The Company I Keep - the objects of my sympathy

My experience of a novel depends as much on a sympathetic response as anyone else's.  The question is: with whom, exactly, do I need to sympathize?  Readers of Wayne Booth's The Company We Keep: The Ethics of Fiction (1988) know where I'm going, even though I was well aware of everything I'm about to say before I read Booth, I swear.

When I read Wuthering Heights, I encounter a fine assembly of weirdos, misfits, idiots, and monsters, a few of whom deserve my pity, but none of whom deserve much more. Yet there is one character with whom I sympathize strongly: I care about what happens to her, and I wish her well in her goals.  She's not much like me, so there's little identification with her, but I appreciate and benefit from the offer of friendship she makes me, and enjoy the opportunity to get to know her better. 

Her name, of course, is Emily Brontë.  She is not the real Emily Brontë, but one I have invented in collaboration with the actual author.  Booth calls her the "implied author."  When "EB" and I get together, she offers to show me this wonderful thing she made, this novel, or perhaps one of her poems.  We look at it together.  She points out the bits she's particularly proud of.  We have a good laugh whenever a book is abused, or when Catherine is bit by a bulldog.  We hunt for fairies and ogres.  We perhaps discuss why Heathcliff is the way he is, and why Catherine is like she is.  I ask her if she has read John Galt.  She unfortunately does not answer. 

It's kind of a one-sided friendship.  But as Booth says (I'm in Chapter 6, "Implied Authors as Friends"), we have many different kinds of friends, some close and wide-ranging, some best met on specific occasions.  Lunch-every-week friends, lunch-every-year friends, and lunch-every-decade friends.  The analogy with books is clear enough, so I'll move on.

Maybe what I do want to emphasize is that before I can really accept or reject an implied author's friendship, I have to have some sense of what she's trying to do.  Emily Brontë did not botch her attempt to create a genial romance.  Her goals were entirely otherwise, and quite interesting; she achieved them admirably, mostly; and her book allows me certain emotional and artistic experiences that I still don't think can be found anywhere else.

Booth never discusses one case: what if the author is not my friend, but my enemy?  Sometimes that relationship is valuable, too.  Emily Brontë (my Brontë, the one I made up) is weird enough that I understand how plenty of people will not be able to accept her friendship so easily, and may even want to fight it out with her.  They should.

So, OK.  That's Sympathetic Character Week.  That's why I don't particularly care about sympathetic characters.  They're a literary device useful for achieving specific goals.  Other devices are useful for achieving other goals.  Sympathetic attention to the book will point us in the right direction.  Then we can puzzle over whether the goals were achieved, or whether they were worth trying in the first place.

Thanks for all of the useful comments.  I thought this all worked pretty well, for such a misguided idea.  For the next two weeks, another bad idea: Who is John Galt?

Like foam-bells from the tide - don't let your sister posthumously edit your poems

When Matthew Arnold published his tribute to Charlotte and Emily Brontë in 1855, Emily had been dead for almost seven years. Arnold could have known only a small number of Emily's poems, the twenty-one Ellis Bell poems published in 1846, and eighteen more that Charlotte included in the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, one of which may actually be by Charlotte. Now we have over 180 poems.

The Complete Poems that I read, the Penguin Classics edition, is too much. The shorter collections that I looked at had too little. Plus, there are serious textual issues. So I don't know what to recommend. The 1846 poems, plus the 1850 poems (see, for example, the Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights), plus a little more.

Charlotte's editing of her sister's poems can be a problem. Mostly, Charlotte just smoothed out the punctuation and verb tenses. But on a few poems, she went to town.

Aye there it is! It wakes tonight
Sweet thoughts that will not die
And feeling's fires flash all as bright
As in the years gone by! -

And I can tell by thine altered cheek
And by thy kindled gaze
And by the words thou scarce dost speak,
How wildly fancy plays -

This is Emily's beginning. That floating "it" is a problem. Or maybe it's good, a source of mystery. Who is speaking to whom? I don't know. Here's Emily via Charlotte:

Ay - there it is! It wakes to-night
      Deep feelings I thought dead;
Strong in the blast - quick gathering light -
      The heart's flame kindles red.

'Now I can tell by thine altered cheek,
      And by thine eyes' full gaze,
And by the words thou scarce dost speak
      How wildly fancy plays.'

