by Deborah Lutz
Where the lark—the wild skylark was filling
Every breast with delight like its own.
Yet, characteristically, this is a poem about longing for a terrain that can’t be had: the speaker remembers the dear place from far away because he is forced to be, the poem explains, “in exile afar.” 28
Being in exile from the true self, whatever or wherever that may be, is a common turn in Emily’s poems, which Janet Gezari (the foremost scholar of Emily’s poetry) characterizes as opening “oneself to one’s own absence.” This is the state that both Catherine and Heathcliff experience when they can’t be together. Catherine sees Heathcliff as “more myself than I am”: “If all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger.” When Catherine dies, Heathcliff laments that his soul is in the grave: “I cannot live without my life!” Many of Emily’s poems situate the beloved as dead and buried, and the lover as the one lingering over the grave. In “Remembrance,” the female speaker’s “only Love” is “cold in the earth . . . Far, far, removed, cold in the dreary grave!” But her thoughts of the dead still hover and rest their “wings where heath and fern-leaves cover” his noble heart. There is something seductive about this grave, like the north wind. She “dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain” or drink deep of that “divinest anguish” because then she would never seek the land of the living again. In other words, she would die to be with him, just as Heathcliff ends his life happily because he thinks he sees Catherine beckoning him just “three feet away,” on the other side of the permeable divide between life and death. His lonely life, devoured by the desire to be with her, ends in Catherine’s box bed, with a “gaze of exultation” on his face. Like Catherine, he quickens to death. 29
Longing is the emotional content of most of Emily’s writing, whether for a lost self or land, the perished, or for escape into death. The plangent call in her poems, the ache arising from absence, can at times bring a complicated ecstasy along with pain. This love of longing has a philosophical dimension, expressed by Romantic thinkers with the German term Sehnsucht. The grandeur and the tragedy of the finite nature of humanity brings on Sehnsucht, a kind of obsessive thinking about the beauties of loss. Emily’s poems are in thrall to time, to the fact that we must live in it and that it must end. This brings anguish, but also the kind of pure aliveness that shines out at times in her works. 30
The stern terrain of her home, a place of Sehnsucht, shaped this appetite for endlessness, for always wanting more, which became Emily’s great theme. It was an emotional tendency probably already in her nature, Charlotte felt, rounded off by her native land. She saw Emily as a “nursling of the moors,” carrying inside her the “purple light” of blooming heather, the shadows of the “sullen hollow in a livid hill-side.” Her type of brooding—a pining after infinity—had its external counterpart, for Emily, in the wind. Only visible in what it moves, the wind makes apparent empty spaces. It seems to come from nowhere and go nowhere. The title of Wuthering Heights aside (which basically means “wind’s place”), winds appear in poem after poem as fitful, chainless souls that breathe spells, swell with divine joy, bring bright rejoicing to the trees. The west wind can be the most soothing air, calming dreams, the restless dead, flowers’ blooms, but it also causes the pulse to “bound anew.” The south has a gentle voice, and when it breaks the “icy grave” of the earth, then “’Tis sweet to wander here at night / To watch the winter die.” The “bleak, bleak” east wind sobs, and the north roars and raves or has a bitter sigh. Wandering airs in her poems speak of sadness, are texts of melancholy, such as an autumn wind that “sighs mournfully,” or a faraway gust that “comes sighing o’er the heathy sea.” Winds moan as they rove; they grieve, repine, lament, wail, flit forebodingly, call the darkness down again: they are figures for loss and lack. The nightwind plays a “lonely vesper hymn”; it is, like its fellow zephyrs, a physical expression of longing. 31
The wind brings on a desire to step outside and be in it, to let it wilder and wuther the body. A glorious blast, in a poem of July 6, 1841, sweeps the world aside, dashes memory from the mind. The walker becomes the “essence of the Tempest’s roaring,” a spirit pouring her presence into all, a “principle of life intense / Lost to mortality.” To die in the wind is to never die because it pushes her “to reach, at last, the eternal home,” a kind of perishing into infinity. 32
While nature and the wind brought Emily a kind of spiritual transcendence, being in and feeling with the body was part of the magic of the moors for her. Walking is a way of being in the body; its restlessness and movement can make it an articulation of yearning. The importance of breath in her verse, of the throb or the tremble that came with emotional reactions to nature—the burst of tears—revealed a visceral engagement with her subject matter. Somehow she needed to transcend the body in her imaginative flights, but also be with and in it, in order to truly feel the gust on her cheek or the sunshine on her skin. It is no wonder that after Emily died, Charlotte found when walking the moors that “there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me of her.” 33
It is hard to think of an author more tied to place: this stands as a testament to Emily’s gifts as a writer of the local. Charlotte was the first of a long string of admirers who believed that it was only by walking on the moors that Emily’s presence could be felt, if it could be felt at all. Not so much in the house itself, its rooms, or even the things that Emily used, such as, perhaps, Branwell’s walking stick, can intimacy with her physical life be had, but rather in setting out into the heath. The pathways around Haworth became themselves relics, and walking them was to walk in her footsteps, to see what she saw, to try to reconstruct her flux of experience. Emily remains the genius loci of these miles of heath.
