Abstract
Following two generations of families on the Yorkshire moors, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) focuses on family, reproduction and lineage, and thus seems to follow a heteronormative sense of time. However, as this article argues, when read within a queer theoretical context, we see that Emily actually produces a queer temporality in the novel through the duplication of characters and plot events. Because the characters and the plot structure largely repeat the events of the past, the novel’s plot cannot be said to progress but instead essentially turns back on itself. This article also suggests that reading the novel in this way may provide a new way of thinking about how Emily may have felt about her identity and her role in her family and nineteenth-century society.
In an early, memorable scene in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Lockwood reads Catherine’s improvised diary. ‘This writing […] was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small’, Lockwood tells us, ‘Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton’ (WH, pp. 15–16).1 Falling asleep repeating these names, Lockwood awakens to a disturbance outside the window and feels an ‘ice-cold hand’ clutching at his wrist (WH, p. 20). Looking through the window, he claims he ‘discerned obscurely, a child’s face,’ and yet the ‘child’ announces herself as ‘Catherine Linton’, the married and adult (and dead) Catherine (WH, p. 20). ‘“It’s twenty years” the child cries, “twenty years, I’ve been a waif for twenty years”’(WH, p. 21).
While this scene clearly contributes to the Gothic nature of the novel, this interaction is also an early example of the novel’s queer temporality. The application of the term ‘queer’ in this article refers to the resistance to norms of gender and sexuality and normative institutions, such as education and marriage, that structure society’s daily life and our conceptions of time. Employing scholar Jack Halberstam’s concise definition, I will be using this term to refer to ‘nonnormative logics and organisations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time’ as it relates to my reading of the novel.2
Normative, or heteronormative, time is structured by heterosexuality, reproduction, the family and the future. One of the central concepts of heteronormative time is the figure of the child. For Lee Edelman, because everything society does is for and in the name of its children, our sense of time and the future are predicated on a heterosexual and reproductive system.3 Similarly, Halberstam views society as structuring ‘the emergence of the adult from the dangerous and unruly period of adolescence as a desired process of maturation’ in which ‘we create longevity as the most desirable future […] and pathologize modes of living that show little or no concern for longevity’.4 Finally, Kathryn Bond Stockton sees heteronormativity as organising temporality along vertical lines, that is, ‘a movement upward (hence, “growing up”) towards full stature, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness’.5 Queer time, then, challenges or complicates a conception of time based on reproduction and the family, and in doing so, distances itself from a normative trajectory of generational events. Instead, queer temporalities focus on the now and the asocial self, and resist the chronological, logical, and linear timelines supported by normative time.6
Reading this scene with Lockwood from the position of queer temporality highlights the way that the child represents a figure outside of a linear conception of time. Although the child names herself Catherine Linton, her description as a ghostly child wandering the moors undercuts this identity and instead is reminiscent of the child Catherine before her marriage to Edgar. The child’s description thus suggests that after death, the adult Catherine reverted back to being a child, foreshadowing the queer circular structure that, I will argue, is found in the rest of the novel.
Time standing still in Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights tells the story of two generations of families on the Yorkshire moors. The emphasis on family and generations in the novel initially suggests that the novel upholds and promotes a normative sense of temporality, that is, one founded on reproduction and the future and that follows a linear development. However, upon a closer examination of these generations and how they are positioned in the novel, we see that the second generation of children (Cathy, Linton and Hareton) are not distinct, autonomous individuals but instead entities defined by the identities and actions of the previous generation. James Kincaid’s view of the child as ‘a wonderfully hollow category, able to be filled with anyone’s overflowing emotions’ is helpful here.7 The second-generation children in this novel are ‘hollow’ entities reproducing the past as each new character is ‘filled’, to borrow Kincaid’s wording, with the identity and, at times, even shares the name of older characters, creating a kind of stagnant circularity. They are empty characters, that is, without their own sense of self, used to patch up old feuds and continue past relationships. As a result, generations and genealogy in the narrative appear cyclical, and thus queer, rather than straight and linear.
