, and piano playing (Guzzetti 60-61). Upon a return home after their aunt's death, they sent out fliers to promote "The Misses Brontë's Establishment for the Board and Education of a Limited Number of Young Ladies" (Masson 62), but no interest was ever aroused in the community, so the idea was abandoned, and authorship became the next goal (Guzzetti 70). Charlotte came across a bunch of poems that Emily had been secretly writing, and Charlotte and Anne revealed that they too had been secretly writing poems. After allaying Emily’s anger towards the greatly unwanted trespassing of her privacy (Thaden 5), they decided to publish their poems together in one volume (Benvenuto 19). They adopted pseudonyms by taking the initials of each of their actual names and warily forming others that were not "positively masculine," meaning they disguised their femininity without unduly encouraging the assumption that they were men (Masson 64-65): Charlotte Brontë chose "Currer Bell," Emily Brontë chose "Ellis Bell," and Anne Brontë chose "Acton Bell"; the common surname preserved their familial relationship as well (Knap 12). The amalgamation of poems received two noticeably good reviews (Guzzetti 74), and Emily Brontë’s work was praised to be the best (Masson 65), yet they sold only two copies of their book (Thaden 5), but the Brontë sisters had only just begun their literary careers and the prospects were infinite. Throughout her lifetime Emily Brontë produced only two major works, but they were both very unique and carried a resounding impact. These were the Gondal Poems and Wuthering Heights, her only novel (Benvenuto, Preface). Emily Brontë began formulating the story of Gondal and its rulers before she was yet fifteen years of age. Her first such poem was “What winter floods” (Hewish 29):
What winter floods, what showers of spring Have drenched the grass by night and day; And yet, beneath, that spectre ring, Unmoved and undiscovered lay
A mute remembrancer of crime, Long lost, concealed, forgot for years, It comes at last to cancel time, And waken unavailing tears." (#96, pp. 101-102) (Benvenuto 39-40)
She had no intention of sharing her creation with anyone other than her sister Anne Brontë, and the story was in fact a product of voluntary isolation (Hewish 30-31). This allowed her to freely dream up a fantastic world that was not just make-believe, but that was her myth (Benvenuto 25). It permitted her to create without the worry of others’ acceptance a story of love, lust, lechery, wars, revenge, murder, and machinations. Her Gondal poetry is generally obscure since she wrote for herself, meaning she did not provide any external clarifications, which is partly why the picture of Gondal is incomplete (Hewish 114). She spent much of her time developing the Gondal story, and at least one hundred and seventeen out of her one hundred and nineteen poems were about Gondal; only forty-five were officially arranged as finished and published in Gondal Poems.
Emily Brontë wrote a voluminous amount of prose concerning Gondal as well, which is a fact that was recorded in Anne Brontë’s diary. In 1837 she had supposedly been working on the first volume of the life of the story’s main character, the heroine Augusta Almeda. Also in 1845, Anne wrote that Emily had been working on an intriguing story of the Emperor Julius’s life as well as a work on the First Wars, while at the same time that they were both collaborating on the Gondal Chronicles, which they had purportedly begun three and a half years earlier. Sadly though, all of the works in prose have since been destroyed, and only her poems, which are solely lyrical accompaniments, are left to tell the tale (Benvenuto 38-39). Emily Brontë began the writing of the saga of Gondal during her formative years as a poet and author. This provided key developments in her imagination with regards to Wuthering Heights (Benvenuto, Preface). The development of the characters of the Gondal stories also engendered a certain pessimistic view of humanity, which diffused into Wuthering Heights as well (Hewish 31). This is why there are ostensible connections between the story of Gondal and that of Wuthering Heights (Hewish 110-12); most notably Gondal's main character Augusta Almeda becomes Wuthering Heights’s Catherine Earnshaw (Hewish 117). In 1845, Emily Brontë began Wuthering Heights after her brother Branwell revealed the possibilities of novel writing (Benvenuto, Chronology). Her original submittal was rejected in 1846, but after a probably substantial revision (Stoneman 9) and the sensational success of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Peters 126), it was published in 1847. Sadly, Emily Brontë died eighteen months after its publication (Smith 7), and being the only Brontë sister never to reveal her true identity, she left the world in virtual obscurity (Benvenuto 1). This afforded Charlotte Brontë the chance to personally edit and redistribute a second