Emily Brontë Reappraised: A View From The Twenty-First Century (Women Writers Rediscovered) - Softcover

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<p>Dr Claire O'Callaghan is a Lecturer in English in the School of Arts, English and Drama at Loughborough University, where her research focuses on Victorian and neo-Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality and queerness. She has published widely on these topics.

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Why all the fuss? She wanted liberty. Well, didn’t she have it? A reasonably satisfactory home life, a most satisfactory dream-life―why then all this beating of wings? What was this cage, invisible to us, which she felt herself to be confined in?’ So said Cecil Day Lewis in 1957. The horror he expresses in this article (published in Brontë Society Transactions, now Brontë Studies) towards the idea that women might dream of something more than domesticity seems rather humorous today. But, sadly, it’s also indicative of the way in which, historically, especially in the mid-19th century, a woman’s place was considered to be in the home. The Brontës wrote at a time during which the ideology of separate spheres was dominant in middle-class households. While women were said to govern the domestic sphere, men had far more freedom, enjoying life in the public world. Theirs was a world of education, medicine, science, travel, employment, business, the military and government. Women had no such power nor were their attempts to leave their ‘proper’ place welcomed, as Cecil Day Lewis’ comment indicates.

Within the history of feminism, then, the Brontës have an important place. Their works come after the ‘birth’ of feminism, which is nominally marked as the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, but before the advent of the first wave of feminism in the late 19th century, which focused on women’s legal emancipation. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre is considered by many to be an early feminist novel, and readings of the text have been enriched since the rise of literary feminisms led by critics such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in the late 1970s.

Anne’s work too, especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, has long been recognised (probably much to Charlotte’s horror) as a feminist manifesto of sorts. Yet, for some reason, despite the work of feminist critics, such as Lynn Pykett and Stevie Davies, both of whom have provided rich insights into Emily’s gender agenda, she’s not so readily recognised as a feminist in the same manner as her sisters. One reason for this is that, as Davies notes, Emily was ‘publicly silent’ about ‘feminist social issues on which her sisters took up outspoken positions’. What Davies indicates here is that neither Emily’s poetry nor Wuthering Heights include such an impassioned speech as that spoken by Jane to Mr Rochester in Charlotte’s novel: ‘Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!―I have as much soul as you,―and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;―it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal,―as we are!’

Neither does Emily’s writing reveal any feminist declaration as offered by Anne in her preface to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: ‘if I have warned one rash youth from following in their steps, or prevented one thoughtless girl from falling into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain.’ But I disagree with Davies and think that Emily was a feminist (or more properly, protofeminist) and her work is, despite views to the contrary, readily accessible as such. It is just presented differently to her sisters.