More comprehensible, maybe; more conventional, certainly. Note that the second stanza is now in quotes. Still not sure what "it" is. Which is worse - the red-kindled heart or the full-gazing eyes?

The next stanza is my favorite. Luckily, Charlotte barely touches it; here's Emily:

Yes I could swear that glorious wind
Has swept the world aside
Has dashed its memory from my mind
Like foam-bells from the tide -

I'll skip to the last stanza:

Thus truly when that breast is cold
Thy prisoned soul shall rise
The dungeon mingle with the mould -
The captive with the skies -

Wow, this is supercharged Emily: the prison and the grave and the unchained spirit disappearing into nature, all in three lines. Charlotte found it too heathenistic and actually added five banal lines of her own, ending:

Mortal! though soon life's tale is told;
      Who once lives, never dies!

Emily Brontë's poems, like the works of Mozart and Schubert, are now referred to by letter and number. This one is H. 123. My thanks to the scholars who disentangled this mess.

I have found these poems highly challenging to write about, and am not sure I have any greater understanding of them than when I started. So thanks also to everyone who had the patience to read along or who left comments.

All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee - angst, heartbreak, and repetitive V sounds in Emily Brontë

A post or two ago, I looked at a poem written by Emily Brontë when she was 19 years old, and mentioned that to me it seemed much more mature. Biblibio politely suggested that it seemed plenty immature, detecting "teenage angst." I was actually thinking about her versification, not the content of what she wrote. Biblibio was committing the readerly sin of responding to what I actually wrote, rather than what I meant, but did not write. Unforgivable!

Biblibio is correct, completely correct. And it's not just Brontë's teenage poems that are packed with adolescent pity and passion; it's the whole project. That's why Les Hauts de Hurlevant is suddenly so popular with vampires and the teenage French girls who love them. Let's look at a poem Brontë wrote when she was 27, published a year later with her sisters' verse in the Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell volume. I'll interrupt it here and there, since the main point of Wuthering Expectations is to mangle the work of geniuses:

Remembrance

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 here, note all of the repetitions of entire words, rather than vowel and consonant sounds, although there's also plenty of that (above, remove, grave, have, love, sever, wave). Also note, that the speaker's tone is hysterical and the sense on a far edge of recognizable human emotion.

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 for ever, ever more?

Those internal "v"s, they're everywhere. And look at all of those "o"s. The answer to the question is "No," as we will see below. Her thoughts, in fact, do not still hover over the mountains containing her lover's grave, and do not rest on the grave. I guess they used to hover until they were tired, and then rest. I'll skip two stanzas.

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?

Ah ha, a twist. She has Moved On. The poem is an argument against teenage angst, expressed in the rhetoric of teenage angst! She checks the tears of useless passion, shes dares not indulge in her memories. Their power is acknowledged, but also their danger.

"Remembrance" has attracted a lot of attention from heavy-hitting critics. I'm looking at the note to the poem in the Penguin Classics edition, p. 228, where I see that Barbara Hardy called it Brontë's "best love poem," and F. R. Leavis wrote that it was "the finest poem in the nineteenth-century part of The Oxford Book of English Verse," and (or but?) it "does unmistakably demand to be read in a plangent declamation." Try that at home. I'm pretty sure it will emphasize the more ridiculous side of the poem, rather than the affecting side. Maybe my declamations have not been sufficiently plangent. I'll keep practicing.

If it but herald death, the vision is divine! - Emily Brontë's fantasy world

Gérard de Nerval, from Aurélia, part 2, chapter 1 (1855): "if only we can identify the missing letter or the obliterated sign, if we can resolve the dissonance of the scale, we shall learn a great deal about the spirit world."

Emily Brontë's works, her poems and Wuthering Heights, present the same temptation that poor, mad Nerval saw in the Kabbalah and other esoteric pursuits, the possibility that there is a key to the lock that allow us entry to the inner core of Brontë's world.

Gondal, that's the key for some people, the Byronesque fantasy world created by Emily and Anne, not to be confused with Charlotte and Branwell's Angria. The Angria stories survived and can still be read. All that's left of Gondal are Emily's poems.

This is why a substantial number of the poems have titles like "A.G.A. to A.S." or "The Death of A.G.A." or, my favorite, "Written in the Gaaldine Prison Caves to A.G.A." No, sorry, my favorite title is "From a Dungeon Wall in the Southern College." That's a good, rigorous college!

