The Brontë Cabinet

by Deborah Lutz

  Emily died a few months after Branwell—possibly catching his consumption—and just a year after the publication of Wuthering Heights. Her death looked nothing like her character Catherine Earnshaw’s “escape into that glorious world.” It started in October 1848, with the east wind “blowing wild and keen over our cold hills,” and with Emily plagued by a persistent cough and an obstinate pain in her chest. “She looks very, very thin and pale,” Charlotte fretted to Ellen. Emily irritably refused sympathy or even any mention of her illness. She continued all of her daily work, spent no extra time in bed, and was fully resolved to deal unflinchingly with her own suffering. She worsened as autumn grew on, becoming feverish and short of breath. Charlotte demanded repeatedly that Emily see the local physician, but this only made Emily angry. She wouldn’t let any “poisoning doctor” come near her. Charlotte and Anne often paused in their sewing or writing to listen to Emily’s step fail as she climbed the staircase, to hear her labored breath forcing frequent pauses. They couldn’t discuss it in her presence, let alone assist her; her usual wall of reserve was now strengthened by stoicism. Becoming more “piteously wasted,” as the days went by, she struggled to draw breath. Charlotte “incurred her displeasure” by again urging the necessity of calling in a doctor, but Emily, intractable, insisted that “Nature shall be left to take her own course.” 6

  By the end of November, any exertion caused her breathing to become a rapid pant. “Day by day,” Charlotte later said of this dark period, “when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love.” Or, put another way, “on herself she had no pity.” In her desperation, Charlotte wrote to a Dr. Epps, trying to describe Emily’s illness in order to receive advice, but the effort proved difficult because Emily would not explain her symptoms. Charlotte, not able to accept how close Emily was to death, retained a fragile hope that she would finally rally. Only later did Charlotte see Emily’s death as of a piece with her life: “Never in her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now . . . she made haste to leave us.” Emily persisted, on the evening before she died, in the nightly ritual of feeding Keeper and Flossy herself, but she staggered on the uneven flagging of the floor and fell against the passage wall. 7

  On the morning of her death, Emily got up and dressed herself, with “the rattle in her throat” and “dying all the while.” Attempting to untangle her hair, she dropped her bone comb in the fire. She watched it burn, too weak to retrieve it. A servant, Martha Brown, came into the room and pulled it out, a few of its teeth having been consumed by the fire. Emily then went downstairs and attempted to sew while Charlotte, who had no inkling Emily would die that day, sat writing to Ellen that “moments so dark as these I have never known.” As noon came on, a terrible change approached. Charlotte finally understood what was imminent when, after a long hunt on the moors for a spray of heather, she presented the flower, Emily’s favorite, to her, but Emily no longer recognized it. Collapsing on the black, horsehair-stuffed sofa in the parlor, Emily whispered to Charlotte, in between gasps, “If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now.” Dr. Wheelhouse was called in, but it was no use. After a “short, hard conflict,” Emily, aged thirty, was “torn from conscious, panting, reluctant.” She died at two o’clock on December 19, of tuberculosis. 8

  William Wood constructed her coffin, recording in his account book that it was just five feet, seven inches long and sixteen inches broad—the smallest he had made for an adult, he claimed. The family purchased white gloves for funeral attendees, some of whom kept them as mementos. Buried underneath the church floor, Emily no longer felt “the hard frost and keen wind,” Charlotte thought, finding some comfort. Black-edged memorial cards were ordered from Joseph Fox—a “confectioner,” the cards say—who dropped a year from her age and a diaeresis from her name: “In Memory of Emily Jane Bronte, who died December XIX, MDCCCXLVII, Aged Twenty-Nine Years.” 9

  The day after the funeral, Charlotte wrote to Ellen on mourning stationery, with a black seal, her handwriting rough with emotional distress and desolation: “There is no Emily in Time or on Earth now . . . She has died in a time of promise—we saw her torn from life in its prime.” A postscript scribbled at the top of the letter, an afterthought written just as she was sealing it up, pleads with raw emotion: “Try to come—I never so much needed the consolation of a friend’s presence.” In other letters she rang the changes on this belief that Emily was “torn”: “from us in the fullness of our attachment, rooted up in the prime of her own days in the promise of her powers . . . like a tree in full bearing—struck at the root.” She asked with great bitterness, in another letter, “And where is she now? Out of my reach—out of my world, torn from me.” 10

