Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination 9781441166302, 9781472543547, 9781441168139

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Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination

Also available from Bloomsbury Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, by Ian Brinton Brontë’s Jane Eyre, by Zoe Brennan Wuthering Heights: Character Studies, by Melissa Fegan Victorian Parables, by Susan E. Colón Blake. Wordsworth. Religion., by Jonathan Roberts Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: ‘This is Living Art’, by Josie Billington Christina Rossetti’s Gothic, by Serena Trowbridge

Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination Simon Marsden

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Simon Marsden, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Simon Marsden has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: PB: 978-1-4411-6630-2 ePDF: 978-1-4411-6813-9 ePub: 978-1-4411-5350-0 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

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Contents Acknowledgements A Note on Texts 1 2 3 4 5

Introduction: Emily Brontë and the Death of God The Enchanted World ‘If your Former Words were True’: Christianity and the Words of Faith Fallen Wor(l)ds ‘A Lovelier Life from Death’: Emily Brontë’s Apocalypse

Afterword Notes Bibliography Index

vi vii 1 29 57 87 113 145 149 169 181

Acknowledgements I want to express my gratitude to the many friends and colleagues who have encouraged this project and been generous with their advice and support. Alison Easton provided important guidance at an early stage. Lynne Pearce, Jon Roberts and Andrew Tate read draft chapters and offered valuable advice. I have benefitted from many conversations during the development of this project, but I would particularly like to mention Arthur Bradley, Matthew Bradley, Jo Carruthers, Rachel Dickinson, Jessica Dyson, Kamilla Elliott, Alison Findlay, Keith Hanley, Gavin Hopps, Margaret Hulmes, Gavin Hyman, John Schad, Catherine Spooner, Michael Wheeler and Sue Zlosnik. I would also like to acknowledge the members of the Ruskin Seminar at Lancaster University. I have presented conference papers based on this project at Spiritual Identities (Lancaster University 2004), Victorian Life-Writing (Lancaster 2005) and as part of a series of nineteenth-century studies colloquia held at Gladstone’s Library: at each event I have received valuable feedback and enjoyed stimulating conversations. I am grateful to Peter Francis and the staff of Gladstone’s Library for their hospitality and assistance during several visits. A period of research at Gladstone’s Library was funded by the English Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. I am grateful to Micael Clarke and to the anonymous readers for Bloomsbury for their detailed and constructive comments on my work, and to David Avital, Colleen Coalter and Laura Murray for their editorial support. Some material used in this book has appeared in my essay ‘ “Vain are the thousand creeds”: Wuthering Heights, the Bible and Liberal Protestantism’, Literature and Theology 20.3 (2006), 236–50. I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce this material.

A Note on Texts References to Emily Brontë’s poems follow the texts and numerical sequence of Emily Brontë: The Complete Poems, ed. by Janet Gezari (London: Penguin, 1992). Gezari’s edition distinguishes helpfully between poems as published in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846) and manuscript texts. Poems identified by roman numerals appeared in the 1846 collection; Arabic numerals denote poems unpublished in Emily Brontë’s lifetime or manuscript versions of poems published in 1846. Other references to Emily Brontë’s works are to the following editions: WH Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, fourth edition, ed. by Richard J. Dunn (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2003). Throughout this book, I refer to the elder Catherine by the longer form of her name and to her daughter as Cathy. Essays Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, The Belgian Essays, ed. and trans. by Sue Lonoff (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). All biblical references are to the King James Version.

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Introduction: Emily Brontë and the Death of God

This book examines the animating dialogues and creative frictions between Emily Brontë’s writing and the texts, traditions and theological resources of Christianity. It reads Wuthering Heights and a selection of Brontë’s poems in relation to theological concepts including natural theology, biblical hermeneutics, original sin, apocalypse and eschatology. Brontë’s literary engagement with religious language is marked not only by representations of liberating numinous encounter, divine immanence and apocalyptic renewal but, also, by notes of uncertainty, despondency and absence. The world in Brontë’s writing is both the site of immanent presence and the place from which God is absent. Focusing upon these notes of tension, this book does not attempt to ‘claim’ Brontë for either side of the faith/scepticism debate.1 Rather than seeking to resolve Brontë’s depictions of uncertainty and incompletion into secure positions of either belief or unbelief, I want to suggest that they are convergent with the renewed emphasis upon paradox, aporia and otherness that have characterized the postmodern ‘return’ of the religious in contem­ porary culture and theory. Brontë’s writing is informed and animated by the religious discourses of its time and, particularly, by Romantic interpretations and appropriations of theological language, the legacies of which continue to influence contemporary theology. Bernard Reardon writes in Religion in the Age of Romanticism (1985): What  .  .  .  pre-eminently distinguishes the Romantic understanding of Christianity is its subjectivization of all religious truth, and this new attitude may, I think, be said to mark the beginning of that process of immanentizing religious reality which was characteristic of the nineteenth century in general and which, despite the neo-orthodox reaction, has continued through the

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present century as well. For the modern theologian, however orthodox he way mish to appear, finds the thought of two worlds worrying. Somehow or other eternal life has to be seen to be lived here and now, eternity itself to be a dimension of the present order of things, the basic Christian values rooted in this world, Jesus Christ to be the man in whom all men may see their own idealized reflection.2

Like her Romantic predecessors, Emily Brontë asks questions both of the theological orthodoxies of her time and of the emerging metanarratives of modernity. I will argue in this book that Brontë’s persistent explorations of tension and uncertainty – her recognition that faith and despondency (to borrow the title of her first poem in the sisters’ 1846 collection) are more intimately related than is often supposed – give her writing a particular resonance with the postmodern situation that has seen religion ‘return’ as the excluded other of secular modernity. Religious readings of Emily Brontë’s work were relatively common for more than a century after her death in  1848.3 While many readers noted the unorthodoxy and individualism of Brontë’s religious vision, she was often situated within mystical and other traditions of Christian spirituality, including the versions of intense feeling associated with Methodist discourses of religious enthusiasm. Since the 1960s, much of the best and most influential Brontë criticism has been predicated upon secular critical methodologies, a turn consistent with the theoretical directions of literary criticism more generally. As Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler point out, ‘literary criticism of the last few decades has been undoubtedly dominated by a range of theoretical movements which are clandestinely united in the silent refusal of the possibility of faith that precedes their diverse practices’.4 Though a ‘return’ of the religious in contemporary culture and critical discourse is now widely recognized, many commentators remain uneasy about the implications of this development, which has coincided with a resurgence of religious fundamentalism. Yet if contemporary political contexts have lent a new urgency to concerns surrounding the place of religion in culture and criticism, the concerns themselves are not new. For many readers of the Brontës, religion has for some time been associated with patriarchal structures of oppression and authoritarianism, and with notions of received truth and doctrinal orthodoxy that are seen to threaten personal autonomy and

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imaginative freedom. This book is written from a Christian perspective, but it does not seek to overlook or marginalize these troubling elements of religious ideology. It does, however, recognize that the horizons of religious thinking extend beyond the antagonistic frameworks within which contemporary public debates between faith and scepticism are often conducted and that many theologians are alert to and have much to say about the political, social and ideological concerns identified by secular criticism.5 It also maintains that Christian theology is far more open to the creative play of the imagination than is often acknowledged by critical methodologies that have tended to rely upon more constrained notions of religious and doctrinal orthodoxy. As Andrew Tate observes, ‘[i]t is sometimes strategically easier to simplify matters of faith rather than to acknowledge ambivalences, differences and uncertainties. However, critical voices, on either side of the faith and scepticism debate, are keen both to give witness to their world view and to hear stories from radically different perspectives’.6 One of the claims of this book is that religion need not be approached as a constrained and static body of received truth, but might rather be considered as a tradition – or a multiplicity of traditions – that is always involved in the active rereading and reinterpretation of its own sacred texts, language and theological concepts. Indeed, in the postmodern situation, the lines of demarcation between the sacred and the secular and between theology and other critical disciplines, always less clear than is often assumed, have come to seem ever more unstable. In recent years, the metanarratives of modernity and secularization have themselves been exposed to renewed critical scrutiny. Not least among the surprising consequences of the postmodern situation has been a growing recognition that the assumptions of secular criticism and of modernity’s ‘death of God’ narrative are no more immune to postmodern scepticism than are religious metanarratives. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described the postmodern condition as ‘the “re-enchantment” of the world after the protracted and earnest, though in the end inconclusive, modern struggle to dis-enchant it’.7 The now widely acknowledged religious ‘turn’ in postmodern culture and theory is not a return to or of naïve, pre-modern belief but, rather, a new openness to what Graham Ward calls ‘the re-evaluation of ambivalence, mystery, excess and aporia as they adhere to, are constituted by and disrupt the rational’.8 The theologian John D. Caputo’s suggestion that

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‘the distinction between theism and atheism is a little more unstable than people think, including most popes and bishops’ reflects both a theological movement beyond the conceptual frameworks of onto-theology – the God of Enlightenment philosophy and theology; the God whose obituary was written by Nietzsche – and a renewed awareness of incompletion, aporia and otherness as aspects of faith rather than as unambiguous signs of its collapse.9 ‘[I]t has for a long time been apparent’, Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler tell us, ‘that whoever is supposed to have murdered God, firstly, seems to have got the wrong man and, secondly, appears to have done religion a favour’: To think God outside of the protocols of onto-theology is to allow God to “be” unconstrained by the category of being. It is to throw open the idolatrously circumscribed horizons of finitude and to respect the irreducible otherness of the divine, by not limiting it in advance according to our own measure . . . The far-reaching implications of this change have yet to be fully registered in disciplines such as literary criticism, which have relied for some time on out-dated notions of theological orthodoxy. The fall of onto-theology, then, like the death of God, may be something of a “fortunate shipwreck” for the religious in that it heralds a beginning as well as an end.10

What are the implications of the theological ‘turn’ in contemporary theory for a reading of Emily Brontë’s poetry and novel? In what ways might theology ‘after the death of God’ illuminate the works of a writer whose engagement with theological and spiritual concerns often takes her far outside of the doctrinal and institutional structures of established religious formulations? As the editors of a recent collection of essays on the post-secular imagination observe, ‘[l]iterature, like religion, has always implied a challenge to strict boundaries – between fantasy and fact, transcendence and immanence, the spiritual and the material’.11 This book explores ways in which Brontë’s writing engages with, challenges and disrupts these and other boundaries: between the sacred and the secular, presence and absence, faith and despondency, life and death, time and eternity. This introductory chapter examines the contexts of disenchantment and Romantic re-enchantment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It surveys critical discussions of Emily Brontë and religion, and suggests that a view of Brontë as a theological heretic might be recuperated productively. The chapter concludes with a reading of Brontë’s

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essay ‘The Butterfly’ that introduces the central thematic and theological concerns of the subsequent analysis.

The disenchantment of the world The early nineteenth century in which Emily Brontë composed her poems and novel has been described as characterized by the secularization of the European mind.12 While the rationalist epistemologies that gained increasing prominence in Europe from the seventeenth century onwards did not, except to a relatively small minority, seem inevitably to discredit theism, by the end of the eighteenth century they had produced a fundamental shift in attempts to articulate the relationship between God and his creation. In the empiricist accounts of natural theology that retained some intellectual credibility into the early nineteenth century, God had been subsumed into the processes of cause and effect by which the Newtonian universe was governed.13 God as First Cause remained a defensible proposition for scientific philosophy, but the possibility that God might be encountered as immanent presence within the world seemed increasingly unstable. When Robert Chambers published his anonymous – and enormously popular – Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in  1844, even God’s status as primary instigator of the material world seemed perilous: belief in a divine First Cause must come, Chambers suggested, from unspecified ‘other grounds’ beyond the horizons of science.14 In parallel with a growing sense that theism might be extraneous to empiricist reason, developments within Christianity itself had contributed to the distancing of God from the material world. Alister McGrath has argued that the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis upon the authority of the Bible in matters of belief and practice, yielded a tendency towards literal rather than symbolic readings that was applied to interpretations of the natural world as well as in biblical hermeneutics.15 Christian apologetics and natural theologies in the age of Enlightenment placed increasing emphasis upon logical argument from creation to creator – the ‘argument from design’ – at the expense of sacramental readings of the world in which nature was allowed both to bear divine immanence and to point symbolically to a reality beyond itself. Keith Thomas claims in his influential study Religion and the Decline

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of Magic (1971) that the gradual decline of belief in a world inhabited by spirits and magic had its origins in Protestant rejection of ritual practices that became associated with Roman Catholic superstitions.16 If this is correct, then the disenchantment of the natural world that is often regarded as synonymous with secularization is at least in part a product of Protestantism itself: the privileging of a theological epistemology predicated upon God’s self-revelation in the Bible evolved into the sense that God reveals himself only in the Bible. At the same time, the Protestant emphasis upon the individual conscience in matters of biblical interpretation, in parallel with the new ecclesiologies developed in the aftermath of the Reformation, participated in what Charles Taylor has called the great disembedding: the cultural shift in which collective beliefs and practices give way to a new individualism. Taylor writes: Embeddedness . . . is both a matter of identity – the contextual limits to the imagination of the self – and of the social imaginary: the ways we are able to think or imagine the whole of society. But the new buffered identity, with its insistence on personal devotion and discipline, increased the distance, the disidentification, even the hostility to the older forms of collective ritual and belonging; while the drive to reform came to envisage their abolition.17

The process of secularization is not a straightforward rejection of or loss of interest in traditional religion but, rather, a complex pattern of cultural and intellectual shifts that have at least some of their origins within Christian theology and ecclesiology. The transcendent God of eighteenth-century Deism, the builder of the mechanistic universe, was in many respects the creation of the same rationalist and empiricist epistemologies that would announce his death a century later. What Hillis Miller has called the ‘gradual withdrawal of God from the world’ might therefore be understood in the context of the changed conditions of belief that emerged with the wider cultural and intellectual movement towards disenchantment.18 In a secularizing culture, collective belief gives way to a new individualism, while the rationalist and literalist tendencies of Enlightenment thought displace symbolic readings of the natural world and thus problematize the epistemological status of the religious imagination. At the same time, denominational formulations and theologies proliferate as theologians, clergy and artists confront the need to articulate faith in new ways that might address and respond to shifting social and cultural conditions. Owen Chadwick has

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described the development of a free market of ideas as an inevitable outcome of liberalism in the Romantic era and beyond. For Chadwick, secularization is the increasing toleration of beliefs and opinions that stand outside of the mainstream or majority opinion. The secular state is one in which all voices, all opinions, are permitted: in a free market of ideas, all opinions and beliefs are subject to the scrutiny and challenge of alternative positions.19 More recently, Charles Taylor has offered three related but distinct definitions of the secular state. The first concerns the emptying of theistic reference from public spaces: in the modern secular state, it is possible to participate fully within political and public life without encountering God. In its second definition, secularity describes the perceived lack of relevance ascribed to religion by individuals. Clearly, a nation might be regarded as largely secular in this second sense despite retaining some religious forms – an established Church, for example – in its public life. The third definition of secularity, Taylor explains, [W]ould focus on the condition of belief. The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.20

To describe a nation or community as secular in this third sense is not to say that religion is absent from its public and political institutions (though this might be the case) or that its members no longer hold theistic beliefs (though this might be true of some or many). It is, rather, to say that religious belief is exposed to and challenged by alternative construals of reality and of human flourishing. In a secular age, individuals are free to hold religious beliefs but are unable to regard them as self-evident or unproblematic. Theistic belief can no longer be held naïvely but must rather be understood as one of several alternative positions and as by no means the most ‘obvious’ or ‘natural’ way of interpreting reality. The individual believer must negotiate between positions of engagement – in which beliefs are seen as describing ontological realities – and disengagement, in which those same beliefs are understood to participate in a range of competing positions, the very diversity of which presents a formidable obstacle to the regarding of a religious or theistic worldview as self-evident.21

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The experience of a world disenchanted by the secularizing tendencies of modernity is articulated in the well-known unweaving of the rainbow in John Keats’s poem ‘Lamia’ (1820). Keats dramatizes the tensions between symbolic and demythologized readings of the natural world and indicates that what is at stake in this encounter is the question of what constitutes legitimate truth: There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine – Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.22

Some popular readings of Keats’ poem have seen in it the rejection of scientific explanation in favour of the preservation of mystery.23 Such readings fail to penetrate beyond the categories of empiricist modernity and thus reproduce the same epistemological horizon that the poem interrogates. The poem’s argument is not that mystery can be preserved only as long as scientific explanation is deferred; it is not a rejection of empiricism as a legitimate source of truth. Instead, it articulates the suspicion that something important has been lost at a cultural moment when the empirical and rational have come to be regarded as the only legitimate sources of truth. As Alister McGrath has pointed out, the poem suggests that materialist philosophy has denied symbolic readings of the natural world and thus emptied the ‘haunted air’ that was once perceived by imaginative vision; the rainbow, interpreted in terms of scientific materialism, is no longer allowed to point to anything beyond itself.24 The unweaving of the rainbow is not a critique of reason or of scientific knowledge but, rather, a representation of the ways in which empiricist modernity is perceived to have effaced the legitimacy of other ways of experiencing and engaging with the world.

Romantic re-enchantment In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both theology and the natural sciences came increasingly to regard the world as a closed system operating

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according to fixed physical laws. God could still be regarded as the original lawgiver, but the notion of divine presence and activity in the world was rendered increasingly problematic both by rationalist philosophy and by theologies that emphasized God’s status as the source of order. Deism retained God’s role as instigator of the material universe while also distancing the wholly transcendent creator from the creation. In this context, the Evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century, characterized by a strong emphasis upon personal experiences of the Holy Spirit, can be understood as responses to the modern intellectualizing of faith and to the perceived distance between creator and creation introduced by rationalist versions of Christian theology. The evangelistic successes of the Wesleys, in particular, were characterized by manifestations of intense religious feeling and powerful experiences of personal conversion. Karen Armstrong notes, however, that Evangelicalism broadly endorsed ‘the Enlightenment concept of “belief ” as intellectual conviction’ and thus perpetuated ‘the Enlightenment separation of the natural from the supernatural’.25 The Romantic philosophies that emerged late in the eighteenth century, in contrast, regarded as intolerable the disenchanted world of modernity. Romanticism responded to the Enlightenment movement towards disenchantment with a renewed emphasis upon imaginative, emotional and spiritual experiences available in the natural world; it aspired towards the re-enchantment of nature. If Romantic radicalism raised both political and theological challenges to orthodox Christianity, particularly where the churches were seen to be most closely associated with oppressive and undemocratic political establishments, Romantic intimations of the sacred and sublime in the world could also revitalize religious faith with new experiential and creative life.26 In his study of the Romantic sublime, Thomas Weiskel argues that Romanticism responded to the secularizing direction of Enlightenment rationalism by relocating the divine within the material world. The natural sublime represented both a reaction against an increasingly unstable theology of absolute transcendence and an attempt to reverse the modern separation of spirit from matter: If the only route to the intellect lies through the senses, belief in a super­ natural Being finds itself insecure. God had to be saved, even if He had to marry the world of appearances. And so, in the natural sublime, He did.27

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The Romantic imagination recuperated elements of Christian sacramental theology, refiguring the natural world as the site of possible encounter with immanent spirit. Romanticism privileged the state of heightened imaginative perception described by Wordsworth as ‘that serene and blessed mood’ In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.28

Wordsworthian seeing requires the suspension of the physical senses: it is with the body ‘asleep’ and the natural eye made quiet that the poet sees into the fuller life of reality. Yet this mode of heightened imaginative perception remains elusive. ‘To speak truly,’ writes Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘few adult persons can see nature’.29 John Ruskin – an inheritor, like the Brontë sisters, of both Evangelical and Romantic traditions – similarly describes the scarcity of spiritual and imaginative perception: ‘[h]undreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, – all in one’.30 The aspiration towards integration, the attempt to see the finite and limited as part of the infinite, was at the heart of Romantic readings of Christianity. For William Blake, religion was the perception of the infinite that transcended the finite horizons of the physical senses and of reason. ‘He who sees the infinite in all things’, Blake argues, ‘sees God’.31 Coleridge was similarly willing to describe the perception of the finite as part of the infinite as an experience of the divine: it is God ‘Diffus’d thro’ all, that doth make all one whole’.32 The attempt to see beneath the surface of things, to glimpse the infinite life that permeated and united the material world, reflected the Romantic aspiration towards union and integration, an experience of nature that resisted the separation of nature and the supernatural. Bernard Reardon writes: We might then say that the essence of romanticism – if determination of its “essence” be possible at all – lies in the inexpugnable feeling that the finite is not self-explanatory and self-justifying, but that behind it and within

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it – shining, as it were, through it – there is always an infinite “beyond,” and that he who has once glimpsed the infinity that permeates as well as transcends all finitude can never again rest content with the paltry this-andthat, the rationalized simplicities, of everyday life  .  .  .  Again and again in Romantic thought we encounter this sense of the coincidence of the finite and the infinite. In all things finite the infinite is present, latent, and the part is meaningless without the whole.33

Romantic notions of divine immanence resisted the distant, wholly transcendent God of Deism but, as the work of the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher demonstrates, the Romantic aspiration towards encounter with an indefinable other could be situated within the traditions of Christianity. In On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799), Schleiermacher describes the essence of religion as the experience of oneself as part of the infinite, distinguishing it from the doctrinal frameworks that are ‘extraneous parts’ rather than religion itself34: Religion’s essence is neither thinking or acting, but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe, wishes devoutly to overhear the universe’s own manifestations and actions, longs to be grasped and filled by the universe’s immediate influences in childlike passivity . . . Metaphysics and morals see in the whole universe only humanity as the centre of all relatedness, as the condition of all being and the cause of all becoming; religion wishes to see the infinite, its imprint and its manifestation, in humanity no less than in all other individual and finite forms.35

Schleiermacher’s theology grounds religious epistemology in the intuitive perception of the eternal. Religious feeling begins in the pre-rational consciousness and is only later to be acted upon by the reason. This experience, ­however, is always to be interpreted in the context of the Christian revelation. Christ remains for Schleiermacher the supreme example of the consciousness of absolute dependence upon God and the means of entry into the Christian ­communion within which that experience is most fully developed: no one, he argues in his important work of systematic theology The Christian Faith (1822; revised ­edition 1831), ‘can wish to belong to the Church on any other ground’.36 Some Romantic thinkers, of course, did not wish to belong to the Church on any ground at all.37 In the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley, orthodox religion is often figured as the antithesis of encounter with the numinous presence that he calls the Power: the ‘still and solemn power of many sights’ of ‘Mont Blanc’.38 In

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the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, the Power is a transient influence that brings renewal and vitality to human experience but which also departs, leaving the world a ‘dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate’.39 Because humanity desires answers to questions that escape final resolution – questions of mortality and meaning; of transience and suffering – the frameworks of religious doctrine have arisen to provide false securities: No voice from some sublime world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given – Therefore the name of God and ghosts and Heaven, Remain the records of their vain endeavour, Frail spells – whose uttered charm might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance, and mutability.40

Shelley’s poetry resists the closing down of theological meaning, refusing formal structures and systems of religious knowledge yet  also opening glimpses of divine immanence in moments of paradox and aporia. Indeed, Romanticism’s persistent explorations of tension, paradox, incompletion and irreducible otherness often resist certainties whether sacred or secular; categories that have a tendency to converge and collapse into one another for many of the period’s most prominent writers. Coleridge’s hazarding of a speculative ‘what if ’ in ‘The Eolian Harp’ – ‘And what if all of animated nature/Be but organic harps diversely framed’ – before returning (if less than wholeheartedly) to a more overtly orthodox position leaves the text poised between two construals of religious knowledge and experience.41 Coleridge’s speculations remain open and unresolved, another way of living with and encountering reality, suspended in the poem between belief and rejection. If Romanticism’s willingness to ‘dwell in Possibility’ challenged many of the religious orthodoxies of its era, it also allowed the otherness of the divine to re-emerge in its openness to mystery, tension and paradox.42

Heretic writing The Brontë family’s immediate context in Haworth, the West Yorkshire industrial town in which Emily and her siblings spent most of their lives,

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was in many respects a microcosm of the evolving religious climate of the early nineteenth century. Patrick Brontë, an Irish Evangelical with both Methodist and Romantic leanings, was appointed to the perpetual curacy of the Church of St Michael and All Angels in 1821 having studied for ordination at Cambridge University, an institution which had become central to the training of Evangelical ministers and missionaries under the influence of Charles Simeon.43 As vicar of Cambridge’s Holy Trinity Church, Simeon took it upon himself to mentor Evangelical candidates for ministry, inculcating in them the disciplines of careful Bible study and Church order.44 Simeon placed typical Evangelical emphasis upon the believer’s personal experience of the Holy Spirit and upon the outworking of faith in a life of fruitful service. A clergyman, he believed, was to be both a minister of the Gospel and a defender of Church order. Simeon regarded the extremes of religious enthusiasm – unrestrained, ecstatic spiritual experience – as a danger to be avoided by responsible Evangelical ministers.45 Patrick Brontë seems to have shared this view. His surviving writings are consistent in their representation of personal spiritual experience as fundamental to Christian faith and life, but this experience is characterized by peace rather than by the excess or frenzy often associated – sometimes in ungenerous parody – with Wesleyan Methodism. Patrick’s poem ‘The Pious Cottager’s Sabbath’ (1815) constructs a picture of Christian devotion in which Bible reading, ‘holy fire’ and the ministrations of the Holy Spirit combine to yield a state of spiritual tranquillity: Now, wrapt in holy fire, they spend the time, In close perusal of the Sacred Book; Or, all their conversation rais’d to heaven, They dwell on Christ’s Eternal Love, and see, Through Faith, the brightness of his face, and feel The breathings of his Spirit whisp’ring peace.46

Evangelicals often felt it necessary to distance themselves from Methodist practices in the early nineteenth century. The movements had much in common – not least their shared emphasis upon personal spiritual experience in the life of the believer – but boundaries were drawn nevertheless between established Church and dissent. Evangelicals remained committed to parish ministry and resisted the itinerancy practised by Methodism and other nonconformist groups.47 When Patrick Brontë arrived in Haworth, he entered

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into a religious context in which Evangelical Anglicans were divided from Methodists and other denominations present in the town despite what was in many respects a common history in the revivalism of the previous century. Like the Wesleys, William Grimshaw, the Methodist clergyman whose impassioned preaching of personal conversion had made Haworth a centre of Christian revival in the eighteenth century, remained throughout his life a member of the Church of England.48 Grimshaw received barely a dozen communicants when he became perpetual curate in Haworth in 1842. Six years later, he was able to report to the Archbishop of York that his congregations numbered in excess of one thousand worshippers.49 Haworth became the centre of a preaching circuit known as ‘The Great Haworth Round’, covering some eight thousand square miles. When travelling on the circuit, Grimshaw would sometimes preach more than twenty times in a single week.50 Grimshaw’s success attracted the attention of John and Charles Wesley, who visited Haworth and preached in the same pulpit that would be occupied by Patrick Brontë, an admirer of the Wesleys, in the nineteenth century. For all his popular success in the Haworth curacy, however, other versions of William Grimshaw persisted in local folklore. He became associated with a form of muscular Christianity and was said to have filled the pews by methods rather more robust than pious exhortation. John Newton, an early biographer, describes Grimshaw’s recruitment of a congregation: ‘[i]t was his frequent and almost constant custom to leave the church, while the psalm before the sermon was singing, to see if any were absent from worship, and idling their time in the churchyard, the street, or the ale-houses, and many of those whom he so found, he would drive into the church before him’.51 Popular (and almost certainly apocryphal) modifications of this tradition equipped Grimshaw with a horsewhip as he rounded up parishioners from the taproom of the Black Bull.52 Grimshaw became associated in local legend with a version of aggressive evangelism alien to Patrick Brontë and abhorrent to his daughters. There is, perhaps, an echo of this folkloric Grimshaw in Lockwood’s dream of travelling to hear Jabes Branderham preach in Gimmerton Kirk accompanied by parishioners who carry ‘heavy-headed cudgel[s]’ in place of pilgrims’ staves (WH: 18). By the early nineteenth century, Evangelical Anglicans were often compelled by political necessity to distance themselves from the practices of dissenters