I could not care less about the Gondal business as such. I'm looking at an article by Rosalind Miles ("The Creative Dynamism of Emily Brontë's Poetry") in which she comes this close to saying that she would rather have the Gondal material than "the novels of Jane Austen's middle age" or "the poems of Keat's full maturity" - nutty, just nutty.*

What amazes me about all this is that, aside from a few names, most of the Gondal poems look just like Brontë's other poems. They're set in a fantasy world, spoken by or to unknown characters, but they're not simply about that world. She, and her sister, created this entire, complicated world, and one way Emily used it was as a frame or inspiration for her original poems.

I think many poets do something like this, although rarely so explicitly. William Blake and Friedrich Hölderlin are extreme cases, sometimes seeming to live in their own mythical world, and meine Frau reminds me that some of the best poems of many German poets - Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Goethe - were first found surrounded by prose. "Mignon," from Wilhem Meister's Apprenticeship, is a perfect example - "Knowst thou the land of flowering lemon trees?" But Brontë's efforts are in their own category.

Emily Brontë returned to the same themes again and again. There are a cluster of parting poems ("O wander not so far away! \ O love, forgive this selfish tear.") Half a dozen prison poems - good examples of what I'm trying to say. In the Gondal world, the poem is about a person in an actual prison; in our world, with no Gondal, the prison is metaphorical. The poem is no worse off.

I'll end with some stanzas from one of them, "The Prisoner. A Fragment," from the 1846 Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. I'm skipping to the end; the prisoner, a young woman, is speaking:

"Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:
Its wings are almost free--its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulph, it stoops and dares the final bound,

"Oh, dreadful is the check--intense the agony
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.

"Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;
The more that anguish racks, the earlier it will bless;
And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine,
If it but herald death, the vision is divine!"

She ceased to speak, and we, unanswering, turned to go--
We had no further power to work the captive woe:
Her cheek, her gleaming eye, declared that man had given
A sentence, unapproved, and overruled by Heaven.

I can't really say that I like this much. But it's intense, passionate, a little crazed: Emily Brontë. No, revise that - the third stanza, "And robed in fires of hell," etc. I like that just fine.

* Rosalind Miles, "The Creative Dynamism of Emily Brontë's Poetry" in The Brontës, ed. Harold Bloom, 1987, p. 72. Really helpful article, actually. I seem to have picked out the one silly thing in it.

Thy mind is ever moving in regions dark to thee - Emily Brontë the nature-worshiping heathen

Shall earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now?
Since passion may not fire thee
Shall nature cease to bow?

Usually I assume that the speaker of a poem is the poet. It's a fiction, I know, a pose. Here, though, someone else is addressing a poet-like figure ("thou lonely dreamer"). Earth and passion and nature seem to be connected.

Thy mind is ever moving,
In regions dark to thee;
Recall its useless roving -
Come back, and dwell with me -

Now the poet really sounds like Emily Brontë, Official Poet Laureate of the Goths.* A mind moving "in regions dark," that's her. The speaker, whoever it is, is not so sympathetic with the whole black clothes and emo thing. "Useless," that's pretty strong.

I know my mountain breezes
Enchant and soothe thee still -
I know my sunshine pleases,
Despite thy wayward will -

So the speaker is actually earth, or nature, or the earth spirit.

When day with evening blending
Sinks from the summer sky,
I've seen thy spirit bending
In fond idolatry -

Nature has observed the poet, at twilight, secretly worshiping nature. "Fond" can mean "mad" - is that what it means here? Note the assonance - all of the "n" sounds, and the second "s" line. I'll shut up for a moment and let the nature spirit finish up.

I've watched thee every hour -
I know my mighty sway -
I know my magic power
To drive thy griefs away -

Few hearts to mortals given
On earth so wildly pine
Yet few would ask a heaven
More like this earth than thine -

Then let my winds caress thee -
Thy comrade let me be -
Since nought beside can bless thee,
Return and dwell with me -

In her dream of Heaven, Catherine Earnshaw "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." (WH, Ch. 9). Maybe nature is not speaking to a Brontë-like poet, but to a Catherine-like wild spirit. Either way, she's a nature-worshiping heathen who has somehow strayed from the natural world into the darkness of the imagination, although she maintains her pantheistic faith in her own way, and will eventually return to the earth, perhaps in death.

Or something. These poems, some of them, are so strange. This one is unusually pure. It does not seem to have any Gondal mixed into it. Tomorrow, I guess, Gondal.

