Once, Penelope had read the difference between fiction and reality was that a novel explained that “she did this because” while life limited itself to saying that “she did this”; that books are the place where everything was clarified, while in life little or nothing wound up comprehensible. That was why people preferred books. That was also why Wuthering Heights was the exception to that rule and why it so resembled Penelope’s inexplicable life, where little or nothing was entirely visible.
The blindness of critics regarding Wuthering Heights is, maybe, not an attitude to be unexpected, confronted with a work of such brilliant and disturbing power, sending tremors through such a tranquil and bucolic landscape. Penelope always thought one of the unmistakable features of a work of genius is that, at first, it always appears as something nobody expects or thinks they need. Something abnormal and, at first, uncomfortable and out of place. Something that doesn’t come with an instruction manual or tool kit. Something that has to sit down and wait for everyone else to get it or catch up to it or learn how to use it.
The perception of a work of genius becomes even more complicated when it is delivered by the hand of a genius who, to top it off, doesn’t correspond to the conventional idea of a genius or of how a genius should be and behave.
And so, at first, nobody can see Emily Brontë.
The only person who really saw her and couldn’t stop staring at her—her sister and administrator of her unforgettable memory—proceeded to set the first stone, with the posthumous edition of Wuthering Heights, of her construction by demolition.
There it reads and is told, settling scores with a love bordering on the most sensitive of reproaches: “Her will was not very flexible, and it generally opposed her interest. Her temper was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her spirit altogether unbending. Doubtless, had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would’ve possessed another character. Even had chance or taste led her to choose a similar subject, she would have treated it otherwise. Had Ellis Bell been a lady or a gentleman accustomed to what is called ‘the world,’ her view of the remote and unclaimed region, as well as of the dwellers therein, would have differed greatly from that actually taken by the home-bred country girl. Doubtless, it would have been wider—more comprehensive: whether it would have been more original or more truthful is not so certain. As far as the scenery and locality are concerned, it could scarcely have been so sympathetic: Ellis Bell did not describe as one whose eye and taste alone found pleasure in the prospect; her native hills were far more to her than spectacle; they were what she lived in, and by, as much as the wild birds, their tenants, or as the heather, their produce. Her descriptions, then, of natural scenery are what they should be, and all they should be. Where delineation of human character is concerned, the case is different. I am bound to avow that she had scarcely more practical knowledge of the peasantry among whom she lived, than a nun has of the country people who sometimes pass her convent gates. My sister’s disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced. And yet she knew them: knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them, she rarely exchanged a word. Hence it ensued that what her mind had gathered of the real concerning them, was too exclusively confined to those tragic and terrible traits of which, in listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress. Her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny, more powerful than sportive, found in such traits material whence it wrought creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catherine. Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done. If the auditor of her work, when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affection. Had she but lived, her mind would of itself have grown like a strong tree, loftier, straighter, wider—spreading, and its matured fruits would have attained a mellower ripeness and sunnier bloom; but on that mind time and experience alone could work: to the influence of other intellects it was not amenable.”
There, in that territory that’s hers and hers alone, according to Charlotte Brontë, are buried the roots of the good depressive wild-woman and of the recluse who stalks the moors. The volatile substance that should never be shaken before use and that moves in a matter of seconds from being sunk in deep wells of melancholy to flying through the skies in ecstasy. That goes from secret tears as she revises her nocturnal verses (those that say things like “I am the only being,” “The night is darkening round me,” like “Shall earth no more inspire thee,” and speak of the imagination as a “Benignant Power” to be worshipped and feared) to the screams of fury when Charlotte Brontë goes through her desk and finds them and proposes publishing them and, later commits the definitive and unforgivable error of revealing the name behind her alias to her new literary friends in London.
The anecdotes abound, yes; because the anecdotes are, to begin with, the boards holding up an as-yet unrecognized genius. She’s not considered a genius, no; but she is, yes, without a doubt, different.
And Emily Brontë has a great deal of material to offer up when it comes to her primary designation as enigma and, according to one critic, “sphinx of English literature” and “author of the most treacherous of English classics.”
Emily Brontë is the one who, unlike her sisters, doesn’t want to be “educated,” who doesn’t need to leave home, and who, when she is obliged to do so, returns soon thereafter on the brink of dying from homesickness, having rejected all pedagogical methods during her stint in Brussels.
Emily Brontë who doesn’t speak to acquaintances but speaks to birds.