  When Charlotte looked at Emily’s face in death, did she believe in an afterlife written there? Her question about Emily’s posthumous location—“And where is she now?”—implies that she had doubts. In fact, Charlotte’s words held a touch of heresy. Heaven, as pictured by sermons and consolation letters of the time, contained loved ones waiting for those still down below, in a place so familiar it varied little from a middle-class suburb. The dead maintained an active existence—growing, continuing good works in their physical selves, and watching over the living. Charlotte wrote such letters herself, at times able to imagine such a place. “Certainly she is happy where she is gone,” Charlotte consoled Ellen when Ellen’s sister Sarah died, using characteristic language of the day, “far happier than she was here—when the first days of mourning are past you will see that you have reason rather to rejoice at her removal.” Charlotte’s publisher William Smith Williams wrote to her of Emily’s state of existence just after her death as pure and exalted. She looked down with “heavenly serenity” at those who mourned her, he wanted Charlotte to believe. Patrick often aired such ideas in letters, such as one to the mother of a little girl who “closed her eyes, on time, and open’d them in eternity, I doubt not in an Eternity of glory and bliss.” When his own wife died, her “soul took its flight to the mansions of glory,” he told a friend. 11

  We don’t have Anne’s reaction to her siblings’ deaths, but she was the most devout of the Brontë children and believed in the doctrine of universal salvation—that everyone would be elevated eventually to heaven, even if some had to spend a little time in purgatorial fires. She grew ill not long after Emily’s death, with the same symptoms, but was as patient and tractable with doctors and their remedies as Emily was unyielding. She drank loads of cod-liver oil and carbonate of iron, which made her nauseous, then she agreed to be treated by hydropathy (dousing in cold water) and with Godbold’s Vegetable Balsam. She wore the cork innersoles that Ellen sent, to keep off the cold of the parsonage’s flagstone floors. By March, Anne was clearly dying. Insisting on traveling to the seaside in May, she convinced Charlotte and Ellen Nussey to take her to Scarborough. Here her life rapidly ebbed. On the day she died, she asked if they might be able to get home if they started right away. But there was no possibility of reaching Haworth in time. She died in Scarborough, on May 28, 1849, aged twenty-eight. And that is where Charlotte buried her, making her the only family member not interred in the vaults under the floors of the Haworth church.

  Even more than with Branwell’s death, Anne’s affirmed Charlotte’s sometimes troubled faith in an afterlife. Charlotte shared the view, common among friends and family, that Anne was a sort of saint going to paradise. Anne sank “resigned—trusting in God . . . deeply assured that a better existence lay before her.” Anne’s quiet, Christian demise struck Charlotte as the opposite of Emily’s stern end, and she even developed a narrative about how Anne, from childhood, seemed always prepared for an early death, whereas Emily turned “her dying eyes reluctantly from the pleasant sun.” Ellen’s description of Anne’s dying moments made concrete her saintliness and closeness to God: Anne “without a sigh passed from the temporal to the Eternal. So still, so hallowed, were her last hours and moments i
t was more like a translation than a death.” 12

  Unlike Anne’s, Emily’s religious beliefs will always remain a mystery. Perhaps she constructed her own faith out of the philosophy and spiritual thought picked up in her reading. A small clue might be found in Emily’s reaction to Mary Taylor, Charlotte’s freethinking friend. Mary, on a visit to Haworth, mentioned that someone had asked about her religion and she had replied tartly, “That is between God and me.” When Emily, lying on the hearthrug, heard this, she exclaimed, “That’s right.” 13

  Wuthering Heights is full of characters who believe in different kinds of postmortem lives, from Nelly’s conventional heaven to Catherine’s dream about being kicked out of heaven and landing, to her delight, on the paradise of the earthly moors. Country folk report seeing the ghosts of Catherine and Heathcliff. A young shepherd claims his sheep refuse to be guided because the dead lovers flit across the road. Others “swear on the Bible” that Heathcliff “walks.” Catherine promises Heathcliff that “they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me; but I won’t rest till you are with me—I never will!” He believes her, having always had a “strong faith in ghosts.”