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with whom their theological views overlapped in significant ways. As perpetual curate, Patrick Brontë would spend much of his life occupied by tensions between Haworth’s various religious communities.53 Though he remained a staunch defender of the Anglican establishment, Patrick demonstrated considerable tolerance towards other denominations. He supported the reduction of church rates paid by members of non-Anglican denominations, was more willing than many Evangelicals to make concessions on the question of Catholic emancipation and, following the deaths of his children, he appointed a Unitarian to write Charlotte’s biography.54 His liberal attitude towards non-Anglicans is, of course, best illustrated by his personal life. Patrick married the Cornish Methodist Maria Branwell in 1812 and, following Maria’s death in 1821, he brought her sister Elizabeth to the parsonage, where she resided until her own death in 1842. The Brontë family’s attitude towards Methodism is easily caricatured by Charlotte’s reference, in Shirley, to ‘mad Methodist Magazines, full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism’.55 In reality, the Brontës’ engagements with Methodism were more nuanced. Like her sisters, Emily Brontë could be critical of the excesses of religious enthusiasm, but her critiques were based on detailed knowledge of Wesley’s writings and her work displays affinities with as well as ambivalence towards Wesleyan Methodism. In The Clue to the Brontës (1948), G. E. Harrison argues that the Methodist tradition of religious enthusiasm provided Emily Brontë with a vocabulary in which to articulate the intense feeling that permeates Wuthering Heights: All the Brontës understood that quality of religious passion as the legacy of their father’s and mother’s own inheritance, but it is only in Emily that the thing stalks as itself, pure and untrammelled of the flesh. She had no earthly idols to confuse the issue as had Charlotte and Branwell and even gentle Anne, so that Wuthering Heights reads as a scrap of history torn from the communion of the saints of old and flung in the face of the modern world, out of its context, to startle its dainty self-restraint. No one in Haworth Parsonage could have done that but Emily, for she had made that religious experience her very own and was twin sister to her father’s saints.56

Harrison’s analysis has some important weaknesses, not least of which is its tendency to perpetuate a picture of Emily Brontë as a solitary spiritual

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visionary distanced from the theological concerns and public debates of the early nineteenth century. Nevertheless, Harrison’s reading also provides the beginnings of a solution to this problem by locating the language of religious experience in Brontë’s writing within a specific theological tradition; that is to say, within a recognizable public discourse. This is a point that has often been occluded by a popular image of Brontë as a solitary imaginative outsider or ‘mystic’, the latter a term that has sometimes been employed as something of a catch-all name for visionary experience without due consideration of mysticism both as a theological tradition and as a spiritual discipline. This is not to deny that there is a strong emphasis upon solitude and individualism in Brontë’s writing. Indeed, Cecil Day-Lewis sees these characteristics as a limitation upon Brontë’s religious vision: ‘her Protestantism and furious individualism prevented her from becoming the great religious poet which otherwise she had it in her to be. Her God, like her Gondal, was too narrowly personal – a Being who, rather than reconciling her to humankind, justified her self-exclusion from it’.57 Yet whatever these literary representations of visionary experience might or might not tell us about their author’s personal spirituality, they participate in recognizable literary and religious traditions; they are mediated and have their meanings in the context of a public language. In The Brontë Myth (2001), Lucasta Miller rightly resists a tendency in earlier critical and biographical studies to read Emily Brontë as ‘a symbol of timeless spirituality’ and argues that ‘Emily’s language, rather than being merely private and personal, was part of a public discourse’.58 Miller’s reading focuses primarily on some of the more overtly secular elements of this public discourse, yet her insistence upon the public character of Brontë’s writing also opens space for consideration of its religious and theological aspects. Like most writers of her era – indeed, like most writers in the canons of English literature – Brontë’s literary vocabulary is shaped significantly by the language, hermeneutics and narrative orientation of the Bible. Lisa Wang has illustrated this point by demonstrating Brontë’s frequent use of biblical tropes and topoi associated with the Holy Spirit: images of wind and breath recur in Brontë’s work, associated with spiritual and imaginative liberation and with a ‘principle of life intense’ (123: 19) that inhabits the created world and unites the human subject with the infinite.59 Indeed, several recent critical studies

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have drawn attention to Brontë’s informed engagement with theological texts and traditions. Emma Mason argues that [A] view of Emily as too emotional for her own good has encouraged critics to presume that she did not understand religion in the detailed way her sister Charlotte did. Only when rescued from the role of emotional visionary can Emily be recognized as a thinking commentator on her religious society: she cannot, it seems, be at once one who feels and thinks.60

Revisiting Harrison’s exploration of Brontë’s Methodist inheritance, Mason uncovers a thread of nuanced engagement with discourses of religious enthusiasm. Resisting readings of Brontë as a solitary visionary detached from her religious and cultural contexts, Mason emphasizes Brontë’s awareness of Wesleyan Methodism as a public theological discourse. In a reading of Wuthering Heights, Mason tells us that ‘[f]igured through a religious fervour which subsists outside of any doctrinal system, Catherine and Heathcliff ’s passion parallels Wesley’s version of the Methodist faith, free from narrow doctrinal concerns and grounded in the authority of feeling’. Drawing attention to the parallels between discourses of religious enthusiasm and the versions of powerful but all-consuming feeling discovered by Heathcliff and Catherine, Mason argues that Brontë’s engagement with Wesleyan Methodism acknowledges both the appeal of enthusiasm and its dangers: ‘[b]oth Wesley and Emily recognize that the experience of enthusiasm offers a compelling metaphor for renewal and revision, but one that simultaneously threatens to overwhelm that which it promises to renew’.61 Where Mason’s work focuses upon Wesleyan Methodism, Marianne Thormählen’s The Brontës and Religion (1999) situates Emily Brontë and her sisters within a broader nineteenth-century religious landscape. Thormählen argues that the Brontës experienced their father’s Evangelicalism not as the restrictive influence that some commentators have taken it to be but, rather, as a tradition that ‘may be said to have promoted the individualistic licence with which they moved in the sphere of religion’.62 In a recent essay, Micael M. Clarke similarly emphasises Brontë’s creative engagement with religious discourses, recuperating the tradition of reading Emily Brontë as a mystic not by relying upon decontextualized notions of personal spirituality but, rather, by pointing to affinities between Brontë’s poetry and theological and literary

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traditions of Christian mysticism. Describing the ongoing need for a religious literary criticism of Brontë’s writing and of nineteenth-century literature more generally, Clarke argues that ‘[r]ather than operating on a naïve either/or polarity, literary criticism must seek a hermeneutics that considers religion in relationship to secular epistemologies’;63 such a criticism would interpret Brontë’s work in terms of its religious intertextual allusions and in the light of ‘a better understanding of religion as a possible ground for creativity, heterodoxy, and metaphysical insight’.64 An important touchstone for Clarke’s analysis, and a significant landmark in religious readings of nineteenth-century literature, is Hillis Miller’s pathfinding study The Disappearance of God (1963). Rather than insisting upon a Nietzschean ‘death of God’ narrative, Miller’s book explores the appalling silence of God: The lines of connection between us and God have broken down, or God himself has slipped away from the places where he used to be. He no longer inheres in the world as the force binding together all men and all things. As a result the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seem to many writers a time when God is no more present and not yet again present, and can only be experienced negatively, as a terrifying absence.65

For Miller, Emily Brontë is one of a handful of Victorian Romantics who attempted to renew the connections between the world and the divine. The world of Brontë’s writing is characterized by disarray and violence; it is a place in which human community has broken down and in which religion has become an oppressive, extreme Protestantism that worships a wholly transcendent and often vindictive God. Brontë’s writing thus charts a spiritual and imaginative quest, animated by the aspiration to restore the absent God as a healing, immanent presence within the world of things.66 Of the many important insights of Miller’s work, two are of particular relevance to the current study. First, Miller recognizes that Brontë’s explorations of absence, alienation, violence and fragmentation are available for theological interpretation, no less than her images of spiritual liberation and apocalyptic transformation. Second, Miller avoids restricting his discussion of religion to a single concept or construal of God. His analysis recognizes an inherent openness to theological language; it acknowledges that the words with which writers (and theologians)

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attempt to speak of the divine are always inadequate and incomplete. As Mark Knight observes, ‘[i]t is by no means certain that references to our experience in the world offer meaningful descriptions of the Divine, and there is no way of testing our analogies against a non-linguistic theology that reveals God as he truly is’.67 Though religious reading is often associated in public debate with the more literalist hermeneutics employed by some conservative faith communities, many theological writers recognize an irreducible otherness of the divine that always resists the fixity of final definition. These complexities and ambiguities of religious discourse have not always been acknowledged by a more sceptical criticism, which has often relied upon relatively constrained notions of theological orthodoxy in readings of Emily Brontë. For Janet Gezari, the ‘vaunted mysticism’ of Brontë’s poems ‘is not readily assimilable to Christian mysticism’ because ‘[w]hat Brontë seeks isn’t union with a transcendent deity but release into a state of undifferentiation where the subject is identified with its object and the imagination has sovereign authority’. On this reading, Brontë ‘doesn’t rebel against Christianity so much as press beyond it’.68 Yet the boundaries of Christianity are less clear, and Brontë’s writing more consistent with directions taken by overtly theological writers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, than Gezari allows. Gezari’s analysis tends to identify Christianity with the ‘received doctrine and conventional belief ’ that are held to be opposed to the poet’s ‘powerfully independent mind responding to her own inner experience in the world’.69 Margaret Homans similarly identifies religion with a restrictive orthodoxy: the few distinct instances of religious discourse that Homans identifies in Brontë’s writing thus become passages in which the language of orthodoxy effaces or silences the authentic voice of the poet.70 This identification of religious discourse with received truth and external authority overlooks the inherent openness of theological language and the extent to which readers and writers are always in negotiation with its words and meanings. Critical readings that rely upon constrained notions of religion as a relatively static body of received truths will inevitably discover that Brontë rejects, rebels against or presses beyond Christianity. These accounts, however, tend to overlook the ways in which the Christian tradition is animated by persistent rereadings and revisionary reworkings of its own texts and hermeneutics. As Valentine Cunningham points out, ‘any Christian believer at any time in

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Church history, down to the present, has very likely been, or is right now, a heretic on the say-so of some orthodox body or other’.71 Indeed, Cunningham maintains that ‘[h]eresy – what is called heresy – has been a guarantor of the continuing life of the Christian Church. Christianity begins, and continues, in heretic reading’.72 Stevie Davies has famously named Emily Brontë a heretic, yet here again the term is used to describe, among other things, a view of Brontë’s antipathy towards religion that, despite the nuance of much of Davies’s analysis, persists in identifying Christianity with its institutional structures and with notions of received truth. Davies echoes a familiar narrative of nineteenth-century secularization when she writes of Brontë: ‘[h]er apostasy may be seen as a final development of Protestantism at the point where emphasis on the inner and personal light of the believer bursts through into disbelief, and dissidence jettisons all formal theologies. It was the inexorable path of Dissent in the nineteenth century, from dispute over details of belief to the cutting of the cord’.73 Yet the story of Christianity and its dissenting voices can be told in other ways, and Emily Brontë’s place within that story evaluated differently. Francis Fike, for example, locates Brontë within a tradition of nineteenth-century Christian heretics: ‘Emily’s mind, unlike her sisters’, moved in a direction already taken by Carlyle and Feuerbach. She saw the need for expressing and understanding Christianity in new ways, the need for experiencing ultimate reality outside outmoded forms and expressions’.74 It seems to me that the concept of heresy, rather than describing a clear breach between Emily Brontë and Christianity, offers a useful paradigm for thinking about her creative relationship to it. Often critical of the religious orthodoxies of her age, Brontë interprets and appropriates the texts, symbols and theological traditions of Christianity, finding in them a language available for new acts of literary creation. These acts of rereading and rewriting are not inherently movements outside of Christianity. Rather, they are part of the persistent and ongoing history of reinterpretation and renewal that is as integral to religion as it is to literature. Indeed, Cunningham argues that theological heresy permeates literary as well as religious history, noting that ‘[o]rthodoxy in any sense is rather rare in the canons of English literature’75: ‘[t]o put it plainly and extremely, literature in English thrives on heresy, is compelled by heresy, wishes to be heretical, and is so’.76

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In many respects, debates surrounding questions of faith and scepticism in Brontë studies have yet to take full account of the reshaping of those questions in the context of postmodern theory and theology. Postmodern scepticism towards grand narratives has opened imaginative space for a return of the religious as the excluded other of modernity. As Graham Ward observes, postmodern re-enchantment is ‘rewriting what we have come to call, in modernity, the Natural’.77 Like other Romantic writers of her generation, Brontë interrogates moments of stress and fracture in the metanarratives of modernity and disenchantment: in this respect, her work speaks to the fragmentation of those metanarratives in the postmodern situation. Brontë’s explorations of persistent tensions between reason and imaginative vision, immanence and transcendence, presence and absence resonate in manifold ways with the renewed emphasis upon paradox, aporia and incompletion that characterizes much of the postmodern theological turn. Indeed, from the perspective of postmodern theology, Brontë’s antipathy towards the ‘thousand creeds’ (167: 9) of sectarian Christianity in favour of her experience of the ‘God within my breast’ whose ‘spirit animates eternal years’ (167: 5, 18) looks less like a rejection of religion than a description of its essence. The theologian John D. Caputo writes: The religious sense of life awakens when we lose our bearings and let go, when we find ourselves brought up against something that exceeds our powers, that overpowers us and knocks us off our hinges, something impossible visà-vis our limited potencies. The religious sense of life kicks in when we are solicited by the voices of the impossible, by the possibility of the impossible, provoked by an unforeseeable and absolute future.78

Rather than perpetuating the constrained notions of theological or doctrinal orthodoxy upon which much literary criticism has been based, postmodern theologians have drawn attention to the incompletion and openness of theological language and knowledge. ‘In the religious sense of life’, writes Caputo, ‘we passionately love something that resists any Final Explanation, that refuses to be boiled down to some determinate form’.79 In this context, the boundaries between belief and scepticism become increasingly blurred. Indeed, the works of some contemporary writers who would be considered atheists according to most recognized notions of religious orthodoxy have nevertheless taken some distinctly theological turns. Jacques Derrida, for

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example, has written of ‘addressing myself here to God, the only one I take as a witness, without yet knowing what these sublime words mean, and this grammar, and to, and witness, and God’.80 Hesitancy, incompletion, otherness and hermeneutic excess disrupt the stability of boundaries between theism and atheism. Caputo observes: Faith is not faith all the way down, so that all the gaps and crevices of faith are filled with more faith and it all makes for a perfect, continuous and wellrounded whole. Faith is always – and this is its condition – faith without faith, faith that needs to be sustained from moment to moment, from decision to decision, by the renewal, reinvention, and repetition of faith which is – if I may say so – continually exposed to discontinuity.81

One of the aims of the present study is to explore these notes of incompletion and discontinuity, the movements between and convergences of presence and absence, faith and despondency, reason and imagination, in Emily Brontë’s poems and novel. The subsequent chapters will read Wuthering Heights and a selection of Brontë’s poems in relation to several key theological concepts. The final section of this chapter introduces these themes by examining one of Brontë’s most overtly theological works.

A new heaven and a new earth Brontë’s essay ‘The Butterfly’ was written as an exercise in French composition during her stay at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels in  1842. Despite the limitations of writing in a foreign language and upon a prescribed subject, the essay encapsulates several literary and theological tropes of Brontë’s work. From an initially pessimistic reading of the natural world as characterized by futile destruction, violence and waste, the essay moves by means of a moment of epiphany to a concluding vision of apocalyptic recreation. Brontë articulates the narrator’s initial state of despondency as an overwhelming awareness of mortal suffering and as alienation from the unconscious happiness of nature; it is ‘one of those moods . . . when the light of life seems to go out and existence becomes a barren desert where we wander’ (Essays: 176). As in several of her poems, Brontë frames this perception of nature’s futility as rooted in a darkening of the imagination; it is no more or less a subjective reading of

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the world than is the more optimistic vision with which the piece concludes. From this despondent perspective, the song of a nightingale becomes the call that will draw a destructive child to its nest or a bullet to its own breast; the flies that play above a brook have their numbers diminished by swallows and fish, which will in turn become food for other creatures. At the summit of this predatory pyramid is man, who either for pleasure or to meet his more practical needs will kill the murderers of the lesser creatures. ‘Nature is an inexplicable problem’, Brontë suggests; ‘it exists on a principle of destruction’ (Essays: 176). The pessimism of the essay’s opening reaches its nadir when the narrator glimpses a caterpillar, which she regards as a parasite upon the leaves that protect and nourish it. ‘Why was it created’, she asks, ‘and why was man created?’ (Essays: 178). Appropriating momentarily the divine prerogative of judgement, she crushes the caterpillar, an action that seems initially to assert her moral superiority over God, whose goodness is rendered suspect by his failure to destroy humanity upon the occasion of the fall. This act of violence, however, is reinterpreted by a moment of epiphany: I had scarcely removed my foot from the poor insect when, like a censoring angel sent from heaven, there came fluttering through the trees a butterfly with large wings of lustrous gold and purple. It shone but a moment before my eyes; then, rising among the leaves, it vanished into the height of the azure vault. I was mute, but an inner voice said to me, “Let not the creature judge his Creator; here is a symbol of the world to come. As the ugly caterpillar is the origin of the splendid butterfly, so this globe is the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth whose poorest beauty will infinitely exceed your mortal imagination”. (Essays: 178)

The apocalyptic vision of recreation completes the biblical narrative trajectory that began with the essay’s earlier invocations of creation and fall. The narrator’s epiphany opens up a vision of redemptive transformation; it points towards an ending that will reveal the fuller shape and meaning of the apparent disorder of the present. Barbara Munson Goff observes that the essay accepts ‘the larger simultaneity of creation and destruction, the larger rationality of apparent irrationality and individual suffering’.82 Brontë’s reference to the new heaven and earth alludes to the apocalyptic vision of the Book of Revelation, in which John sees ‘a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and  the first

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earth were passed away’ (Revelation 21: 1). Brontë might also have in mind the new heaven and earth of Isaiah 65 (to which Revelation 21 also alludes), in which destructive nature is resolved into restored harmony: ‘The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in  all my holy mountain, saith the Lord’ (Isaiah 65: 25). The apocalyptic vision points towards transformation and renewal. Its significance lies not only in its intimations of new creation, but also in the transfigurative effect upon the subjective perception of present reality when that present is seen in the light of its eschatological future. ‘The Butterfly’ illuminates several recurring imaginative and theological concerns of Brontë’s writing. Like much of her poetry, it shows the natural world to be available for multiple interpretations. In Brontë’s writing, the world can be a place of spiritual liberation and numinous encounter; a place in which heaven and earth converge and overlap and nature bears the presence of divine immanence. Yet the world can also be encountered as futile, an empty symbol that points to nothing beyond itself. It is the site of spiritual exile and alienation, the place from which God is absent. Redemptive vision does not simply efface these bleaker depictions of the world. They coexist as instances of the different and competing meanings opened up in subjective encounter. They are indications of the imagination’s aspiration towards wholeness, integration and divine meaning in the context of a world that is often experienced as exilic, fragmented and disenchanted. ‘The Butterfly’ is also indicative of the influence of biblical language and narrative shape upon Brontë’s literary imagination. The biblical resonances of the essay’s apocalyptic conclusion have been widely recognized. Yet it is less often noted that the essay draws not only upon individual biblical texts but, also, upon the narrative orientation of the biblical story. Brontë locates the origins of the world’s disarray in the fall: the conflicts, violence and wasteful destruction that Brontë perceives in nature are construed overtly as the enduring legacies of original sin. Indeed, the offence of which the narrator accuses God is that of allowing living things to continue to exist in a world contaminated by original sin; God, she suggests, should have punished humanity’s first fall with absolute destruction. The essay thus echoes the trajectory of biblical narrative from origins to apocalypse. Its argument

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is predicated upon a theology rooted in creation and fall and orientated towards an apocalyptic ending. ‘The Butterfly’ illuminates Brontë’s creative engagement with biblical literature: she reads, rewrites and appropriates the Bible not simply as a static body of received truth but, rather, as a text always open to new readings and a vocabulary in which to articulate individual experience, struggle and conflict. Valentine Cunningham points out that biblical narrative is characterized by dynamic movements and by the dialogic interaction of polarities: The Christian drama or plot . . . involves the intimate connection between a set of apparent polarities, the dialogic relation between them and indeed the redemptive passage from one to the other. This binary array is huge and hugely dynamic: sin-salvation; despair-hope; sadness-pleasure; human selfdivine other (I-Thou); loss-gain; death-resurrection; flesh-spirit; mortalityimmortality; absence-presence; emptiness-fullness; voicelessness-voice; earth-heaven; worldliness-otherworldliness; and reality-transcendence.83

Brontë’s work is open to this tradition of negotiation between fluid and dynamic polarities. She responds to Christian literature and theology as living traditions, always available for new interpretations and new acts of literary creation. The essay also serves to illuminate the insistence of Brontë’s writing that the world is fallen and that there is no human way to remove the corruption that permeates all aspects of the creation. Echoes of the fall can be heard often in Brontë’s poems and novel: it offers a mythological language in which to articulate both the condition of the world and the loss of innocence repeated in the life of each individual. Images of fallenness, exile, estrangement and sin in Brontë’s writing are linguistic echoes common to a literary culture influenced in important ways by the language and narrative shape of the Bible. In literature as in Christian metanarrative, the fall is the beginning of story; it is the entrance of the individual into a world marked by disarray. Indeed, Michael Edwards argues that Literature occurs because we inhabit a fallen world. Explicitly or obscurely, it is part of our dispute with that world, and of our search for its and our own regeneration. It begins in alienation, and stands over against a reality which it perceives as exilic and mortal. Or rather, even when its first impulse is to record, to mimic, to celebrate, it immediately disturbs reality, and draws it

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into itself. Whatever the strictness or even fidelity of its representation, it delights in a new world produced by its own powers of fiction: of narrating, imaging, combining, changing.84

The imagined worlds of Brontë’s writing are marked by violence and corrup­ tion, manifested in conflicts that are perpetuated across generations. The world is experienced as a place of exile; individuals are alienated from nature, from the sacred and from each other. Yet Brontë also finds possibilities of redemptive hope in this fallen world. Glimpses of transformation and healing remain active in her writing. Critical of an exclusive religious orthodoxy that judges and condemns, Brontë also opens heterodox textual spaces in which to imagine the creative play of human and divine grace. Finally, ‘The Butterfly’ imagines the possibility that the world’s present condition might point ahead of itself, towards renewal and recreation. In this respect, it seems to me that a significant point in the essay’s theological argument has tended to be overlooked by critics. Janet Gezari argues that in the essay ‘the butterfly appears coincidentally, just after [Brontë’s] narrator has crushed the caterpillar in a gesture that demonstrates her own human nature and at the same time mimics divine acts of destruction’. The point of the essay, then, is ‘violent disjunction without organic continuity’: ‘Emily Brontë’s caterpillar doesn’t metamorphose into a butterfly but dies violently so that the butterfly can appear’.85 Yet the essay’s conclusion suggests that the narrator’s destruction of the caterpillar is based upon a misreading of creation: the narrator sees only its present, parasitical ugliness rather than the beauty that is to emerge from it in the future. Rather than mimicking divine acts of destruction, the narrator’s destruction of the caterpillar is framed in overt contrast to God’s refusal to destroy his creation at its first fall. The narrator’s glimpse of the butterfly reminds her that where her own impulse is to destroy, God preserves and renews. Present reality is reinterpreted as the ‘embryo’ of the new creation: surely an image of organic continuity. Gezari is right to emphasize the persistent and often debilitating wrestling with mortality in Brontë’s writing, but her reliance on a limited construal of ‘last things’ – death, judgement, heaven and hell – as an account of Christian eschatology does not do sufficient justice to the theological tradition.86 As the theologian Colin Gunton has pointed out, the common construal of last

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things ‘supposes a merely otherworldly account of eschatology: first we die, then we are judged, then we go to either heaven or hell’.87 The biblical images of a new heaven and earth upon which Brontë draws in ‘The Butterfly’ imagine renewal and recreation rather than otherworldly survival in a distant heaven or hell: a future for the creation rather than a future removal from it. Brontë’s caterpillar and butterfly allegorize the movement of the world from its present condition to its apocalyptic renewal, not the death and spiritual afterlife of the individual. Yet the essay also recognizes that this hope of transformation requires commitment to an order of reality beyond the finite horizons of human reason and experience. Exploring the religious and literary implications of prominent theological critiques of a more limited account of last things, Mark Knight tells us that eschatology is ‘a way of thinking about the end towards which creation moves, the incompleteness of theological understanding, and the narrative orientation of the biblical story’.88 Biblical apocalyptic claims to unveil eternal realities and hidden meanings that might reveal the fuller sense and purpose of present reversals and disappointments; it imagines an ending that is also a beginning, figured in images of redemptive transformation and renewal. It imagines the possibility that the world might become other than what it is now. This is, of course, one of the reasons why apocalyptic language was so often harnessed to Romantic political radicalism and appropriated again by movements of protest such as Chartism in the nineteenth century. As Knight points out, ‘[a]ware of the extent of our past suffering and the material needs that continue to surround us, eschatology commits itself to imagining a future in which the whole of creation might be resurrected and made new’.89 The following chapters read Wuthering Heights and a selection of Brontë’s poems in relation to Christian theological concepts including natural theology, biblical hermeneutics, original sin, apocalypse and eschatology. Chapter 2 draws upon Christian reflection on creation and natural theology in order to examine images of enchantment and disenchantment in Brontë’s writing. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between faith and words. It considers the significance of the apophatic and ineffable in Brontë’s writing, and explores her engagement with biblical hermeneutics. Chapter 4 draws upon the doctrine of original sin in order to examine Brontë’s literary representations

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of the fallen world and the hermeneutic implications of her approach to themes of judgement and forgiveness. Chapter 5 examines apocalyptic echoes, resonances and affinities in Brontë’s work and considers their significance for her engagement with persistent tensions between imagination and reason, despondency and hope.