Emily Brontë who has an extreme relationship with dogs: when one bites her, she says nothing and cauterizes her lacerated flesh to the bone in secret with a red-hot poker so the dog won’t be put down; when another dog attacks her, she punches it and kicks it down the stairs, and nobody dares intervene, for it was better not to go near her “when her eyes shone in that way in her pale face and her lips pressed together into a stony line” or something like that. And, yes, Miss Hyde in action who, subsequently, turns back into Doctor Jekyll and heals the dog that would love her “with the love of a slave” until the end of her days.
Emily Brontë who would rather cough and die than visit a doctor and be cured.
Emily Brontë who, at first, still fresh and not having settled into the dirt of her tomb, is remembered by those who knew her as, merely, “dull” and “intractable” and “always wearing those old-fashioned, ill-fitting dresses and moving clumsily, always stooping,” to, then, the engines of immortality kicked into gear, beginning to correct her version of the subject with increasing and increasingly impassioned loquacity. With elegiac imagery that, at times, sounds like involuntarily parody of Wuthering Heights: “hers was a mix of extreme timidity with Spartan airs,” “she should have been a man—a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old,” “She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman,” “she was a wild, original, and striking creature,” “she possessed a lovable personality and a very personal elegance and moved with a wild free grace,” “mistress of a defiant humor,” “a pianist of wonderful fire and brilliancy who, besides, did willingly and untiringly the heaviest household drudgery,” “she was the most enigmatic and mysterious of the three Brontë sisters.”
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nbsp; The work of genius produced by the genius undergoes a similar process. Wuthering Heights, which—contrary to what Charlotte Brontë insists on stating and making us believe—was not unanimously condemned in the beginning, though it did suffer the lashes of critics who seem suddenly abducted by the punishing spirit of Heathcliff, ever since and until not long ago. Renowned academics like F. R. Leavis didn’t include it in his The Great Tradition, claiming it was “a kind of sport” (adding that the rest of the sisters’ work was nothing more than “a permanent interest of a minor kind” and, hey, pins to stick in a little Leavis doll or, better, strangle that little dog he surely has around or, if he’s dead, to profane his tomb and dance on his bones; Penelope promises herself she’ll do this and, also, promises herself not to mention it to her doctors); and people continue to pop up every so often who don’t hesitate to write off Wuthering Heights as “a romance novel of certain prestige.”
Before, in the beginning, Wuthering Heights was: “a disagreeable story,” “a strange, inartistic story” seemingly only interested in “painful and exceptional subjects,” “We know nothing in the whole range of our fictitious literature which presents such shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity … There is not in the entire dramatis persona, a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible … Even the female characters excite something of loathing and much of contempt,” “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery,” “It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors,” “There seems to be great power in this book but a purposeless power,” and “It could be that this book was written by a woman, but it was not written by a lady.”
And yet, in breaking storm, amid so much outcry, there are moved and admiring voices that, even from the beginning, start to put Wuthering Heights in its rightful place: “Respecting a book so original as this, and written with so much power of imagination, it is natural that there should be many opinions. Indeed, its power is so predominant that it is not easy after a hasty reading to analyze one’s impressions so as to speak of its merits and demerits with confidence. We have been taken and carried through a new region, a melancholy waste, with here and there patches of beauty,” “Yes, as Lockwood describes in its opening pages: a perfect misanthrope’s heaven,” “This novel contains undoubtedly powerful writing, and yet it seems to be thrown away. Mr. Ellis Bell, before constructing the novel, should have known that forced marriages, under threats and in confinement are illegal, and parties instrumental thereto can be punished. And second, that wills made by young ladies’ minors are invalid. The volumes are powerfully-written records of wickedness, and they have a moral—they show what Satan could do with the law of Entail,” “This is a strange book and the people who make up the drama are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer,” “It is humanity in this wild state that the author of Wuthering Heights essays to depict,” “In the whole story not a single trait of character is elicited which can command our admiration, not one of the fine feelings of our nature seems to have formed a part in the composition of its principal actors. In spite of the disgusting coarseness of much of the dialogue, and the improbabilities of much of the plot, we are spellbound,” “Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterward and say nothing about it. In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by the details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love—even over demons in the human form. The women in the book are of a strange fiendish-angelic nature, tantalizing, and terrible, and the men are indescribable out of the book itself. Yet, toward the close of the story occurs the following pretty, soft picture, which comes like the rainbow after a storm … We strongly recommend all our readers who love novelty to get this story, for we can promise them that they never have read anything like it before,” “The author only had three ideas: but those ideas are nothing more and nothing less than life and love and death,” “The nightmare of a superheated imagination,” “Its characters do not resemble any others in our reading experience, so we must leave it to our readers to decide what sort of book it is.”