  The strangest notion about death in the novel gives the corpse itself a value, as if in the afterlife the body still mattered. When Heathcliff slips into Catherine’s room to see her body, he finds the curl of Linton’s light hair in the locket around her neck. He throws it to the floor, replacing it with a hank from his own black head. Many who sent tokens down into the grave with a loved one imagined a sort of life down there, as if the dead might be able to see or care about such things. John Callcott Horsley, a popular Victorian painter, wrote in his diary about a little red-velvet bag he hung around his wife Elvira’s neck after her death in 1852. It contained locks of his and all their children’s hair, which she had cut herself when she found out she was dying, labeling each with the person’s name and the date it was snipped. Like Horsley and his family, both Edgar Linton and Heathcliff want a synecdochic fragment of their bodies to persevere in the place where Catherine is going. They dearly hope that their hair will act as tenuous filaments stretching across the permeable boundary between life and death. 14

  Letters and manuscripts might have meaning to the dead. Horsley also included letters to his wife in a pine box settled next to her body, and the poet John Keats asked to be buried with letters from Fanny Brawne, the woman he had hoped to marry. He received these letters from her when he was dying, but he was too distraught to open them, so they went into his coffin sealed and unread, along with a lock of her hair and a purse made by his sister. In another gesture of adding pages to a coffin, the Victorian poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti buried the only copy of his recently written verse with his young wife, Elizabeth Siddal, who had committed suicide. An act of atonement for the part he felt he played in her death, the interment of his notebook turned out to be only temporary. When he wanted to publish the poems years later, he had her coffin opened and the sodden, wormy book pried away from her body. Sometimes texts were added to coffins for practical reasons. A Victorian woman had promised that when her close friend died she would bury with her letters from a son who had predeceased her. But the woman forgot, when this friend indeed died, to include the letters in her grave. Luckily, a local postman died soon afterward, and the woman buried the letters with him, assuming that he would deliver the letters to her friend in his next existence. 15

  Many still believed in grave goods—belongings included with the corpse in case they might be needed on the other side—a mixture of early Christian and even earlier pagan ideas that still lingered. Pennies, combs, jewelry, and medicine bottles were nestled next to bodies. Confusions about what happened to the body in the afterlife—whether the soul stayed in the grave with the body until judgment day, for instance, or was judged right at death and then reunited in heaven with the body—led many to feel that the dead body must be as whole as possible upon burial. The ancient custom of holding onto lost teeth and including them with one’s corpse, to have a full set after death, survived well into the mid-nineteenth century. Violent protests against human dissection grew, in part, out of this thinking that the body would be raised to heaven. 16

  Catherine’s corpse, buried with his hair in her locket, has, for Heathcliff, a secret life on which he dwells longingly. Finally needing to press his flesh against hers, he digs up her grave, not once but twice. When her husband, Edgar Linton, dies and his grave next to Catherine is being dug, Heathcliff gets the sexton to remove earth off of her coffin lid so he can open it. Preserved in the peaty soil, her face is yet hers, and Heathcliff thinks he’ll stay there with her for good. The sexton has “hard work” to stir him, but tells him her face would “change if the air blew on it.” So, instead, Heathcliff strikes one side of the coffin loose and bribes the sexton “to pull it away, when I am laid there, and slide mine out too . . . by the time Linton gets to us, he’ll not know which is which!” His yearning for Catherine even after her death includes her body; he wants to find her “resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child,” and it doesn’t matter if his heart is “stopped and my cheek frozen against hers.” What he unearths are not so much “remains” as Catherine herself, and what he desires most is not that their spirits meet in heaven, as a good evangelical would, but that their bodies dissolve into each other, in the earth.