2

The Enchanted World

The previous chapter surveyed the broad cultural shift from experience of the world as a site of spiritual presence towards materialist and scientific accounts of nature or, in the terms used commonly by historians of science and religion, from enchantment to disenchantment. This shift cannot be understood simply as a decline of religious belief: as we have seen, it was produced by intellectual and theological developments within Christianity as well as by the broader philosophical directions of Enlightenment rationalism. The enchanted world of pre-modern belief has little in common with the mechanistic view of the natural world that characterized Deism and some versions of Christian natural theology in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thomas Carlyle addressed these intellectual shifts within Christianity when he complained, in 1829, that wonder was ‘on all hands, dying out: it is the sign of uncultivation to wonder’.1 Rationalist versions of Christianity shared with some of the physical sciences a view of the natural world as analogous to a machine, a view given its most famous articulation in William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802). Paley invites his readers to approach the created world by the analogy of a clockwork watch. Paley’s version of natural theology proposed that a logical path from creation to creator could be followed by scientific reasoning – an argument that was already dated in 1802 and which nineteenth-century science would further discredit – but it seemed to offer little prospect that the eternal might be encountered as immanent presence within the world. The Romantic imagination, however, resisted the absence of God from the world and made the attempt to locate the divine presence as immanent within the world of things. Hillis Miller has described Emily Brontë as one of the nineteenth-century Romantics who responded to the intolerable absence of God by attempting to go ‘out into the empty space between man and God and . . . to create in that vacancy a new fabric of connections between man

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and the divine power’.2 God, Miller argues, comes to be experienced as immanent presence in Brontë’s work: by the end of Wuthering Heights, the divine spirit permeates a world in which the new heaven and earth of Christian eschatology is experienced as present reality.3 Miller identifies an important theological trend in Brontë’s work, which frequently locates or attempts to locate spiritual presence and experience in the natural world. Indeed, J. Robert Barth points out that the immanentist theologies of Romanticism might be understood as having brought into present experience the far-off deity of much eighteenth-century Christianity.4 The visionaries that populate Brontë’s poems experience the world as re-enchanted, inhabited by a fullness of spiritual presence and meaning, but this experience can be fleeting and transient. If Brontë’s poems and novel often represent a world imbued with immanent spirit, they also show that the world might be experienced as emptied of significance and, indeed, that emptiness and absence might be its final state. Several of the poems look to a resolution that lies beyond time and mortality: unable to locate the divine securely within the world, they seek meaning in moments of apocalyptic unveiling and in eschatological contexts by which present reality might be reinterpreted. Charles Taylor has described the Western cultural experience of disenchantment as the splitting of spirit from matter.5 The Romantic imagination seeks to undo this split and to restore spirit to the world of things but, in Brontë’s works, consciousness of divine absence emerges to disrupt the sacramental encounter with immanent presence. Brontë holds the possibility of enchantment (or re-enchantment) in tension with competing construals of a world emptied of spiritual significance. This chapter considers relationships between nature, the imagination and religious experience in Brontë’s poems and novel. It begins by exploring moments of spiritual revelation in which the world is experienced as imbued with divine meaning and as pointing to a reality beyond itself (the same mode of symbolic meaning, we recall, that is disrupted by materialist philosophy in Keats’s ‘Lamia’). In several of Brontë’s mature poems, these moments of revelation are disturbed both by the competing demands of reason and by the visionary’s inability to commit wholeheartedly to their truth. The chapter concludes with a reading of the dream sequence in the third chapter of Wuthering Heights, which represents the disruptive return of the enchanted world experienced as horror from the perspective of rationalist modernity.

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Nature and sacrament The first version of enchantment to be considered in this chapter concerns a reading of the natural world as imbued with spiritual meaning that might be glimpsed by imaginative perception. While this imaginative encounter with nature can be understood as revelatory, its concern is not primarily with the disclosure of propositional truths but, rather, with the encounter with a reality that escapes rational description. Paul S. Fiddes argues that the literary imagination is able to articulate this encounter because it recognizes both the limitations and the capacity for expanded, metaphorical signification of language: in poetry, drama and novel, ‘the imagination . . . reaches out towards mystery, towards a reality that is our final concern but which eludes empirical investigation and bursts rational concepts’.6 The imagination transcends the categories of scientific or rationalist interpretations of the world, opening up alternative possibilities for meaning and experience. Secular materialist accounts of the imagination would, as Fiddes acknowledges, find little with which to disagree in this view while identifying these deeper meanings and experiences of the sublime as the creations of subjectivity. Christian theology, however, proposes that the deeper meanings apprehended by the imagination belong to the encounter between the human subject and the eternal; they begin not in the imagination alone, but in the imagination’s encounter with otherness. As alien as this view of imaginative meaning might seem to readers committed to secular materialist and psychoanalytic approaches to visionary experience and the literary imagination, it is one with which Emily Brontë was  certainly familiar. She could have found it, after all, in her father’s poetry: The smile of spring, the fragrant summer’s breeze, The fields of autumn, and the naked trees, Hoarse, braying, thro’ stern winter’s doubling storms; E’en rural scenery, in all its forms, When pure religion, rules the feeling heart – Compose the soul, and sweetest joys impart. With heart enraptured, oft have I surveyed, The vast, and bounteous works, that God has made.7

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Patrick’s poem articulates the dual creative activity of God and the human imagination. The human subject, observing nature from the spiritual perspective of ‘pure religion’, finds sublime meaning in the world; meaning that is there, Patrick asserts, because of the creative activity of God. It is in the collaboration of the perceiving subject and the creative God that meaning is yielded. Imaginative and aesthetic perception opens up to the receptive subject a deeper meaning that is understood as already present in the natural world but invisible to those without the necessary spiritual, emotional and imaginative discernment. This experience is suggestive of what Rowan Williams calls sacramental action: All sign-making is the action of hope, the hope that this world may become other and that its experienced fragmentariness can be worked into sense. The sacramental action of the believer is, at one level, a working into sense like any other; the difference is that this “working” is done to open to us the sense already made by God as creator and redeemer.8

To interpret the natural world sacramentally is to discern in it meanings produced by the creative and redemptive activity of God; it is to read the world as a symbol of a reality beyond itself. As J. Robert Barth observes in his reading of sacramental thought in Wordsworth’s poetry, a sacramental perspective sees the natural world as the point at which the transcendent becomes immanent.9 From the Christian doctrine of creation, Alister McGrath tells us, derives a view of nature as possessing ‘an inbuilt ability to act as a sign to its creator. The divine creation of the world establishes an analogy between the creator and what is created’.10 This reading of the world as a sign that points beyond itself needs to be distinguished from the empiricist approaches to natural theology developed throughout the eighteenth century and harnessed to Christian apologetics in popular works such as Paley’s Natural Theology. It does not regard the existence and attributes of God as deducible from the natural world by the application of scientific method. Instead, the world is read through the prism of the biblical story: the doctrine of creation is a hermeneutic key to the world’s meaning, rather than a proposition to be deduced from scientific observation of the world. This is, we might note, the method by which Patrick Brontë approaches nature: ‘As roves my mind, o’er nature’s works abroad,/It

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sees, reflected, their creative God’.11 A theology of creation allows the natural world to be read as a sign that points beyond itself to the activity and being of its creator. The enchanted world of Christian sacramental theology, then, is both the site of God’s continued creative activity and a point of encounter with divine self-disclosure. Creation is understood not as a single event at the beginning of time – the ‘First Cause’ of Deist thought – but as the ongoing activity of God as maker and sustainer. The imagination becomes the means by which this creative action and divine presence is known. The mode of revelation opened up by the imaginative encounter with nature is to be understood, Fiddes argues, as God’s self-disclosure: The idea is not that God leaves messages or propositions about himself embedded in the natural world which can then be “picked up” by the receiving apparatus of the human mind. Rather, he unveils his own being through the vehicle of human and natural events. Nature is a place of encounter with the living God, not a dead-letter drop.12

To understand the natural world as enchanted in this sense is to experience it as a site of divine presence. This presence is revealed in the imaginative engagement with nature: it is received, in the first instance, not as propositional truth but as an encounter with what Rudolf Otto calls the numinous, an indefinable other that is experienced intuitively prior to rational or theological conceptualization.13 The literary imagination encounters the eternal as that which is at or beyond the limits of language. It represents experiences that are irreducible to mimetic or literal description. While this view of language is particularly concurrent with postmodern thought, several writers have demonstrated that postmodernism has, in many respects, only rediscovered a problem of language that was well known to pre-modern religion.14 As Karen Armstrong has pointed out, classical theology was familiar with the view that ‘the words we use to describe mundane things were simply not suitable for God’.15 God always remained other than the words used to describe him, which were to be understood as metaphors the significance of which lay in their inadequacy and incompletion. Though meaning is understood as beginning outside of the self, it is disclosed in imaginative perception and reflection rather than by empirical

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observation. The subjective imagination interacts with external reality to disclose fuller meaning in the world of things. A revelatory moment of this kind is articulated in an early poem in which Emily Brontë describes a movement from despondency to heightened imaginative perception16: And first an hour of mournful musing And then a gush of bitter tears And then a dreary calm diffusing Its deadly mist o’er joys and cares And then a throb and then a lightening And then a breathing from above And then a star in heaven brightening The star the glorious star of love (18: 1–8)

The poem articulates a sequence of shifting sensations, with its crux at the beginning of the second stanza when a ‘throb’ signifies the beginning of new experience. This ‘throb’ is followed by a response from a presence other than the poet, a ‘breathing from above’ that hints at an encounter with the numinous and anticipates the divine as ‘Being and Breath’ in ‘No coward soul is mine’ (167: 27). To these two events – the ‘throb’ within the poet and the breath from above – the poem adds a third: the brightening of a star in heaven that takes on expanded signification and suggests that there is no need to choose between the naturalistic and theological referents of ‘heaven’. The final line of the poem – ‘The star the glorious star of love’ – enacts textually a hermeneutic movement from the star as object to the star as symbol of something – love – that exceeds and transcends its empirical status.17 The source of this love remains undefined: Brontë makes no attempt to conceptualize or theologize a feeling that is significant primarily for its transformative effect upon her emotional and imaginative state. The poem is an account of spiritual experience by which the poet’s unexplained sorrows are overcome, but it also articulates the collaborative work of the human subject and the numinous ‘breathing from above’ in making new meaning. The star remains an object to be seen by the physical eye but, by the end of the poem, it is also a symbol that conveys fuller meaning for the new mode of spiritual perception and receptivity now available to the poet. Perceived in this way, the star becomes more than what

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it is. Without attempting to theorize or define the experience, the poem moves from despondency to the consciousness of love of which the star has become a symbol. The natural world perceived by imaginative vision becomes the site of numinous encounter. The perceiving subject not only sees the world imbued with expanded signification but, in a reciprocal creative action, receives something of imaginative and emotional significance. The natural motions of a storm yield the beginnings of liberating spiritual experience: Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending Man’s spirit away from its drear dungeon sending Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars (5: 3–6)

Brontë’s image of earth rising as heaven descends functions both as a description of an event in the natural world – the blurring of a clear boundary between earth and sky in the movements of the storm – and as an example of poetic language that pushes towards mystery. The image is both an account of a natural event observed empirically and an experience imbued with symbolic signification. As earth and heaven converge – a sacramental image that gestures metaphorically towards the transcendent becoming immanent – the human spirit is liberated from its material ‘dungeon’.18 The poem’s language operates as both mimesis and metaphor: meaning escapes and disrupts literalist and rationalist interpretations of words and things. The subjective perception of the storm – a natural event of the material world – initiates the human subject’s transcendence of materiality. This liberating power of nature is revisited in ‘Lines’ (1839), a poem sometimes read as expressing Emily’s feelings about Branwell’s failures and disgrace.19 The speaker hopes that the renewed perception of a natural world ‘bright as Eden’s used to be’ (83: 3) might yield her companion’s spiritual awakening and renewal: Let me draw near ‘twill soothe to view His dark eyes dimmed with holy dew Remorse even now may wake within And half unchain his soul from sin

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Perhaps this is the destined hour When hell shall lose its fatal power And heaven itself shall bend above To hail the soul redeemed by love (83: 43–50)

Recalling Christ’s promise that ‘joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth’ (Luke 15: 7), the poem anticipates a spiritual and imaginative awakening initiated by the renewed perception of nature’s lingering edenic beauty. For those with eyes to see, nature is imbued with the power to effect moral transformation and spiritual renewal. The moment of redemption never arrives, the poem suggests, not because nature lacks redemptive efficacy but because the apostate’s perception is limited: ‘One glance revealed how little care/ He felt for all the beauty there’ (83: 53–4). Nature possesses transformational and liberating power for the perceiver open to its deeper meaning but, for one unable or unwilling to see such meaning, this power is rendered ineffective. Redemption does not simply break in upon the apostate subject, who must receive it through openness to the transformative influence of nature. The individual must be receptive in order for the fuller significance of the natural world to be revealed and experienced. The enchanted world as a site of encounter with immanent spirit is not inherently incompatible with institutional religion but, in the particular contexts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Christianity, it is possible to identify tensions between versions of religious thought that emphasized rational order in their accounts of the natural world and alternative theologies that continued to locate the eternal as present and active in the natural world of things. Some readers of Brontë’s poems have seen in them the secularization of religious language, which is removed from its institutional context and redeployed as an account of individual worldly experience.20 I want to suggest that it is possible to read these poems not as the secularization of religious language but, rather, as the breaking of boundaries that confined religious experience within the walls and forms of the Church. In shifting the site of religious experience from the Church to the natural world, I suggest, Brontë’s poems need not be understood as emptying that experience of its theological content but might rather be seen as bringing the distant, transcendent God of

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Enlightenment Christianity into immanent presence in the world of human experience.21 The disruption of the Church’s monopoly on religious experience is represented in the Gondal poem ‘A. G. A. to A. S.’ (1840–3). A. G. A.’s rejection of the ‘cell and cloister drear’ (138: 35) in which others seek heaven’s light has prompted some critics to read the poem as rejecting Christianity itself.22 The poem’s negotiation with religion, however, is more complex than simple rejection. At several points in the poem, A. G. A. employs theological language to describe her experience of the natural world and her relationship with Alfred: That heaven is reigning in my thought Which wood and wave and earth have caught From skies that overflow – That heaven which my sweet lover’s brow Has won me to adore – Which from his blue eyes beaming now Reflects a still intenser glow Than nature’s heaven can pour – (138: 7–14)

Heaven escapes containment in this poem, flowing from the sky, through the woods and earth, into Alfred’s eyes and A. G. A.’s thoughts. Its signification is expanded as it flows through the poem: by the time it is seen to shine in Alfred’s eyes, it reflects an ‘intenser glow’ than that of the sky in which it began. The world, indeed, seems ‘made of light’ (138: 2) as A. G. A. perceives it. Those who seek heaven’s light in the forms and rituals of religion, A. G. A. suggests, might have missed the point: that light inhabits the world outside of the ‘cell and cloister drear’ (138: 35). Throughout this poem, heaven’s light defies restraint or limit, overflowing the sky, flowing through the world and, the poem implies, bursting free of the structures of the Church. In this respect, Brontë’s usage of ‘heaven’ echoes a biblical understanding of heaven and earth not as wholly separate spheres but, rather, as realities that ‘overlap and interlock’.23 A. G. A. contrasts her love for Alfred with the forms and rituals of institutional religion: where others achieve their bliss by ‘penance, fasts, and fears’, she claims, ‘I have one rite – a gentle kiss –/One penance – tender tears –’ (138: 39–41). That

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this analogy is something other than ironic parody of religious language is suggested by A. G. A.’s continuing use of an eschatological framework within which to understand her relationship with Alfred: I know our souls are all divine I know that when we die What seems the vilest, even like thine A part of God himself shall shine In perfect purity – (138: 15–9)

Nothing in the poem undermines this eschatological expectation of souls restored into the deity. Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang have described a broader nineteenth-century trend towards the sacralization of human love: without ‘losing belief in an all-powerful God, nineteenth-century Christians increasingly accorded to romantic love the attention once reserved for the soul’s love for the divine’.24 Brontë’s poem echoes this trend, locating spiritual experience outside of the forms and institutions of the Church. Heaven escapes containment within the walls and doctrines of the Church and flows through the enchanted world in which A. G. A. and Alfred participate. For Emily Dickinson, a spiritual life outside of the Church closes the separation between time and eternity: ‘instead of getting to Heaven, at last –/I’m going, all along’.25 Brontë’s poem is similar in its suggestion that heaven can be encountered in the world and need not be relegated to an existence beyond human life. The Church, it seems, has missed the point. Its adherents shut themselves in cloisters in order to pursue a divine light that flows through the world outside of their walls. Brontë depicts a church that has lost contact with the natural world and with the aesthetic. This particular critique was, of course, far from unique in the nineteenth century, particularly among writers whose thinking was influenced by the legacies of Romanticism. Carlyle regretted the loss of wonder in the experience of his contemporaries: both nature and religion, he complained in ‘The Signs of the Times’ (1829), had been reduced to mechanical systems without reference to inner feeling. Religion’s power, Carlyle argued, ‘arose in the mystic deeps of man’s soul’; its ‘heavenly light shone, as it still shines, and (as sun or star) will ever shine, through the whole dark destinies of man’.26 The religion of the modern age had lost this sense of dynamic spiritual

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experience, replacing it with systems and institutions. Carlyle’s distaste for the loss of wonder in the religion of his contemporaries was shared by other nineteenth-century Romantics. John Ruskin’s ‘unconversion’ experience in  1858 had many and complex causes, but not least among them was his dissatisfaction with an Evangelical faith that he had come to regard as aesthetically barren.27 While some Evangelicals – Patrick Brontë among them – were able to combine their theology with aesthetic experience, much of the movement could be characterized by its seriousness and moral discipline at the expense of beauty, art and literature.28 It is no coincidence that when Charlotte Brontë describes her protagonist’s vision of edenic nature at its evening prayers in Shirley, she locates the experience outside of a church in which ‘the curates will hammer over their prepared orations’.29 The novel constructs an uneasy relationship between the versions of Christianity preached and practised by its flawed ministers and the forms of aesthetic spirituality situated outside of the Church’s walls, albeit not wholly outside of its theology.30 Religious authorities rarely speak directly into Emily Brontë’s poems but, when they do, they express a version of religious dogma in sharp contrast to the imaginative and subjective versions of spiritual experience found elsewhere in the poems. In the Gondal poem ‘From a Dungeon Wall in the Southern College’ (1844), a judge delivers his verdict in language that incorporates the voice of Evangelical seriousness: ‘Glorious is the prize of Duty Though she be a serious power Treacherous all the lures of Beauty Thorny bud and poisonous flower! Mirth is but a mad beguiling Of the golden gifted Time – Love – a demon meteor wiling Heedless feet to gulfs of crime. Those who follow earthly pleasure Heavenly knowledge will not lead Wisdom hides from them her treasure, Virtue bids them evil speed! (154: 13–24)

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Beauty and duty are represented as contradictory pursuits by a moralistic philosophy that identifies salvation with the renunciation of the world. The judge – a forerunner, perhaps, of Joseph and Branderham in Wuthering Heights – frames his sentencing of the prisoner (Julius Brenzaida) as an attempt at moral reformation: ‘And to this end, our council well/And kindly doomed you to a cell’ (154: 31–2). The judge is a caricature of Evangelical seriousness, condemning Julius to a dungeon that, in reality, offers no hope of redemption but only ‘Suggests and nourishes despair’ (154: 38).31 Whatever Julius’s crimes – the context of the poem in Brontë’s wider Gondal storyline is unclear – it is clear that the judge’s moralistic severity provides no route to the salvation that it promises. Heaven’s light, in Brontë’s poems, is located in the natural world: it is rarely to be found inside buildings, be they dungeons or churches.

A world too much with us The enchanted world can, then, represent a site of spiritual experience located outside of the forms and rituals of the Church. Imaginative perception facilitates encounters with the divine as immanent, indwelling presence. Brontë’s poems, however, articulate alternative experiences of the world that challenge the epistemological legitimacy of imaginative vision and call into question the status of spiritual perception. The visionary’s consciousness of mortality and of the harsh and painful experiences common to much of humanity disrupts her perception of the world as enchanted. In several of the poems published in the 1846 collection, possibilities of divine meaning are located in revelatory experiences by which the poet attempts to reinterpret the world within the wider contexts offered by apocalyptic or eschatological unveiling. The vestiges of enchantment remain present within these poems, but the status of the world as a site of divine immanence and spiritual experience is rendered ambiguous. The poems seek fuller meaning in the revelation of a transcendent context that is other than the world of present experience, while acknowledging that the very experience that prompts the desire for revelation also calls into question its legitimacy. ‘How Clear She Shines’ (1843) opens with a moment of imaginative interaction between poet and nature. As in many of Brontë’s poems, imaginative

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vision begins in the collaboration between a natural world alive with spiritual presence and the receptive subjectivity of the poet: How clear she shines! How quietly I lie beneath her guardian light; While heaven and earth are whispering me, ‘Tomorrow, wake, but, dream tonight.’ Yes, Fancy, come, my Fairy love! These throbbing temples softly kiss; And bend my lonely couch above And bring me rest, and bring me bliss. (xii: 1–8)

The moonlight, the whispering of heaven and earth and the poet’s own receptivity interact to produce new visions of a fuller reality, a ‘heaven of glorious spheres’ (xii: 22) from which the pain and conflicts of earth are absent. This vision, however, is always threatened by the very reality that it seeks to transcend. ‘The world is going’ (xii: 9), claims the visionary as Fancy comes to her and the vision begins; yet in this poem, the world never goes. Winifred Gérin argues that the poem is representative of a point in Brontë’s moral and artistic development at which her ‘vision of a radiant world was being marred by her growing awareness of humanity’s misery’.32 The world that sometimes seems ‘made of light’ (138: 2) in Brontë’s poems becomes the ‘dark world’ (xii: 9) from which the poet seeks imaginative release. The paradox of the poem is that the painful reality of the world is both the source of the visionary’s need for the vision and the limitation of its capacity for spiritual liberation. The imagination offers a glimpse of a cosmos beyond earth’s pain, yet this glorious world can be described only by comparison with the familiar place that it is not. The final stanza describes the harsh realities of earth and, by the end of those lines, it is easy to forget that the reason for describing this world at all was to show that the spheres of the vision are not like it. ‘The world is too much with us,’ Wordsworth observes and, in ‘How Clear She Shines’, it is.33 Transcendent vision remains earthbound, disrupted and threatened by the visionary’s consciousness of the reality beyond which she attempts to gaze. Belief in the cosmos glimpsed in the vision remains available, but it is threatened and contested by the visionary’s experience of a world that becomes ever more present as the poem progresses. The vestiges of enchantment remain in the private experience of nature, but they are now held in tension with the

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futility of the social world of human action. Seeking to transcend the fallen human world in her experience of nature, Brontë finds herself drawn back to its bitter reality. The instability of enchantment – its disruption by the poet’s awareness of the world’s bleaker realities – yields both the divided subjectivity of the visionary and the attempt to locate fuller meaning and resolution in a transcendent, eschatological context. In ‘A Day Dream’ (1844), Brontë foregrounds the conceptual malleability of the natural world. Before it arrives at a moment of apocalyptic revelation, the poem has already offered multiple conceptualizations of the world perceived by the poet. Brontë reads the natural world as a site of hermeneutic proliferation but, instead of finding creative satisfaction in its multiplicity of interpretations (as Walt Whitman does in ‘Song of Myself ’), the poet begins to retreat from the uncertainty and instability of her own readings. By the time its revelatory vision begins in the tenth stanza, the poem has already passed through a series of alternative interpretations and has revealed a poetic subjectivity unable to participate in the natural world that she observes. Brontë’s initial reading of the natural world employs the image of a wedding as a metaphor for chronological movement: ‘It was the marriage-time of May/ With her young lover, June’ (x: 3–4). From the first stanza, the poet makes meaning of the world by rendering it in metaphoric structures. The poem establishes imaginative communion between the poet and the other ‘wedding guests’ (x: 11), which include trees, birds and rocks. These natural things are imbued with agency by the poet and made participants in a celebratory encounter between nature and the human. Such, at least, is the impression created by the first ten lines of the poem until, midway through the third stanza, the poet begins to withdraw from her own metaphor: ‘And I, of all the wedding guests,/Was only sullen there!’ (x: 11–12). Rather than participating in the celebration created by her own imaginative interpretation, Brontë’s lack of joy excludes her from it; the other guests wish to shun ‘My aspect void of cheer’ (x: 14). The wedding metaphor participates in a series of literary associations. Brontë becomes a version of Coleridge’s wedding guest, rendered unable to enter the wedding feast by the strange tale of the ancient mariner; or, perhaps, a type of the five foolish virgins excluded by their own lack of readiness from the wedding feast that represents the coming of the kingdom

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of heaven in Matthew 25: 1–13.34 She is unable to explain ‘Why I had brought a clouded eye/To greet the general glow’ (x: 19–20); her non-participation is not, as yet, the result of conscious intellectual decision but, rather, of an emotional and imaginative failure to enter into the joy that is itself perceived by her imagination. Brontë has not abandoned the notion that joy is to be found in the world: she can imagine it, but she cannot participate in it. As Brontë distances herself from the wedding metaphor, she begins to explore intellectually the reasons for her own non-participation. Along with her own heart, which becomes an othered self, she sinks into a reverie in which she is able to ascribe her ‘clouded eye’ to her consciousness of the world’s mortality: like Christina Rossetti’s eye that is ‘dimmed with tears’ and unable to see ‘everlasting hills’,35 Brontë’s despondency limits her perception and causes her to reinterpret the wedding metaphor as ‘a vision vain’ and an ‘unreal mockery’ (x: 27–8). For Brontë as for Rossetti, despondency obscures perception and leaves the poet unable to glimpse redemptive meaning. This clouded eye is emotionally and imaginatively debilitating. Summer will end, Brontë knows, and the birds that now ‘blithely sing’ will be reduced to ‘spectres of the perished spring’ (x: 29, 31). Rejecting the wedding metaphor, Brontë now begins to read the world as a tragedy, the passage of time a movement towards decay. Only those beings celebrate that possess no knowledge of their own mortality; in this respect, Brontë’s poem echoes the insight of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Where Keats seeks to escape mortality by losing his consciousness in the sensual experience of the nightingale, however, Brontë’s poem introduces a different response to the disturbance effected by the awareness of death. As the speaker lies upon the moor in ‘a fit of peevish woe’, a glimpse of apocalyptic unveiling breaks in upon her imagination. In Isidor Thorner’s terms, this experience is prophetic rather than mystic: it contains verbal revelation and interrogates a conceptual problem.36 In the vision, spirits seem to the poet to sing of an eternal perspective from which mortality is seen as rebirth into new fullness of being: ‘O mortal! mortal! let them die; Let time and tears destroy, That we may overflow the sky With universal joy!

