Wuthering Heights

From Daphne Merkin'sIntroduction toWuthering Heights More than 150 years and many cultural upheavals later, Emily Bronte's novel remains almost blindingly original, undimmed in its power to convey the destructive potential of thwarted passion as expressed through the unappeasable fury of a rejected lover. To paraphrase Shakespeare, age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety. Every aspect of the novelwhether it be the writer's expert grasp of the laws pertaining to land and personal property, her meticulous rendering of local dialect, or her use of multiple narratorshas been put under microscopic study. And yet, despite the shelf after shelf of books that have been written in the attempt to understand the frail yet flinty-willed young woman"the sphinx of literature," as she was called by Angus M. Mackay inThe Brontes: Fact and Fiction(1897)who wrote it, as well as the tragedy-struck, remarkably talented family from which she came, Wuthering Heightsstill presents a dark and fierce view of the world that is seemingly without precedent. The book's autobiographical components aroused interest from the start, especially given the original mystery surrounding its authorship. Lucasta Miller, inThe Bronte Myth, gives an often spellbinding account of the ways in which the Brontes' "lonely moorland lives" (p. xi) lent themselves to the process of mythification even before the last sister had died. (None of them lived to see forty: Anne died within five months of Emily, at the age of twenty-nine, and Charlotte, the only one of the sisters to marry, was in the early months of pregnancy at the time of her death, at the age of thirty-nine.) But unlike Charlotte, who lived long enough to help shape the myth that would grow up around the Brontes, beginning with Elizabeth Gaskell's landmarkLife of Charlotte Bronte, which appeared in 1857 and for which she was the primary source, Emily wasn't around to answer for herself. "All of Emily's biographers have had to cope with the absences surrounding her," Miller notes (p. 193). The baroque conjectures concerning her character were first introduced by Gaskell'sLife, which included scenes that had Emily pummeling her disobedient bulldog into submission with her bare hands and dramatically cauterizing a bite from a strange dog with a red-hot kitchen iron. Gaskell's two-dimensional portrait of Emily as kind of savage force of nature, "a remnant of the Titans,great-grand-daughter of the giants who used to inhabit earth," held sway for decades, drawing admirers like the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, whose own provocative impulses (which included a well-documented sadomasochistic bent) were stirred by the novel's almost pagan quality, its disregard for bourgeois niceties. The efforts to penetrate Emily's veils grew even more overheated in the wake of Freud, just as the textual analyses would become more and more exotic in the trail of the new French theories of narrative propounded by Derrida and Foucault. One 1936 biographer, who featured herself as having paid "especial and respectful" attention to primary sources, misread the title of one of Emily's manuscript poems as "Louis Parensell" instead of "Love's Farewell" in her zeal to bring new light on a hypothesized lost lover, and then went on to unearth another dark secret, proposing that Emily had been "a member of that beset band of women who can find their pleasure only in women" (Moore,The Life and Eager Death of Emily Bronte. There were discussions as to how genuinely close Emily had been to her sisters Charlotte and Anne, or whether she in fact resented the older one aMerkin, Daphne is the author of 'Wuthering Heights ', published 2005 under ISBN 9781593081287 and ISBN 1593081286.