The repetitive nature of the novel’s storyline and the doubling among characters are frequently noted by scholars.8 However, I wish to resituate discussions of repetition and the doubling in the novel to a queer theoretical context in order to explore how the narrative’s structure and the repetition of characters and characteristics produce a queer temporality that resists heteronormative compulsions for linear growth and futurity. And while I am not suggesting that we need to read the novel as an autobiography of Emily’s life, exploring the novel using queer theory may also provide a new way of thinking about Emily herself and her desire to remain in her childhood home with her family.
Emily queers the temporality of her novel through three strategies: by creating the second generation of characters — primarily Cathy, Linton and Hareton — as surrogates for the first generation of characters — Catherine, Edgar and Hindley; by repeating the same basic plot structure and events throughout the two halves or generations of the novel; and by creating queer characters that exist outside normative timelines, removing the normative institutional milestones from the narrative’s focus that suggest growth and temporal progression.
The duplication of characters from one generation to the next begins early on in the novel with Lockwood’s interaction with the waif, cited at the beginning of this article, and Heathcliff’s introduction into the narrative. Introducing Heathcliff to his family, Mr Earnshaw tells his wife to ‘“take it as a gift of God although it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil”’ (WH, p. 29). ‘I found they had christened him “Heathcliff,”’ Nelly recounts, ‘it was the name of a son who died in childhood, and it has served him ever since, both for Christian and surname’ (WH, p. 30). Heathcliff is an extreme example of this replication process in the novel as he is given only one name — Heathcliff — and no surname, so his entire identity revolves around and is subsumed by the former Heathcliff.
However, it is not until the entrances of Hareton, Cathy and Linton that we can begin to read or recognize this duplication as a pattern in the novel. When each second-generation character is introduced, we see the same pattern occurring: each child is conceived and birthed offstage, without warning, and precipitates the death or removal of the mother. These second-generation characters take the place of their parents or predecessors as they allow for the narrative to continue many of the outstanding tensions and relationships from the first generation. Emily’s novel, then, never truly advances but continues to dwell on the conflicts from the beginning. This focus, Leo Bersani notes, makes it seem ‘as if Emily Brontë were telling the same story twice, and eliminating its originality the second time’.9 Bersani’s reading suggests the notion of a copy without an original, or a non-originary origin, which disrupts conventional notions of temporality. If there is no original character or origin point, then we cannot trace the character’s progress or development.
Hareton is the first second-generation character to be introduced in the text. Nelly announces Hareton’s arrival at the beginning of Chapter VIII. However, in her tale to Lockwood directly preceding this announcement, Nelly recounts the altercation between Heathcliff and Edgar at Christmas and Hindley’s subsequent punishment of Heathcliff (WH, p. 46). Immediately before breaking off her story to attend to Lockwood, Nelly tells readers that Heathcliff was planning his revenge on Hindley. ‘“I’m trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back”’ Heathcliff tells Nelly, ‘“I don’t care how long I wait, if I can only do it, at last”’ (WH, p. 48). Nelly then pauses in her story and tells Lockwood, ‘“I’m annoyed how I should dream of chattering on at such a rate; and your gruel cold, and you nodding for bed!”’ (WH, p. 48). Readers then have to wait until the beginning of the next chapter to pick up her tale again. Rather than starting where she left off with Heathcliff, though, Nelly begins Chapter VIII with the birth of Hindley’s son Hareton, thereby structurally connecting Hareton to Heathcliff’s desire and plan for revenge and positioning Hareton as Hindley’s surrogate on which Heathcliff can take his subsequent revenge.