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Let grief distract the sufferer’s breast, And night obscure his way; They hasten him to endless rest, And everlasting day. To thee the world is like a tomb, A desert’s naked shore; To us, in unimagined bloom, It brightens more and more! And could we lift the veil, and give One brief glimpse to thine eye, Thou wouldst rejoice for those that live, Because they live to die. (x: 53–68)

Death is refigured not only as a passage into new life, but also as part of the world’s own eschatological becoming: seen from this new perspective, the trajectory of mortal existence is not only towards death, as Brontë had suspected previously, but also towards renewal. The words of the spirits call for the world to be read as pointing towards a version of itself beyond its present reality. Yet the final and decisive revelation remains deferred. If the spirits could lift the veil, they claim, a glimpse of apocalyptic revelation in all its fullness would be enough to convince the visionary that death is to be celebrated as the passage into rebirth. The poet’s imagination gestures towards such a moment of unveiling but is unable to arrive at it.37 Irene Tayler argues that Brontë’s visionary experiences re-enact ‘the precious moment when her imagination, trained in the paradox of Christian doctrine, learned to transform death into birth, or rebirth’.38 The vision of ‘A Day Dream’ points towards but does not complete such a transformation. Death is not effaced from the poem but, rather, embraced as a sign to be reinterpreted by a biblical narrative trajectory that points towards eschatological renewal.39 Gerard Loughlin reminds us that the Christian doctrine of resurrection does not erase the reality of death but is, rather, predicated upon it: ‘the condition of this happy ending is the agony of Jesus on the cross . . . His suffering is not undone by his resurrection; it remains, like all suffering, for all time’.40 The image of rebirth in ‘A Day Dream’ is similarly founded upon death, which must be acknowledged and accepted even as it

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is transformed into something other than futility. The narrative trajectory of Christian theology, Alister McGrath tells us, establishes the expectation that the ‘fading beauty and goodness of the world are to be interpreted in the light of the hope of their restoration and renewal’.41 Brontë attempts to read the world through the prism of eschatological anticipation, but the deferral of the final, definitive unveiling renders this hope fragile, another subjective reading of the world in a poem that has already offered multiple competing interpretations. The poem has moved between three readings of the natural world. The first is based upon a pre-rational joy in which the present can be celebrated without the consciousness of mortality. In the second, the rational mind and clouded eye of the poet demand that mortality be acknowledged, that the present cannot be enjoyed when one has become conscious that life is a movement towards death. The third, apocalyptic perspective offers a glimpse of redemptive transformation: an external, divine viewpoint from which the world’s movement towards death becomes only a step in its further progress towards recreation and new life. The visionary, however, remains unable to embrace the vision as authoritative. By the end of the poem, Brontë recognizes the comforting and redemptive power of the vision but remains able to make only a tentative and provisional claim to its authority: The music ceased; the noonday dream, Like dream of night, withdrew; But Fancy, still, will sometimes deem Her fond creation true. (x: 69–72)

Eschatological belief remains one possibility among others, to be held in tension with the alternative construals of reality that the poem has articulated. Brontë constructs a dialogic relationship between three imaginative positions – immediate participation, conscious reflection and apocalyptic vision – that holds open each as possibility while refusing to commit to any as final truth; the poem thus suspends both belief and disbelief. As Michael O’Neill argues, ‘Brontë guards herself against extremes of dejection and hope by reminding us explicitly, at the close, of what the poem’s structure has brought unobtrusively into focus: that subjectivity is divided against itself ’.42 Visionary experience points towards an incomplete revelation that offers a solution to

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Brontë’s debilitating consciousness of mortality, yet she continues to waver between belief and unbelief, only ‘sometimes’ believing the vision to be true. Avery Dulles describes transcendental faith as ‘a new cognitive horizon . . . that enables one to see and assent to truths that would otherwise not be accepted’.43 The apocalyptic mode in Brontë’s poem opens up such a cognitive horizon but, though it offers the possibility of belief, it does not bring assurance. For all the vision’s appeal, Brontë remains aware that it might be no more than the creation of a wishful thinker; that, rather than delivering the authoritative Word, the vision contains only her own words. In ‘To Imagination’ (1844), Brontë revisits the same problem explored in ‘A Day Dream’. The world is a site of hardship and hopelessness, of ‘earthly change from pain to pain’ (xi: 2) – change that is no change at all – and Brontë seeks the imaginative vision that might glimpse redemptive possibility. Her embracing of the imagination is presented initially as a turn inwards: So hopeless is the world without; The world within I doubly prize; Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt, And cold suspicion never rise; Where thou, and I, and Liberty, Have undisputed sovereignty. (xi: 7–12)

The life of the imagination, it seems, offers an escape from the conflicts and pain of the external world. Liberty is located in the turn inwards: freedom is achieved not by changing one’s circumstances in the external world but, rather, by losing one’s consciousness of those circumstances in the onset of visionary experience. That Brontë conceptualizes the imagination as more than simple escapism becomes apparent, however, as the poem locates in the imaginative life the power to open up a vision of the world transfigured: But, thou art ever there, to bring The hovering vision back, and breathe New glories o’er the blighted spring, And call a lovelier Life from Death, And whisper, with a voice divine, Of real worlds, as bright as thine. (xi: 25–30)

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The imagination offers the same expanded perspective that is represented by the spirits in ‘A Day Dream’ and by the moonlight in ‘How Clear She Shines’. Glimpsed by the imagination, the hopeless world is transfigured: the vision is not simply an escape from harsh reality but, rather, an alternative way of seeing that reality. As in ‘A Day Dream’ and ‘The Butterfly’, this expanded perspective calls ‘a lovelier Life from Death’; once again, the imagination points towards resurrection and interprets death as the passage into new and fuller life. In seeking the ‘voice divine’ of the imaginative life, Brontë does not renounce the world. Instead, she seeks the means by which that world might be seen as more than its present empirical reality by the opening up of an expanded perspective. If the world prior to its imaginative refiguring is the site of ‘change from pain to pain’ (xi: 2), the imagination offers the possibility of genuine change to break the cycle. The visionary hears the voice of the imagination whisper of ‘real worlds’ in which its transfigurative perspective is embodied. In turning to the inner life of the imagination, the visionary’s hope is that the vision reveals truth and that she is glimpsing a fuller reality of the external world. As in ‘A Day Dream’, however, Brontë commits herself to only the most tenuous belief in the vision’s truth. ‘I trust not to thy phantom bliss’ (xi: 31), she tells the imagination in the final stanza, even as she continues to welcome its ‘sweeter hope, when hope despairs’ (xi: 36). Despite the vision’s appeal, the suspicion remains that the imagination is only wishful thinking and that visionary experience contains no true transcendence. Brontë is aware of other perspectives which insist that the pessimistic view expressed earlier in the poem constitutes the only truth of the world: Reason, indeed, may oft complain For Nature’s sad reality, And tell the suffering heart how vain Its cherished dreams must always be; And Truth may rudely trample down The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown: (xi: 19–24)

Though she turns back to the imagination, her awareness of these competing perspectives has already rendered suspect the status of her visions. Brontë does not question the conclusions of Reason and Truth: she is fully aware that death

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and pain are realities of the world. The poem navigates a tension between rationalist epistemologies which Brontë, despite her dissatisfaction with their conclusions, is unable to dismiss and a transcendent perspective that, for all its apparent transformative power, might prove to be nothing more than a false consolation. Though it sometimes emerges as a threat to imaginative experience, reason is also valued in Brontë’s poems as a necessary limit upon the excesses and dangers of enthusiastic zeal; among the world’s problems in ‘How Clear She Shines’, we recall, are the helplessness of reason and the weakness of truth. The conclusions of reason, as uncomfortable or unwelcome as they might be, cannot simply be rejected. Like several of the poems included in the 1846 collection, ‘To Imagination’ represents a condition of divided subjectivity that shifts between multiple readings of the world, seeking to commit to imaginative vision yet drawn back from complete engagement by the voices of reason and truth that demand recognition of the world’s harsh realities and hint that the imagination might be a perjured witness.44

The empty symbol Brontë’s conception of the imagination is characterized by withdrawal and absence as well as transfiguring presence. For Brontë as for Shelley, spiritual presence and imaginative vision are transient and, in their absence, the world becomes a ‘dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate’.45 Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ – the echoes of which can be heard often in Brontë’s poems – similarly describes a world changed by the absence of imaginative perception46: There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore; – Turn wheresoe’er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.47

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With the separation of the self from the eternal in which it has both its origin and its destiny comes changed perception of the world, which gradually loses the glory once witnessed by the poet. The world becomes a site of absence; a place in which, for all its enduring beauties, the poet is always conscious of the greater glories that are lost. Several of Brontë’s poems articulate this tension between the imaginative perception of transcendent signification in the natural world and the absence of such signification when the imagination fails or its visions are no longer trusted. If the imagination allows the world to be perceived as imbued with deeper meaning, the absence of transfigurative vision renders that world a site of futility. In ‘O Dream, where art thou now?’ (1838), Brontë addresses a lost vision: The sun-beam and the storm, The summer-eve divine, The silent night of solemn calm, The full moon’s cloudless shine Were once entwined with thee But now, with weary pain – Lost vision!’tis enough for me – Thou canst not shine again – (75: 9–16)

In the absence of the lost vision, the natural things that were once entwined with the poet’s imagination are now united with her ‘weary pain’. The departure of the dream is not explained in this poem but, elsewhere in Brontë’s work, the absence of imaginative vision is associated with a movement from innocence to worldly experience48: First melted off the hope of youth Then Fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew And then experience told me truth In mortal bosoms never grew (85: 17–20)

If Brontë’s poetry seems sometimes to reflect Wordsworth’s view of nature as a teacher of ‘Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,/Truth breathed by chearfulness’, that benevolent influence can be lost when the world is

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experienced as futile and painful.49 It can also be abandoned by individuals who turn away from nature in order to pursue other goals and other versions of satisfaction. ‘Shall earth no more inspire thee’, asks personified nature in a poem from 1841, now that ‘Thy mind is ever moving/In regions dark to thee’ (122: 1, 5–6)? Nature’s apostate worshipper has sacrificed the satisfaction bestowed by nature for unfulfilled desires that bring no peace: Few hearts to mortals given On earth so wildly pine Yet none would ask a Heaven More like this Earth than thine – (122: 21–4)

The poem’s addressee is a conflicted figure, driven to pursue desires that lead her away from the fulfilment that she can find only in nature. That for which she pines, nature reminds her, is not that in which she has experienced deepest satisfaction. The poem never reveals what it is for which its addressee pines; the precise object of her desire is really not the point. The poem hints instead at the tragedy of one who does not know her own heart and has been distracted from that which is of deepest meaning by other construals of fulfilment that she now pursues despite their failure to grant satisfaction. Juliet Barker points out that the poem anticipates Catherine Earnshaw’s rejection of a conventional heaven in favour of an earthly paradise.50 It seems to me, however, that the poem’s most powerful foreshadowing of Wuthering Heights lies in its representation of a conflicted subject caught between multiple construals of fulfilment and distracted from her own best chance of contentment: it anticipates Catherine’s choice of worldly prosperity and status with Edgar Linton over the union with Heathcliff that has until then been the source of her deepest fulfilment. In the poem, nature recognizes a truth that the addressee does not. The remaining question, never answered in the poem, is whether the apostate will listen; whether she still possesses the heart ‘That watches and receives’.51 Janet Gezari notes that Brontë ‘represents the ecstatic release associated with mystic experience more enduringly than the Romantics, but she is also more at home than they are in a natural world unimbued with moral significance’.52 This is, I think, correct: certainly, Brontë remains willing to engage with nature even when it is entwined only with weary pain in the absence of a more satisfying imaginative vision. The poems, however, describe

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a conceptually malleable world available for multiple imaginative construals. The absence of moral and/or spiritual significance is not a permanent state of nature: we have seen that the natural world appears in some poems as imbued, however problematically, with redemptive efficacy. The readings that I have developed in this chapter suggest complex and shifting interpretations of nature. In several poems, the natural world becomes a site of spiritual presence consistent with Hillis Miller’s account of Brontë’s immanentist theology.53 This perception of the world as a site of spiritual presence is challenged in multiple ways: the transience of vision itself; the visionary’s pursuit of other versions of fulfilment; experience of the world’s apparent futility; the voices of reason and truth that deny the epistemological legitimacy of imaginative perception. Several of the poems respond by seeking moments of apocalyptic unveiling by which the futility of time and mortality might be reinterpreted within the eschatological contexts of resurrection and eternity. Such visions remain provisional, gesturing towards but never arriving at the moment of unveiling which is also the moment of vindication and validation. Versions of imaginative faith remain active in Brontë’s poems and show that the world might be read as both inhabited by and pointing towards a reality beyond itself. This reality is known in fleeting, visionary moments – a star that becomes a symbol of love, the light of heaven that flows from the sky and into a world that seems made of light – but it remains transient, experienced in glimpses that lack wider context or conceptualization or, perhaps, as pointing towards an eschatological consummation that is always beyond and ahead of the experience and the text.

Spectres of enchantment The texts considered thus far represent imaginative experience as vulnerable to the competing epistemologies of rationalist modernity. Yet ­epistemological and hermeneutic disturbance can cut both ways, and it is characteristic  of Romantic writing that all worldviews – including those that might be ­considered mainstream orthodoxies – are exposed to difference. I conclude this ­chapter with a reading of an incident in Wuthering Heights that depicts modern, rationalist orthodoxy threatened by an imaginative experience that allows the world to be perceived, briefly, as re-enchanted. Lockwood’s

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r­ eading of ­Catherine’s ­journal yields a moment of imaginative perception that both discloses ­hitherto unsuspected presence and disrupts the securities of ­modern orthodoxy. This glimpse of imaginative re-enchantment is figured as horror from the perspective of disenchanted modernity: the world ‘Instinct with spirit’ (118: 16) becomes a site of Gothic haunting. In the narrator of Wuthering Heights, Brontë constructs her most fully developed representative of sceptical modernity. Though he does not identify his religious allegiances (or lack thereof), there seems little reason to conclude that Lockwood is anything other than a relatively orthodox – if somewhat half-hearted – churchman. As Graeme Tytler has noted, Lockwood knows his Bible: he quotes it on several occasions, while his dream of Jabes Branderham’s sermon contains a complex tapestry of biblical references and allusions.54 When Nelly Dean speculates that the wayward Catherine might have found peace in the afterlife, Lockwood declines to engage with a question that he deems ‘something heterodox’ (WH: 129); he positions himself by implication as a representative of Christian orthodoxy. As Tytler points out, however, Lockwood’s frequent use of religiously inflected epithets raises doubt as to the depths of his Christian convictions.55 He is a man of the modern urban world, an environment alien to the Romantic landscape of Wuthering Heights. Lockwood is half-hearted in many of his feelings and actions: he is a lover who worships from afar but never speaks of his feelings to the object of his affections; a self-professed misanthrope who repeatedly seeks out human company and conversation. His self-image is that of a man of reason and civilized urbanity, qualities that are called into question during his first night at Wuthering Heights. In the scene which we will now consider, Lockwood’s reading of the young Catherine Earnshaw’s journal makes manifest the disruptive imaginative energies and superstitions that his self-image as man of reason seeks to exclude. Brontë was familiar with the notion that written texts could facilitate the engagement with earlier versions of the self and that they could be used to gather absent people into the imaginative world of the present: her own diary papers navigate such experiences.56 This awareness that texts could bring absent people into phantom presence is given uncanny representation during Lockwood’s first night at Wuthering Heights. Passing the night in Catherine’s

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childhood bed, Lockwood encounters her multiple textual legacies. The window ledge in Catherine’s former bedroom has carved into it a sequence of names: ‘Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton’ (WH: 15–16). Under Lockwood’s fatigued gaze, the names take on ghostly life: In vapid listlessness I leant my head against the window, and continued spelling over Catherine Earnshaw – Heathcliff – Linton, till my eyes closed; but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres – the air swarmed with Catherines; and rousing myself to dispel the obtrusive name, I discovered my candle wick reclining on one of the antique volumes, and perfuming the place with an odour of roasted calf-skin. (WH: 16)

The book is a Testament inscribed ‘Catherine Earnshaw, her book’ (WH: 16). Like the other books in Catherine’s collection, this one contains her own words written in the white spaces around the printed text. It is thus clear that Catherine’s inscription carries multiple meanings: ‘her book’ implies authorship as well as ownership. The text that carries Catherine’s written narrative renders her imaginatively present within Lockwood’s experience of the Heights: the Catherine recorded in the text will soon be manifested in the ghost-child of Lockwood’s dream. If haunting is, as Colin Davis has argued, ‘the sign of a disturbance in the symbolic, moral or epistemological order’,57 the narrative that invokes Catherine’s unquiet spirit exposes tensions within Lockwood’s modern, rationalist subjectivity. To read Catherine’s journal is to expose himself to vital imaginative energies that cannot be contained by his self-image of educated modernity; reason is ‘haunted by what it excludes’ as the past intrudes itself into the present and, by that intrusion, works to destabilize the epistemological and ontological securities of the present.58 Summoned into its liminal (non-)being by a man who at the end of the novel is still unable to commit himself to a belief in ghosts, Catherine’s spectre emerges into the present as an irruption of gothic and Romantic energies into a version of modernity that, ideologically and epistemologically, has no place or use for them.59 Alison Milbank argues that in Wuthering Heights ‘the most vivid materiality is accorded to the ghosts of the novel’;60 it is the securities of

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Lockwood’s modern present that are rendered insubstantial by the intrusion of spectrality. The first characteristic of the ghost-child, however, is not materiality but textuality. It is the letters of Catherine’s multiple names that first dance, ‘vivid as spectres’, before Lockwood’s eyes; it is written narrative that brings Catherine’s past self into the present. The man of reason confronts language that pushes beyond rationality and into mystery; words are imbued with disruptive, spectral meaning. Valentine Cunningham has described the ‘drama of marginality’ in written language as ‘a continuing struggle between emptiness and fullness, a persistent convergence of, and clash between, absence and presence’.61 Catherine’s book – and Lockwood’s reading of it – enacts this simultaneous convergence and clash. Like her narrative written in the white spaces of printed texts, Catherine exists at the margins of Wuthering Heights, intruding into presence and into the present by an act of textual incursion. As Lockwood falls asleep, his attention shifts away from Catherine’s marginal narrative: ‘I began to nod drowsily over the dim page; my eye wandered from manuscript to print’ (WH: 18). This printed narrative provides the basis of his first dream: the work is ‘Seventy Times Seven, and the First of the Seventy-First. A Pious Discourse delivered by the Reverend Jabes Branderham, in the Chapel of Gimmerden Sough’ (WH: 18). In Lockwood’s dream, he attends a crowded church to hear the interminable sermon preached by Branderham. The service collapses into chaos as biblical texts are used to provoke acts of violence against Lockwood himself. At the edge of the dream, however, and persisting beyond it, is the branch that taps at Lockwood’s window and which becomes, in his second dream, the hand of the ghost-child who calls herself Catherine Linton. Marginalized by death and time, excluded from participation in the present, the ghost-child seeks to interpolate herself into the Heights, just as Catherine’s textual self occupies the white spaces in the margins of Branderham’s sermon. When Lockwood’s scream summons to the room the other inhabitants of Wuthering Heights, his language contains evidence of the epistemological disturbance that he has suffered. The room, he claims, is haunted, ‘swarming with ghosts and goblins’; the ghost-child is ‘a changeling’ whose 20 years of wandering the earth are ‘a just punishment for her mortal transgressions, I’ve no doubt’ (WH: 22). Lockwood’s dream has given him a disturbing encounter

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with an enchanted world in which spirits and magic are experienced, momentarily, as belonging to objective reality. He is able quickly to restore this experience to its proper status as mere dream but, as he leaves the room, he witnesses one more surprising phenomenon: [I]gnorant where the narrow lobbies led, I stood still, and was witness, involuntarily, to a piece of superstition on the part of my landlord, which belied, oddly, his apparent sense. He got on to the bed and wrenched open the lattice, bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears. “Come in! come in!” he sobbed. “Cathy, do come! Oh, do – once more! Oh! my heart’s darling, hear me this time – Catherine, at last!” The spectre showed a spectre’s ordinary caprice; it gave no sign of being; but the snow and wind whirled wildly through, even reaching my station, and blowing out the light. (WH: 23)

Where Lockwood had sought to repel the enchanted world that threatened the stability of his rationalist orthodoxy, Heathcliff invites it in. Lockwood thus confronts a double disturbance: though he has already relegated the spectre to the status of non-being, he cannot so easily dispense with his new realization that a man of ‘apparent sense’ might wish to live in the enchanted world of immanent spirit. Lockwood’s encounter with the ghost-child deconstructs categories of reason that are essential to his self-image. For a fleeting moment, Lockwood is given a glimpse of a mode of being that transcends the material. He can reject the truth of that vision, but he cannot deny the fact that others embrace it. Like many of Brontë’s characters in Wuthering Heights and in the poems, Lockwood finds his epistemological and ontological certainties threatened both by the competing worldviews of others and by the things that he has seen for himself. In Brontë’s poems, the compatibility of visionary experience with reason is often rendered suspect. The imagination offers possibilities for expanded meaning in the natural world and points to an eschatological context within which the temporal world might be situated and reinterpreted. At the same time, the imagination itself is transient; the authority of its visions is contested by worldly experience and rationalist epistemology. Imaginative experience can be rejected or abandoned by individuals lured away from

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nature and inspiration by other construals of fulfilment. Yet if it is often numinous experience and revelation that are rendered unstable by the competing claims of reason, Lockwood’s encounter with the ghost-child shows that rationalist epistemologies might themselves be destabilized by the intrusion of non-rational otherness.

3

‘If your Former Words were True’: Christianity and the Words of Faith

The previous chapter suggested that even the most benign versions of institutional Christianity represented in Brontë’s works are associated with a failure of imaginative vision and with the withdrawal from nature and from beauty. The believers who seek heaven’s light in ‘cell and cloister drear’ (138: 35) miss the presence of that light in the world outside of their walls, where it overflows the skies and inhabits the sacred in nature and in human love. Christianity becomes complicit with the Enlightenment’s separation of spirit from matter; the world ‘Instinct with spirit’ (118: 16) is experienced as a site of horror from the perspective of Lockwood’s orthodox, Anglican modernity. Brontë represents institutional Christianity at best as having sacrificed a sacramental theology – the encounter with the transcendent as immanent presence – for forms and ritual observances directed towards a future reward and, at worst, as conferring cultural and theological legitimacy upon structures of oppression. Numerous commentators have seen in Brontë’s work a rejection of or antipathy towards institutional Christianity. Edward Chitham’s biography describes Brontë as having continued to attend church ‘even if she opted out of it spiritually. She sat bolt upright in the family pew as motionless as a statue’.1 Stevie Davies, in a reading of ‘No coward soul is mine’, goes further: the poem has ‘a quality of out-of-doors: no church could hold it. The roof would blow off ’.2 The roof of Brontë’s most famous fictional church – Gimmerton Kirk, beside which Catherine, Heathcliff and Edgar are buried in Wuthering Heights – seems less likely to be blown off than to fall down. For Hillis Miller, the church is abandoned into ruin ‘because it is no longer necessary’: the wholly

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transcendent God of extreme Protestant theology has broken through into the world in the love of Catherine and Heathcliff that ‘has brought “the new heaven and the new earth” into this fallen world as a present reality’.3 Miller’s analysis distinguishes helpfully between a movement away from a particular formulation of Christian theology and the attempt to reimagine or reconstruct a version of religious experience as the renewal of human communion with the immanent divine. Several recent studies have explored this distinction between institutional religion and personal religious experience. Lisa Wang finds in Brontë’s frequent uses of the biblical topoi of breath, wind and spirit a texture of allusions that articulate ‘the kind of liberating, epiphanic apprehension of the divine nature that is the primal religious experience for the poet’.4 For Micael M. Clarke, a ‘religious spirit that overflows doctrinal boundaries’ should not be conflated with or misinterpreted as ‘hostility to religion itself ’ in readings of Brontë’s work.5 Brontë’s creative engagement with Christianity is characterized both by antipathy towards creedal and institutional structures and by the recuperation of Christian sacramental, experiential and apophatic traditions. God remains always other than the creedal formulae by which religion attempts to speak of the divine. ‘God is not like human kind’, observes one of Brontë’s speakers: ‘Man cannot read the Almighty mind’ (113: 25–6). Institutional religion becomes most dangerous, in Brontë’s imagined worlds, when it forgets the otherness of God and attempts not only to ‘read the Almighty mind’ but, also, to enact judgement and retribution on God’s behalf. Authoritarian, aggressive religiosity is the antithesis of the encounter with divine presence that occurs in moments of tranquillity when the inner eye of the imagination is able to perceive the union of the human subject with the eternal. Brontë’s work evinces the tensions between doctrinal formulations and personal, intuitive religious experience that animate Romantic texts such as Coleridge’s conversation poems and which are integral to the emerging liberal Protestantism of the early nineteenth century. Brontë engages with Christianity not as a fixed and monolithic structure of doctrine that must be embraced or rejected but, rather, as a living tradition available for creative reinterpretation; a sacred language in which new experiences and stories might be articulated. The first section of this chapter explores Brontë’s representations of personal, subjective religious experience and its relationship to institutional and creedal forms of

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Christianity. The second section focuses on biblical hermeneutics and argues that Brontë limns both a weakening of confidence in the status of the Bible as authoritative text and a recuperation of its creative vitality. Brontë finds in Christian literary and theological traditions a creative space for the telling of new stories and a language in which to articulate the encounter with the eternal that is always other than and irreducible to human words and doctrinal structures.

The thousand creeds Apophatic and mystic traditions in pre-modern Christianity were familiar with the notion – given renewed emphasis by postmodern theology – that God is encountered at and beyond the limits of language. Notions of the ineffable and unspeakable emerge in the earliest Christian literature: Paul writes of being ‘caught up into paradise, and hear[ing] unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter’ (2 Corinthians 12: 4). Postmodern suspicion of a naïve relationship between language and a reality outside of the text has drawn renewed attention to what Luke Ferretter calls ‘the theological problematic of using language to denote the wholly other than that to which language applies’.6 The contemporary collapse of onto-theology has yielded a renewed emphasis upon the apophatic, unnameable and ineffable in postmodern theology and literary theory. ‘The name of God’, writes John D. Caputo, ‘is very simply the most famous and richest name we have to signify both an open-ended excess and an inaccessible mystery’.7 It is not my intention in this chapter to recruit Emily Brontë anachronistically as a postmodern but, rather, to suggest that the openness to mystery, excess and ineffability in postmodern thought offers a way of understanding religious discourses in Brontë’s works that seeks neither to limit theology to a particular concept of God nor to regard faith and scepticism as absolute opposites. The encounter with the eternal in Brontë’s poems occurs in moments of epiphany and heightened spiritual perception; in darkness and solitude, when the imagination responds to the influences of wind, moon and starlight, collapsing boundaries between the human subject and the vital life of the

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universe. An early attempt to mediate such an encounter appears in a poem probably composed in 1838: I’m happiest when most away I can bear my soul from its home of clay On a windy night when the moon is bright And my eye can wander through worlds of light When I am not and none beside Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky But only spirit wandering wide Through infinite immensity

The poem is expressive of the ‘passion for freedom’ that Cecil Day-Lewis regards as characteristic of Brontë’s work.8 Physical particularity is negated as boundaries between the embodied self and the infinite give way to undifferentiated participation. This experience resonates with Rudolf Otto’s account of mystical encounter as the annihilation of self by its incorporation into the numinous other that becomes the ‘sole and entire reality’.9 The eye of the imagination responds to the familiar stimuli of wind and moonlight and begins to perceive ‘worlds of light’ in the natural darkness of night. This heightened imaginative perception allows the individual to encounter and participate in the infinite. Brontë turns to the language of negation in order to mediate this experience: ‘When I am not and none beside/Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky’. The mediation of an experience in which differentiation collapses into union remains dependent upon a language predicated upon the world of division and bounded identities from which the poet seeks liberation. Brontë describes the encounter with the infinite by writing about the independent material forms and objects that, to the eye of the imagination, are no longer there. The reliance of textual mediation upon the world of differentiation from which the poet seeks release in visionary experience becomes more explicit in ‘Stars’ (1845). The poem describes another night-time encounter with the infinite, a collapse of boundaries between self and other in which the poet perceives her union with the spiritual life of the creation. Yet the act of writing remains situated in the daytime world in which the inner eye of the imagination is blinded by sunlight. Writing belongs to the daytime realm of differentiation and activity rather than the enchanted world experienced

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at night. The poem laments the loss of a night-time vision in which the inner eye was able to perceive the unity of creation and itself as part of that union: Ah! why, because the dazzling sun Restored our Earth to joy, Have you departed, every one, And left a desert sky? All through the night, your glorious eyes Were gazing down in mine, And with a full heart’s thankful sighs, I blessed that watch divine. I was at peace, and drank your beams As they were life to me; And revelled in my changeful dreams, Like petrel on the sea. Thought followed thought, star followed star, Through boundless regions, on; While one sweet influence, near and far, Thrilled through, and proved us one! (ii: 1–16)

Robin Grove argues that ‘the language in which [Brontë] commits herself to night is sensitive to truths she will not, cannot, consciously allow; the day restores her earth to “joy”, the stars are drunk-in as though they were life, and their cool remoteness is a “spell” ’.10 Yet the poem displays more self-conscious awareness of the status of its own mediation than Grove allows. Brontë depicts an experience of imaginative vision that, like Coleridge’s fragmentary glimpse of Xanadu in ‘Kubla Khan’, is available for textual mediation only when it is finished. The act of writing is rendered possible by the daylight and by the differentiation that it brings; the night and the imaginative perception that it enables can be mediated textually only when they have departed. The poem’s perspective is always situated in the daytime world: its professed attempt to shut out the day is a self-conscious construct. The poem’s self-reflexivity is signalled by Brontë’s reference to the ‘sweet influence’ that unites her with the ‘boundless regions’ glimpsed by the inner eye of the imagination, the latter an organ of spiritual perception that sees