And the readers decide.
And soon Wuthering Heights turns into a fetish object of the sighing and moaning schoolgirls of the end of that century who sleep with it and delve into its ardors under boarding-school pillows. Algernon Charles Swinburne admires “the dark unconscious” of its author. Dante Gabriel Rossetti refers to Wuthering Heights as “A fiend of a book—an incredible monster […] The action is laid in hell—only it seems places and people have English names there.” And a short time later, the philosopher May Sinclair inaugurates the idea of Emily Brontë as mystic-proto-ecologist. Someone points out that “Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre, because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte” and someone elevates it to the heights of “a kind of prose Kubla Khan.” The languid feminists and the muscular feminists and lesbians of action and the passive lesbians hoist it aloft like a standard and the suicide poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath (driven mad by that Heathcliff Ted Hughes) dedicate their own crepuscular poems to it. And Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly recommends to the writer that he write “something like Wuthering Heights.” And Yoko Ono (telephonic typer of aphorisms like “If you can’t sleep, visualize your friends and enemies being happy. Go to sleep thinking about that”) screeched in “You’re the One” that she is Cathy and John is Heathcliff. And mentions of the novel in An American Werewolf in London and The Simpsons and in Mad Men and in an interview with the actor Johnny Depp where he asks and answers “Am I a romantic? I have seen Wuthering Heights ten times. I’m a romantic.”
And Penelope—who can’t help but wonder if Johnny Depp has read Wuthering Heights at least once in addition to having seen it ten times—cuts out and compiles and stores all this information in scrapbooks and on hard disks. Everything Penelope knows about just one thing. Information now deposited, along with all the rest—shall we say Brontë-esquely—of her “earthly possessions,” in a basement in the gothic mansion where, now, her bad brother lives, guardian of her memory, of the memory of her, she who can’t forget anything and can’t remember that. And Penelope agrees: there’s nothing worse than older siblings who say they’re protecting you and who, so you don’t fall down, chain your foot to the wall and, yes, can even end up burning inside your head the second novel you never managed to write. And nothing bothers Penelope more than those interpretations that claim Catherine and Heathcliff are stepsiblings, daughter and son of the same father. And that their passion feeds on something so crude as second-rate incest, when, actually, it is a love beyond love. A love for which love is nothing more than the entryway to a straight-lined labyrinth, or the elevator to a launch tower to the stars, or the ladder of the tallest diving board off which to plunge to the bottom of all things.
“You have killed me,” says Catherine, more alive than ever and on the brink of death, to a dying Heathcliff who will live on after her for many long years.
Here inside, as it relates to feelings, for Penelope, everything is much more clumsy and mild and fleeting and as if anesthetized.
Common love is, in the words of Catherine, “like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees” and it looks nothing like “the eternal rocks” beneath the roots.
Here, in Our Lady of Our Lady of Our Lady of … Penelope likes to tell herself that “if the heart could think like the brain, the heart would stop immediately.” Voluntary victim of sudden cardiac arrest. Ripping open its shirt, sending all its buttons flying, to flip the secret switch that marks the end of all heartbeats and the immediate echo of the next heartbeat. Heartbeats like footsteps up a ramp th
at climbs and climbs and climbs only to reach a wall with no way out. A wall that, the effort of trying unsuccessfully to tear it down, ends up breaking your heart in a thousand pieces.
Emily Brontë (unlike her two sisters, who write about society’s external forces) becomes the first great explorer of the tyrannical internal forces (in Wuthering Heights, novel-of-homes, the domestic is elevated to the Olympic) and thus the psychoanalysts have new archetypes to assist in their diagnoses.
And the legend continues and grows until it reaches Penelope when she’s going through puberty.
And Penelope reads Wuthering Heights and she can’t believe what she’s reading, but, from then on, she believes in nothing else. Wuthering Heights as religion and state of mind and way of life.
A book that, as much in the moment of its publication as right now, is simultaneously old-fashioned and avant-garde.
A book that’s mad and wise. A book that’s imperfectly perfect and perfectly imperfect.
A brilliant book, both idiot and savant.
A book where, yes, everything is love and hate and life and death, but that’s really all you need.
And it’s not that such things don’t happen outside books: it’s that such things don’t happen in any other book that’s not Wuthering Heights, whose only defect is coming to an end and being unique—being one of a kind.
The Dreamed Part Page 22