Not surprisingly, tourists began to flock to Haworth, beginning in the 1850s, soon after it became known that the person publishing under the pen name Currer Bell was a curate’s daughter named Charlotte Brontë, born and bred in this little corner of England, along with her now-dead sisters, Emily and Anne. Pilgrimages to the homes and haunts of revered writers were made around the turn of the nineteenth century to commune with genius, and the Victorians turned the practice into a widely fashionable form of pleasurable travel. Wordsworth and other Romantics popularized the walking tour, but their belief in the centrality of the individual also brought a shift away from allegiance to religious figures to national ones and then to personal ones. One might worship Shakespeare, Robert Burns, or Emily Brontë as secular saints worthy of pilgrimage, not so different from the travels to religious shrines and relics in the past. Books on such travel proliferated, such as William Howitt’s 1847 Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets and Theodore Wolfe’s 1895 Literary Pilgrimage among the Haunts of Famous British Authors. T. P. Grinsted described his project in the preface to his 1867 Last Homes of Departed Genius: “Our plan is, first, to sketch the edifice or locality; then, to glance at the busy lives of those who there lie sleeping, and thus to present to the reader their first and last.” 34
John Keats understood a walking pilgrimage to a literary shrine to be part of his apprenticeship to poetry. He trekked to the house in which Robert Burns was born, during an 1818 walking tour that covered 642 miles and included the Lake District, in order to “use [me] to more hardship, [to] identify finer scenes, load me with grander Mountains, and strengthen more my reach in Poetry, than would stopping at home among Books.” It inspired him to write a sonnet about his own body standing there in Burns’s house, moving toward death, a death that had already taken Burns: “This mortal body of a thousand days / Now fills, O Burns, a space in thine own room.” Charlotte visited the show house of her hero Sir Walter Scott on a trip to Scotland in 1850. Abbotsford, as Scott called it, was fast becoming a major tourist attraction, only to be rivaled in the future by Haworth. She didn’t record her reactions to the historical souvenirs Sco
tt had amassed there in his nostalgic drive to hold onto history, such as remnants of the Battle of Waterloo collected from the battlefield itself by his own hands two months after its end; a walking stick given to him by a friend, made from a hazel that grew near a key position in the same battle; and a chair made of wood from the beams of the house where the Scottish nationalist William Wallace was captured in the fourteenth century. Charlotte wrote no poem on the experience, but other visitors of the time found that the pilgrimage evoked a communing with Scott in the flesh, like Keats felt with Burns. A suit of Scott’s clothes, bolstered by the presence of his walking stick, was on display, along with a lock of his hair and his death mask. One pilgrim had a walking stick made from a tree that grew out of Scott’s tomb. 35
This need to travel to the very site where the beloved author was born, lived, or died became integral to Brontë fandom from the start. The luster of Haworth as a destination for literary pilgrims began even before Charlotte’s death. The Brontë scholar Lucasta Miller details how the “cult” that developed around Charlotte—the only celebrity in the family at first—and the religious awe many felt for her soon came to encompass Haworth and its environs. Haworth and the Brontës are “somehow inextricably mixed,” wrote a young Virginia Woolf, herself a vehement moor wanderer and daughter of the Sunday tramper Leslie Stephen, when she went on her pilgrimage there in 1904. “It expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express it; they fit like a snail its shell.” So convincing was the notion that the Brontës were the landscape, many writers assumed that the sisters’ bodies were buried in that peaty, moorland soil, as Emily puts Catherine Earnshaw not in the chapel, nor in the tomb with her relations, but “on a green slope, in a corner of the kirkyard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor; and peat mould almost buries it.” Despite the fact that Emily and Charlotte are buried in a vault beneath the church and Anne at Scarborough, Matthew Arnold, who met Charlotte in 1850, places them all around each other in “Haworth Churchyard,” so that “the grass / Blows from their graves to thy [Charlotte’s] own!” He imagines them waking from their eternal sleep with the west wind and the plovers calling. Emily Dickinson, an adorer of the Brontës, compounded the confusion by picturing Charlotte’s grave as a cage (and Charlotte a dead nightingale), “all overgrown by cunning moss / All interspersed with weed.” 36