* Not mockery. The Goths chose correctly. One thing Emily Brontë is, one among many, is the original Goth girl.

She can bear her soul from it's home of clay - the mystical superpowers of Emily Brontë

I'm happiest when most away
I can bear my soul from it's home of clay
On a windy night when the moon is bright
And my eye can wander through worlds of light

When I am not and none beside
Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky
But only spirit wandering wide
Through infinite immensity

This is an early poem of Emily Brontë's, written when she was 19, but not published until 1910. Does it sound like a 19 year old? It sure sounds like Emily Brontë.

This is early poetic mastery, varied in form, strange in concept, although perhaps not as weird as it looks (or, perhaps, weirder). That third line is fancy - an internal rhyme, and "wind/ when." I actually pronounce "win" and "when" the same way, a regionalism I'm trying to combat, so the effect is really strong for me.

That line is a bit singsongy, which is why the fourth line changes the order of the sounds. Line three stresses wind/night/moon/bright, while line four has eye/wand/worlds/light. She flips the location of the "I" sound and the "w_nd" word, a trick that looks so easy. The variety keeps the poem from sounding insipid. It sounds pleasing and sophisticated to me.

What does the poem mean? One pass - it's a celebration of the poet's imagination, with the soul and spirit as a stand-in. It's the poet describing how she does her job. The second stanza is tricky, and could use some punctuation, but it's consistent with this idea, mostly. The first "Nor" really means "Neither," an archaicism. So maybe it means:

"I am happiest
When I am Not and also None -
Not, for example, earth or sea or sky -
But only a spirit, etc."

This is still not quite English, and still pretty strange, and suggests another way to interpret the poem is to take its surface seriously. The speaker is happiest when her spirit mystically leaves her body and becomes Not, a perfect nothing, somehow existing only in some infinite world of light. But then why the eye, why the bright moon (itself a kind of world of light, I guess)?

Emily Brontë's poems share many characteristics with Wuthering Heights. One of them is that they're impossible to completely pin down. Just to add another complication, the "I" of the poem may very well be neither Emily Brontë nor a poet at all but a character in a lost fantasy epic.

I've demonstrated well enough that I barely know what I'm talking about, but that won't stop me from spending all of the week with Emily Brontë's poems. Or perhaps not all - I hear the songs of the Jewish gauchos in the distance.

Might, passion, vehemence, grief, daring - Baffled, unknown, self-consumed - Matthew Arnold and Emily Brontë

As he aged, Matthew Arnold wrote fewer poems. Many of those are memorial poems, culminating in the glorious trilogy "Geist's Grave" (1881), "Poor Matthias" (1882), and "Kaiser Dead" (1887). Geist was a dachshund, Matthias a canary, and Kaiser a dachshund-collie mix. These are not manuscript poems; they were all published, by England's greatest critic, in magazines.

"Poor Max, with downcast, reverent head,
Regards his brother's form outspread;
Full well Max knows the friend is dead
          Whose cordial talk
And jokes in doggish language said,
          Beguiled his walk."

These are the only Arnold poems that contain any evidence of a sense of humor. The poems are heartfelt, but the poet does see that they're a bit ridiculous.

Many of the elegies are among Arnold's best poems: "Memorial Verses" (1850), to Wordsworth; "Rugby Chapel" (1867), to his father, "Zealous, beneficent, firm!"; "Heine's Grave" (1867).

My favorite, or perhaps just the one that most surprised me, was "Haworth Churchyard" (1855), about when:

"I saw the meeting of two
Gifted women. The one,
Brilliant with recent renown,
Young, unpractised, had told
With a master's accent her feign'd
Story of passionate life" (7-12)

That's Charlotte Brontë, and the other woman is Harriet Martineau. A "feign'd \ Story of passionate life" - Arnold seems a little suspicious of fiction, doesn't he? But that description 's accurate, and not just of Jane Eyre.

Most of the poem fits the title - a tour of the Haworth churchyard - so when Arnold reaches Charlotte's graveside, he also sings the praises of Anne and Emily and even, rather gassily, of Branwell ("the child \ Of many hopes, of many tears"). Look how the rhetoric ramps up when he discusses a fellow poet:

"-and she
(How shall I sing her?) whose soul
Knew no fellow for might,
Passion, vehemence, grief,
Daring, since Byron died,
That world-famed son of fire - she, who sank
Baffled, unknown, self-consumed;
Whose too bold dying song
Stirr'd, like a clarion-blast, my soul." (92-100)

As with every line of Arnold I've mentioned here, as soon as I copy it out I want to edit it. Why do we need to drag Byron into this, for example? But overall this is meaningful, a recognition of the power of a poet of a very different breed than Matthew Arnold (Arnold definitely lacks vehemence and daring), like the scholar-gypsy another hero in his modern Pantheon.