Hareton’s introduction in the narrative is similar to Heathcliff’s introduction in Chapter IV. Introducing Hareton, Nelly tells us ‘[o]n the morning of a fine June day, my first bonny little nurseling, and the last of the ancient Earnshaw stock, was born’ (WH, p. 50). When we look at the wording here, and in the other descriptions of the second-generation children, Hareton, like Heathcliff, is not even considered an ‘autonomous’ child until after Nelly names him in her story. Instead, Hareton is referred to as ‘it’ until Nelly gives ‘it’ a name, Hareton, almost a page and a half into the chapter. Until then, we are told that Nelly is going to ‘nurse it […] to feed it […] and take care of it […] it will be all’ hers (WH, p. 50, my emphasis). Nelly finally gives readers his name after telling us that Frances has died: Hindley ‘raised [Frances] in his arms; she put her two hands about his neck, her face changed, and she was dead […] the child Hareton fell wholly into my hands’ (WH, p. 51). Like Heathcliff’s introduction, it is not until the child is connected to Hindley’s family, effectively providing him with an identity (i.e., Hindley’s identity), that he is given a name and seen as a real character within the narrative. Until then, the child is considered a neutral and empty entity.
We also see this pattern occurring with the other two second-generation children, Cathy and Linton. Cathy is born next, satisfying Heathcliff’s need for an immortal Catherine and serving as a stand-in for Catherine’s murderer just as Hareton stands in as the object of revenge on behalf of Hindley. Following the pattern, Nelly tells readers about the birth of Cathy at the start of a new chapter (Chapter XVI), after describing the emotional and dramatic confrontation between Heathcliff and Catherine. Nelly tells Lockwood ‘[a]bout twelve o’clock that night was born the Catherine you saw at Wuthering Heights, a puny, seven month’s child; and two hours after, the mother died’ (WH, p. 128). Nelly then goes on to describe Cathy as ‘an unwelcomed infant it was […] It might have wailed out of life, and nobody cared a morsel […] its beginning was as friendless as its end is likely to be’ (WH, p. 128, my emphasis). Here, as with the other characters, we see the use of ‘its’ to describe the child. The child is not identified as something other than ‘its’ or the generic use of ‘baby’ until fifteen pages after she is introduced (at the start of Chapter XVII). There Nelly tells readers that
[i]t was named Catherine, but [Edgar] never called it the name in full. […] The little one was always Cathy; it formed to him a distinction from the mother, and yet, a connection with her, and his attachment sprang from its relation to her, far more than from its being his own. (WH, p. 143, my emphasis)
Nelly’s description shows that the child is a structuring relation, not an emotive entity; it does not signify the future but reproduces the past.
With her birth, Cathy becomes the object of Heathcliff’s revenge as well, as she takes the place of Catherine in Heathcliff’s desire to punish Catherine for her self-destruction. During the confrontation that Nelly describes right before she tells readers about Cathy’s birth, Heathcliff, seeing Catherine’s ill and hysterical state, places his grief and despair onto her, crying, ‘“I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer — but yours! How can I?”’ (WH, p. 126). Not only, in Heathcliff’s view, did Catherine bring on her death herself (whether through her pregnancy or her self-created hysteria), but we can also read Cathy herself as one of the reasons for Catherine’s death. If Catherine had never become pregnant then it is possible she would not have died, thus marking Cathy as the literal and figurative representation of Catherine’s murderer. As Catherine’s duplicate, both in name and description, Cathy is positioned as the perfect surrogate on whom Heathcliff can take revenge.
Although not as detailed, Linton’s birth follows the same pattern as Hareton’s and Cathy’s. After fleeing Heathcliff and Thrushcross Grange, Isabella gives birth to Linton in an undisclosed area, ‘south, near London,’ very much removed from the narrative (WH, p. 142). In her address to Lockwood, Nelly tells us ‘there [Isabella] had a son. […] He was christened Linton, and, from the first, she reported him to be an ailing, peevish creature’, similar, as we know, to a young Edgar (WH, p. 142). Just as with the birth of Cathy, Nelly refers to Linton as an ‘it’ when recounting her conversations with Heathcliff about Linton (WH, p. 142). And while Isabella does not die immediately after childbirth like the other two mothers, Nelly tells readers about her death shortly after she recounts Linton’s birth; the two events are separated by only a little over ten lines in the text, thus connecting the two for readers (WH, p. 142). Although not the focus of the narrative in the same way as Hareton and Cathy, Linton’s birth is necessary in order for Isabella to re-enter the narrative in the second half of the novel, thus recreating the original generation of Catherine, Isabella, Edgar and Hindley, and for Heathcliff, again, to take revenge. Linton is positioned as a stand-in for Isabella who serves, she tells Nelly in her letter, as ‘Edgar’s proxy in suffering’ to Heathcliff (WH, p. 114).
