Emily Bront?'s Prison
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry EMILY BRONT?'S PRISON BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Somebody always seems to be writing another study of the Brontes. In Cold Comfort Farm, her brilliant satire of the rural British novel,...
...A series of poems on this theme, removed from their context, was published in a slim volume that appeared a year before her novel...
...Reaching theend of Frank's fast-paced narrative, I regretted that she had not made the argument more forcefully...
...The tragic outcome of his passion for the mother of his pupils inspired Anne's most successful work...
...Instead, she re-creates a portrait of a lonely, stubborn genius, determined to control her own destiny amid a chaotic and disturbed family...
...Frank, in dealing with the phenomenon, observes that "The rest of us are united and yoked to the fates of others: We are obligated, committed, beholden and not free...
...Her skillful depictions of the texture of 19th-century settings recall Dickens or Thackeray or Charlotte Bront...
...Long after her siblings abandoned this youthful pastime for more adult pursuits, Emily continued to elaborate on A.G.A.'s doomed romance with a Byronic duke at her court...
...He became a drunkard and a laudanum addict, alternately possessed by grandiose fantasies and insane rages, during which he threatened to kill his father or himself...
...Katherine Frank's A Chainless Soul: A Life of Emily Bront...
...After his death she hardly ate, and she only survived him by a mere few months...
...Although Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne spent much of their brief time on earth cloistered in their father's remote parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, they felt everything with the intensity that propels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights ?r The Tenant of Wildfell Hall...
...It is that this seemingly independent spirit really suffered from anorexia nervosa...
...was, as she affirmed [in her bestknown poem] 'achainless soul.' " Frank believes she has discovered the clue to her subject's psychology...
...Implacable February weather...
...Readers at the time found the book morbid, and some charged "Ellis Bell" (her pen name) with coarseness...
...Oneagrees with Gibbons' heroine that, far-fetched as the notion may be, a book expounding it would sell like hotcakes...
...Emily Bront...
...All four Bront...
...Houghton Mifflin, 303 pp., $21.95) is the latest case in point...
...Emily's distress over Branwell colors Wuthering Heights...
...Her poetry also shares a spiritual similarity with visions of certain mystics produced by prolonged fasts...
...If Frank ultimately fails as a controversialist, she remains a wonderful storyteller...
...Finally, Emily's own rapid demise contrasts with her sisters' gradual declines...
...Moreover, power was vital to her temperament...
...She could not cope with relationships outside the family circle, refusing to eat or speak among strangers...
...The author rightly notes that her subject is the most inscrutable of the four talented Brontes...
...The Reverend Patrick Bront...
...Charlotte endured two boarding schools—one pleasant, one ghastly—then spent time in Belgium, where she fell in love with her married French preceptor...
...Emily's poems and novel do not reflect her personal experience, asdothoseof hersisters...
...Did anorexia hasten the progress of tuberculosis...
...Emily Bront...
...One wishes she had cast scholarly caution to the winds and been more of a Mybug...
...Frank paints a picture of the family and its surroundings that is considerably less genteel than was usual for people of their class and education in 19th-century England...
...Even the generally pallid English weather turned dramatic on the moors...
...Frank makes the most of such details...
...She listened to his rantings about his illicit love affair, then poured the material into Wuthering Heights...
...The high vaulted arches of the station—suggesting a Gothic cathedral more than the terminus of a new technology—resounded with the tumult...
...The author subscribes neither to Charlotte's "child of nature" theory about Emily's temperament, nor to the vie w of other writers who have seen her as a my stic philosopher...
...Gas lamps bathed the scene in a peculiar lurid light...
...An unfinished second novel was destroyed after her death by Charlotte, who sought to protect her sister's reputation from additional aspersions...
...In Cold Comfort Farm, her brilliant satire of the rural British novel, Stella Gibbons mocked the obsession with reinterpreting the remarkable family when she created "Mr...
...Frank can't take us inside her subject's feelings (as good biographers can in the case of Charlotte), but she does enable us to peer through the grate of the prison Emily made her home...
...His father's favorite, he seemed driven by a perverse determination to spoil all hopes for him...
...This literary poseur tells everyone who will listen his theory that Branwell Bronte actually ghosted his sisters' poems and novels to pay for their addiction to gin, while pretending to be a lush himself to savetheir reputations...
...Branwell failed at a series of jobs before ending upasatutorinahousewhereAnnewas the governess...
