The Bronte Sisters (13 page)

Rigby decided that Currer Bell had to be a man, “for if we ascribe
the book to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to ascribe it to one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex.” She could not resist adding that “if by no woman,
it is certainly also by no artist.” This review made Charlotte Brontë furious. She kept it—and others like it—from her father, but she responded to their authors in the preface to the second edition of
Jane Eyre.
She reminded those “in whose eyes
whatever is unusual is wrong” that “conventionality is not morality.”

This might have been true, but
Jane Eyre
was becoming a dangerous book, one that decent mothers forbade their daughters to read. What caused this shift in public opinion? Could it have been the appearance of another novel, an even more disturbing one, written by a different Bell? Some readers struggled with
Jane Eyre.
But hardly anyone knew what to make of
Wuthering Heights.

W
HEN
the air was in an uproar and rainy squalls blew over the Yorkshire moors, the locals had a word for it:
wuthering.
Emily Brontë grew up hearing this word from Tabby Aykroyd and other country folk, and in 1846, she wrote it down. Emily gave the name
Wuthering Heights
to her only novel and to a home that is central to the story it tells. It is there that Emily’s dark tale of destructive love, cruelty, and early death begins.

Just a few stunted firs and thorn bushes grow near Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse on a lonely, windswept moor, miles from any neighbors. Strange things happen there. Ghostly fingers tap at its windows; a tortured man lives within its walls and brings those around him to ruin.

But these dreadful goings-on have yet to happen when Catherine Earnshaw’s father returns from Liverpool with a mysterious child, a boy who is dirty and ragged and “dark almost as if it came
from the devil.” Mr. Earnshaw christens the child Heathcliff and intends to raise him as his own. Young Catherine and Heathcliff form a kinship that is stronger than any blood tie. They become inseparable friends, a rebellious pair who like nothing better than to run freely on the moors. Meanwhile, Mr. Earnshaw’s love for the boy consumes Catherine’s older brother, Hindley, with deadly envy. After years pass, Mr. Earnshaw dies, and Hindley marries and becomes the master of Wuthering Heights. Hindley takes revenge on Heathcliff by forcing him to labor on the farm, but the bond between Heathcliff and Catherine stays as strong as ever, even as they grow up and life draws them apart.

At Wuthering Heights, emotions like jealousy and love are forces as wild and savage as the harshest weather. But another moorland house, Thrushcross Grange, is a place of comfort and refinement. There, the Linton family enjoys a peaceful, genteel life supported by wealth. Their fine clothes and manners attract Catherine, and when kind, docile Edgar Linton asks her to marry him, she accepts.

Her choice sets off a dark sequence of revenge and destruction that leaves no one unhurt. Heathcliff hardens into a sinister Byronic figure whose heart is closed to everyone but Catherine. He acquires wealth and wins possession of Wuthering Heights and, later, Thrushcross Grange. He elopes with Edgar Linton’s sister, Isabella, only to cause pain. Isabella will ask what many readers have pondered: Is Heathcliff a man or a devil?

As for Catherine, she will shock Victorian readers by claiming that she has no place in heaven; her soul belongs on the moors. “I’m wearying to escape
into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it.” Rejecting earthly existence, Catherine retreats to her room, where she refuses food and steadily weakens. She and Heathcliff meet for the last time in her bedchamber on a Sunday, while Edgar is at church and Catherine lies close to death. They kiss and embrace, yet each blames and accuses the other.
“You have killed me—and thriven on it, I think. How strong you are!” cries Catherine, who is beautiful in her frailty.

“You have killed yourself,” Heathcliff argues back. “I have not broken your heart—
you
have broken it—and in breaking it, you have broken mine.” Catherine sinks into unconsciousness, and she dies that night after giving birth prematurely to a daughter, another Catherine, or Cathy.

So much has happened, but Emily Brontë has told only half her story. In the second part of her novel, it will be the task of another generation to restore joy and hope to Wuthering Heights.

Emily Brontë devised a complex structure for
Wuthering Heights.
She told her tale through the diary of a character named Lockwood, who some years later is a new tenant at Thrushcross Grange. When he rides up to Wuthering Heights on a winter day to call on his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff, a snowstorm forces him to spend the night. A servant shows him to a chamber that was never used, explaining that the master rarely allowed it to be entered. As Lockwood
drifts into sleep, half dreaming, he hears a tree blowing against the window beside his bed. The window refuses to open, so he breaks a pane of glass and reaches out to snap off the bothersome branch. To his surprise, he grasps not twigs, but tiny, cold fingers. His cries bring Heathcliff into the room. By this time the spirit has gone, but what Lockwood sees next is equally shocking. His landlord throws open the window and in anguish begs his beloved Cathy to enter.