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more clearly in darkness than in daylight. The phrase alludes to Job 38: 31, in which God challenges Job: ‘Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?’ The purpose of the question is to remind Job of his status as creature before the creator: in the same chapter, Job is also reminded of his inability to command the morning (Job 38: 12). Brontë’s allusion to Job would seem to suggest that she too must accept the impossibility of ‘call[ing] back night’ (ii: 30). Brontë would also have encountered the ‘sweet influence’ of the stars in Book VII of Paradise Lost, where Milton alludes to Job 38 in his account of the creation of the heavenly bodies: First in his east the glorious lamp was seen, Regent of day, and all the horizon round Invested with bright rays, jocund to run His longitude through heaven’s high road: the grey Dawn, and the Pleiades before him danced Shedding sweet influence11

Milton, like Job, associates the ‘sweet influence’ of the stars with the creative activity of God. The cycle of night and day is divinely ordained, an aspect of the order that God has bestowed upon the creation. In Brontë’s poem, the passage between night and day allegorizes the transience of imaginative vision, its perpetual departure and return. Brontë’s dual allusion to Job and Milton is not a passive repetition. She extends the range of the sweet influence, representing it as an all-pervasive presence that unites the visionary subject with the whole of creation. The unity of creation, and of the poet as part of that union, is received in an instance of what David J. Leigh calls the ‘sacred moment of perception’ in Romantic poetry: ‘a spot of time in a visionary quest both within and beyond nature’.12 Yet the order of creation insists upon the severing of the poet from this imaginative union by the coming of dawn. Liberating spiritual encounter remains fragmentary, belonging to the perpetual cycle of shifts between night-time vision and the return of daylight that blinds the inner eye and unveils the world of differentiation in which writing can take place. Brontë represents the encounter with the eternal as always incomplete, a perpetual transition between and convergence of presence and absence that points ahead of itself towards renewal and, perhaps, final consummation. In ‘The Prisoner [A Fragment]’ (1845–6), the eponymous prisoner describes the

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nightly visitations of a ‘messenger of Hope’ that comes to her as numinous presence in the natural world: ‘He comes with western winds, with evening’s wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars. Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire. (viii: 37–40)

Hope comes to the prisoner in the elemental forces of wind and starlight, which mediate the life of the infinite to the human subject. Rational structures of language collapse into contradiction and negation as the eternal reveals itself as presence: ‘But, first, a hush of peace – a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends. Mute music soothes my breast, unuttered harmony, That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me. Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals; My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels: Its wings are almost free – its home, its harbour found, Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound. Oh, dreadful is the check – intense the agony – When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again, The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain. (viii: 45–56)

The prisoner attempts to articulate an encounter that pushes beyond language and into the speaking silences of ‘mute music’ and ‘unuttered harmony’. The experience is revelatory, but the truth received by the prisoner is that of presence rather than proposition: the ‘Unseen’ discloses itself in the silence at the heart of the poem. The visionary encounters the immanent presence of the wholly other as a silence in which language and differentiation collapse and the ‘earth’ – the fallen, daytime world of confinement and suffering – passes from consciousness. Yet the experience remains incomplete, a fragment of a desired union that remains always yet to come. ‘Romanticism’s relation to the fragment’, writes Arthur Bradley, ‘is an ongoing, infinite project of becoming

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which we will never be totally out of ’.13 The prisoner speaks of immanent presence from the perspective of its absence; the final consummation, the entry into absolute and indivisible union, remains always ahead of the textual present. Like ‘Stars’, the poem speaks of both presence and absence; it narrates an encounter that remains partial and transient, an anticipation of a fullness located beyond the moment of writing. In ‘My Comforter’ (1844), the serenity yielded by personal encounter with otherness as immanent presence is held in tension with the disruption effected by the public displays of religious feeling associated with some versions of revivalist Christianity. Brontë situates herself at the interstices of two versions of spiritual experience, suspended between the calming influence of the Comforter and the frenzy of religious enthusiasm. Lisa Wang notes that the poem echoes the language of Christ’s farewell discourses in John 14–16.14 Preparing his disciples for his coming death and ascension, Jesus promises to send ‘another Comforter . . . the Spirit of truth’ (John 14: 16–17). Among the activities of the Comforter will be to ‘bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you’ (John 14: 26). Brontë’s version of the Comforter reprises this role, raising into the poet’s conscious mind a ‘latent thought,/A cloud-closed beam of sunshine’ (xx: 3–4). Rather than teaching new truths, it recalls thoughts and feelings forgotten by the poet. In echoing this role of the Holy Spirit as recaller of truths already known, Brontë’s poem is also suggestive of the context in which the divine Comforter is given. It is Christ’s impending absence that renders necessary the Spirit’s presence: living in the time between the inauguration of Christ’s kingdom and its eschatological consummation, the disciples will need the Spirit to guide them into truth because Christ will be gone and not yet come again. The Comforter is given to those who live in the conflicted and troubling time between inauguration and completion. A representation of the enthusiastic tradition associated with Wesleyan Methodism and other forms of revivalist Christianity is recognizable in Brontë’s account of the public religious world in which her spiritual tranquillity is rendered fragile: Was I not vexed, in these gloomy ways To walk alone so long? Around me, wretches uttering praise, Or howling o’er their hopeless days, And each with Frenzy’s tongue; –

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A brotherhood of misery, Their smiles as sad as sighs; Whose madness daily maddened me, Distorting into agony The bliss before my eyes! (xx: 11–20)

Emma Mason has described Brontë’s ambivalent attitude towards the enthu­ siastic tradition in which powerful spiritual experience produced the ‘abnormal atmosphere in which converts would fall to the ground crying out in prayer while groaning and wailing passionately in delightful pain at a new-found faith’.15 The ‘Frenzy’ with which this version of ecstatic spiritual experience is associated disrupts the gentler influence of Brontë’s ‘thoughtful Comforter’ (xx: 32). The poem can thus be read as situating its speaker on the threshold between two alternative construals of spiritual encounter; religious enthusiasm was, after all, understood by its participants as the ecstatic experience of the Holy Spirit.16 Brontë’s Comforter recalls other works of the Spirit, bringing serenity in the midst of opposition, recalling to the mind forgotten truths and rekindling a hidden, inner light. Caught between two versions of spiritual experience, Brontë’s ‘spirit drank a mingled tone,/Of seraph’s song and demon’s moan’ (xx: 23–4). In the final stanza, she seeks the calming voice of the Comforter: And yet a little longer speak, Calm this resentful mood; And while the savage heart grows meek, For other token do not seek, But let the tear upon my cheek Evince my gratitude! (xx: 33)

The Comforter is embraced as a calming influence upon a subject disturbed and troubled by her exposure to frenzied displays of religious passion. The tension between differing construals of the Spirit remains active in the final stanza when Brontë asks the Comforter to accept a single tear as evidence of gratitude, in place of the more extreme responses that might be elicited from the enthusiast. Brontë’s Comforter is a ‘soft air’ (xx: 27) above the tempesttossed sea of fanaticism; it brings quiet and calm to one disturbed by the noise and activity of enthusiastic experience.

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Brontë’s exploration of the tensions between personal encounter with the infinite and the disorder effected by competing religious formulations achieves its creative apotheosis in ‘No coward soul is mine’ (1846). Brontë constructs an overt opposition between creedal religion and the personal, subjective encounter with a deity described by Hillis Miller as ‘the God of whom one may say either that He is contained within the soul or that the soul is contained within Him, and in the same way the essence of every created thing is contained in God’.17 As in ‘My Comforter’, personal spiritual encounter offers liberating release from a public world of conflict and disorder, yet the fragile confidence of the earlier poem is elevated in ‘No coward soul is mine’ to an assertion of Promethean boldness: No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere I see Heaven’s glories shine And faith shines equal arming me from Fear O God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest As I Undying Life, have power in thee (167: 1–8)

When Charlotte Brontë published ‘No coward soul is mine’ in her 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, she described it inaccurately as ‘the last lines my sister Emily ever wrote’.18 Charlotte’s comment frames the poem as the last words of one dying the good death of a faithful Christian and, by implication, identifies death as the threat against which the believer must have courage.19 Charlotte’s note is reflected in Matthew Arnold’s description of the poem as Emily’s ‘too bold dying song’20: the poem becomes a statement of faith in the face of mortality. ‘No coward soul is mine’, however, is concerned primarily with a faith that brings courage to live without trembling in the ‘world’s stormtroubled sphere’ (167: 2). The poem expresses confidence in immortality, yet its perspective is not that of the deathbed but, rather, of the need to live creatively in a conflicted and troubling world. Juliet Barker points out that the poem is both ‘a defiant rejection of conventional organized religion’ and ‘a triumphant declaration of faith’.21 The confidence articulated in the poem is based upon reciprocity: the twin

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lights of heaven’s glories and Brontë’s faith articulate the human subject’s response to divine self-disclosure. Brontë does not simply express belief in God but, rather, describes an experience of God both as an immanent presence within her own breast and as an omnipresent power into which she is incorporated along with the whole of creation. Lisa Wang tells us that Brontë’s poem articulates ‘a confident belief in God’s all-pervasive, life-giving Spirit; and what is celebrated  .  .  .  is the empowering experience of a direct and visceral relationship with such a Deity’.22 The divine is encountered as presence rather than in propositional truth-claims. Micael M. Clarke observes that the experience described in the poem is one in which ‘the immanent and transcendent merge, and the Oneness of all creation finds its fullest expression’.23 This bridging of the separation between external deity and indwelling divine spirit is integral to the poem’s theology. The speaker both contains and is contained by the divine power: Though Earth and moon were gone And suns and universes ceased to be And thou wert left alone Every Existence would exist in thee There is not room for Death Nor atom that his might could render void Since thou art Being and Breath And what thou art may never be destroyed (167: 21–8)

Hope is grounded in ontology: because of the nature of the deity and the subject’s participation in that nature, life and existence are assured. The theologian Paul Tillich has written of the doctrine of creation as ‘the basic description of the relation between God and the world’;24 it ‘points to the situation of creatureliness and to its correlate, the divine creativity’.25 Rather than imagining God as the Deist First Cause, Brontë’s poem expresses a view of God’s creative activity as ongoing. The deity addressed in the poem is not a being, belonging to the same order of being as the created universe, but the source of being itself. The poem addresses itself to a God in whom ‘we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17: 28) and who is ‘before all things, and by him all things consist’ (Colossians 1: 17).

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Should the universe itself cease to exist, Brontë is confident that ‘Every Existence would exist in thee’ (167: 24), for the creative activity of God and the reciprocal encounter between faith and divine self-disclosure have effected the removal of boundaries between temporal and eternal, material and transcendent. Lawrence J. Starzyk observes that ‘union with God demands the repudiation of multiplicity and individuation’; God is, for Brontë, ‘that being in whom the individual species of creation become intelligible through the denial of particularity’.26 God is known both as a transcendent creator and as an indwelling, sustaining presence; this subjective experience of a God who is no longer wholly other is the source of the courage that allows the poet to pass through ‘the world’s storm-troubled sphere’ (167: 2) without trembling. Even the visionary assurance of ‘No coward soul is mine’, however, admits into its discourse the possibility of doubt. The powerful assurance of visionary faith is contrasted with the creedal formulae of sectarian religion. In a poem that represents faith as inspiring the courage to overcome the ‘world’s stormtroubled sphere’ (167: 2), it seems that the proliferation of religious creeds represents one of the challenges that faith must overcome. The poem suggests that the thousand creeds are not only unnecessary but actually dangerous to the believer’s assurance: Vain are the thousand creeds That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain, Worthless as withered weeds Or idlest froth amid the boundless main To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by thy infinity So surely anchored on The steadfast rock of Immortality (167: 9–16)

From the second half of the twentieth century, the prevailing view of the reference to creeds in ‘No coward soul is mine’ has been to regard the poem as a condemnation of conventional religion27 and as a refusal to accept the truthclaims of others that ‘would threaten autonomy’.28 In reading the reference to creeds as a synonym for religion itself, critics have often overlooked the

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specific functions of creeds within religious life and identity.29 As Lisa Wang observes, the poem celebrates the personal experience of God while rejecting the creeds as ‘formal expressions of such belief ’.30 Brontë’s poem, indeed, resonates with wider movements in earlynineteenth-century theology towards intuitive encounter with the divine as the primary and essential religious experience. The German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher distinguished between the intuitive consciousness of the divine presence – the feeling of absolute dependence upon God that was to be regarded as true religion – and the doctrinal formulations by which many Christians claimed to know God: In the next place, we have to note that our proposition is intended to oppose the view that this feeling is itself conditioned by some previous knowledge about God. And this may indeed be the more necessary since many people claim to be in the sure possession of a concept of God, altogether a matter of conception and original, i. e. independent of any feeling; and in the strength of this higher self-consciousness . . . they put far from them, as something almost infra-human, that very feeling which for us is the basic type of all piety.31

The articulation of religious knowledge was thus to be understood as secon­ dary to intuitive experience of the divine. If theology and doctrine were regarded as the primary source of religious knowledge, they became inimical to true religious feeling. Brontë’s poem, of course, does not simply reject creeds as inadequate or constrained – though by depicting them as lifeless ‘withered weeds’ it constructs them in opposition to the vital, creative life of the divine – but, also, associates them with the awakening of doubt. Again, however, it is possible to identify resonances between ‘No coward soul is mine’ and the work of some of Brontë’s theological contemporaries. James Martineau, a Unitarian theologian with whom Branwell Brontë shared a brief correspondence in 1842 and the brother of the novelist Harriet Martineau, argued that the function of creeds was to privilege specific readings of the Bible and of Christian faith, establishing them as the truth to which a believer must subscribe in order to be saved.32 Creeds worked to define the limits of correct, authorized belief and, by extension, to differentiate between those people included in the religious community and those outside of it. Protestantism’s insistence upon the primacy of the Bible

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and of the individual believer’s reading of it, Martineau argued, was in practice often little more than a disguised priestcraft: But do you suppose [the Bible] will be trusted to go by itself among the people? It would be a great mistake. Preachers will go before it, and tell them what they are to find in it; creeds will go after it, and ask them if they have found it.33

The purpose of the creeds, then, was to differentiate between doctrinal and/ or denominational positions and to define correct theological understanding; the heretic was ‘the reader, to whom the Bible suggests ideas different from yours’.34 The multiplicity of creedal statements left the individual believer faced with the impossible task of determining whether he or she believed the right things; membership of a faith community became a test of assent to a set of propositions. F. W. Newman, brother of John Henry Newman, writing in 1850, recalls an encounter with the Bishop of London who had examined him for confirmation prior to Newman’s eventual shift towards Unitarianism. Surprised that the Bishop seemed interested only in his memory of the catechism rather than in his actual belief in it, Newman reflected that ‘I was not then aware that his sole duty was to try my knowledge’.35 If creeds could be seen as intellectualizing religion and making knowledge rather than faith the condition of entry into the Christian communion, Martineau also argued that they served to weaken the believer’s assurance of salvation by identifying that assurance with adherence to the correct creedal statements: how, given the proliferation of denominations and creeds, could one ever be sure of having chosen the right ones? Faith, for Martineau, was its own assurance, ‘for no merely finite being can possibly believe the infinite’.36 Martineau’s argument resonates with the suggestion in ‘No coward soul is mine’ that creeds might waken doubt in the mind of the believer: they identify redemptive faith with denominational allegiance, ideological commitment and doctrinal assent – assent, moreover, to the one correct creed among the ‘thousand’ alternatives – rather than with the assurance that comes from the believer’s own experience and from the personal, subjective encounter with the divine. Like Brontë’s poem (and, at times, in very similar language), Martineau locates the security of faith in the personal experience of divine self-disclosure and the response in faith of the eternal spirit within the human. It is this

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reciprocal encounter which enables the believer to overcome the challenges and conflicts of sectarian religious division and fanaticism: There is greatness in a faith, when it can win a wide success or make rapid conquest over submissive minds. There is a higher greatness in a faith that, when God ordains, can stand up and do without success; – unmoved amid the pitiless storms of a fanatic age; with foot upon the rock of its own fidelity, and heart in the serene Infinite above the canopy of cloud and tempest.37 The true natural language of devotion speaks out rather in the poetry of the Psalmist and the prayers of Christ; declares the living contact of the Divine Spirit with the human, the mystic implication of his nature with ours, and ours with his; his serenity amid our griefs, his sanctity amid our guilt, his wakefulness in our sleep, his life through our death, his silence amid our stormy force; and refers to him as the Absolute basis of all relative existence; all else being in comparison but phantasm and shadow, and He alone the real and Essential Life.38

Martineau’s work represented an attempt to rethink the nature of Christian experience and to articulate a theology that restored imaginative and spiritual vitality to versions of Christianity (including Unitarianism itself) that had come to be characterized by dry intellectualism or narrow dogmatism.39 His challenge to the sufficiency of the creeds, like that enacted in Brontë’s poem, was not a rejection of religion but, rather, an attempt to recuperate Christianity from doctrinal structures perceived to be inadequate and restrictive. ‘No coward soul is mine’ revisits the tensions between numinous encounter and the disruption of such experiences by different modes of perception and competing formulations of religious truth and experience that shape, in different ways, the representations of spirituality and the imagination in poems such as ‘Stars’ and ‘My Comforter’. Michael O’ Neill sees in ‘No coward soul is mine’ ‘a poetry which, like Shelley’s, allows affirmation to co-exist with, and even be animated by, the prospect of the wakened doubt which it denies’.40 Brontë, bearing witness to her perception of and encounter with the divine, remains conscious of competing formulations of religious truth. Her language sets in contrast the vitality and creativity of the divine, figured as the spirit that ‘animates eternal years  .  .  .  Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears’ (167: 18–20), with the lifelessness and finitude of a creedal religion that is only ‘withered weeds’ and ‘froth’ (167: 11–2). Paul S. Fiddes,

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exploring the possibilities of a productive dialogue between theology and literature, argues that ‘because no doctrine can be absolute or final, it needs to be constantly broken open by the impact of image and story in changing times and situations’.41 ‘No coward soul is mine’ depicts the encounter with a divinity that always escapes the limits of doctrine and breaks open creedal and theological formulations. God remains irreducibly other than human concepts and definitions, which are always incomplete and inadequate, yet Brontë’s poem affirms that by openness to spiritual and imaginative perception the subject might know itself as a participant in the creative life of the eternal; differentiation sublated within union.

‘Yah knaw whet t’ Scripture ses . . .’ I have argued thus far that Brontë’s poetry draws freely upon religious literary sources while resisting religious formulations that might be understood as limiting the divine to propositional truths and doctrinal statements. The language and narratives of Christian tradition provide Brontë with a rich and enabling resource for her literary representations of spiritual and imaginative encounter but, like theologians such as Schleiermacher and Martineau, she approaches that tradition as always available for reinterpretation rather than as a fixed structure of received truth. The final section of this chapter explores Brontë’s engagement with biblical narrative as a potential source of truth and spiritual insight. I will argue that in ‘Faith and Despondency’ (1844), a statement of apparent Christian hope is disrupted by the ambiguous status of the narrative tradition upon which it is based. I conclude the chapter by considering the uses of biblical intertexts in Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë rarely portrays her characters as active Bible-readers and, of the few exceptions, the likes of Joseph and Jabes Branderham in Wuthering Heights can hardly be regarded as overwhelming endorsements of the activity. Sacred texts are used as tools of violence and oppression in Brontë’s novel: they are appropriated by the self-serving and employed in acts of selfjustification and of the condemnation of others. The evidence of Wuthering Heights would seem to be that when the Bible is employed as authoritative Word by the representatives of institutional religion it becomes oppressive

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and divisive. As I will attempt to demonstrate, however, Wuthering Heights opens up alternative possibilities for the use of sacred narrative. One of the novel’s protagonists, as we saw in Chapter 2, is in the habit of writing her personal story in the margins of sacred texts. In the remainder of this chapter I will argue that the emergence of doubts as to the status of sacred narrative as authoritative revelation grants it a new creative vitality and allows it to participate in the polyphonic world of the novel in new and surprising ways. Like the young Catherine Earnshaw, Brontë in Wuthering Heights finds spaces to write new stories in the margins of sacred texts; the novel defamiliarizes and distorts biblical narratives but, in doing so, it allows those narratives to yield new and subversive meanings. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the Bible subjected to the new forms of historical scrutiny associated with the methods of Higher Criticism that emerged in European theology. Higher Criticism was in many respects typical of the demythologizing and rationalist directions of European thought in the context of modernity. For the Higher Critics, the Bible was to be approached as a text written by human authors and subject to the same methods of critical analysis as any other work. The Enlightenment scepticism towards the miraculous yielded a demythologizing impetus in biblical studies; scholars attempted to distinguish between historical facts recorded in the Bible and the religious myths that had grown up around them.42 Emily Brontë belonged to a generation for whom the traditional authority of the Bible was becoming ever less certain. The experiences of some of her literary contemporaries would be reflected by George Eliot – the translator into English of D. F. Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835; translation 1846) – abandoning the Evangelical faith of her childhood,43 or in John Ruskin’s account of hearing the ‘dreadful Hammers’ of the geologists ‘at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses’.44 In science as in theology, the historical perspectives of the nineteenth century often came into conflict with Evangelical attitudes towards biblical authority.45 Even as the historicity of the Bible became a matter for debate and controversy, shifts in popular reading habits facilitated new ways of approach­ ing sacred texts. David Jasper’s account of the Romantic appropriation of the Bible describes a new sense of creative vitality that emerges when sacred texts are read outside of both the traditional frameworks of doctrinal

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interpretation and the historical-critical method. Remove the Bible ‘from the protective custody of the ancient religious institutions and take it from the grip of narrow historicism and fruitless historical “quests”, and, surprisingly, it springs into new life, more truly the Word of God, though it is no longer clear who this god is or where he (or she) is to be found’.46 The Romantic Bible disrupted boundaries between sacred and secular, providing fertile soil for the imaginations of poets as well as priests. Rather than seeking fixed and systematic truth in the Bible, Romantic readings celebrated its multiple subjectivities; its tensions and contradictions came to be regarded as aspects of its creative vitality. Stephen Prickett associates shifts in ways of reading the Bible with the emerging popularity of the novel: ‘the idea of the Bible as presenting a novel-like narrative, with character, motivation and plot, is, like the modern novel itself, no older than the eighteenth century’.47 For contemporary narrative theology, religious texts are understood to have what Mark Knight calls ‘an afterlife that brings with it space for other texts to continue the open-ended stories of their predecessors and narrate the story of the world in new ways’.48 Christianity holds in tension the open-endedness of its narratives – their lack of final completion and their availability for retelling and new narration – with the significance of the truth-claims made by those narratives. Biblical metanarrative tells a story of the world from its origins to its ending and renewal. This story, Gerard Loughlin points out, is told in order that the individual might participate within it: we ‘are not so much enjoined to get inside the text, as to let the text get inside us, so that we are nourished by its word and enabled to perform its story’.49 The Christian story has ‘both an historical and a transcendent reference’;50 it makes claims to be both the story of the world and the story of that which is other than and the source of the world. The dialectic established in the title of Brontë’s poem ‘Faith and Despondency’ (1844) concerns the ability of the individual believer to accept the Christian story as speaking meaningfully of a reality outside of its own words. The poem has usually been read – approvingly or otherwise – as articulating a relatively straightforward Christian eschatology.51 Yet its exchange of sacred stories raises important questions about the extent to which those stories might be accepted as giving shape and meaning to painful human experience. The poem articulates a view of human existence as directed towards eschatological

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fulfilment while also hinting at the difficulties involved in committing to that narrative as truth. The context of its sacred storytelling is located outside of religious institutions: the stories communicated in the poem are passed between a father and daughter in their own home. The poem is structured as a dialogue between an unnamed man and his daughter, Iernë, and charts an emotional and imaginative conflict similar to that represented in ‘A Day Dream’. Content at first to sit with his daughter, Iernë’s father soon discovers that ‘even this tranquillity/Brings bitter, restless thoughts to me’ (i: 14–15). From the warmth of the room, his thoughts pass to the cold mountains where lie the bodies of ‘those that I have loved of old’ (i: 21). Like Brontë in ‘A Day Dream’ and ‘The Butterfly’, Iernë’s father is initially unable to perform the imaginative leap by which mortality is transfigured into hope; death represents only separation, articulated by Iernë’s father as the feeling that ‘I shall greet them ne’er again!’ (i: 24). This emotionally and imaginatively debilitating consciousness of mortality receives a check from Iernë. Where ‘A Day Dream’ introduces supernatural figures in order to offer a transcendent perspective upon human mortality, in ‘Faith and Despondency’ it is the voice of the child that demands a consideration of eternity. Iernë responds to her father’s despondency by reminding him of the transformative power of faith, by which death is reinterpreted as rebirth: ‘But, I’ll not fear, I will not weep For those whose bodies rest in sleep, – I know there is a blessed shore, Opening its ports for me, and mine; And, gazing Time’s wide waters o’er, I weary for that land divine, Where we were born, where you and I Shall meet our Dearest, when we die; From suffering and corruption free, Restored into the Deity. (i: 53–62)

Iernë’s father, declaring his daughter to be ‘wiser than thy sire’ (i: 64), accepts her words of consolation and concludes the poem with his own statement of faith. Iernë’s response to her father’s initial despondency recalls her own

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fears during a period at which he was in a foreign land. She, too, thought of loved ones never to be seen again in this world; she knows that ‘this world’s life has much to dread’ (i: 36). Iernë understands mortality, but she also anticipates a new, resurrected life beyond death. Human lives must pass through ‘Time’s wide waters’ but, on the other side, lies the ‘blessed shore’ of Christian hope. Embedded in the poem’s structure, however, is an interrogation of the foundations of this hope of a better life beyond the grave. Iernë reveals the source of her eschatological hope: it comes from the stories of a better world told to her by her father in order to prepare her for his long and dangerous absence. The words of consolation that Iernë now offers are the same ones that were given to her in the past; Iernë quite literally returns her father’s own words to him. There is no external voice, no position outside of this cycle of repetition by which the words of consolation might be validated. Rather than a definitive statement of eschatological hope, the triumph of faith over despondency, the poem represents the repetition and return of sacred narrative. As Iernë recognizes, her father’s current despair is at odds with his previous words of consolation: You told me this, and yet you sigh, And murmur that your friends must die. Ah! my dear father, tell me why? For, if your former words were true, How useless would such sorrow be; (i: 42–6)

Iernë’s affirmation of faith tacitly acknowledges its alternative: the possibility that her father’s words might not be true. The poem hints that the comforting stories told by father and daughter might be nothing more than stories, without reference to any reality beyond themselves. The devotional mode is employed and subverted: there is no final victory of faith over despondency, for the poem has already demonstrated that faith held securely at one time might fail in the future. Rather than rehearsing unambiguously a conventional devotional structure, the poem constructs a dialectic relationship between faith and despondency. The poem suspends both belief and disbelief, allowing faith and despondency to coexist as elements within the imaginative and emotional life.

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Her father’s loss of confidence in his own story of eschatological hope introduces into Iernë’s consciousness the possibility that the story might prove inadequate. The Christian story, T. R. Wright reminds us, involves like any other story ‘the organization of otherwise isolated “facts” into a meaningful whole’; yet whether ‘ultimate reality has a “plot”, whether the world contains a meaningful history, is, of course, a matter of faith’.52 The stories told to Iernë by her father offer the hope that history has a shape and that the human experiences of loss and mourning might point towards eschatological renewal. Those stories, however, do not guarantee the truth of the ending towards which they point: they require a further act of faith that remains vulnerable to the vagaries of human emotional and imaginative change. The poem hints that belief and unbelief are not absolute opposites but, rather, dynamic polarities that converge with and become one another. As Emily Dickinson observes: ‘Faith slips – and laughs, and rallies –/Blushes, if any see –’.53 Iernë restates the Christian hope that those whose bodies now rest in sleep will wake to new life, but the dialogue with her father has already shown her that today’s faith might be tomorrow’s doubt; that ‘Narcotics cannot still the Tooth/That nibbles at the soul –’.54 The stories of a better world told by Iernë to the father who had previously told them to her are not secure as a source of spiritual comfort or confidence. The authoritative Word remains out of reach in a poem that offers only human words. If the status of the truth-claims of Christian narrative becomes ambiguous in ‘Faith and Despondency’, Brontë’s works also demonstrate the creative vitality of those stories and texts when they are removed from the control of restrictive religious authorities. I will close this chapter by examining Brontë’s rewritings and distorted echoes of biblical texts in Wuthering Heights. The Bible has often been regarded as an absence from Brontë’s novel: Lisa Wang suggests that the relative lack of biblical allusion creates ‘a sense of vagueness, a kind of moral silence’ in the novel’s theological discourses, prompting critics to find in it ‘everything from atheism to pantheism’.55 I want to argue that the Bible is active in Wuthering Heights in ways that have often been overlooked in critical readings. Biblical texts appear in the novel in distorted form. Brontë rewrites sacred texts and stories, allowing them to participate in the dialogues and hermeneutic conflicts of the novel’s polyphonic narrative. The Bible in Wuthering Heights is sometimes not heard but misheard.