One of the first Haworth pilgrims was a young Bessie Rayner Parkes, the walker and feminist. Along with admiring the Romantic poets and practicing their radical pedestrianism, she was also a lover of Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights. One wonders if her walking habit was influenced by Emily’s Catherine. Elizabeth Gaskell, another early pilgrim, had met Charlotte in 1850 in, of all places, the Lake District. Gaskell came to stay at the parsonage in September 1853 and accompanied Charlotte through the “sweeping moors.” “Oh! those high, wild, desolate moors, up above the whole world, and the very realms of silence,” she declared in a letter. After one of these walks she decided that Emily must have been a “remnant of the Titans—great granddaughter of the giants, who used to inhabit the earth.” Her 1857 best-selling biography of Charlotte dwelled on place almost as much as person, with the Brontës and their works inextricably interwoven with their home terrain. 37
Many other pilgrims followed. Some walked from Keighley to Haworth and, after visiting the church, the graveyard, and the parsonage, would saunter out behind the house and feel the wind that “blew across these moors on that January winter’s day, fiercely, coldly, but right gloriously,” a visitor in 1867 remarked. Longer walking tours of Yorkshire began to include a stop in Haworth. One traveler in 1871 found the moors dreary and desolate, but could see the “charm of freedom in their wild solitude.” Like many after him, he wanted to imagine the sisters there, and he fell asleep in the high grass and lost “consciousness of my own identity in trying to realize the daily influences of nature and society that had shaped and disciplined those remarkable characters.” A romantic girl, Emma Cullum Huidekoper of Pennsylvania, arrived in 1866 with the “one idea . . . to fly to the moorland eyrie of her dreams and there to remain forever.” 38
The trek to Haworth became an important rite of passage for women writers, an early stage in the apprenticeship of the likes of Parkes, Gaskell, and Woolf. Sylvia Plath went with Ted Hughes in 1956, just after their marriage. They hiked up to Top Withins, and Plath wrote of the two pathways there in her journal: one “a track worn, losing itself, but not lost” and the other “across the slow heave, hill on hill from any other direction across bog down to the middle of the world . . . all eternity, wildness, loneliness.” The house at Top Withins, with its two trees “where the long winds come, piece the light in a stillness.” In a poem called “Wuthering Heights” based in part on her moor wandering, she says that the wind “pours by like destiny” and “the sky leans on me.” 39
Later poets influenced by Emily found that walking went hand in hand with watching the natural world from within its everyday texture, what the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne called Emily’s “love of earth for earth’s sake.” In Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” her remarkable poem about troubled desire and Emily Brontë, she ponders the character of the watcher in Emily’s poems, which Emily spelled “whacher”: “Tell me, whacher, is it winter?” Carson pictures Emily as this “whacher”:
She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night.
She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.
She whached the bars of time, which broke.
She whached the poor core of the world,
wide open.40
When the Haworth church was pulled down and rebuilt in the 1870s because of decay (and over the vehement protests of Brontë lovers), parts of the wooden interior were saved as relics. Pew fronts with renters’ names painted on them became treasured souvenirs, and oak from furniture and rafters was recycled into many items, such as urns, vases, salt boxes, candlesticks, paper knives, picture frames, tobacco boxes, spittoons, tatting shuttles, and at least one “escritoire.” And, not surprisingly: a walking stick. 41
CHAPTER FOUR
Keeper, Grasper, and Other Family Animals
The dog was throttled off; his huge, purple tongue hanging
half a foot out of his mouth, and his pendent lips streaming
with bloody slaver.