I've been thinking, for a while, about trying to write about Emily Brontë's poems. Matthew Arnold has inspired me. I like her more than Arnold, but understand her even less. Next week, or part of it, I'll see if I have anything to say about this strange, difficult poet.

Emily Brontë, Maria Edgeworth, and John Galt - a great curiosity

My glance at the scholarly literature suggested to me that a lot of work on Wuthering Heights has been spent on finding the predecessors of Heathcliff. What mix of Lord Byron, Gothic literature, vampires, and Melmoth the Wanderer went into Heathcliff? I understand this; Heathcliff is fascinating, weird, good fun. The stretches of Wuthering Heights that do not feature Heathcliff are less energetic.

Wuthering Heights kept reminding me of two other novels that I am pretty sure are genuine predecessors: Maria Edgewoth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and John Galt's The Entail (1822).

Castle Rackrent is deceptively titled. One might guess that it's a Gothic novel. It is actually "the Memoirs of the Rackrent Famliy" as told by "honest Thady," or "old Thady," or "poor Thady," a servant of the estate. In one hundred pages, Thady pushes us through at least four different owners of the estate, each one more ridiculous than the previous, who lose the estate through drink or gambling or lawsuits. The new owners come and go, but Thady is always there, always expressing his great respect for the masters, always making them appear ludicrous. He's a sly devil.

A short sample of Thady's voice:

"He is said also to be the inventor of raspberry whiskey, which is very likely, as nobody has ever appeared to dispute it with him, and as there still exists a broken punch-bowl in Castle-Stopgap, in the garret, with an inscription to that effect - a great curiosity." (Oxford, p. 10)

It's a very funny little book, unique for it's time. I don't think Nellie Dean is as underhanded in her narration as the continually ironic old Thady, but every once in a while she would quietly slips a knife into someone, and I would be reminded of the only earlier novel I know of where the servant tells the story.

The Entail is the earliest multi-generational family novel I know. A Glasgow merchant, obsessed with recovering some specific pieces of property, all in the name of his family, successively destroys his own heirs. Over time, though, his survivors are able to find ways to repair some of the damage.

I think this novel is a masterpiece, one of the great novels of the 19th century. That it's not better known is some sort of crime; that John Galt's name is now only seen with the words "Who is" in front of it makes me weep hot tears of anger. Be sure to answer the Randians as follows: "A brilliant Scottish novelist of the early 19th century."

Galt's novel covers four generations of the family, a great grandmother down through her great grandchildren, over the course of one hundred years. A family saga that takes one hundred years - why does that sound familiar? Anyway, two things linked The Entail to Wuthering Heights in my mind. The first is the basic structure - one generation causes harm, a second recovers, however imperfectly.

The second link is the importance of money and the acquisition of property. The passionate, insane relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine obscures the fact that the adult Heathcliff spends much of the book scheming about how to acquire the Wuthering Heights and Grange estates. His motive is revenge rather than profit, but his schemes always seem to be highly monetized. Claude, the merchant in the Galt novel, wants property that he thinks is rightfully his, while Heathcliff knows he's cheating the proper heirs. But the results are not that different. Heathcliff's son Linton has some similarities to Claude's son Watty, too.

I don't know that Emily Brontë read either of these books, although I would be surprised if she didn't. I should write more about Galt and Edgeworth some other time. I would have to reread them to do them justice. That would be a great pleasure.

So ends the Wuthering anniversary. Come back in a year for Expectations.

The Brontë family creative writing workshop

I don't have any particularly interest in all of that Brontë stuff. Like being able to see the drawer full of Brontë socks at their house.* The whole terrible Brontë family saga.

But I am interested in how writers write, and the Brontës wrote most of their novels under unusual circumstances. Imagine, in that house on the moors in 1846, all three sisters are writing their first novel at the same time. They would read their work to each other, and criticize each other. It doesn't sound to me like it was a collaborative process, but they must have responded to each other in some way.