edition in 1850; this edition reduced the strange punctuation and altered the dialect to better appeal to the southern English (Stoneman 9). Despite any contemporary laudation, Wuthering Heights was met with scorn and disdain. Both American and English critics declared it to be vulgar trash: The American Graham’s Magazine wondered “How a human being could have attempted such without committing suicide?” (Stoneman 12-13). It was considered "a rude and strange production" (Smith 9). The public’s repugnance was conveyed with such descriptions as "shocking, crude, and sensational" (Peters 127), violent, coarse, and morbid, meaning unhealthy (Stoneman 12). Emily Brontë’s eldest sister Charlotte joined the criticism too by saying that even though she considered Wuthering Heights to be more vigorous and original than her own book Jane Eyre (Peters 126), she was repelled by its intrinsic evil, but such disgust betrays her misunderstanding of the story's ending in which love triumphs over hate (Peters 128). Its cold reception was most likely due to the relatively unrefined tone of the book. Its subject matter was of most dispute (Stoneman 13), but the text was unsettling in its time as well since it associated with such “vulgarities” as damn, devil, and hell (Gregor 45). She presents common ideas that were unorthodox for her time: She describes the moor as a savage earthly paradise since it provides a common social status for the young protagonists, Cathy and Heathcliff, while she describes another family's splendid parlor as a source of unhappiness since it intensifies the social separations between them (Bloom 12) Also, she displays love as a deeply emotional relationship between equals and soul mates, which was not the common view of the time (Bloom 13). The critic James Lorimer epitomizes the Victorian conviction: " commences by introducing the reader to a perfect pandemonium of low and brutal creatures, who wrangle with each other in language too disgusting for the eye or the ear to tolerate, and unredeemed, so far as we could see, by one single particle either of wit or humour, or even psychological truth, for the characters are as false as they are loathsome." (p. 486; CH p. 115) (Stoneman 13) Nevertheless, the first edition of Wuthering Heights sold out, and it had spread to America after its initial publication within a matter of months (Hewish 162). The complexity is such that Wuthering Heights has no single underlying point that can be used to explain its fundamental purpose, which was another disliked quality (Gregor 2). It was not until later years that the complexity of the story was recognized as genius, and the complexity is superficially seen in how the story is told, namely that there are several narrators; the narration begins with Mr. Lockwood, then Nelly Dean, who tells much of the story to Lockwood, and then the story is further revealed by other narrators through letters and documents as described by Nelly Dean (Thaden 22-23). Wuthering Heights is obviously well thought out, because it is cyclic such that like the love between Cathy and Heathcliff in the beginning, so is that of Catherine and Hareton in the ending, though the second couple takes an alternate route by becoming engaged (Thaden 29). The novel also reveals Emily Brontë’s belief in the idea of a heaven in which the soul is immortal in the real world, and that is why the story ends with sightings of the ghosts of Heathcliff and Catherine walking through the moors (Thaden 42). The most interesting facet of Wuthering Heights is that there are many seemingly contradictory interpretations that are all plausible in their own right, which further divulges the intangible enigma of the story; it is unable to be categorized in that it exhibits the qualities that pertain to novels of Realism, gothic horror, domestic issues, love or Romanticism, mysticism, and the occult (Thaden 21). Emily Brontë’s work has been considered by critics to be original in creation, meaning it follows no particular literary precedent, and she is frequently described as enigmatic, because she presents herself with a deluge of contradictions; she has produced an amalgamation of works that carry tones of the traditional as well as the unorthodox and profundity as well as the doggerel of common juvenilia (Smith 40). The aura of mystery surrounding her is exacerbated by the contradiction of subjects as well: In the Gondal wars, she conveys the truth and hideousness of violence while in the work of "Portrait of Harold" in her Essays in French she expresses King Harold's violence as liberating and fulfilling for him (Benvenuto 77). She often polarizes the emotions and the identities of her characters by having them either love or hate each other to extremes (Benvenuto 39), and in Wuthering Heights she makes a noticeable distinction between the untamed, natural Heathcliff and the cultivated, material Edgar, who both represent the worlds between which