In presenting the second generation in this way, Emily structurally positions these characters as stand-ins for the unresolved conflicts and relationships of the first generation. Within this pattern, we see that the children are not distinct, autonomous individuals with their own desires, identities and agendas but instead entities defined by and in the previous generation. While any child carries, to some extent, the traits of previous generations, in this inverted family structure the children literally revert to the past, as if returning to a previous state. However, the connection between the two generations is not just structural or positional. The second generation of characters also resembles the first generation, both in terms of characteristics and in the similarities between their plot trajectories. These structural connections between generations allow readers to see the temporality of the narrative as resisting the heteronormative drive forward as Emily recreates events and relationships from the first half of the novel.
On the broadest, most basic level in the novel, the second generation consists of three children (two boys and one girl) involved in a triangular relationship just as with the first generation. However, the similarities go even further than this basic character and structure formation. The names of the children in the second generation (Cathy, Linton, Heathcliff) play on the names from the first generation (Catherine, the Linton family and Heathcliff) and the descriptions of the second-generation characters (both physical and behavioural) recall their predecessors. For example, Cathy has Catherine’s ‘capacity for intense attachments’ as well as Catherine’s ‘breadth of forehead’ and the same ‘arch of the nostril that makes her appear rather haughty’ (WH, pp. 146, 246) and Cathy and Hareton both have ‘the Earnshaws’ handsome dark eyes’ (WH, p. 146).
In addition to their names and physical characteristics, the two generations are also similar in the events that happen to them in the novel. Many of the same plot points and tropes that occurred with the first generation of children are repeated with this second generation, emphasising the view that these new children are simply copies reliving the first half of the novel. One of the most obvious similarities between the two generations is the way in which Hareton’s degradation mirrors that of Heathcliff. Both individuals are cast out of their homes and used for manual labour and as objects of scorn, although they both long to be involved in the family, particularly with the Catherine/Cathy character. Heathcliff traps both Isabella and Cathy in the different halves of the novel and Heathcliff’s imprisonment of Cathy, Nelly and Linton (WH, pp. 206–07) in the second half is reminiscent of Catherine’s imprisonment of Edgar, Heathcliff and Nelly (WH, pp. 90–91) in the first half, which is similar to the altercation between Heathcliff, Hindley and Isabella (WH, pp. 134–38). Linton and Heathcliff are both rescued from outside the narrative and brought into the novel proper, and their respective histories and childhoods are both unknown to readers. Cathy’s joy at preparing to welcome Linton home (WH, p. 154) is similar to Catherine’s joy when Heathcliff returns to her life (WH, pp. 74–76). Catherine is injured in the first half of the novel, leading to her relationship with Edgar, and Linton emphasizes his frailty in the second half of the novel (albeit on behalf of Heathcliff) in order to form a relationship with Cathy.
Time does progress in the sense that new characters appear in the novel, but because the novel largely replicates the same events and relationships from generation to generation and because the ‘new’ characters can be read as replications of the older characters, time also seems to stand still, stuck in the temporality and plot of the first half of the novel. These select examples also point to a larger system of replication that sees the second half of Emily’s novel as a retelling of the first. This retelling is emphasized at the end of the novel when readers are brought back to the very beginning of the narrative. The end of the text shows Cathy and Hareton together in possession of Wuthering Heights. While it is easy to read this relationship as the reversal of Heathcliff’s and Hareton’s degradation and the resolution of Catherine and Heathcliff’s doomed love, these readings disregard Hareton’s role and lineage in the text. Hareton is Hindley’s son, not Heathcliff’s, and, as I have argued, we can read Cathy and Hareton as surrogates for Catherine and Hindley. Thus, at the end of the novel, we have direct descendants of the original inhabitants of Wuthering Heights, Cathy and Hareton (or, as I have argued, structurally Catherine and Hindley) back in possession of their house with just the original, nuclear family and characters present: Cathy (or Catherine), Hareton (or Hindley), Nelly and Joseph. Nelly confirms this reading when she tells Lockwood that Cathy and Hareton’s ‘eyes are precisely similar, and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw’ (WH, p. 246). In remarking that the eyes come from Catherine Earnshaw, Nelly reminds readers that Hareton is Hindley’s son (even though Hareton’s early behaviour suggests he is Heathcliff’s). Because the characters and the plot structure largely repeat the events of the past, the novel’s plot cannot be said to progress but instead essentially turns back on itself, forming a circular temporal structure. This is a queer temporality. The return to the beginning, then, suggests a moving backwards instead of forwards, resisting the heteronormative pull towards the future.