The strangest thing may have been that while Charlotte and Anne were writing ordinary first novels, Emily was producing a real masterpiece. Did they know the difference? Charlotte later wrote that she was aware, the first time she read Emily's poetry, that Emily was the only real poet in the family. Charlotte also said that both Emily and Anne had trouble accepting constructive criticism abut their writing, which is delightfully self-serving.

I should admit that I have not read and have no plans to read The Professor, Charlotte's first novel. Agnes Grey, Anne's first, I have read, and it's basically a dud. There's some cute stuff about badly behaving children, but otherwise, it's thin. It's hard to imagine that it was published in a set with Wuthering Heights. The reader who turned directly from Emily's madness on the moors to pale, sensible Agnes must have been startled. Or relieved.

Here's what I think is really great about the Brontë workshop. Whatever the source of her creativity, Emily wrote a truly original book while the other two sisters did not. Charlotte's response was to almost immediately write a masterpiece of her own. Reading the books so close to each other, it's easy to see how many aspects of Jane Eyre respond directly to Wuthering Heights.

Look, for example, at the fairy-and-ogre business in Jane Eyre, that I wrote about here. This now looks to me like a deliberate parody of Emily. Heathcliff and Catherine are monsters, a step removed from human experience. Rochester and Jane play with the idea, but don't really mean it. They're both human, all the way through.

Look at how Charlotte splits Heathcliff in two - Rochester's the wild man, while St. John is the bully, the real monster. Look at how each sister plays around in innovative ways with the first person narrator. I can think of a half dozen more items. It's all very impressive.

Then a little later, Anne produced her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a shocker with a Heathcliff-like alcoholic. I have not read this one yet, but I will. If only the sisters had been able to carry on the conversation. The things they might have dreamed up.

* You apparently have to be a serious researcher to be allowed to see the socks. Pity the non-scholarly Brontë fan.

Heathcliff is a monster

Wuthering Heights is a story about child abuse. It's a story about other things, too, but it's an abuse novel. I think academics prefer the term "trauma," which is a better fit here, since one can include the deaths of the various parents and so on. Heathcliff comes from a terrible background (I assume - that's actually one of the novel's dark mysteries). His foster brother Hindley resents him and abuses him. Heathcliff turns on Hindley as soon as he is powerful enough, and possibly murders him; he's also brutal to Hindley's son Hareton and even worse, much worse, to his own son.

Really brutal - remember pathetic Linton out on the moors, too terrified to stand up. What is he afraid of, what will his father do to him, or what has he done? Brontë doesn't exactly say, but by this point in the book she doesn't need to. Heathcliff is a violent monster.

Sounds hilarious, I know. Romantic, too. That's the shift in tone I was talking about before. For a while, Wuthering Heights is grown-up Lemony Snicket. All sorts of horrible things are threatened, but it's so outrageous it's hard (for me) to take seriously. Look at the scene where a drunken Hindley drops his son over a banister. Heathcliff catches the baby, but is then angry that he did so. This is a terrible scene, really, just awful, but it's also sort of comical. Heathcliff's petulance is outrageous, but not yet threatening enough to spoil the fun.

I'm not so heartless. It's all Nellie Dean's fault. Yes, I blame the narrator: "A miser who has parted with a lucky lottery ticket for five shillings, and finds next day he has lost in the bargain five thousand pounds, could not show a blanker countenance than [Heathcliff] did on beholding the figure of Mr. Earnshaw above." This is what you say when someone saves a baby? That miser upset about the lottery, that's comedy.

Almost all of the story is told to us by Nellie Dean*, who is rarely quite horrified enough by anyone's bad behavior. She always finds rationalizations. The view of Heathcliff as a romantic figure is partly her fault - she likes him well enough. As a narrator, she is an ancestress of Humbert Humbert, an obscurer of atrocities. Heathcliff has corrupted her, too, at least a little.

I don't think the "trauma" interpretation is sufficient. Heathcliff is rescued from a terrible situation by a nice family, right, so he should improve, like Hareton does when rescued from Heathcliff? Heathcliff seems to be an actual monster, a creature of a not-quite-human species, a relative of Frankenstein's creation, or the Icelandic saga heroes who are half troll and can't function in normal society. And how does one explain Catherine, who's a bit of a monster herself? Surely not as a victim of Heathcliff? Wuthering Heights always turns in on itself. It's such a rich novel, but perhaps it's not quite coherent, in the latter respect like this post.

