The preludes to Wuthering Heights

Abstract

This dissertation is a reading of Emily Bronte' s poetry as the music that heralds the creation of Wuthering Heights. 'A peculiar music - wild, melancholy and elevating': Charlotte Bronte was lucky enough to be the first reader and to attribute to her sister's poems, what are perhaps the most suitable adjectives when she accidentally lighted on a volume of verse in Emily's handwriting. The music that Charlotte heard while reading what she had discovered should not have been surprising at all to her. For Emily was the most musically gifted member of the family and the rhythm of her poems mirrors the graceful touch with which she struck the keys of her piano; a rhythm that tantalises the reader to sing rather than read; hence the musical term chosen for this dissertation; 'prelude'; a composition that is performed prior to a greater one in order to introduce it. Beethoven, Byron and Blake, were a lasting influence and made her the rebel and visionary she remained to the end. Consider, for instance, Beethoven's 'Sonata no.8 in C minor' justly known as 'pathetique', with its turbulent exposition, fragments of which reappear to open the heartbreaking middle, and to introduce the coda. It would not be far-fetched to associate it with Lockwood's stormy arrival at Wuthering Heights, and with Heathcliff's fiery reaction when Lockwood refers to the child-ghost of his nightmare as a 'little fiend': 'What can you mean by talking in this way to me! thundered Heathcliff with savage vehemence. 'How-how dare you, under my roof - God! He's mad to speak so!' And he struck his forehead with rage. (I. 3). Whether in the form of a personal statement or as the dramatisation of Gondal conflicts, her lyrics move tensely and stressfully bordering on the haunting quality of the ballad form; and so does her greatest poem, Wuthering Heights; it is after all, her most mysterious and profound nature - poem extended in novel form. Mary Visick is deadly accurate therefore, when she states that 'the term "poetic" applied to Wuthering Heights is no mere honorific adjective; the novel is a realisation of poetry in the necessary actions and words of the characters'. The final bound between the world of the poems and that of the novel, is not solely literary and technical, but also emotional and psychological. The reverberations of the poems in the novel will here serve as a device to trace the origins of Catherine and Heathcliff, their agony of love denied and Emily Bronte's comment upon it. Whatever her experience or inexperience of the nature of love, she clearly comprehended that to be excluded from one's beloved, as the ghost-child is excluded from her old home in Wuthering Heights or as Heathcliff is deprived of Catherine's love, is to know despair. The first chapter seeks to highlight the imagery through which Emily Bronte portrays the child, mother and ghost that live simultaneously in Catherine and how this character was gradually hewn throughout the author's Gondal experience. The second chapter deals with those characters in the Gondal poems that point toward the creation of Heathcliff; hence the Doomed Man, Douglas and Fernando De Samara. The feelings and actions of these men are juxtaposed with those of Heathcliff not only to draw the affinities between them but also to capture those qualities that pertain solely to him, thus drawing attention to what constitutes his originality. Heathcliff's howl to Catherine, for instance, to 'haunt him in any shape' rather than leave him in the abyss where he cannot find her, is the ultimate expression of the agony of love denied. The third chapter assesses the indispensability of nature's presence in Emily Bronte's art; how it literally provides the basis for her creations and how it is constantly entwined with them in a way that it becomes their own self It also seeks to capture those particular moments of the day in which Emily Bronte lived her mystical experience and how this experience is hinted at, in both poems and novel; dusk, night-time and moonlight are main sources of inspiration and provide the onset for her visionary experience. The fourth chapter is a study of Emily Bronte's sacramental view of nature and how this is reflected in her characters' ambivalent idea of heaven; how their longing for the Christian heaven is subdued by the tangible, accessible heaven provided by the surrounding nature. This is ultimately a reading of Wuthering Heights as the stormy weather that blurs the distinction between poetry and novel; the two literary gemes become one to shape the very oneness of Catherine and Heathcliff.