The third way in which Emily creates a queer temporality in the narrative is by removing society’s milestones that signify normative growth and the passing of time (e.g., adolescence, marriage, formal education). These developmental markers structure the normative temporality upheld by social institutions — we are born, we mature, we get married and reproduce, and then we die — and make sure society’s members are growing into approved and appropriate adults. Because, as I have argued, the first generation of children is replicated by and in the second generation, in a sense repositioning the first generation back into childhood in the second half of the novel, this first generation of characters resists the ‘natural’ impulse to grow up. Instead, this first generation remains stuck as children and thus rejects or delays heteronormativity’s influence and temporal structure. The children in the novel are kept outside the ‘maturational models of growth’ that produce normative-abiding citizens and normative temporalities.10 As a result, the novel structurally produces a single generation of queer children that do not grow up and that bring us back to the beginning of the novel rather than looking outward towards the future.
While it could be argued that the first generation of characters does in fact grow up, because the second generation is produced, when we look at how sexuality or maturity in general feature in the narrative, we see that these signs of adulthood are kept from the novel, which suggests they are not its focus. Pregnant mothers and pregnancy in general are largely effaced in the narrative and the mothers removed, killed off, after they produce a child. And both the male and female figures are largely kept out of the narrative during their adolescence, re-emerging after they have matured. Both Hindley and Heathcliff are offstage during what is, we presume to be, their adolescence — Hindley off at school and Heathcliff out of the narrative completely — and both return to the novel as ‘men’. Edgar and Isabella are also out of the scope of the novel at Thrushcross Grange, and what knowledge we do get of them suggests they have already been converted into the roles society expects of them. Significantly, Catherine’s development into a woman and a lady also occurs at Thrushcross Grange while she recovers her health, and we see her only after the transformation has occurred. When Catherine finally returns to Wuthering Heights, she is no longer ‘a wild, hatless little savage’ but ‘a very dignified person’ who can now be called ‘a lady’ (WH, p. 41). In these instances, the middle stage of development is missing, and thus there is no sense of progression.
The children remain outside normative trajectories of time in the novel not only because they are removed from their reproductive, and thus forward-moving destiny, but also because they are positioned as outside the conventional family structure, a paradigm which creates and promotes both normativity and normative time.11 Instead of being intimately involved in family life, the children appear as orphans, outsiders and surrogates, which allows them both to access and distance themselves from the constraints of normative time. In her discussion of genealogy in novels, Patricia Drechsel Tobin suggests that ‘[o]rphans and foundlings, the[se] characters are let loose in the world without ever having been born into it, foregoing the delicacy of initiation rites […] which a society responsive to and responsible for them would have institutionalized as stages in their maturing processes’.12 Orphans and outsiders operate outside societal codes and thus outside normative, heterosexual and reproductive time.
The novel’s rejection of the characters’ sexuality and maturation and the characters’ location outside the family and normative institutions like school and church allow them to sidestep the dominant social framework that requires all participants to grow up and perpetuate this social order.13 It allows them to access other modes of living and other (queer) temporalities that do not require them to look to and make decisions for the future or invest in longevity. Thinking about the characters in this way may help to explain why so many of them engage in behaviours that may initially appear as selfish, immature and self-destructive, such as Catherine’s reasons for accepting Edgar’s proposal (WH, pp. 61–62), but when viewed from a queer position suggest that they are simply focussing on their own life and desires rather than investing in the future or in conventional structures like their families.