Lockwood goes home to Thrushcross Grange, and as often happens to people in nineteenth-century novels, exposure to wintry air gives him a bad cold. While he rests in bed, his housekeeper tells him the saga of Wuthering Heights. In this way, Emily Brontë’s novel becomes a tale within a tale, as Lockwood records in his diary the housekeeper’s story.

Wuthering Heights
belongs to the Yorkshire landscape, Charlotte Brontë said. “It is moorish,
and wild, and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors.”

But was there anything natural about
Wuthering Heights?
“The characters are as false
as they are loathsome,” one outraged critic declared. He pronounced Heathcliff, Hindley, Catherine, and the rest “a perfect pandemonium of low and brutal creatures, who wrangle with each other in language too disgusting for the eye or the ear to tolerate.” This critic had no idea how Ellis Bell’s novel ended, because after reading a few offending scenes, he “took the liberty
of declining the honour of a farther acquaintance.”

Ellis Bell’s skill as a writer failed to excuse the “strange wild pictures”
that he had created, another reviewer wrote. Rather, Bell’s powerful talent succeeded only in “heightening their repulsiveness.” The editors of a weekly newspaper promised their readers “that they have never read
anything like it before.”
Wuthering Heights
was so puzzling that the editors concluded, “We must leave it to our readers to decide what sort of book it is.”

Today people might decide that the behavior Emily Brontë described was dysfunctional. Harmful relationships are nothing new, though; human beings have hurt one another through their words and actions in every period of history. But to the prim Victorians, this side of life was to be kept hidden. It was to be ignored, if possible, and certainly not displayed in a novel for anyone to read. Emily cut out some reviews and saved them in her desk drawer, but neither she nor Anne ever told their father that they were published authors.

While the two-volume
Wuthering Heights
was causing so much noisy comment, the third volume in the set,
Agnes Grey,
slipped quietly into the world. To the relief of the few critics who bothered to notice it, Acton Bell’s slender novel offered a clear moral lesson: it taught readers “to put every trust
in a supreme wisdom and goodness.” This was the author’s intention. “Such humble talents
as God has given me I will endeavour to put to their greatest use,” Anne stated. “If I am able to amuse, I will try to benefit too; and when I feel it my duty to speak an unpalatable truth, with the help of God, I will speak it.” This is why her novel began with the words, “All true histories
contain instruction.”

Yet this author, like the other Bells, chose “subjects that are peculiar
without being either probable or pleasing,” some critics lamented. It hardly mattered that
Agnes Grey
was written well; “the injudicious selection of the theme and matter” marred the work. Anne’s tale contained no dark secret or deadly revenge. Instead, its tyranny and cruelty were truer to life. Anne had described everyday behavior in well-to-do households.

Emily Brontë found the raw material for
Wuthering Heights
in her imagination, but Anne drew on her own experience, as Charlotte had done. Her main character, Agnes Grey, comes from a poor but respectable clergyman’s family, and she seeks a post as a governess, like Jane Eyre. Recounting Agnes’s adventures among the families that employ her, Anne revealed much that she had seen and done as governess to the Inghams and Robinsons. Her account sounded so true to life that one reviewer supposed Acton Bell—this man—“must have bribed some governess
very largely, either with love or money, to reveal to him the secrets of her prison-house.”

Also like Jane Eyre, Agnes tells her own story. “How delightful it would be
to be a governess! To go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself,” Agnes thinks. She wants, too, “to earn my own maintenance, and something to comfort and help my father, mother, and sister.” She finds the governess’s life anything but delightful when she is given charge of three impossible children in the Bloomfield family. Seven-year-old Tom,
“the flower of the flock—a generous, noble-spirited boy,” according to his mother, delights in cutting up live birds with his penknife. It shocks Agnes that Tom’s father and uncle encourage this gruesome hobby. Tom and his sisters refuse to obey Agnes, knowing their parents have forbidden her to punish them, while the parents blame Miss Grey for the children’s tantrums and wild behavior. A frustrated Agnes pulls six-year-old Mary Ann’s hair and shakes her violently in a desperate effort to make her cooperate. But these methods of discipline, questionable at best, do no good. The Bloomfields fire Miss Grey before a year has passed.