Cathy is torn (Thaden 46). Emily Brontë’s works illustrate the portrait of a cynic in that they look down upon humans as practitioners of hypocrisy, cruelty, and ingratitude (Benvenuto 81). In the French essay "Filial Love” she explains that humans are so debased that God needs to threaten them with commandments "to perform the tenderest and most holiest of all duties" such as honoring their parents. This revelation of the ubiquitous lack of regard that children have for their parents is inversed in another French essay entitled "Lettre" in which a mother is shown to be devoid of love for her child (Benvenuto 80-81); this apparently shows that Emily Brontë viewed the world as more hateful, or at least apathetic, than loving. Though Emily Brontë’s work tends to be viewed as a panoply of contradictions, she has consistently employed a number of themes. These include violence, mystical vision, and the nature of imagination as common elements (Benvenuto 80). The image of an enclosure or frame such as a closet bed, coffin, window, or painting define separate states of mind and of existence in Emily Brontë's work, and its use serves as a most apparent correlation between the tales of Gondal and Wuthering Heights (Hewish 114); in Wuthering Heights, windows and doors represent portals between the refined, material world and the liberating, natural world of the moors (Thaden 46). She frequently uses the images of martyrdom and heroism, and she often conveys a sense of imprisonment for her characters with the only solution being death. Her later poems express death as the separation of an individual from his natural environment, and this notion was perhaps derived from her unhappy stay away from home while attending school at Roe Head (Peters 54-55). In Wuthering Heights, she expresses this through Catherine Linton née Earnshaw's notion that her childhood youth had been lost: " been converted at a stroke into Mrs. Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger; an exile, and outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world." (Thaden 25). In her poetry, she often uses the serial, or slice-of-life technique, to capture a moment in time (Benvenuto 50). Despite this, Emily Brontë also creates an epic sense by creating the stories of Gondal and Wuthering Heights around extensive spans of time, and she does this specifically for Wuthering Heights by placing the past within the present (Hewish 116). This is achieved through multi-layered narration that allows for anachronistic retellings and which bring the story from a degree of ludicrousness to one of truth and reality (Thaden 45). A repeated motif is that Emily Brontë ties her characters to nature and the landscape. When Heathcliff is emotionally hurt by overhearing incompletely one of Cathy's private conversations, he runs away and tacitly incites a violent storm (Bloom 14). Also, Cathy compares Heathcliff's soul to the arid wilderness of the moors, and Nelly illustrates the Lintons as honeysuckles since they are cultivated and fragile. These contrasting images of nature and refinement correspond with the rough nature of Heathcliff and the refinement of Cathy's adopted world (Bloom 16). It is interesting to note that the name Heathcliff is composed of two elements of nature: cliff and more importantly heath, which is a large tract of uncultivated land that is covered with herbage and shrubs, which is a description of his rough character as well as a further reflection of the moor in which he and Cathy feel so strongly attached. In a couple of instances it seems as if Heathcliff is referred to through nature: after becoming engaged with the cultivated Edgar, Cathy dreams of being homesick in Heaven and as a result being cast back down to earth where she finds herself on the heath "sobbing for joy" (Bloom 13). Also, when Cathy dies she is buried in the corner of a churchyard overlooking the heath, and this position would have been unconventional for the time, which stresses an ulterior meaning (Bloom 17). Emily Brontë is characterized not only by the topics about which she writes, but also in the way she writes. She uses obscure, compact verse to convey an incredible intensity of emotion (Benvenuto 39-40). Her poems use of the pronoun I make them seem self-declarative, but it is actually a device through which potent emotions can express themselves; this interpretation is corroborated by Emily Brontë’s admittance that her speakers are shadowy heroes, titanic lovers, winds, spirits, and abstract qualities (Smith 42). In a few early poems, she switches between points of view, creating the same effect as that of several intertwined melodic tunes (Benvenuto 50); to this end, it is never quite certain when she is speaking with her own voice (Benvenuto 76). Though Emily Brontë’s works are now considered classics (Guzzetti 102), she died during a time when her poems were disregarded and her novel was thought by the majority to be trash. There