...Abuse, incest, murder—known to most young ladies only through novels—were familiar to Emily and her sisters from the daily pastoral problems of their father, since he worked among rough farm laborers...
...As the media have amply informed us, anorexics fast to control their bodies when they feel powerless otherwise...
...shall rise, That dungeon mingle with the mold— That captive with the skies...
...Contemporary accounts all attest to Emily's extreme thinness...
...children enjoyed writing histories of countries that they invented...
...The open entranceway let in the fog and din of hansom cabs and carriages outside...
...who functioned as the teenage author's alter ego...
...But as Frank demonstrates, Emily lived imaginatively through her writings, the more so as she withdrew further and further from the outer world...
...Wuthering Heights displays a fixation with food, a hallmark of anorexia...
...Hence Henley Earnshaw'salcoholicdegeneration, and Heathcliff s deliberate attraction to wrong...
...Emily's existence was primarily interior...
...Her isolation bred an originality that recalls another solitary figure, Emily Dickinson...
...What little we know of her life comes mostly from Charlotte, who adored her without understanding her very different disposition...
...will always remain somewhat inaccessible and mysterious...
...Meals are described in sensuous detail, though several of the characters starve themselves to death...
...Previous biographers have marveled at Emily's nonjudgmental acceptance of Branwell, particularly in contrast to Charlotte, who ceased speaking to him after learning of his adulterous liaison...
...There appears to be no spoiling the fascination of the Bront...
...In Emily's private universe, the mind strives continuously against the fetters of the flesh...
...And that quality seems to spill over into every book about them, starting with Elizabeth Gaskell's 1857 biography of Charlotte...
...But so far as we can tell Emily, who described love as passionately as any writer in English, never felt it for anyone...
...Lawrence...
...If upset, she wouldnot eat...
...Her thesis helps illuminate many hitherto mysterious aspects of Emily's personality...
...Frank argues that, in fact, the younger sister was destroyed by watching her beloved brother's descent into madness...
...Yet there, too, Catherine and Heathcliff remain Augusta and her lover in English costume...
...No one has yet managed to fully explain how this Victorian maiden, who lived like a child in her father's household until her death at age 30, could have composed Wuthering Heights, a story that resonates with brutality and naked emotion...
...Her siblings briefly adapted, in varying degrees, to life away from home...
...An important facet of Emily's creative development came to light in this century with the discovery of her Gondal Chronicles...
...The claustrophobic atmosphere permeates the Brontes' lives in this latest retelling...
...was phobic about burglars and always slept with a loaded revolver...
...She, too, suffered an unhappy love affair, falling victim to a fickle curate of her father's...
...A Chainless Soul begins, in medias res, with a pistol shot: the daily alarm that awakened all residents of the Haworth parsonage...
...indeed the family, recognizing this, nicknamed her "the Major...
...Euston Square Station teeming with passengers arriving and departing, jostling one another, impatiently shouting for their [luggage] to be unloaded or wedged into already bursting train carriages...
...story...
...while reading Franks Prologue, I found myself questioning her decision to base a reinterpretation of Emily's life on so chic a disease as anorexia nervosa...
...Once captured by its narrative spell, you cannot shake off its somber atmosphere or forget its troubled heroine...
...Mybug," the arty devotee of D.H...
...She wanted Emily remembered for her ethereal poems, which declare war against the body: Thus truly when that breast is cold Thy prisoned sou...
...A Chainless Soul reads like a Bront...
...Too often the biographer pulls her punches just when she ought tobe driving her point home...
...It was Emily who sat up night after night to help him to bed, following evenings of debauchery at the local tavern...
...Emily's Gondal was a matriarchy, ruled by the despotic Princess Augusta Geraldine Almeda (usually shortened to A.G.A...
...Consider the folio wing vignette from the outset of Charlotte's and Emily's trip to Brussels, the last attempt the latter made to leave home: "London, 1842...
...Early critics assumed they referred to some tragic love affair of Emily's, not least because their depth of feeling far outshines the autobiographical poetic effusions of her sisters...
...Given her devotion to Gondal, it seems surprising that she settled for a realistic Yorkshire setting in Wuthering Heights...
...Each morning, he discharged the gun out of his bedroom window—a fitting gesture for a disappointed and angry man whose wife died at a very young age...
...Emily and her father once saw a bog swollen with rainwater explode, casting peat and rocks for miles around...
...Her description of the horror of Branwell's deterioration is particularly vivid...
Vol. 73 • December 1990 • No. 16