—EMILY BRONTË, Wuthering Heights
KEEPER IS IN the kitchen,” Emily announced on July 30, 1841. But Keeper, Emily’s big dog, was often in other parts of the house too, ones where he wasn’t allowed. Both Aunt Branwell and Tabby were afraid of the powerful beast, who had a history of lunging at the throat of anyone who tried to punish him. Soon after his arrival at the parsonage in 1838, Keeper took up the habit of slinking upstairs when no one was about, jumping up on a bed, and stretching out on the clean bedspreads for a nap. Tabby didn’t want her counterpanes dirtied, and Emily, knowing that this habit would mean Keeper’s banishment, declared that she would beat him into submission if he did it again. When Tabby came to her one day to tell her that Keeper was drowsing on one of the best beds, Charlotte watched Emily’s face become grim and set. Emily dragged Keeper, who was lowly growling and had stiffened his legs to make it more difficult to move him, down the steps by the scruff of his neck, Charlotte and Tabby watching in the hallway. Cornering him at the bottom of the staircase, Emily clenched her fist, and before he had time to bite her, she beat him about the eyes. She punched him until he was almost blind from the swelling. Then she led him into the kitchen and tended to his wounds herself. After this, his stubborn loyalty was directed all toward her. 1
Keeper, whose collar is pictured here, was a gift to Emily. His exact breed is hard to determine—he was once called a “conglomerate, combining every species of English caninity from the turnspit to the sheepdog, with a strain of Haworth originality superadded.” Probably mostly bull terrier—a cross between a bulldog and a terrier—Keeper might have had some mastiff mixed
in his blood. The classification and standardization of dog breeds was still in its infancy in the 1830s. In 1859 the British held their first formal dog show; in 1873 they founded the Kennel Club. Humans had not yet fully invented the breeds that today we often assume are “pure.” The bull terriers of the 1830s usually had longer legs than they do today, for instance, and were bred for dog fighting, badger hunting and drawing, and bull baiting (tethering a bull to a stick, to be attacked by dogs). Such “sports” were popular in rural areas during this time; in Haworth they were still being practiced openly in the 1850s. They slowly fell out of favor and were outlawed with the growing power of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in 1824, which pushed through various laws, accumulating in the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act. Bull terriers became known as a breed favored by women in the Victorian period, for reasons now obscure. Too large to be used as “turnspits,” mentioned in the quotation above to describe Keeper’s breed, bull terriers and related mixes had little in common with the small, bandy-legged worker dogs put in caged treadmills connected to spits that turned meat over a fire. Even so, some of them spent their lives working, as did other breeds. Draft dogs, usually Newfoundlands, pulled carts, carriages, trucks, and barrows, and hauled boats along rivers. One could still, in Britain in the early nineteenth century, buy gloves and wallets made of dog skin. 2
Emily probably gave Keeper his name, but we don’t know why she chose it. Perhaps because the other pups weren’t for keeping, like this one was? Or was it to signal his guard dog capabilities: to keep guard, to keep safe? Perhaps he kept hold of things, once his strong jaws had locked? Or was there something else he kept, like secrets? The name Keeper, along with Grasper, another Brontë dog, and many of the canines that slink around in Wuthering Heights, like Gnasher, Wolf, Growler, Thrasher, and Throttler, are throwbacks to an earlier time, when animals were less likely to have human names because they were less likely to be kept as pets. These names sound more like labels for what the dogs did, or were kept to do, like gnash teeth at an intruder, or skulk about the stranger’s heels with suspicion. The name “Wolf” especially evokes the long history of dogs in Yorkshire. Archaeologists have discovered Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) dog remains in an area called Star Carr, where dogs kept the packs of wolves—who had dens in the fens among the rushes, bogs, and furze—from killing sheep in the night. Bred from wolves themselves, these dogs had jaws and teeth with both lupine and canine characteristics. Much later, ancient Romans in Britain used ancestors of such wolfish dogs to bear messages, attached to their collars. 3