was great admiration for the Brontës in the nineteenth century, but it was mostly centered on Charlotte, and it was not until the 1920s that Emily Brontë was viewed as a separate author without the stigma of being related to her famous, older sister. Over time, Emily Brontë has been considered the most talented of her siblings through studies of the intricate structure of Wuthering Heights and through a less straitlaced society. Wuthering Heights became by the 1950s a powerful example of literary symbolism, irony, and myth from which to study, and by the mid-1970s it had possibly "elicited more critical essays than all of the other Brontë novels" (Benvenuto 121-22). In 1928, the Brontë Society opened the Brontë house in Haworth as a museum and tribute to the family. It is still open today (Guzzetti 104), and about one hundred thousand people pour through its doors each year (Benvenuto 122). The nineteenth century was the dawn of the novel, and Emily Brontë helped shape its future. One of Emily's greatest achievements was her marriage of the novel with the intensity, spirituality, and transcendental form of romantic poetry (Thaden 9). She pioneered the expression of characters' inner struggles, and she furthered the use of melodrama to pronounce a story’s plot, generating excitement and tension (Knapp 184-85). She introduced emotional suffering and unusual states of consciousness to the novel, helping to bring about the realization that the human mind "half perceives and half creates" experience; she aided in naming the idea of the metaphysics of Romanticism, or the notion that human experience defies logic. She brought to the novel an unprecedented intricacy and a disregard for the societal reality on which novels had been based (Thaden 17-18). She demonstrated the possibilities of the novel, and her Wuthering Heights has become a gauge by which the Victorian literary tastes are judged (Hewish 160). Emily Brontë’s work has also been related to race, gender, and revolution (151): the most noticeable correlation of the sort occurs between the description in Wuthering Heights of the character Heathcliff as "dark almost as if came from the devil," possibly linking him to the Africans that had been forced into servility at the time (Stoneman 150). Also in Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë has the character Catherine describe her great love Heathcliff as being very much like herself, and this has been interpreted as an equation between man and woman, meaning it rings of feminism (Stoneman 155). As for revolution, the characters and story of Wuthering Heights were related by some to the Plug Riots of 1843 and Marxism in the 1940s, and they have since been compared with numerous social and political events and philosophies (Stoneman 135-36). Emily Brontë left no traces of herself besides the accounts of other individuals, which are few (Hewish 170). She published very little in regard to the standards of her time (Benvenuto 121), and the critics seem to be either impressed or appalled by her work such that those who did show appreciation seemed to suppress the true praise that they would have liked to give (Hewish 166). Nevertheless, her artistry has continued to live through the ages in movie adaptations, new critical studies and biographies that are published yearly, and in modern times websites have been devoted to her (Thaden 18). It does not appear that it has been her literature that has entreated so many generations to revive Emily Brontë, whether through rancorous criticism or resounding approbation, rather it seems that it is has been the undeniably enigmatic story of her life. The one person who came closest to a satisfying explanation of Emily was her sister Charlotte Brontë: "Stronger than a man and simpler than a child, her nature stood alone" (Peters 61).
Works Cited
Benvenuto, Richard. Emily Brontë. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
---. Preface. Emily Brontë. By Benvenuto. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
---. Chronology. Emily Brontë. By Benvenuto. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: Bloom’s Notes. Broomall, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House, 1996.
Gregor, Ian, ed. The Brontës: a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970.
Guzzetti, Paula. A Family Called Brontë. New York: Dillon, 1994.
Hewish, John. Emily Brontë: a Critical and Biographical Study. New York: St. Martin’s, 1969.
Knapp, Bettina L. The Brontës. New York: Continuum, 1991.
Masson, Flora. The Brontës. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat, 1970.
Peters, Mauren. An Enigma of Brontës. New York: St. Martin’s, 1974.
Smith, Anne, ed. The Art of Emily Brontë. New York: Harper, 1976.
Stoneman, Patsy, ed. and Richard Beynon, ed. Emily Brontë. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.
Thaden, Barbara Z. Student Companion to Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2001.