Emily Brontë’s queer time
Examining Emily’s novel in relation to a discussion of queer temporality not only opens up how we see the children in and the structure of the novel but also may illuminate how Emily herself may have felt about her identity and her role in her family and nineteenth-century society. Although the use of ‘queer’ as I am discussing it here would not have been a concept familiar or available to her (and certainly not the idea of ‘queer temporality’), Emily’s own life suggests an affinity with the idea of living outside the norm. Building on Claire O’Callaghan’s and Lydia Brown’s works on queerness and Emily’s poetry,14 we can find similarities between the way temporality is portrayed in both the novel and Emily’s own life that may suggest that Emily lived outside normative conceptions of time, or at least felt that she did.
Although our information about Emily is limited, especially compared to the correspondence and material left by Charlotte, what we do know about her suggests that she lived in such a way that the milestones and institutions involved in normative temporality did not apply. ‘Unlike Charlotte, who craved social acceptance’, Lucasta Miller reports, ‘Emily did not care what people thought’.15 Emily refused to follow trends in fashion, preferred solitude over social interactions with strangers, and frequently favoured animals over people. Rather than care about or cater to normative markers of maturation, she lived an asocial life.
While an avid learner, Emily’s formal education was minimal, with only a few years in total at Cowan Bridge, Roe Head School and the Pensionnat Heger. Instead Emily received a general education from her family and pursued her own individual interests through ‘self-instruction’ and what she had available around her — the parsonage, the moors and her siblings.16 Even while at her various schools, Emily resisted the institutionalisation of education.17 Emily’s resistance is best described by Charlotte Brontë when she, reputedly, refers to Emily’s home life and learning as an ‘unrestricted and unartificial mode of life’ and the life of Law Hill as ‘one of disciplined routine’.18 By receiving her education at home and in largely teaching herself, Emily evaded, like the characters in her novel, the way education helps to mould students into socially-acceptable members of society and helps to push them through the chronological maturational process associated with going to school. Instead she was able to nourish her own way of understanding and approaching the world around her.
Formal education was not the only social rite in which Emily did not participate. Emily never married and although scholars have tried to uncover a lover, which Miller reads as the urge to ‘pin her down’ and ‘normalize her’, the search has not yielded any viable results.19 Instead, Emily focussed on her own individual pursuits, especially her writing. Emily also was not interested in non-familial social interactions, but instead preferred to stay at home and take care of her family. In her discussion of the Brontë family, Drew Lamonica Arms argues that the siblings ‘were self-sufficient in each other’s company and thus did not seek out other relationships in the Haworth community’,20 a claim also made by Charlotte in her ‘Biographical Notice’ (1850) and her ‘Editor’s Preface’ (1850).21 Emily’s ability to stay at home became a reality when she inherited money following her Aunt Branwell’s death.22 While we can read Emily’s desire to stay home as an elevation of the domestic and thus the elevation of conventional gender roles and associated temporalities, a queer reading suggests that home, to her, was actually a way to elide socially-prescribed norms and temporalities.
As housekeeper, Emily could write whenever she wanted and live in such a way to serve her goals, her interests and her creative and scholarly pursuits rather than follow society’s prescribed path for her gender, i.e., courtship — marriage — reproduction. As O’Callaghan argues, ‘Emily’s place may have been firmly located in the domestic sphere, but her decision afforded her control over her own time. She could continue to widen her knowledge of various subjects and write until her heart was content’.23 Similarly, Lamonica Arms claims that ‘Emily viewed her home as a place of unparalleled freedom and thought of personal fulfilment in terms of family togetherness’.24 ‘For the Brontë sisters’, Lamonica Arms continues, ‘home — and no place like home — offered the liberty to be themselves, to be together, and, crucially, to write’.25 In staying home rather than moving out into society, home, for Emily, became both a queer space and a queer temporality as it allowed her to sidestep what society required of her.
