Pinocchio
Crossing boundaries with Pinocchio: Stefania Ciocia meanders through matters of language, culture,
...
Jul
21
As we mark the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth, Sally Minogue sets her work in its cultural context – and in the social media world of 2018.
As I made a casual foray
on to the web to get my bearings on the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth 200
years ago, I discovered a mini twitter storm around Kathryn Hughes’ piece (July
21st, The Guardian online
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/21/emily-bronte-strange-cult-wuthering-heights-romantic-novel)
on Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
(which she describes as a ‘hot mess’) and the way the bicentenary is being
marked by the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth https://twitter.com/BronteParsonage, #Brontë200).
Hughes’ memorably scratchy article was at least trying to get underneath,
behind, through the resiliently resistive carapace of the Brontë myth. One of
the troubles about that myth is that it is founded on rocks as eternal as those
to which Cathy compares her love to Heathcliff. Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and
Anne did live an enclosed and isolated life up to their adult years.
Emily was three years old when her mother died; when she was seven, a pupil at
Cowan Bridge School, her older siblings Maria and Elizabeth died of
tuberculosis caught at the school. From that time the girls remained at home,
with a father who was largely distant, and during this period they constructed
their imagined world of Angria, in and around which they constructed fictions
and poems. They did wander the moors; they did live their lives
in a world of imagination; and they brought that world to the page (Emily and
Anne in adulthood through another imagined world, that of Gondal) – finally in
their adult fictions and poems, in which Emily led the way.
There’s quite enough
there to make it extraordinary that all three women, Charlotte, Emily and Anne,
produced some of the most sensational fiction of their own lifetime, but also
the most lasting fiction of the two centuries since. Where the myth starts to
get problematic is when commentators conflate that fiction with the lives.
Hughes makes this very mistake herself, suggesting initially that Wuthering Heights is an autobiographical
novel, and conflating Cathy with her creator Emily, suggesting that Brontë ‘is
the girl who, on the evidence of Wuthering
Heights, seems to have considered hanging a small dog an act of sexy
foreplay’. I don’t want to get embroiled in all this speculation based on what
we can’t know; but even so, I’d put money on the fact that Emily was a virgin who,
sadly, knew nothing of sexy foreplay; and I bet Kathryn Hughes believes that
too, whatever she writes. And come on – what’s with ‘the girl’? Wuthering Heights is so powerful
precisely because it is a work of the imagination – written by a woman.
Well, the twitterati can answer back,
and they have. Hughes’ piece led me to Lily Cole, who is one of the celebrity
fans that the Brontë Museum is bravely and rightly getting on board. Kate Bush
is there too; alongside Carol Ann Duffy (for Charlotte), Jackie Kay (for Anne)
and Jeanette Winterson (for all the Brontës), Bush has written a poem for
Emily. Each poem is inscribed on a natural stone and is out there somewhere on
the Yorkshire moors.
http://www.katebushnews.com
Not quite the eternal rocks, but a passable 21st
version. Lily Cole (lilycole.com) in particular represents a more youthful
generation; and if her piece on Heathcliff as a foundling is anything to go by,
she is sage and well informed and gives an interestingly fresh take on Emily
Brontë. I visited the Foundlings’ Museum in London recently, but I hadn’t
connected it with Heathcliff and Wuthering
Heights. Now I will.
So, to my own view of Emily Brontë. In truth, I have
always found Wuthering Heights a difficult
novel to talk about, because I’m still stuck in the mind of the precocious but
entirely inexperienced 16-year old I was on first reading. For me, the novel
reduces to three words: ‘I am
Heathcliff’. This leaves an awful lot out – to be precise, 244 pages. Cathy’s
passionate pronouncement (with its attendant irony that Heathcliff overhears
her denunciation of him, but leaves before that declaration) takes place
exactly a third of the way through the novel. The rest of the story stems from
his misunderstanding; and there’s an awful lot of narrative unravelling to be
done. Mine is the simple view of Wuthering
Heights: romanticism at its most extreme, physical nature and human nature
intertwined so deeply that there’s no metaphorical separation, Cathy and
Heathcliff as almost supranatural beings who have an extra-bodily
communication. And sex – what sex?
But there’s many another
reading of Wuthering Heights. Raymond
Williams sees it socio-economically: ‘It is class and property that divide
Heathcliff and Cathy, and it is in the positive alteration of those
relationships that a resolution is arrived at in the second generation.’ (The Country and the City, 176) Kate
Millett, writing of all the Brontë sisters, avers that ‘Literary criticism of
the Brontës has been a long game of masculine prejudice wherein the player
either proves they can’t write and are hopeless primitives ... or converts them
into case histories from the wilds, occasionally prefacing his moves with a few
pseudo-sympathetic remarks about the windy house on the moors, or old maidhood,
following with an attack on every truth the novels contain...’ (Sexual Politics, 147). Both readings are
powerful reminders of the political and social context in which Brontë was
writing, and also of that in which she has been read. And Williams and Millett
(now themselves figures from the past, but a powerful past) also remind us of
the changes that have taken place in our cultural thinking; indeed Millett’s
male critic now looks like a straw man, as he has been replaced by so many
formidable female critics and biographers. In those, I want to include Lily
Cole, but also Kathryn Hughes. We know there’s something going on when we are
irritated, discomfited, out of sorts, simply cross with a writer. I think Emily Brontë would have been happy to
be a thorn in her reader’s flesh two hundred years on. And a barbed Yorkshire
thorn at that.