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Joseph, one of the novel’s most regular readers of the Bible, provides an example of this distortion of sacred texts. On the same night that Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights after overhearing Catherine’s rejection of him as a potential husband, Joseph attempts to lecture Catherine on the subject of personal reprobation: This visitation worn’t for nowt, und Aw wod hev ye tuh look aht, Miss – yah muh be t’ next. Thank Hivin for all! All warks together for gooid tuh them as is chozzen and piked aht froo’ th’ rubbidge! Yah knaw whet t’ Scripture ses – (WH: 67)

The irony of this passage, as Brontë could reasonably have expected her readers to recognize, is that Joseph does not ‘knaw whet t’ Scripture ses’. He misquotes Romans 8: 28 which, in the King James Bible, reads: ‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose’. Joseph’s misquotation removes from the text both love and the notion of the divine purpose as conditional clauses defining and describing the elect, substituting for them an aggressive condemnation of all those who do not belong to his notion of the saved. Indeed, Nelly Dean describes Joseph as ‘the wearisomest, self-righteous pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself, and fling the curses on his neighbours’ (WH: 33); his reading does symbolic violence both to the text and to the neighbours at whom he flings its curses. Joseph’s corruption of the biblical text allows the reader to hear both the original passage and Joseph’s distortion of it; meaning is created in the dissonance between the two versions. The text that Joseph uses to hurl accusations of reprobation at Catherine is a distortion of Paul’s words that might rather be read as calling into question Joseph’s own status among the chosen; the love for God (or, indeed, for anyone else) that is a sign of the divine promise in Romans 8: 28 is conspicuous by its absence in Joseph’s behaviour. Joseph’s appropriation and distortion of the biblical text is self-serving but, for readers alert to the differences between the source text and Joseph’s misquotation, a pointed and specific critique of Joseph’s own spiritual state and extreme Calvinist theology is enabled. The Bible challenges its own appropriation and speaks against the individual who would use it as a tool of oppression. This passage is suggestive of new possibilities for meaning created by the awareness that what one is reading is not the familiar

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biblical text. At such moments, the Bible becomes another of the discourses by which the polyphonic narrative of Wuthering Heights is haunted. The novel’s most overt instance of textual haunting – the private journal of Catherine Earnshaw that is manifested as the ghost-child of Lockwood’s dream  – is inscribed upon a series of religious texts: a Testament retitled ‘Catherine Earnshaw, her book’; the sermon of Jabes Branderham which provides the basis for Lockwood’s first dream (WH: 16–18). The journal itself records both the neglect of Christian texts – Hindley and his wife ‘doing anything but reading their Bibles’ (WH: 16) – and violence against them: ‘Miss Cathy’s riven th’ back off “Th’ Helmet uh Salvation,” un’ Heathcliff ’s pawsed his fit intuh t’ first part uh “T’ Brooad Way to Destruction!” ’ (WH: 16–17). Written in the margins of sacred texts, the journal represents an act of ideological rebellion against the authorized narrative. Some of Catherine’s additions are described by Lockwood as a ‘pen and ink commentary’; some are only ‘detached sentences’; still others are the ‘regular diary’ that Lockwood begins to read (WH: 16). For Mikhail Bakhtin, a defining feature of authoritative discourse is its resistance against intrusions by other voices. In this respect, Bakhtin argues, the authoritative discourse (a category that includes the Bible and other religious narratives) is incompatible with the polyphonic language of the novel: [A]uthoritative discourse permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it. It enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it.56

This resistance of heteroglossia, of dialogue, is the reason why ‘the authoritative text always remains, in the novel, a dead quotation, something that falls out of the artistic context’.57 As several critics have pointed out, however, Bakhtin’s reading of the Bible as a dead text unable to speak into the dialogic context of the novel overlooks the polyphonic and dialogic nature of the Bible itself.58 The young Catherine Earnshaw demonstrates the Bible’s ability to enter into the context of novelistic discourse, reappropriating the Testament as ‘her book’ (WH: 16) by telling her own story in its margins. Her diary literally plays with the borders of authoritative texts, enacting the convergence of sacred and secular discourses. If the authoritative discourse becomes a ‘dead quotation’ in

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the context of narrative fiction, as Bakhtin claims, then Catherine’s writing in the margins of that discourse raises it to new life. The sacred text assumes new creative vitality as it begins to participate in the novel’s heteroglossia. The new life of the biblical text within the polyphonic language of the novel is exemplified in Lockwood’s dream sequence, which manifests both the once-authoritative sacred text (the first dream) and the intrusive textual presence at its margins (the second dream). As Lockwood falls asleep, his ‘eye wander[s] from manuscript to print’ (WH: 18). The ‘print’ in question is the Reverend Jabes Branderham’s sermon ‘Seventy Times Seven, and the First of the Seventy-First’. As his dream begins, Lockwood imagines himself travelling with Joseph to the chapel at Gimmerton, where they will hear Branderham preach his sermon. The sermon is divided into four hundred and ninety parts, each one describing a different sin that must be forgiven until, finally, the first of the seventy-first is reached: this is the sin that, in Lockwood’s words, ‘no Christian need pardon’ (WH: 19). In the late 1950s, the source text of Branderham’s sermon became the sub­ ject of a brief critical discussion. Ruth M. Adams suggests that the sermon is based upon Genesis 4: 23–4, which tells the story of Lamech’s vow of vengeance upon his enemies59: And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.

As a scion of the outcast line of Cain, Lamech lived outside of the people of God. Rejected by God as a result of the murder of his brother, Cain nevertheless remained under divine protection. Genesis 4 describes the descent of his progeny into the godlessness of Lamech. God had promised that anyone who killed Cain would receive a sevenfold punishment, but Lamech claims for himself the right to a greater vengeance – to seventy-sevenfold rather than the sevenfold promised to Cain – and, in contrast to the divine wrath reserved for the killer of Cain, Lamech vows to carry out the punishment himself. Based upon this text, Adams reads Wuthering Heights as a portrayal of a godless people living outside of the constraints of moral law. The allusion to the words of Lamech therefore establishes a parallel between the line of Cain and the inhabitants of the Heights.

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Edgar Shannon responds to Adams’ argument by pointing out that Matthew 18: 21–22 is the more likely source for Branderham’s sermon as it includes the command to forgive that is represented, in distorted form, by Branderham60: Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.

The theme (and, indeed, the arithmetic) of Branderham’s sermon, which is a discussion of the number of sins that the Christian is required to forgive, shows this text to be the correct one. Yet Jesus’ words are themselves an appropriation of Lamech’s vow of vengeance: where Lamech had promised vengeance up to ‘seventy and sevenfold’, Christ commands forgiveness to the greater magnitude of ‘seventy times seven’. In its depiction of Branderham’s sermon, Brontë’s narrative hints at this typological and dialogic relationship, collapsing the distinction between vengeance and Christian forgiveness.61 Instead of reading Christ’s words as a call to perpetual and unconditional forgiveness, Branderham and his congregation interpret them as a legal requirement that must be fulfilled before some Lamech-style retribution can be dished out. Branderham reads as law a text that construes forgiveness not as a legal requirement but as the human response to divine grace. Yet the sinner guilty of one sin too many remains a matter for doubt. Lockwood initially believes that ‘either Joseph, the preacher, or I had committed the “First of the Seventy-First,” and were to be publicly exposed and excommunicated’ (WH: 18–19). The dream concludes with Lockwood accusing Branderham of the sin, only for Branderham to respond with the counter-accusation ‘Thou art the Man!’, itself a quotation of the prophet Nathan’s words to David in 2 Samuel 12:7. The service degenerates rapidly into violence and the dream ends. Lockwood’s dream is consistent with the portrayal of dogmatic Christianity represented by Joseph and to which ‘No coward soul is mine’ alludes. Branderham’s sermon suggests that legalistic, literalist readings of the Bible have reverted to a distorting insistence upon vengeance under the guise of Christian forgiveness. Lamech’s desire for vengeance and violence lies at the heart of this Christian congregation (we recall that moments later, in his second dream, the civilized, orthodox Lockwood will rub a child’s wrist across broken glass). Lockwood has been shown to the room in which he dreams of

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Branderham’s sermon by Zillah, the servant – and religious ally of Joseph – who shares her name with one of the wives of Lamech in Genesis 4: 23.62 The legacy of Lamech, the thirst for vengeance, endures at Wuthering Heights. The accusations levelled at both Branderham and Lockwood are trivial: the ‘sin that no Christian need pardon’ is either forcing the congregation to sit through an excessively long sermon or attempting to leave before that sermon is finished (WH: 19–20). Religiosity is one more component in the illusion of civilization that covers the more disturbing truths of fallen human nature. Branderham’s version of Christianity can offer no transcendence or transformation of this human condition: his religion is only a fragile veneer upon the deeper truths of violence and social disintegration. Branderham’s ‘Thou art the Man!’ is unstable, inadequate. It is spoken not by the authentic prophetic voice as in its original form in 2 Samuel 12:7, but by a priestly figure already rendered ludicrous. The sinner guilty of one sin too many is never identified; instead, the attempt to enact judgement provokes the collapse of the service into violence. In this respect, however, Brontë’s use of biblical allusion opens up a complex but not inherently unorthodox reading of the biblical text. In  2 Samuel 12, Nathan’s accusatory ‘Thou art the Man’ identifies King David as the very sinner whom the king himself was prepared to punish with death: it is, as Susan E. Colón observes, ‘directed against the powerful, to one perhaps inclined to see himself as master of the Law rather than as accountable to it’.63 The function of Nathan’s parable is to deconstruct the apparent polarities of divinely appointed king and frail human sinner. The efficacy of the parable depends upon the individual auditor’s willingness to identify himself or herself with the sinner, to acknowledge one’s own failures rather than positioning oneself in the place of the vindicated (self-)righteous. By each casting the label of transgressor at the other, Branderham and Lockwood position themselves as righteous rather than penitent; they become, to use a language more common to the New Testament, Pharisees. Brontë’s use of biblical language in the dream sequence destabilizes and defamiliarizes the scriptural text but, as Colón has argued, defamiliarization is integral to the genre of parable itself: The narrative strategy that characterizes parable is the staging of a gap between everyday human experience and a gesture of extravagance that points to human limit-experience. This strategy is performative: it involves

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the reader in a process of discerning and reacting to the gap. It is also perlocutionary: it is completed only in the embodied response of the reader. Its vision of limit-experience is confrontational and disorienting, particularly in that it exposes the reader’s complicity with the everyday conceptual scheme that the parable puts under critical scrutiny.64

Brontë’s use of the Bible in Lockwood’s dream sequence is disorienting and subversive, inviting multiple auditors both within and, perhaps, outside of the text to locate themselves in relation to its multiple accusations of guilt. This use of biblical texts, however, is consistent with a hermeneutic employed within the Bible itself. By refusing to identify either the unforgiven sin or the identity of the sinner, the narrative implicates its reader in the interpretative process. We can pass our own judgements and thus become complicit with Branderham’s conceptual scheme and its poisonous social consequences; alternatively, we can recuperate the radically different readings of the biblical texts that Branderham and his congregation deny. As a genre, parable demands an active, embodied response. Robert Morgan describes biblical parables as belonging to the wider category of revelatory discourses which ‘invite the hearers or readers to respond by acknowledging a total claim upon their own lives’.65 Branderham’s reading of Nathan’s parable in 2 Samuel 12 misses the deeper moral and spiritual meaning of the story: by appropriating Nathan’s ‘Thou art the Man’, Branderham identifies himself with the prophetic figure rather than grasping the parable’s challenge to those who would pass judgement upon others while remaining ignorant of their own failings. The Bible becomes for Branderham, as for Joseph, a symbol of his own righteousness and religious authority. Yet the Bible itself, for the reader alert to the original narrative contexts of the novel’s intertextual allusions, participates in the refusal of Branderham’s reading. The Bible is appropriated by Branderham as a symbol of authority, but the same texts that he employs as tools of oppression and control also speak against the preacher who uses them to serve his own violent agenda. A different approach to the Bible is demonstrated in Heathcliff ’s use of a biblical text as a means of narrating the crisis in his relationship with Catherine. Despite the antipathy towards institutional religion that he expresses at several points in the novel, Heathcliff often appropriates biblical language in articulating his relationship with and separation from Catherine. When he

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accuses Catherine of betraying their love, his language carries clear echoes of the New Testament: You loved me – then what right had you to leave me? What right – answer me – for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. (WH: 126)

Brontë’s biblically literate readers might have recognized the rhythms of Romans 8: 38–9: For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Where the biblical text emphasizes the security of the believer’s relationship with God, Heathcliff subverts its statement of faith by accusing Catherine of breaching their union of her own free will. Paul writes of faith both as relational and as impervious to external disruption. Heathcliff undermines this security by asserting that the believer himself (or, in this case, herself) might choose to reject the relationship, to break faith. Heathcliff appropriates biblical language but, unlike Joseph and Branderham, his purpose in doing so is not to assert authority over others but, rather, to employ its words in the narration of his own experience. His echo of Romans frames his relationship with Catherine as impervious to external dangers but vulnerable to disruption from within. There is, of course, a subversive and heterodox dimension to Heathcliff ’s use of biblical language, which construes his and Catherine’s human love as analogous to the relationship between God and the believer. Lisa Wang discusses the use of theological language by Heathcliff and Catherine and argues that although the novel ‘does seem to endorse the supreme value of some kind of transcendental experience of relational existence’, it also suggests that ‘a finite, imperfect being cannot perform the work of an infinite, perfect being’.66 In appropriating biblical language in order to articulate his own experience, Heathcliff ’s words also hint at the limitations of an analogy between human and divine love. Once again, the Bible speaks back into a narrative in which its own discourse is appropriated; it becomes an active voice in the polyphonic text.

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Heathcliff and Catherine are not orthodox Christians and they are most definitely not biblical literalists: the latter, we recall, writes her own story in the margins of sacred texts. The margins, however, are liminal spaces, neither entirely within the text nor wholly outside it. Exploring these interstices between secular and sacred words, Brontë’s narrative opens space for sacred texts to participate in the dialogic context of novelistic discourse. The novel’s rewritings of biblical texts pose hermeneutic challenges to versions of Christian orthodoxy that seek to control meaning and to employ biblical texts in support of authoritarian and oppressive social and institutional structures. In the process, however, Brontë recuperates the subversiveness of her biblical intertexts. To resist the notion that biblical texts have a single, stable meaning is not to reject the Bible itself; it is, rather, to open up the tensions, dialogues and paradoxes – the radical strangeness – of biblical discourse. The Bible is active in Wuthering Heights not as Bakhtin’s dead quotation but as a living text, reanimated by the other discourses that disturb its boundaries in the novel’s heteroglossia. If its own status as authoritative discourse is destabilized by the voices that speak at its margins, it is also enabled to enter into dialogue with those voices. The Bible interprets the narrative subjectivities of Wuthering Heights even as it is itself interpreted by them. The novel’s biblical allusions and rewritings function not simply by using biblical texts in order to arrive at defined and controlled meanings but, rather, by defamiliarizing sacred narratives in order that their radically subversive potentialities for meaning might be recovered. Marilynne Robinson has described the Bible as a text with which ‘after long and sometimes assiduous attention I am not familiar’.67 It is this defamiliarization as creative potentiality – the reading that displaces the yielding of a final, definitive meaning – that is effected in Wuthering Heights.68 My intention in this chapter has been to argue that despite its often subversive attitude towards institutional and dogmatic Christianity, much of Brontë’s work interacts in original and surprising ways with religious literary traditions and with the religious contexts of the nineteenth century. It explores the imaginative possibilities – the potential for new meanings and new stories – that exist both within and at the margins of Christian narrative and theological traditions. It asks questions of religious epistemology, locating the possibility of assurance in intuitive, unmediated experience of the divine rather than in doctrinal

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commitments that provoke doubt rather than faith. At the same time,  it recognizes that faith and imaginative encounter might in turn prove fragile in the face of the competing claims of reason and of alternative construals of religious truth and experience that work to destabilize the subjective assurance of the believer. Brontë’s writing becomes a space in which to register the creative play of presence and absence, faith and despondency, law and grace.

4

Fallen Wor(l)ds

First melted off the hope of youth Then Fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew And then experience told me truth In mortal bosoms never grew ’Twas grief enough to think mankind All hollow servile insincere – But worse to trust to my own mind And find the same corruption there (85: 17–24)

Central both to the Christian faith and to Emily Brontë’s writing is the conviction that the world is fallen and that, though they retain an enduring capacity for beauty and goodness, human nature, culture and community are tainted by and continue to manifest the enduring traces of this corruption. Brontë’s poems and novel chart the movements of individuals through a world marked by disarray, in which the imagination’s aspiration towards unity and wholeness is contested by a persistent sense of disintegration. As Marjorie Burns argues, ‘[f]or each of us, Emily Brontë seems to be saying, the world is created anew, and we ourselves are Adams and Eves alone in our Edens of childhood, and each of us alone confronts the Fall’.1 Brontë’s characters are often haunted by memories of a lost innocence and her writing returns frequently to images of absence, exile, alienation, transience and estrangement. Brontë limns a world in which human nature is fallen and each person stands in need of forgiveness, yet one in which human readiness to forgive the offences of others is often conspicuous by its absence. Hillis Miller observes of the characters in Wuthering Heights: ‘[t]hey are, for the most part, without pity or forgiveness for one another, and their conscious defiance of the law by which God reserves vengeance to himself echoes through the novel’.2 Characters

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who profess formal religious observance are often associated at best with a moralistic piety that has little meaningful to say to the complexities of the human situation and, at worst, with a vindictive proclivity for the judgement and punishment of transgressions. Yet Brontë’s writing also recognizes that the concept of sin might speak in more meaningful ways about the nature of the human predicament. In the Gondal poem ‘Sleep not dream not this bright day’ (c. 1837), the language of sin describes the child’s inevitable passage from innocence into a world of disorder in which suffering and failure become inevitable and relationships are divided. Yet its final lines also register a glimpse of lost innocence that waits to be recovered: I too depart I too decline And make thy path no longer mine ’Tis thus that human minds will turn All doomed alike to sin and mourn Yet all with long gaze fixed afar Adoring virtue’s distant star (13: 23–8)

Contrary to the preoccupation with individual transgressions that Brontë caricatures in the figures of Joseph and Branderham, much of the Christian theological tradition has understood sin as a concept rooted in relationship – with God and with other people – rather than identifying it simply with individual actions or with the breach of moral laws. Surveying the grammar of evil in biblical literature, Paul Ricoeur tells us that sin is ‘a religious dimension before being ethical; it is not the transgression of an abstract rule – of a value – but the violation of a personal bond’.3 Nevertheless, the contem­ porary persistence of a narrowly individualistic account of sin, perpetuated in some versions of fundamentalist rhetoric, lends credence to a view of sin as little more than a mask for cultural and ideological prejudices. Indeed, Ronald Paulson argues that sin is ‘one fictive lens through which ideologues [see] the actions of their opponents’. Paulson concludes his book Sin and Evil: Moral Values in Literature (2007) by maintaining that ‘[w]hether or not evil is in the eye of the beholder, sin certainly is’: Much of what is called evil is only sin. Sin is the term for the large gray area covered by custom and ideology: whether a woman’s head should be

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covered, or her breast; whether members of the same sex should marry. We  must conclude that evil as an act has remained a constant, sin a variable.4

Insofar as it draws attention to the potential for the grammar of sin to imbue prejudice with a form of religious and cultural legitimacy, it is difficult to argue with Paulson’s conclusion. As Mark Knight points out in response to Paulson, however, the theological tradition ‘offers a broader perspective on the world, one that affirms the value of sin as a means of naming the predicament in which we find ourselves’.5 The doctrine of original sin attempts to describe the complex and indissoluble relationship between individual moral agency and the social contexts, manifestations and consequences of our actions. It is concerned not simply with individual transgressions, but with the condition of the world itself and the ways in which our words and actions are both tainted by and implicated in the disorder and fragmentation that mark much of our experience. Most theologians also recognize an aspect of inwardness to human sin, which  in biblical and other Christian writing is often regarded first and foremost as a condition of the ‘heart’. Patrick Brontë’s reading of the enduring legacy of the fall reflects this tradition. In his poem ‘The Phenomenon’, for example, he writes: ‘One deadly tree in Eden only grows:/Now, every heart its tree of knowledge shews’.6 Yet if original sin is held to leave its traces in the ‘heart’, the doctrine also understands evil as permeating all aspects of our participation in the world. Writers and theologians in the Judaeo-Christian tradition often speak of original sin in images of corruption and contamination: sin is a stain, a taint, a violation, a distortion of a world that was created to be good.7 These images offer a language in which to represent the persistent sense that evil leaves traces of itself in the world that become part of our common social, cultural and linguistic inheritance. In a discussion of the biblical fall narrative and its aftermath, Hugh Connolly tells us that ‘[t]hese mythic accounts attempt thus to account for the replication and reproduction of sins from one generation to the next’.8 Aware of the narrower focuses of some readings of original sin, Colin Gunton argues that ‘[i]ndividualistic conceptions of sin, encouraged by a certain kind of evangelistic strategy which seeks to impress upon individuals at almost any cost their need of salvation, underrate the fact that human evil takes

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essentially social form’.9 The kind of evangelistic strategy that Gunton describes is recognizable in the emphases of revivalist preaching in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which often focused upon calls to personal repentance accompanied by persistent warnings of imminent damnation; this, indeed, is the tradition of which Joseph and Branderham are born in Wuthering Heights. Without rejecting notions of individual moral responsibility and agency, Gunton points out that the doctrine of original sin is concerned not simply with the actions of individuals, but with the social mediation and manifestations of evil: ‘[t]he plight of the individual is that he or she – he and she, and all of the rest of us – adopt, inevitably but voluntarily, the inheritance that we have received. Sin is a social reality because that inheritance is mediated to us by our history and by the social setting in which our lives take shape’.10 Understood in this way, the doctrine of original sin attempts to address the complexity and involvedness of our actions and their social contexts. As Mark Knight observes, ‘[t]hough evil sometimes manifests itself in extreme forms that capture our attention and appear qualitatively different from the normal course of affairs, catastrophies such as genocide and global poverty are inseparable from the activities and linguistic currency that make up daily life. The participation in the world that so often seems innocuous accumulates, over time, a destructive capacity that we struggle to free ourselves from’.11 Emily Brontë’s writing takes her into some dark places of human conflict and violence, for which the religious orthodoxies of the day offer few consolations. Yet the world that she depicts is one in which divine grace is often obscured by the human proclivity for vengeance, rather than one from which glimpses of grace are wholly absent. Brontë’s work resonates with Patrick Sherry’s observation that it is ‘difficult to convey the workings of grace in any medium, but the simplest way to start is to imagine a world without grace’.12 This chapter explores Brontë’s representations of sin and grace. It focuses primarily on ‘Why ask to know the date – the clime?’ (1846) and Wuthering Heights, though it also considers the grammar of sin as it emerges elsewhere in her writing. It considers Brontë’s work in relation to Christian theological representations of sin, with particular reference to the Augustinian concept of evil as privation. It pays attention to the involvedness of human evil in its social contexts and linguistic mediation. The chapter concludes by examining the ‘heterodox’ play of moral law, sin and grace in Wuthering Heights.