* I'm assuming Lockwood is presenting Nellie's narration more or less accurately. This book is a tangle.

Obscure Emily Brontë - A strange choice of favourites!

Lockwood the lodger is much like the first-time reader. He's completely lost before Wuthering Heights has even properly begun. We're only in Chapter 2 when we get this exchange. Lockwood has just met, and is somehow courting, the peevish Catherine and is asking her about her pets:

'Ah, your favourites are among these?' I continued, turning to an obscure cushion full of something like cats.

'A strange choice of favourites!' she observed scornfully.

Unluckily, it was a heap of dead rabbits. I hemmed once more, and drew closer to the hearth, repeating my comment on the wildness of the evening.

I see now that there's a good reason so many enthusiastic readers pick up such odd impressions of Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë has designed the book to achieve exactly that goal. That's why we start the book with Lockwood, someone who knows nothing and gets everything wrong. Brontë deliberately has him misidentify Heathcliff's relationship with both Hareton and Catherine II, which has the effect of rapidly multiplying the number of characters (ghost husbands and parents appear on every side). Because Lockwood is a fool, he makes it harder for the reader to keep everything straight.

I think the changes in register have some of the same effect. The comic tone at the beginning is misleading and, like the confusion about the family relationships, makes it hard for the reader to know which details are important. All of them, sure, but let's not kid ourselves. That pile of dead rabbits should be pretty memorable, but it, like much of the beginning will inevitably become a blur once we launch into the main current of the story.

Lockwood's dream in Chapter 3 is a good example of how this works. Everyone - everyone! - will remember Catherine's ghost at the window, when "my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!" But what about the page or two before, when the "famous Jabes Branderham" preaches sermons on the "Seventy Times Seven" sins, followed by a dream-battle in the dream-chapel. All of that stuff is part of the underlying imagery and themes of the novel, while Catherine is part of the plot, so any reader trying to figure out what the heck is going on with this crazy book latches onto Catherine's wrists and forgets the other stuff.

What a confident writer Emily Brontë was. The basic story, the creation of Heathcliff and Catherine, and some of the most famous scenes are fine accomplishments on their own, so there are plenty of rewards for the first-time reader. But Wuthering Heights demands to be reread.

I took my dingy volume by the scroop - a Wuthering Heights anniversary - Then there was a hubbub!

"I could not bear the employment. I took my dingy volume by the scroop, and hurled it into the dog kennel, vowing I hated a good book.

Heathcliff kicked his to the same place.

Then there was a hubbub!"

Ha ha! That's the stuff!* Those are, of course, the immortal words of Catherine Linton-Heathcliff-Earnshaw, ten years old** and already out of her gourd. They were also written by Emily Brontë in Chapter 3 of Wuthering Heights, an inspirational book.

The internet is full of re-readings of Wuthering Heights - see Dorothy W. a few months ago for a high-level example, or Rohan Maitzen, who gets it all into one paragraph. "Not what I remember," that's the common refrain. It's not a romantic book, it turns out. Nor a sane one.

I see here that Anna Quindlen has a novel with a scene where a therapist prescribes Wuthering Heights to a teenager for therapeutic purposes. I had not realized that Quindlen had written a thriller about a psychiatrist who gaslights her clients - I had always thought she was so nice. I myself find Wuthering Heights therapeutic, but that's because I think maniacal laughter is healthy.

I have never seen a movie of Wuthering Heights, and I did not read it while an impressionable teen, so I will have to confess that the novel was just as I remembered it: funny, horrifying, original, clumsy in places, sublime in others.

This week I'll celebrate a slightly late first anniversary of Wuthering Expectations by wallowing around in the Wuthering half. I don't have anything in particular to say about the book, but that won't stop me from enjoying a good roll in it, like the bulldog Skulker*** when he has found a particularly fragrant and enticing dead thing on the moor.

P.S. I extend a special welcome to the omniscient Brontëblog, who will somehow make their way here by means of their mysterious internet voodoo.

* More books are abused - kicked around, thrown in fires - in Wuthering Heights than in almost any book I can think of this side of Swift's The Battle of the Books.

** More or less. I didn't keep track that carefully, although Emily Brontë did.

*** Note that it's the "normal" Lintons who have a bulldog named Skulker trained to bite little girls - "and look how Skulker has bitten her -- how her foot bleeds!" This is from Edgar and Catherine's "meet cute" scene - she's bit by a dog, he stands there and points at her.