  Finding a measure of eroticism in bodies—or parts of bodies—joined in the grave wasn’t new to the Victorians. The seventeenth-century poet John Donne, for instance, wrote two poems about corpses wearing their lovers’ hair as bracelets, emblems of the two being, at last, together. In “The Relic,” the speaker fears that a gravedigger will disturb the “bracelet of bright hair about the bone” that might allow the lovers to “meet at this grave, and make a little stay.” Victorians also saw the appeal of the grave as a kind of marriage bed. In Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson’s 1842 “Locksley Hall” (which Emily knew well, as she did Donne’s poems) the speaker thinks it “Better thou wert dead before me . . . Better thou and I were lying, hidden from the heart’s disgrace, / Roll’d in one another’s arms, and silent in a last embrace.” The Victorian writer Algernon Charles Swinburne says in a poem that he (or an alter ego) wishes he were dead with his lover today, “Lost sight of, hidden away out of sight, / Clasped and clothed in the cloven clay . . . Made one with death, filled full of the night.” 17

  Emily, alert to intensities of longing, created Heathcliff with these desires in mind. He pines for his body to meet Catherine’s in the grave and make just such a little stay. But she also has a presence above ground, he believes, which draws so near that he can’t sleep or eat from yearning for her. When he tries to sleep in her box bed in order to find her, he is “beaten out of” it, for the moment he closes his eyes, she is “either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room . . . and I must open my lids to see.” He finds her in all things, especially those everyday objects around the house, as if her spirit has infused ordinary matter. “I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flag!” Inanimate things seem to come alive, to gain a certain strangeness, because they feed on an afterlife. There is not only the fir branch knocking on the window that becomes Catherine’s girlish hand, but also the windows that “reflected a score of glittering moons” and two old balls in a cupboard, one marked “C” and the other “H,” with the bran having fallen out of the latter. Through such things, Catherine begins drawing ­Heathcliff into death, which he comes to believe is a place just a few feet away. He has to remind himself to breathe, his heart to beat, he is so devoured by anticipation. This desire is fatal: he quickens to death. His corpse, which Nelly finds in Catherine’s box bed, works as a sort of parody of the “good” death, on his face a “frightful, life-like gaze of exultation” and a sneer on his lips. The servant Joseph interprets this as proof that the devil has made off with his soul.

  This belief that an afterl
ife shimmered through objects (and animals) was another holdover from ancient folk customs. When death approached, furniture and other possessions might respond. Clocks stopped at the moment of their owner’s death, and mirrors needed to be covered in case evil spirits came to reside in the reflected image. Things nearby had to be manipulated so that all would go well: windows and doors would be left open so that the spirit or soul could easily slip out. Black hangings and clothing protected the living from evil forces let loose by death’s presence. Related worries haunt Catherine Earnshaw when her mind is weakened by illness at the end of her life, such as her confusion at seeing her face in a mirror, which she takes as her double, traditionally a sign of one’s imminent death. Finding pigeon feathers as she picks apart her pillow, she remembers that they prevent an easy death, according to tradition. “No wonder I couldn’t die!” Among these charmed tokens—clocks, mirrors, feathers—the hair of the dead held a special place. Enlivened by the spirit world too, the hair of others worn on the body strengthened the connection between the living and the dead. 18

  Part of the body yet easy to separate from it, hair retained its luster long after the rest of the person decayed. Portable, with a shine like certain gems or metals, hair moved easily from being an ornamental feature of the body to being an ornament worn by others. By the 1840s, hair jewelry had become so fashionable that advertisements for hair artisans, designers, and hairworkers ran in newspapers, and magazines printed a sea of articles on the minute particulars of the fad. The London jeweler Antoni Forrer, a well-known professional hairworker in the 1840s, had fifty workers fully employed at his Regent Street store. At the Great Exhibition, around eleven displays of the art garnered glowing reviews, including pictures embroidered in hair of Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales, and the Hamburgh Exchange. A tall vase “composed entirely of human hair” and a “horn filled with artificial flowers in human hair, representing the horn of plenty,” were other impressive exhibits. Hairwork kept women’s hands busy at home, another one of those many domestic arts, like needlework, quilling, shellwork, and taxidermy. Fashion magazines discussed the homecraft of hairworking and included jewelry patterns, instructions, and tips. Hair wreaths, set into shadow boxes or under glass domes, also had their day, as did the use of hair in drawing and painting. One industrious woman copied a Rembrandt using only hair in a cross-stitch. Charlotte brought the device of a “cambric handkerchief with a coronet wrought upon it in black hair” into more than one early story, a means of signaling that the male owner has a secret lover who embroidered it with her own hair. 19