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Naming the problem As Paul Ricoeur has shown in The Symbolism of Evil (1967), the JudaeoChristian tradition attempts to articulate the human predicament in a wide variety of myths and metaphors.13 For the biblical writers, original sin emerges not as a fully-formed doctrine but, rather, as an aspect of story, figured in a rich and varied tapestry of symbols and imagery. Trevor Hart points out that this textual and theological tradition is available for multiple readings that respond to differing cultural and historical contexts: ‘[w]hat this amounts to in practice is that some communities find it easier to identify with a particular element of the human plight as described by scripture – guilt, alienation, impurity, mortality, ignorance, oppression or whatever – than others, and therefore find it easier to own the correlative metaphor of salvation – acquittal, forgiveness, sanctification, bestowal of new life, illumination, liberation, etc’.14 Images of loss, exile, alienation and imprisonment in Emily Brontë’s writing constitute a kind of cultural echo that is heard often in a literary tradition shaped in important ways by the influence of biblical metanarrative. Like William Blake or John Clare, Brontë reads the fall as a literary and mythological paradigm that speaks of the loss of innocence: it is the awakening of adult consciousness, the entry into a world characterized by disorder and corruption, and the severing of the individual from an original union with nature.15 Karen Armstrong tells us that the biblical fall narrative, often interpreted in moral terms, focuses primarily upon estrangement rather than ethics: It is less concerned with morality and more interested in the existential fact  of our separation from the divine source of all existence. Nearly all cultures have evolved a myth of a golden age at the dawn of time when men and women lived in close intimacy with the gods. Human beings, it was said, were in complete harmony with their environment, with one another, and with the divine. There was no sickness, no death, no discord. The myth represents a near-universal conviction that life was not meant to be so painful and fragmented. Much of the religious quest has been an attempt to recover this lost wholeness and integration.16

Brontë’s writing frequently characterizes life in a fallen world as a perpetual seeking after lost wholeness in the context of a present reality that is experienced as exilic and fragmented. The fall is a mythic archetype, but for

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Brontë it is also  an event repeated in the experience of each individual. It represents the end of childhood, the loss of innocence and the awakened consciousness of mortality and transience as the condition of all living things. In the early Gondal poem ‘I saw thee child one summer’s day’ (1837), the beginning of the child’s entrance into adult consciousness is marked by his desire for knowledge of the future: he ‘longed for fate to raise the veil/That darkened over coming years’ (12: 7–8). The poem’s speaker is an otherworldly visitant who is granted power to lift the veil, giving the child a glimpse of his fate: Cut off from hope in early day From power and glory cut away But it is doomed and morning’s light Must image forth the scowl of night And childhood’s flower must waste its bloom Beneath the shadow of the tomb (12: 48–53)

The symbolic lifting of the veil offers a metaphor for the severing of the child from his state of innocence by the awakened knowledge of his own mortality. For Brontë as for Byron’s Manfred, ‘The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life’.17 From the perspective of childhood innocence, the future appears as ‘A mighty glorious dazzling sea/Stretching into infinity’ (3: 11–2). The fall into knowledge throws a shadow across this vision, marking the inescapable orientation of all life towards the grave. This inevitable departure from the symbolic Eden of childhood is also the subject’s entrance into a world of disarray characterized by experiences of alienation from the earth, from the divine and from other people. Indeed, echoes of the fall in Brontë’s writing resonate with Ricoeur’s claim that mythic accounts of the origins of evil are concerned primarily with the crisis of ‘the bond between man and what he considers sacred’.18 In several of Brontë’s poems, as for Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights, the earth becomes the symbol of a lost fullness, a landscape that recalls a state of innocence and imaginative communion now available only in fleeting, incomplete glimpses.19 ‘Why do I hate that lone green dell?’ asks A. G. A. in a poem composed in 1838: ‘That is a spot I had loved too well/Had I but seen it when a child’ (47: 1–4). A lingering trace of edenic enchantment arises

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momentarily, only to subside as adult consciousness reasserts itself: ‘The earth shone round with a long lost charm/Alas I forgot I was not the same’ (47: 15–6). Nature retains redemptive possibility, glimpsed in moments of tranquillity and imaginative return, yet the turn back to the sacred remains contested by a persistent sense of absence and alienation. The condition of estrangement, once experienced, often acquires a momentum that draws the human person ever further away from the influence of the sacred and into a world marred by disorder and fragmentation. In several poems, Brontë tells stories of individuals hardened against the redemptive influences of nature and human sympathy. Estranged from nature and insensitive to the earth’s lingering edenic beauty, these ‘iron men’ seem to have lost even the memory of innocence: But did the sunshine even now That bathed his stern and swarthy brow Oh did it wake I long to know One whisper one sweet dream in him One lingering joy that years ago Had faded – lost in distance dim That iron man was born like me And he was once an ardent boy He must have felt in infancy The glory of a summer sky (83: 9–18)

The iron man remains unmoved by memory and past association, closed to the redemptive power of ‘The earth as golden-green and fair/And bright as Eden’s used to be’ (83: 2–3). The speaker’s hope that ‘Remorse even now may wake within/And half unchain his soul from sin’ (83: 45–6) remains unfulfilled. The unnamed man is estranged from nature and from his own origins, ignorant both of the beauty by which he is surrounded and of the childhood bonds by which the landscape is rendered sacred. Nature and memory fail to awaken in the iron man the love by which he might be redeemed. Surveying the biblical language of sin and evil, Hugh Connolly points out that ‘[f]or Jesus, as for the prophets before him, the response to God is rooted in the heart and to sin is really to “harden one’s heart” to God’s love’.20 This emphasis upon the inwardness and interiority of sin is echoed in a biblical

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understanding of human community: ‘[t]o be a relational being means that the human person cannot achieve his or her true realization except in communion with the other. Sin is an egocentric act or attitude, therefore, because it is a refusal to open the “heart”, to reach out and to love’.21 Images of iron and steel in Brontë’s writing echo a biblical vocabulary in which the hardening of the heart symbolizes the failure to open oneself to communion with the other, whether human or divine, and to live in healthy relationship. The hardened individual fails to love and to forgive other people, and thus denies the calling to realize him or herself fully as a relational being. In Brontë’s writing, the symbolic hardening of the heart is associated with estrangement from other people, from nature and from the divine. In several poems, this hardening is invested with eschatological significance. Though her writing offers glimpses of redemptive grace, Brontë also imagines a moment at which The time of grace is past And mercy scorned and tried Forsakes to utter wrath at last The soul so steeled by pride (94: 21–4)

Estrangement becomes eternal separation; the iron man becomes the outcast, ‘Shut from his Maker’s smile’ (94: 29). Another echo of the Judaeo-Christian language of original sin occurs in Brontë’s essay ’Filial Love‘ (1842), which argues that the love between parent and child is a natural outworking of the ‘particle of the divine spirit we share with every animal that exists’ (Essays: 156). The denial of this ‘God within my breast’ (167: 5) represents a symbolic undoing of the order of creation reflected in God’s image-bearers: ‘the spark of heavenly fire dies out in their breast, leaving them a moral chaos without light and without order, a hideous transfiguration of the image in which they were created’ (Essays: 156). The refusal to love is construed as a reversal of the divine activity of creation. God’s image is distorted in his image-bearers; light is darkened; order collapses into formlessness and chaos. By speaking of evil as a hardening of the heart and an undoing of creation, Brontë echoes a theological and literary tradition in which evil is understood as privation: it is a corruption and distortion of what the world and the human person were created to be. The most influential theologian in this tradition is Augustine, for whom evil is understood to

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be ‘continually driving things in the opposite direction from the good and making them what they ought not to be’.22 Charles Mathewes tells us that the Augustinian understanding of evil incorporates both ontological and anthro­ pological aspects: Ontologically, in terms of the status of evil in the universe, it understands evil as nothing more than the privation of being and goodness – “evil” is not an existing thing at all, but rather the absence of existence, an ontological shortcoming. Anthropologically, in terms of the effect of evil on a human being, it depicts human wickedness as rooted in the sinful perversion of the human’s good nature – created in the imago Dei – into a distorted, misoriented, and false imitation of what the human should be.23

For many writers in the Christian tradition, following the influence of Augustine, evil is conceptualized not as an addition to the sum total of reality but, rather, as a distortion of what reality ought to be. Evil is an absence or lack, a concept that is reflected in the work of the influential nineteenth-century Anglican theologian F. D. Maurice: I believe that Christ came into the world expressly to reveal the kingdom of Heaven, and to bring us into it. He and His Apostles speak of it as the kingdom of righteousness, peace, joy in the Holy Ghost. They present Righteousness, Love, Truth, to us as substantial realities, as the Nature of the Living and Eternal God; manifested in the Only-begotten Son; inherited by all who claim to be made in His image. And since they reveal Heaven to us, they of necessity make known Hell also. The want of Righteousness, Truth, Love, the state which is contrary to these, is and must be Hell.24

Maurice’s construal of hell is not an alternative set of ‘substantial realities’ to those that characterize the kingdom of heaven, but a world without the realities of which God’s kingdom is constituted. Evil is without substance; it is the absence or distortion of a ‘substantial’ good rather than the creation or presence of some ‘thing’ else. As Mark Knight observes, ‘[t]he concept of privation makes it hard for us to imagine what evil is like. Loss, violation, corruption and tragedy may provide figures of speech that link evil to something real and substantive, yet evil itself lacks solidity’.25 These biblical and Augustinian echoes in Brontë’s writing – her depiction of evil as the distortion of the imago Dei – illuminate her critique of the moralistic piety and pharisaic legalism that she caricatures in the figures of Joseph and

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Branderham in Wuthering Heights. Branderham’s sermon makes the error of assuming that evil can be reduced to a series of discrete and specific acts of transgression. Yet as Lockwood’s dream demonstrates, the complexities of human sin escape the confines of this narrow reading. Rather than identifying and punishing the ‘sinner of the sin that no Christian need pardon’ (WH: 19), the service degenerates into a scene of violence in which ‘[e]very man’s hand was against his neighbour’ (WH: 20). The condition of disarray and violence of which the dream is emblematic is not attributable to any discrete act of transgression but, rather, emerges as the destructive consequence of the human silencing of compassion, mercy and grace. Indeed, in Brontë’s writing it is often the eagerness with which an individual passes judgement upon the offences of others that provides the clearest index of the hardening of his or her own heart. The depiction of a religious orthodoxy contaminated by legalism and by the human proclivity for vengeance in Wuthering Heights and elsewhere in Brontë’s writing recognizes that theological language is not exempted from the corruption of which it attempts to speak. Indeed, Brontë’s novel illustrates what Rowan Williams has called ‘the almost infinite corruptibility of religious discourse’.26 Branderham’s sermon is only the most overt expression of the constrained and oppressive reading of sin that permeates the narrative. The inadequacies of an account of evil that focuses only upon individuals acts of transgression is further illuminated by Joseph’s collusion with Heathcliff ’s attempts to degrade Hareton, an act of vengeance that Heathcliff himself describes with an image of distortion: ‘we’ll see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!’ (WH: 145). As Heathcliff pursues his vengeance against Hindley by degrading his son, Joseph encourages this degradation in the hope of invoking divine retribution upon Heathcliff: If the lad swore, he wouldn’t correct him; nor however culpably he behaved. It gave Joseph satisfaction, apparently, to watch him go the worst lengths. He allowed that he was ruined; that his soul was abandoned to perdition; but then, he reflected that Heathcliff must answer for it. Hareton’s blood would be required at his hands; and there lay immense consolation in that thought. (WH: 153)

At one level, this scene is typical of Brontë’s depiction of Joseph’s religion as tainted by self-interest and moral cowardice. Yet it also reflects an implicit

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criticism of his reductive construal of sin. It would seem that Joseph’s ‘store of theology’ (WH: 229) includes neither Augustine nor Aquinas: he has no understanding of sins of omission. Aquinas writes that ‘sin may arise from a man doing what he ought not, or by his not doing what he ought’; sin is thus interpreted as a failure to perform a virtuous act as well as the commission of an evil one.27 The clear implication of the text is that Joseph’s hands, no less than Heathcliff ’s, bear the stain of blood that is a familiar symbol of original sin in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. His lack of compassion and his failure to act in order to alleviate suffering render him entirely complicit with Hareton’s degradation. In Brontë’s final poem, ‘Why ask to know the date – the clime?’ (1846), the hardening of the human heart against the influence of the sacred reaches its nadir in a vision of the natural order devastated by human violence. The earth is ravaged by civil war, the times and seasons of nature set out of joint by apocalyptic destruction. The poem’s speaker is a former soldier who enlisted for ideological reasons in a revolutionary conflict. The poem draws upon a Gondal framework but, as Mary Visik points out, ‘Gondal, as Gondal, is no longer important’.28 Brontë’s refusal of historical or geographical specificity allows the poem to become a representation of the universal condition of fallen humanity: Why ask to know the date – the clime? More than mere words they cannot be: Men knelt to God and worshipped crime, And crushed the helpless even as we – (168: 1–4)

‘[W]e’ are implicated in the soldier’s story; the reader, like the soldier himself, is addressed as complicit with the state of the world described in the text. This suggestion that the events of the war speak in some way to the condition of humanity itself is given further emphasis in the amended opening lines of Brontë’s incomplete revision of the poem: ‘Why ask to know what date what clime/There dwelt our own humanity’ (169: 1–2). The poem refuses to localize human evil. The soldier is both caught up in circumstances that far exceed his control or comprehension and a moral agent who bears personal responsibility for his actions and omissions. Hardened both by his ideological zeal – he describes his younger self as ‘Enthusiast – in a name

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delighting’ (168: 31) – and by his participation in violence, the soldier appropriates and reproduces the same corruption that he recognizes in his fellow combatants: At first, it hurt my chivalry To join them in their cruelty; But I grew hard – I learnt to wear An iron front to terror’s prayer; (168: 37–40)

Brontë’s poem resists versions of Romantic political radicalism that imagined the ushering in of a new world order by a secular version of apocalypse and millennium.29 The participants in revolution are tainted by the corruption that Brontë depicts as endemic to human nature, leaving the political idealism of the revolutionary cause doomed to distortion from its beginning. The ideals for which the two armies fight – ‘Loyalty, and Liberty’ (168: 34) – are rendered meaningless by a war that devastates the landscape and destroys the lives and livelihoods of the rural poor.30 The earth itself bears the material traces of this violation: It was the autumn of the year, The time to labouring peasants, dear: Week after week, from noon to noon, September shone as bright as June – Still, never hand a sickle held; The crops were garnered in the field – Trod out and ground by horses’ feet While every ear was milky sweet; And kneaded on the threshing-floor With mire of tears and human gore. Some said they thought that heaven’s pure rain Would hardly bless those fields again: Not so – the all-benignant skies Rebuked that fear of famished eyes – July passed on with showers and dew, And August glowed in showerless blue; No harvest time could be more fair Had harvest fruits but ripened there. (168: 9–26)

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The soldier’s narrative carries distorted echoes of the vision of apocalyptic harvest in the book of Revelation: ‘And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe’ (Revelation 14: 15). In Brontë’s poem, there are no hands to hold the sickle and the ‘harvest of the earth’ has been trampled underfoot. This human version of apocalypse brings destruction without recreation: there is no new heaven and earth to emerge on the other side of the revolution. Bloodstained human hands, Brontë maintains, will build Jerusalem in the green and pleasant land of neither England nor Gondal. Yet rumours of grace persist throughout the poem’s vision of a ravaged earth. Those people who believe that heaven must turn away from humanity’s violation of the order of creation are contradicted by the continuation of sun and rain from the ‘all-benignant skies’; an allusion, perhaps, to the biblical affirmation that God ‘maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust’ (Matthew 5: 45). The poem is animated by its vision of a merciful God whose voice and influence are silenced by human hearts hardened against compassion and grace. From the perspective of awakened conscience, the soldier now confronts the terrible prospect of the God of mercy whose nature and influence he has denied. He recalls that an act of cruelty, the torture of a prisoner, was sanctioned by human religious authority: ‘And truly did our priest declare/“Of good things he had had his share”’ (168: 118–9). The soldier cannot escape his complicity with these acts of violence couched in forms of the sacred. He remembers tormenting the prisoner with promises of eternal damnation, words that now haunt him as signs of his own corruption. Betrayed by the words of cruelty that his story cannot efface – Brontë recognizes that words, like actions, leave enduring traces in the world – the soldier now believes himself to be condemned by his own willingness to condemn: I know that Justice holds in store Reprisals for those days of gore – Not for the blood, but for the sin Of stifling mercy’s voice within. (168: 161–4)

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The soldier thus identifies his sin not simply as the external acts represented by the spilling of blood, but as the hardening of the heart, the silencing of mercy, of which his acts of violence are the expressions. The poem recalls numerous New Testament texts that represent the promise of divine mercy as conditional upon human willingness to demonstrate the same mercy towards other people (e.g. Matthew 5: 7). The significance of these biblical intertexts is given heightened emphasis in Brontë’s revision of the poem, which describes the combatants ‘Mocking heaven with senseless prayers/For mercy on the merciless’ (169: 10–1). The poem carries further biblical echoes, recalling Old Testament prophetic condemnations of corrupted religious observance. ‘And when ye spread forth your hands’, God says to Israel in one of the prophecies of Isaiah, ‘I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood’ (Isaiah 1: 15). Haunted by the memories and enduring consequences of his words and actions, Brontë’s soldier believes himself to be excluded from divine mercy by his silencing of its human equivalent. He recalls his prisoner ‘Pleading in mortal agony/To mercy’s Source but not to me’ (168: 184–5); in death, the prisoner’s face is ‘raised imploringly/To mercy’s God and not to me’ (168: 255–6). The prisoner’s longing for mercy draws his gaze away from the soldier and towards the God from whom the soldier is estranged by his refusal to demonstrate to others the mercy of which he stands in need. The awakening of the soldier’s conscience is prompted by an act of mercy performed by the prisoner. When the soldier’s son is captured by the enemy, the prisoner, whose own daughter has been tortured by the soldier, refuses to return evil for evil and gives orders that the soldier’s child be released. The signing of the letter that gives freedom to the soldier’s son is the final act of the prisoner, whose death both coincides with the soldier’s moral awakening and becomes a symbol of his inability to redeem or transform the legacies and material traces of his actions: I wrote – he signed and thus did save My treasure from the gory grave And O my soul longed wildly then To give his saviour life again. But heedless of my gratitude The silent corpse before me lay (168: 247–52)

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The soldier attempts to atone for his crimes by locating and providing for the dead man’s orphaned daughter. Yet the legacy of his past cruelties returns to him as the conflicts of one generation are inherited by the next: ‘But she was full of anguish wild/And hated me like we hate hell’ (168: 260–1). The prisoner’s act of mercy – an act that refuses to perpetuate conflict and thus offers a glimpse of healing possibility – is framed in overt contrast to the hatred engendered by the soldier’s cruelty. The sin that begins as an absence, the silencing of mercy, leaves traces of itself in the world, adding to the world’s corruption and driving it ever further into disarray. The storyteller is unable to redeem his own story; his desire for atonement or absolution confronts the material legacies and generational echoes of his previous words and actions.

Bad words As Brontë’s soldier recognizes, evil and suffering present particular problems for storytellers. The soldier cannot separate himself from his involvement in the evil of which he attempts to speak; despite his attempts to make sense of his experiences from the perspective of awakened conscience, his own story shows him to be a compromised witness. Mark Knight argues that ‘[o]ur talk about evil adds additional layers to an already complex situation, ensuring, perversely, that we never find our way to the root of the problem’: we have no way of speaking about the problems of human imperfection, sin and suffering from the outside, and no words that are not already contaminated.31 Stories of evil and suffering are always complicated by the involvement of the teller and of language itself in the condition of the world of which they attempt to speak. Knight writes: ‘[l]ike our actions, our language is tainted by participation in the world and the things that we learn from others. Our collusion with the very problem of evil that we identify makes it difficult to bring any clarity to our talk about evil’.32 The interconnectedness of evil and language is one of the important insights of ‘Why ask to know the date – the clime?’: the soldier recognizes the duplicity of his own words of condemnation, words in which he has learnt to discern an excess of meaning that now haunts him. The words with which he had sought to pass judgement upon the evils of his prisoner betray his own complicity with the violence and corruption engendered by the war.

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A recognition of the sociality of evil and of the extent to which talk about human imperfection remains inseparable from the very problem of which it attempts to speak is integral to the tragic narrative of Wuthering Heights. The novel’s multiple narrators are implicated in the events of which they speak and their judgements are tainted by misunderstanding, prejudice and self-interest. What we read in Wuthering Heights is presented to us as already a reading, one that signals the contamination of each of its narrative perspectives by others: Lockwood informs us, after fourteen chapters, that ‘I’ll continue it in [Nelly’s] own words, only a little condensed’ (WH: 121). The novel resonates with Geoffrey Hartman’s observation that ‘[w]hat active reading discloses is a structure of words within words, a structure so deeply mediated, ghostly, and echoic that we find it hard to locate the res in the verba’: ‘[t]he res, or subject matter, seems to be already words’.33 Marianne Thormählen has described Brontë’s novel as a ‘nineteenth-century Revenger’s Tragedy’, yet it is one that persistently refuses to trace its cycles of vengeance and violence to a secure point of origin.34 The mystery at the beginning of Nelly’s narrative suggests that there is always an earlier history of painful experience and, as Lockwood discovers during his ill-fated night in Catherine’s childhood bedroom, the present always bears the material traces and spectral echoes of the past. Nelly is able to relate Heathcliff ’s history only from the time at which Mr Earnshaw found him abandoned, homeless and close to starvation in the streets of Liverpool. There is always an untold story behind the story, a disturbing absence of origins or final explanation. The Earnshaw family has its own prior history of tragedy, the lingering echoes  of which are inherited by Heathcliff as a consequence of his incorporation into the domestic environment of Wuthering Heights. His name is given to him in memory of a son who died in childhood and, as Geoffrey Hartman points out, ‘[n]aming does have a spectral dimension if we seek to perpetuate someone by calling a child after him’.35 Heathcliff ’s name carries echoes of another untold story, another history that leaves its marks upon the present. The inherited name becomes a symbol of Earnshaw’s favouritism for the revenant son that provokes further enmity within the family as Hindley, the biological son and legal heir to the estate, ‘learnt to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and Heathcliff as a usurper of his parent’s affections and his privileges, and he grew bitter with

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brooding over these injuries’ (WH: 31). Later in the novel, Heathcliff ’s own son becomes the latest to inherit the name and, like his father, discovers it to be a tainted legacy, burdened this time by its perpetuation of the previous generation’s conflicts: ‘[t]hey wish me to hate it too, do they?’ (WH: 142) Heathcliff asks upon hearing his son’s name – Linton Heathcliff – for the first time. Brontë limns a world in which each generation is marked by the failures of its predecessors; their individual stories are conditioned by this inheritance and by the histories within which they take shape. Even the version of Heathcliff ’s history that Nelly is able to relate problematizes the notion that the novel’s subsequent tragedies can be attributed to a discrete cause or to the faults of a single person. Earnshaw’s act of compassion in bringing Heathcliff to the Heights is undermined by the hostility and prejudice with which his household receives the stranger. Mrs Earnshaw is ‘ready to fling it out of doors’ (WH: 29) at first sight and, though she finally agrees to allow the child to stay, her children display a similar lack of hospitality. ‘They entirely refused to have it in bed with them’, Nelly recalls, ‘and I had no more sense, so I put it on the landing of the stairs, hoping it might be gone on the morrow’ (WH: 30). As Steven Vine points out, Nelly and the Earnshaw children conspire to render Heathcliff ’s introduction into the family simultaneously an expulsion from it.36 Later in the novel, Nelly is one of several characters to entertain notions of supernatural origin or demonic possession as explanations of Heathcliff ’s vindictive behaviour. Yet her own narrative works to undermine these appeals to the otherworldly by suggesting that the problems of evil and suffering remain inseparable from the complexities of human agency and social participation. As the philosopher John Hick observes, ‘[t]he puzzles attending human imperfection, free will, and sin are reiterated, but not further illumined, by transferring them to a superhuman plane’.37 Despite her subsequent attempts to consign Heathcliff to the sphere of otherworldly evil, Nelly’s narrative offers a different reading of his history – ‘[h]e seemed a sullen, patient child, hardened, perhaps, to ill-treatment’ – and reveals her complicity with his childhood suffering: ‘we plagued and went on with him shamefully’, she admits, ‘for I wasn’t reasonable enough to feel my injustice’ (WH: 30). Heathcliff enters the domestic environment of Wuthering Heights not as a disruptive presence in a metaphoric Eden but, rather, as a friendless child

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incorporated into a social world that is already fallen and that receives him with prejudice and violence. His integration into this flawed social context is illustrated by his acquisition of language at the Heights. The child who is able initially only to ‘[repeat] over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand’ (WH: 29) must learn to speak a language that construes him as other and alien: a ‘stupid little thing’; a ‘gipsy brat’; ‘it’ rather than ‘he’ (WH: 29–30). Reflecting the social context in which they participate, words in Wuthering Heights are often freighted with prejudice and hostility. Lynne Pearce tells us that rather than functioning as ‘a mode of communication associated with reciprocal exchange and negotiation’, dialogue in Brontë’s novel is often resisted with ‘a torrent of threat and abuse’.38 The violence that inheres to language in the novel is illustrated in its opening paragraphs when Lockwood, newly installed as tenant of Thrushcross Grange and paying his first visit to his new landlord, understands Heathcliff ’s invitation to ‘walk in’ as expressive of the sentiment ‘[g]o to the Deuce!’ (WH: 3). Indeed, dialogue in Wuthering Heights frequently exemplifies Geoffrey Hartman’s claim that Blessing and curse, euphemism and slander, praise and blame undermine statement. However neutral or objective words seem to be, there is always a tilt of this kind, produced by the very effort to speak. There are those who must curse in order to speak, and those who must bless in order to speak: some interlard their words with obscenities, some kill them with kindness expressions.39

The ‘effort to speak’ in Wuthering Heights is inseparable from the contaminated language to which it often seems that the only alternative is silence. As Linton Heathcliff reminds Hareton, ‘Papa told you not to say any bad words, and you can’t open your mouth without one’ (WH: 170). Betraying ironically the contamination of his own words by prejudice and insult, Linton’s accusation is emblematic of a social context in which ‘bad words’ constitute much of the common linguistic currency. Among the contaminants in Wuthering Heights are the extreme Calvinism and religious legalism that taint the words and actions even of characters who reject their formal observances. Throughout the novel, the offences and grievances that are the inevitable result of participation in a fallen world accrue a destructive momentum that is perpetuated and amplified by the refusal of

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individuals to demonstrate forgiveness or compassion to others. William A. Madden argues that Branderham’s misreading of Matthew 18 illuminates a central ethical and theological concern of the novel: ‘[a]lthough the precise nature of the unforgivable sin [in New Testament theology] has been debated, Emily Brontë makes it clear that for her the unforgivable sin consists in judging the human offenses of others as unforgivable’.40 The legacies of Joseph’s extreme Calvinism, manifested in Earnshaw’s refusal to forgive the peccadilloes of his own children, permeate the social world and linguistic currencies of the novel. As Marianne Thormählen has pointed out, the prominence of forgiveness and revenge in the works of each of the Brontë sisters reflects the wider importance of those concepts in nineteenth-century soteriology and in Christian theology more generally. Thormählen reads Heathcliff ’s career of vengeance in Wuthering Heights as illustrating the point that ‘[t]he worst aspect of hating people and being unable to forgive them is that it closes the heart to love, human and Divine, received and bestowed’.41 Yet it seems to me that the novel’s concern with vengeance belongs to a wider exploration of frictions between moral law, sin and grace. In constructing Branderham’s legalistic reading of Matthew 18, Brontë was certainly aware of the different reading performed by the New Testament itself. The parable of the unforgiving servant that Jesus offers as a gloss on his command to forgive ‘not  .  .  .  Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven’ (Matthew 18: 22) asks its auditor to identify him or herself with the individual forgiven of an unrepayable debt by God (the servant’s master in the parable) and thus to offer the same forgiveness freely to other people. Brontë depicts a world dominated by the morality of the unforgiving servant, a morality that demands the full redress of law for wrongs endured. Heathcliff ’s words are often inflected by this legalistic bias. ‘I’ve done no injustice’, he claims of his campaign of vengeance, ‘and I repent of nothing’ (WH: 254). Yet this claim of legal propriety itself denotes a kind of lack, a use of law as a justification for retribution without pity or compassion for human failure. Judith E. Pike’s analysis of Heathcliff ’s treatment of Isabella during their marriage demonstrates his careful observance of laws relating to domestic violence: he pushes physical and emotional abuse to its legal limits while refraining from any action that might expose him to criminal proceedings.42 ‘If you are called upon in a court of law’, Heathcliff says when Isabella expresses a wish to die or see him dead, ‘you’ll remember her language, Nelly!’ (WH: 119).

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Despite their overt reference to secular law, Heathcliff ’s words echo a theologically inflected vocabulary of law and grace familiar to Brontë’s nineteenth-century readers, many of whom would undoubtedly have recalled Paul’s warning that ‘no man is justified by the law in the sight of God’ (Galatians 3: 11). Mark Knight reminds us that ‘there can be little doubt that the majority of nineteenth-century Protestants, like many of their forebears, read the New Testament in terms of an unambiguous attack on a legalistic framework of belief allegedly blind to the real spiritual needs of the day’.43 Indeed, in ‘Filial Love’, Brontë describes the Mosaic Law and its attendant threats as given only because humanity silences and distorts the promptings of the divine spirit: the essay suggests that there would be no need for law if humanity would or could fulfil its vocation to reflect the imago Dei. Read in this context, Heathcliff ’s assertion that ‘I keep strictly within the limits of the law’ (WH: 118) functions ironically to illustrate his failure to acknowledge the higher claims of grace. When Isabella reflects upon her experiences as Heathcliff ’s wife, her own language displays this same legalistic inflection. Only on one condition, she insists, can she hope to forgive Heathcliff for his cruelties towards her, and that is ‘if I may take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; for every wrench of agony, return a wrench, reduce him to my level’ (WH: 140). Isabella’s words are doubly allusive, referring directly to the Mosaic Law (Exodus 21: 24) but also recalling the New Testament passage in which Jesus provides a new gloss upon the Old Testament text, calling his followers to renounce the claim to equivalent retribution by turning the other cheek (Matthew 5: 38–9). Isabella’s desire for full and violent redress for wrongs endured further illustrates the novel’s insistence that ‘the letter killeth’ (2 Corinthians 3: 6).

