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Abstract
This article considers the role of spectrality in Emily Brontë’s writing, focussing on her Gondal poem ‘Written in Aspin Castle’ (1842–3) and Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s use of spectrality demonstrates both her understanding of Gothic narrative conventions and her awareness of popular traditions of haunting. These influences are reflected in her use of sceptical narrators who encounter versions of sublime terror and in her insistence upon a connection between haunting and place. Yet ghosts also disrupt the places in which they appear, rendering the home ‘unhomely’ to its present inhabitants and disrupting clear divisions between past and present. Indeed, the disruption of boundaries is integral to Brontë’s use of the spectre and reflects her familiarity with the apocalyptic tradition as well as the ghost story. The article concludes by arguing that spectrality in Brontë’s writing is inseparable from the Romantic impulse to see beyond the surfaces of things: to open oneself to the experience of the sublime in nature is also to open oneself to the possibility of ghosts.
Notes
Notes
1 Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 18.
2 Melissa Edmundson Makala, Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), p. 8.
3 I have discussed these conflicting attitudes to ghosts, with some reflections on their theological and metaphysical significance, in Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 51–6.
4 Emily Brontë, ‘Written in Aspin Castle’, The Complete Poems, ed. by Janet Gezari (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 139–42, line 22. Further references are given parenthetically by line number.
5 Carol Margaret Davison, Gothic Literature 1764–1824 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), p. 29.
6 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. by Ian Jack and Helen Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 299. Further references are given parenthetically.
7 Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 45.
8 Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 5.
9 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. by David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 123–62.
10 Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, p. 5.
11 Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, The Belgian Essays, ed. by Sue Lonoff (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 156–9.
12 Davison, Gothic Literature 1764–1824, p. 71.
13 Kevin Mills, Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), p. 166.
14 Emily Brontë, ‘The Night of Storms Has Passed’, Complete Poems, ed. by Janet Gezari (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 38–40, lines 31–40.
15 Emma Mason, “‘Some God of Wild Enthusiast’s Dreams’: Emily Brontë’s Religious Enthusiasm”, Victorian Literature and Culture, 31.1 (2003), 263–77.
16 Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings, p. 3.
17 On the uses of repetition and return in the novel, see J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 42–72. I offer a response to Miller and a different reading of the novel’s repetitions in my essay ‘“A Strange Change Approaching”: Ontology, Reconciliation, and Eschatology in Wuthering Heights’, in The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination, ed. by Alexandra Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 189–206.
18 See, for example, ‘Stars’, ‘The Prisoner [A Fragment]’ and ‘How Clear She Shines’, all of which were included in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846).
19 Emily Brontë, ‘The Night-Wind’, in The Complete Poems, pp. 126–7, line 16.
20 Gavin Hopps, ‘“Je sais bien, mais quand même…”: Wordsworth’s Faithful Scepticism’, Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens, ed. by Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 57–73 (p. 59).
21 William Wordsworth, ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abey’, The Major Works, ed. by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 131–5, line 50.
22 For an example of a critical reading that sees both Lockwood and Nelly as flawed interpreters because of their supposed failure to understand Cathy and Heathcliff, see Michael S. Macovski, Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (New York and Oxford: OUP, 1994). Such readings tend to be shaped by the critical tendency, identified by Lynne Pearce, to read the overwhelming force of the Heathcliff-Cathy romance as the novel’s baseline truth. For a discussion of this tendency and a critical response to it, see Lynne Pearce, Romance Writing (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), pp. 83–109.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Simon Marsden
Simon Marsden is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on literature, religion and the Gothic. He is the author of Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination (2014) and The Theological Turn in Contemporary Gothic Fiction (2018).