Conclusion
Examining the novel’s characters and plot structure from a queer theoretical context suggests that time in Wuthering Heights does not progress in a linear manner, but rather circles back on itself producing a queer temporality. As a novel that does not appear, at the onset, to be overtly queer, my discussion helps to show the ways in which queer theory might open up texts, like Wuthering Heights, and produce new ways of reading nineteenth-century novels. Such readings do not simply impose a contemporary theory on a past work but unravel the queer elements, in this case temporality, already structuring that work, showing us that queer theory need not pertain primarily to twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. My readings of Wuthering Heights also illustrate the various ways, in addition to identity and kinship, in which queer theory may apply to nineteenth-century novels.
Moreover, in tracing the novel’s queer temporality, we not only see how the characters in the novel operate outside heteronormative control but also how elements in Emily’s own life can be similarly read. Emily likewise resisted or worked outside many of the concepts and institutions, like education and marriage, that help to create and shepherd individuals through normative constructions of temporality. Instead, Emily cultivated a life at Haworth that was focussed on her own intellectual and creative pursuits. In doing so, her life resembles the ways in which the characters in the novel rejected normative conventions to focus on themselves and their desires. Examining Emily from this queer perspective helps shift the perception of her as a victim or antisocial individual. Instead, she is someone who consciously rejected the normative standards that she disliked, while making deliberate, focussed and empowered choices to ensure comfort in her own life.
Notes
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Emily Datskou
Emily Datskou is an English PhD candidate in the Nineteenth-Century Studies programme at Loyola University Chicago. Her dissertation explores the role of queer theory in nineteenth-century novels. She is also the Project Manager for the Lili Elbe Digital Archive and has recently co-published in Feminist Modernist Studies.
Notes
1 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. by Richard J. Dunn, 4th ed (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); hereafter WH.
2 Judith (Jack) Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 6.
3 Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
4 Halberstam, Time, p. 152.
5 Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 4.
6 I am using ‘asocial’ here to refer to an avoidance of or lack of motivation for engaging in normative social interactions, not in any diagnostic sense.
7 James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 12.
8 See, for example, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 248–308; Lynn Pykett’s ‘Changing the Names: The Two Catherines’, in Wuthering Heights, ed. by Linda H. Peterson (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003), pp. 468–77; Kathryn McGuire, ‘Second Chances: Doubling in Wuthering Heights’, CCTE Studies, 58 (1993), 56–62; and Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).
9 Bersani, p. 222.
10 Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 73.
11 See discussions in Halberstam, Failure, p. 71; Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 22-23; and Drew Lamonica Arms,”We are three sisters”: Self and Family in the Writing of the Brontës (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), p. 13.
12 Patricia Drechsel Tobin, Time and the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 31–32.
13 While Nelly does tell readers (and Lockwood) that the characters are married or in love, we do not see these events taking place in the narrative, just through Nelly’s recounting.
14 Claire O’Callaghan, ‘“A poet, a solitary”: Emily Brontë—Queerness, Quietness, and Solitude’, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, 134 (2018), 204–17 and Lydia Brown, ‘Absent Emily: Ecstasy, Transgression, and Negative Space in Three Emily Brontë Poems’, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, 134 (2018), 181–92.
15 Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 191.
16 Claire O’Callaghan, Emily Brontë Reappraised (Salford: Saraband, 2018), p. 20.
17 Miller, p. 191.
18 Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Vol. I (London: Electronic Book Co., 2001), p. 126. ProQuest Ebook Central.
19 Miller, p. 274.
20 Lamonica Arms, p. 19.
21 Charlotte Brontë, ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Action Bell (1850)’, in Wuthering Heights, pp. 307–12 and ‘Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights (1850)’, in Wuthering Heights, pp. 313–16.
22 O’Callaghan, Reappraised, p. 30.
23 O’Callaghan, Reappraised, p. 30.
24 Lamonica Arms, p. 38.
25 Lamonica Arms, p. 38.