Something heterodox The creative frictions between law and grace in Wuthering Heights extend beyond the words or actions of any single character. The rhetoric of an exclusive orthodoxy permeates the novel’s internalized self-reading. Michael S. Macovski points out that Wuthering Heights is ‘about the act of interpretation itself ’.44 Yet in some respects it is also about the partiality and incompleteness of interpretation. As Luke Ferretter reminds us, reading is never an ideologically

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neutral act: ‘[t]here is no act of interpretation which is not determined in advance by the pre-understandings which derive from an interpreter’s situation in traditions’.45 The novel recognizes something of the partiality of interpretation when Nelly interrupts her own reflections upon the contrasting deaths of Edgar and Hindley to remark that ‘you’ll not want to hear my moralizing, Mr Lockwood: you’ll judge as well as I can, all these things; at least, you’ll think you will, and that’s the same’ (WH: 143). The acts of interpretation performed by Nelly and Lockwood are frequently inflected by a moralistic piety that echoes words of judgement spoken by Joseph and others. The novel interrogates this legalistic orthodoxy not simply by articulating or embodying an alternative doctrine but, rather, by implicating the act of interpretation in the perpetuation of the corrupted religious discourse that contaminates the social environment of Wuthering Heights. Refusing to pass a decisive judgement upon her protagonists, Brontë depicts human judgement itself as compromised by prejudice, preconception and hermeneutic limitation. In one of the novel’s scenes concerned most overtly with the act of reading the material and textual legacies of the past, Lockwood reads a passage from Catherine’s childhood journal that records Catherine’s decision to rebel, along with Heathcliff, against Hindley’s ‘atrocious’ (WH: 16) conduct and the religious tyranny exercised by Joseph in the aftermath of Earnshaw’s death. When Catherine and Heathcliff reject Joseph’s religious tracts, he interprets this rebellion as further evidence of their reprobation. The children are ‘hurled  .  .  .  into the back-kitchen, where Joseph asseverated, “owd Nick” would fetch us as sure as we were living; and, so comforted, we each sought a separate nook to await his advent’ (WH: 17). Not for the last time in the novel, the children effect a Blakean reversal of Joseph’s religious language, appropriating his threat of satanic abduction as an image of the spiritual liberation that is denied to them by Joseph’s belief in their reprobation. Hillis Miller points out that the children rebel against Joseph’s religious tyranny but, tragically, they do not deny the legitimacy of his judgement of them.46 Joseph’s judgement of the children becomes self-fulfilling, driving them to the rebellion for which it condemns them. Trained to believe that God does not forgive, Heathcliff ’s subsequent campaign of vengeance becomes the inverted image of the New Testament’s call to forgive as one has been forgiven. Brontë critiques extreme Calvinist moral seriousness not simply

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by caricaturing it, but by depicting a social environment shaped by its paradigms: God is a capricious dispenser of rewards and punishments; righteousness is determined by one’s observance of an oppressive and seemingly arbitrary moral law. Raised in a religious climate dominated by Joseph’s brand of extreme Calvinism, the children are taught by theological precept and human example that they can have no hope of forgiveness. In this as in other respects, the novel begins to illuminate the activity of grace by depicting a world in which it is frequently eclipsed. The condemnation of the children that is recorded in Catherine’s narrative is repeated and renewed by Lockwood’s reading. Shaken by his glimpse of Catherine’s spectre, Lockwood echoes Joseph’s judgement, declaring the ghostchild’s outcast state to be ‘a just punishment for her mortal transgressions, I’ve no doubt!’ (WH: 22). Indeed, Lockwood’s dreams testify to his collusion with the flawed theological paradigms that shape the novel’s construal of religious orthodoxy. His only complaint about Branderham’s sermon is that the preacher takes too long to arrive at his denunciation of ‘the sinner of the sin that no Christian need pardon’ (WH: 19); he accepts Branderham’s premise that such a person exists. Yet it is this premise that is subverted by the biblical intertext of the sermon which, as we have seen, calls its reader to recognize him or herself as having received an undeserved forgiveness and thus to offer the same forgiveness to others. Lockwood’s attempt to exclude the ghost-child in the second part of his dream illustrates both his complicity with a corrupted religious discourse and the novel’s perpetual openness to the excluded other of that discourse. The novel both performs and subverts a self-reading predicated upon the construal of moral and theological orthodoxy that it critiques.47 Confronted in his dream by the spectre of the outcast child, Lockwood reaches for the symbolic and material weapons of orthodox, authorized discourse as a barrier against the stranger: The fingers relaxed, I snatched mine through the hole, hurriedly piled the books up in a pyramid against it, and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer. I seemed to keep them closed above a quarter of an hour, yet, the instant I listened again, there was the doleful cry moaning on! “Begone!” I shouted, “I’ll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years!”

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“It’s twenty years,” mourned the voice, “twenty years, I’ve been a waif for twenty years!” Thereat began a feeble scratching outside, and the pile of books moved as if thrust forward. (WH: 21)

Closing his ears to the ‘lamentable prayer’ of the spectre of human suffering invoked by his reading, Lockwood erects a wall of orthodox discourse between Catherine and the wholeness that she seeks. Yet Lockwood’s textual barrier paradoxically offers a compelling metaphor for the return of the excluded other of orthodox discourse in the novel. The ‘feeble scratching’ heard by Lockwood recalls the act of writing by which the young Catherine inscribed her story within the books that now bar her spectre’s entrance; the seemingly disproportionate result of that scratching – the movement of the books ‘as if thrust forward’ – signifies the incursion of the excluded other into the texts and into the narrative. Despite the best efforts of its principal narrator, the novel refuses to close down the possibility that the wandering outcast might finally come home. Permeated by the rhetoric of a religious orthodoxy construed as exclusive and vindictive, the polyphonic narrative of Wuthering Heights makes space for the voices of heterodoxy that play creatively at the margins of orthodox discourse. One of these voices emerges in a scene that includes another repetition of the judgements passed upon Catherine: To be sure, one might have doubted, after the wayward and impatient existence she had led, whether she merited a haven of peace at last. One might doubt in seasons of cold reflection, but not then, in the presence of her corpse. It asserted its own tranquillity, which seemed a pledge of equal quiet to its former inhabitant. “Do you believe such people are happy in the other world, sir? I’d give a great deal to know.” I declined answering Mrs. Dean’s question, which struck me as something heterodox. She proceeded – “Retracing the course of Catherine Linton, I fear we have no right to think she is: but we’ll leave her with her Maker.” (WH: 129)

Lockwood’s refusal to engage with Nelly’s question is another act of exclusion, another judgement passed upon Catherine by a voice claiming the authority of theological orthodoxy. As late as 1877, despite the increasing prominence

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of universalist views in Victorian Christianity, the preacher and theologian Frederic W. Farrar would describe the popular view of eschatology as still including the beliefs ‘(i.) that at death there is passed upon every impenitent sinner an irreversible doom to endless tortures, either material or mental, of the most awful and unspeakable intensity; and (ii.) that this doom awaits the vast majority of mankind’.48 Judging Catherine according to his understanding of doctrinal orthodoxy, Lockwood refuses to countenance the notion that ‘such people’ might find peace in eternity. Like Nelly’s own moralistic orthodoxy, which she describes as her ‘seasons of cold reflection’, Lockwood assumes that the hope of eternal life must be predicated upon the ‘merit’ of the individual rather than upon the undeserved activity of grace. The excluded other of Lockwood’s orthodoxy is the central tenet of the Reformation that salvation is always the gift of grace to fallen humanity. Hillis Miller argues that ‘[f]or Emily Brontë, if it is true to say that all men are worthy of damnation, it is equally true to say that all men may be saved, without exception’.49 Nelly’s ‘heterodox’ question probes the creative frictions between moral law and grace with which the novel is occupied. Alister McGrath points out that ‘heterodoxy’ is a common synonym for ‘heresy’ in Christian tradition.50 In the context of a narrative that has consistently depicted orthodoxy as confident in its ability to pronounce divine judgement upon human transgressions, the heresy of Nelly’s question lies in its willingness to entertain the possibility that divine grace might exceed the constraints imposed upon it by human religion. Nelly’s beliefs about Catherine’s eschatological destiny are, of course, no less an interpretation than are the judgements pronounced by Joseph and Lockwood. Yet it seems to me that the abortive exchange in this passage – the silence that resists further dialogue – might itself speak theologically. Lockwood’s refusal to engage with Nelly’s ‘heterodox’ question, even with a reassertion of his orthodox position, resists the disturbing implication that theological knowledge might be less secure, and human judgement more compromised, than his version of orthodoxy acknowledges. Nelly’s question posits a note of uncertainty; it recognizes the incompleteness and partiality of theological understanding. To recognize the otherness of the divine is also to acknowledge that ‘God is not like human kind/Man cannot read the Almighty mind’ (113: 25–6). Brontë’s writing can offer no assurances of the scope of divine mercy, but it does recognize that a God conceived in the image of human

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judgement can offer little hope of redemption or transformation of the human predicament. Depicting the damaging consequences of a legalistic religious discourse that seeks only to pass judgement upon human transgressions, Wuthering Heights refuses to close down the possibility of human and divine grace that remains the excluded other of that discourse. In this context, it is notable that as the union between Cathy and Hareton – a relationship that undoes much of the degradation inflicted upon Hareton – emerges in the novel’s final chapters, it is characterized both by the waning of Joseph’s influence and by a demonstration of unconditional forgiveness. At the close of the novel, Hareton and Cathy are preparing to move to Thrushcross Grange, leaving Joseph ‘and, perhaps, a lad to keep him company’ alone in a house that is to be ‘shut up’ and left, Lockwood suggests, ‘[f]or the use of such ghosts as choose to inhabit it’ (WH: 257). The novel’s cycle of vengeance has created the conditions for a further appropriation and renewal of conflict: Hareton, the dispossessed and degraded heir to the estate (and, of course, another person abandoned to perdition by Joseph), has ample cause to exact his own retribution upon Heathcliff. Hareton’s renunciation of this claim is one of the circumstances that conspire to draw the momentum from Heathcliff ’s campaign of vengeance. As Marianne Thormählen observes, ‘love acts on several planes to undermine the power of Heathcliff ’s hate, not least Hareton’s love for him and Cathy’s acceptance of it’.51 This love that renounces its claim to vengeance is perhaps best illustrated in the poignant scene of the dispossessed son grieving for the one who has wronged him: But poor Hareton, the most wronged, was the only one that really suffered much. He sat by the corpse all night, weeping in bitter earnest. He pressed its hand, and kissed the sarcastic, savage face that every one else shrank from contemplating; and bemoaned him with that strong grief which springs naturally from a generous heart, though it be tough as tempered steel. (WH: 256)

With this scene, the novel offers a final rejoinder to the flawed paradigms of Branderham’s sermon that permeate much of the novel’s religious discourse: it suggests that there might after all be no sinner who is beyond the possibility of forgiveness. Recognizing something of the finitude and partiality of theological understanding, and depicting the destructive consequences of a

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religious discourse willing to limit the reach of grace, Wuthering Heights offers a glimpse of healing possibility that is located not in expressions of doctrinal certainty but, rather, in an individual act of unmerited forgiveness and love. Hugh Connolly points out that discussion of human evil in New Testament theology is framed in the context of a dynamic relationship that is held to exist between sin and grace: So divine grace and the response of love, which it evokes in humankind, are the antidote to sin. “Where sin abounds grace still further abounds” (Romans 5.20). Indeed, one has to say that throughout the New Testament sin is always viewed in the perspective of charity. Fraternal love, agape, or charity is considered to be the surest defence against sinful behaviour. A key index of this agapeic love is one’s readiness to forgive and be reconciled.52

As Branderham’s sermon and its violent consequences demonstrate, the dangerous inadequacy of the moral seriousness that permeates much of the religious discourse in Wuthering Heights lies in its severing of the relationship between sin and grace. In the context of a postlapsarian world, the judging of others to be outside of the possibility of human or divine forgiveness serves to drive the world further into disarray and to perpetuate conflicts across generations. Brontë’s novel arrives at no secure position of faith. Yet it is able to suggest the beginnings of grace by imagining a world in which grace is often absent. Depicting a legalistic and vindictive Christianity that offers no hope that the stain of sin might be transformed, Wuthering Heights registers the incompleteness of theological understanding and refuses to close down the possibility that glimpses of grace might return as the excluded other of a hopeless orthodoxy. Declining to pronounce a final judgement upon its protagonists, the novel leaves its eschatological questions open and unresolved, content to dwell in possibility rather than in the closure of final meaning.

5

‘A Lovelier Life from Death’: Emily Brontë’s Apocalypse

On the evening of Thursday 2 September 1824, a bog burst on the moors behind Haworth parsonage, causing a landslip that sent a torrent of mud and water down the valley towards Ponden. Fearing for the safety of his children, who were outdoors at the time of the mudslide, Patrick Brontë ventured out into the storm in search of them. He found the children safe and well, sheltered under a porch.1 In the days that followed, Patrick’s thoughts turned to the deeper significance of the burst, which he believed erroneously to have been caused by an earthquake. When he preached on the subject of the eruption on 12 September, the event had become a sign and portent of the end of the world: Sometimes, God produces earthquakes as awful monitors to turn sinners from the error of their ways, and as solemn forerunners of that last and greatest day, when the earth shall be burnt up – and the heavens shall pass away with a great noise – and the universal frame of nature shall tremble, and break, and dissolve. In this sense, earthquakes are viewed in our text; and in this sense our Lord viewed them, when he spoke of the destruction of Jerusalem, and of his coming to judgment; and in this sense we ought to view the earthquake that has lately been produced in our own neighbourhood and parish.2

The eruption of Haworth moor was to be understood as a reminder that a day was coming when the deep structures of nature itself would be undone, bringing history to its end and inaugurating the new creation. It pointed to the transience of mortal existence and of worldly affairs. The apocalypse was the ending in the light of which the business of mortal life was to be conducted; it demanded that attention be paid to matters of eternal consequence.

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Patrick’s anticipation of an apocalyptic end to history was shared by many nineteenth-century Evangelicals. It corresponds to what Frank Kermode, in his influential study The Sense of an Ending (1967), has called ‘our deep need for intelligible Ends’.3 Apocalyptic expectation offered a meaningful shape to human history and to individual lives; it pointed to an ending that imbued the present with eternal significance. The apocalypse is thus a model for Kermode’s distinction between chronos – ‘ “passing time” or “waiting time” ’ – and kairos: ‘a point in time filled with significance, charged with a meaning derived from its relation to the end’.4 Yet despite the persistence of some forms of apocalyptic belief, nineteenth-century Christians also experienced and participated in a cultural and intellectual demythologizing of history. The Bible, argues Kermode, is ‘a familiar model of history’: ‘[i]deally, it is a wholly concordant structure, the end is in harmony with the beginning, the middle with beginning and end’.5 In the context of European modernity, readings of history predicated upon the trajectory of biblical metanarrative became increasingly problematic, as, indeed, did the theological and hermeneutic status of the Bible’s apocalyptic ending. The historicist and demythologizing impulses of the new methods of biblical criticism tended to regard the strange symbols, prophetic visions and fantastic beasts of the book of Revelation – the canonicity of which has been disputed in several periods of Christian history – with considerable unease. For many nineteenth-century Christians as well as sceptics, apocalyptic belief seemed at best difficult to reconcile with a modern understanding of history and, at worst, an obsolete relic of a more naïve age. Describing the shifts in the understanding of time that have occurred in the context of European secularization, Charles Taylor observes that ‘unlike our ancestors, we tend to see our lives exclusively within the horizontal flow of secular time’. While this shift does not preclude the possibility of belief in the eternal, it does represent a significant change in the normative experience of time, so that ‘the imbrication of secular in higher times is no longer for many people today a matter of common, “naïve” experience, something not yet a candidate for belief or disbelief because it is just obviously there; as it was for pilgrims at Compostela or Canterbury in the fourteenth century’.6 In the age of European secularization, the apocalyptic sense of an ending is gradually displaced by the perpetual flow of chronological time. Apocalyptic expectation, then, is problematized in the context of modernity not simply

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as a result of shifts in patterns of religious belief but, also, by the emergence of chronos as the normative experience of time. Kermode argues that in this cultural and intellectual context, the ending that is understood to imbue lives and stories with significance – to reveal the concordance of beginning, middle and end – is rendered increasingly fragile. The loss of confidence in a universal end to history is reflected both in a cultural turn towards literature as a source of the shape and purpose that is no longer located securely in the sense of an ending provided by apocalyptic expectation and in an accompanying suspicion that such shaping can itself be no more than a consoling fiction. Paul S. Fiddes summarizes Kermode’s analysis: Since the Reformation there has been a “wearing out” of the paradigm of concordance on the world scene. A lack of confidence in history as God’s story has appeared among us. In particular, the expectation that an end will come to the world and history has been weakened. The “end” as an objective event has been generally demythologized in two directions. First, people have become more preoccupied with the individual ending of their own death; and second, the sense of an ending to history has been modified into a crisis of perpetual “transition” from one age to another.7

The decline of confidence in an imminent end to history is reflected in the difficulties confronted by writers in ending their stories. The end that reveals the meaning and shape of the preceding narrative comes to be treated with suspicion as offering a fiction of concordance that can no longer be regarded as true to lived experience. Despite the ambiguous status of the book of Revelation and the shift towards the perpetual flow of chronos as the normative experience of time, the language of apocalypse remained a significant aspect of the literary culture of the nineteenth century. Indeed, in some respects it is unsurprising that this should be the case. The apocalyptic mode is particularly attuned to the vagaries of doubt, uncertainty and change; biblical apocalyptic is a genre that ‘grew out of disappointment’.8 Jewish and early Christian apocalyptic responded to moments of political and religious crisis, exile and persecution. The visions and symbols of biblical apocalyptic claimed to open glimpses of a transcendent perspective upon the apparent disorder and reversals of present experience, offering reassurance that despite appearances to the contrary, the purposes of God had not failed. The theological function of the book of Revelation,

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Christopher Rowland tells us, is ‘to reveal that which is hidden in order to enable readers to understand their situation from the divine perspective’: ‘[t]he apocalypse offers a basis for hope in a world where God’s way seemed difficult to discern’.9 Though apocalypse is often regarded as synonymous with stories, images or predictions of the end of the world – a trope that recurs in contemporary narratives of nuclear holocaust and environmental catastrophe – biblical apocalyptic is also a genre of revelation. One of its primary purposes is to lift the veil on another order of reality and thus to set the disappointments, aspirations and uncertainties of the present in eternal context. Apocalyptic affinities thus emerge frequently in Victorian literature attuned to the vicissitudes of faith and doubt. The language of apocalypse is recognizable in Tennyson’s longing to know whether there can be ‘answer or redress . . . Behind the veil, behind the veil’;10 in Matthew Arnold’s sense of ‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/The other powerless to be born’;11 and, indeed, in Emily Brontë’s intimations of possibility that the seemingly futile experience of chronological time as ‘earthly change from pain to pain’ (xi: 2) might be transformed by the power of imaginative vision to ‘call a lovelier Life from Death’ (xi: 28). For these and other nineteenth-century writers, the language of apocalypse emerges as an aspect of their negotiations with doubt, loss and absence. Resolvable finally into a stable position of neither belief nor unbelief, these apocalyptic echoes and affinities point rather to a state of liminality, a position at the interstices between faith and doubt, presence and absence, time and eternity. In Approaching Apocalypse (2007), Kevin Mills argues that in Victorian literature ‘[i]t is almost as if the obvious uses of the Apocalypse are there as a palliative against the unmasking of certain shadowy, atavistic proclivities: the desire to regain lost control, the need for a new order to replace defunct systems, the longing for a narrative closure that could give shape, meaning, and purpose to a world rendered unintelligible by constant flux’.12 The continuing cultural importance of the language of apocalypse is thus tied paradoxically to the ambiguities of its epistemological, hermeneutic and theological status. As Mills has shown, the liminality of the book of Revelation in the nineteenth century renders its language particularly resonant for writers who had learnt to think of the Victorian age itself as wandering between worlds.13

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This chapter examines apocalyptic themes and resonances in Emily Brontë’s writing. Like much nineteenth-century literature – the final chapter of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is a particularly striking example – Emily Brontë’s poems and novel reflect the ambiguous status of the apocalypse in Victorian intellectual and artistic culture. Images of apocalyptic transformation and redemptive vision in Brontë’s writing are held in tension with the perpetual openness of chronological time and with the often-debilitating consciousness of mortality. The absence of a consistent eschatological doctrine in Brontë’s poems and novel has been noted by several critics, and this chapter does not attempt to supply one.14 Instead, it argues that apocalyptic echoes and affinities in Brontë’s work reflect a proclivity for or aspiration towards an ending or a revelation that might imbue the present with deeper significance; they are concerned not only with questions of a mode of being beyond death but, also, with the transformation and renewal of mortal experience and with possibilities of a meaningful textual closure. The chapter begins by considering the ‘sense of an ending’ in Brontë’s poems, focusing on texts concerned overtly with eschatological themes and questions. The second section examines echoes of apocalyptic as a revelatory discourse concerned with the desire for redemptive transformation and renewal. The final section considers apocalyptic aspects of Wuthering Heights, focusing on the novel’s juxtaposition of chronos and kairos and its exploration of moments of fracture and aporia in its realist frame. The language of apocalypse provides Brontë with a vocabulary in which to articulate glimpses of renewal and transformation, yet it also marks a point of convergence between presence and absence figured in moments of excess and otherness that remain irreducible to stable categories of belief or unbelief.

The sense of an ending ‘Literature is full of complaints about time’, observes Paul S. Fiddes in The Promised End (2000): ‘[i]t seems that the problem of time is not just that human life never has enough of it, but that in some way the personality is broken by its passing’.15 In several of Emily Brontë’s poems, time is an endless, debilitating flow of moments without the prospect of meaningful change. To strive for

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change, for revolution, is to learn the disappointing lesson that ‘however I frown/The same world will go rolling on’ (103: 17–8). Human relationships are divided and broken by the passage of time: And surer than that dwelling dread, The narrow dungeon of the dead Time parts the hearts of men – (108: 30–2)

Time, however, is also short. Life is a movement towards the grave, so that ‘childhood’s flower must waste its bloom/Beneath the shadow of the tomb’ (12: 52–3). Death brings conclusion to every life and to every tale: ‘follow out the happiest story’, insists one of Brontë’s speakers, ‘It closes with a tomb!’ (xix: 7–8). The consciousness of the self and all living things as mortal has a debilitating effect upon the emotional and imaginative life. Yet death is also the ending that renews the urgency of mortal experience and of human ties to the familiar world. For the dying speaker of ‘O mother I am not regretting’ (1837), the personal ending that is welcomed initially as a release from mortal suffering also provokes the ‘anguish/Of leaving things that once were dear (35: 7–8). Rather than embracing death as the moment of ‘forgetting’ (35: 3) that she seems to welcome in the poem’s opening stanza, the speaker insists upon retelling her story, returning in the act of narration to the landscape rendered sacred by memory and history. ‘[O]nly by facing up to death as a real negation’, argues Fiddes, ‘can we gain knowledge of ourselves, gain insight into being itself, and find the fragments of life coming together into a whole’.16 Yet if the consciousness of mortality can give renewed significance to mortal experiences and to human ties to the familiar world, Brontë’s poems also confront death as an ending that threatens the annihilation of meaning. Her writing returns often to the experiences of protagonists who must witness the death of a loved one or live on as mourners in a world that seems emptied of significance. Time in Brontë’s poems is both the perpetual openness of chronos, without prospect of redemptive change or renewal, and an all-too-rapid movement towards the grave. We have too much time, and it is running out. Images of apocalyptic transformation in Brontë’s writing can be under­ stood in the context of these persistent complaints about time. As we have seen

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in texts such as ‘The Butterfly’, ‘A Day Dream’ and ‘Faith and Despondency’, Brontë employs the language of apocalypse in order to imagine possibilities of transformation and renewal, a sense of an ending that might restore hope and imaginative vitality to present experience. The significance of these apocalyptic images lies not only in what they might have to say about eschatological doctrine but, also, in their potentially revivifying effects upon present experience. In ‘The Butterfly’ and ‘A Day Dream’, intimations of apocalyptic transformation open the possibility of transfigured imaginative perception in the present. They imagine the kind of ending that ‘gives each moment its fullness’.17 Yet they also acknowledge, overtly or implicitly, that the apocalyptic ending lies beyond the horizons of experience and of finite, mortal perception. The ‘clouded eye’ (x: 19) of disenchantment is able to perceive mortal existence as orientated only towards death and decay. Brontë’s literary echoes of the apocalypse thus recognize the aspiration towards an ending that gives shape, meaning and purpose to lives and stories while also acknowledging the tensions between the apocalyptic sense of an ending and the horizontal flow of disenchanted, chronological time. Brontë’s poem ‘Anticipation’ (1845) enacts this persistent tension between chronos and kairos. The poem constructs a dialogue between two unnamed speakers, the first of whom articulates the experience of time as a movement away from a lost innocence, through a world of disarray and disappointment without the prospect of meaningful change. Disillusioned by experience, this speaker now perceives the world as emptied of spiritual and aesthetic consolations. This emptying is enacted textually in the opening lines of the poem, in which an apparent affirmation of nature’s beauty is displaced by the second line to the perspective of the other speaker: ‘How beautiful the earth is still,/To thee – how full of happiness!’ (vii: 1–2). From the disillusioned, disappointed perspective of the first speaker, the other’s continued ability to perceive beauty in the earth is as enviable as it is mystifying; how, she asks, is it possible to retain the enchanted perspective of childhood When those who were thy own compeers, Equals in fortune and in years, Have seen their morning melt in tears, To clouded, smileless day;

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Blest, had they died untried and young, Before their hearts went wandering wrong, Poor slaves, subdued by passions strong, A weak and helpless prey! (vii: 11–8)

The poem thus repeats a familiar trope of Brontë’s writing. The awakening of adult consciousness is figured as a symbolic fall into experience. Participating in a world marked by disarray and disintegration, the individual becomes estranged from nature and unable to perceive the enchantment once available to the eyes of childhood. ‘Anticipation’ suggests that the ambitions and desires of mortal life yield only disappointment and disillusionment; disappointment that stems not simply from failure but, rather, from consummation that is the death of hope. The second speaker responds by explaining that her continued perception of the earth’s beauty is rooted in an eschatological perspective that looks beyond transient worldly desires and into the eternal. Recognizing that ‘every phase of earthly joy/Must always fade, and always cloy’ (vii: 25–6), the second speaker avoids the perpetual disappointments of worldly existence and embraces a vision of radical transformation: There cast my anchor of desire Deep in unknown eternity; Nor ever let my spirit tire, With looking for what is to be! (vii: 33–6)

The first speaker, disillusioned by the pursuit of worldly ambitions, adopts a nihilistic perspective from which early death seems preferable to continued existence in the world; she is unable to regard ‘what is to be’ as anything other than the continuation of what already is. For the second speaker, the continued perception of the sublime and the beautiful in nature is predicated upon an apocalyptic perspective that views the present in the light of a redemptive future. Refusing the first speaker’s nihilism, she commits herself to imagining a future in which present reality will be transformed into something radically other; she retains the ability to experience the

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world as enchanted because she perceives it in the light of its eschatological becoming.  From this eschatological perspective, death can be interpreted not simply as the cessation of being that the first speaker imagines, but as pointing towards resurrection and new life in a redeemed creation. As Colin Gunton points out, ‘the end is understood biblically in terms of the perfecting, not the abolition, of the created order. There may indeed be a “new” heaven and a new earth, but they remain heaven and earth, not some utterly timeless and spaceless realm, and they already bear graciously on this one’.18 The second speaker lives in anticipation of an ending that gives shape and meaning to experience; she perceives present reality in eschatological context. Rather than dwelling on the details of eschatological doctrine, ‘Anticipation’ focuses upon the contrast between a disillusioned perspective able to see only the perpetual and unredeemed flow of chronological time and an eschatological vision orientated towards a redemptive ending. It is less concerned with eschatology as a discrete science of ‘last things’ than with an exploration of human orientation towards the eternal. In this respect, it resonates with the theologian Emil Brunner’s claim that ‘[t]he life of the believer is in fact eschatological, a manner of life according to ultimate reality’.19 A perspective orientated towards ‘what is to be’ revitalizes the experience of the present, transfiguring perception and allowing the world to be experienced in the light of its redemptive future: ‘It is hope’s spell that glorifies, Like youth, to my maturer eyes, All Nature’s million mysteries, The fearful and the fair – Hope soothes me in the griefs I know; She lulls my pain for others’ woe, And makes me strong to undergo What I am born to bear. Glad comforter! will I not brave, Unawed, the darkness of the grave? Nay, smile to hear Death’s billows rave – Sustained, my guide, by thee?

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The more unjust seems present fate, The more my spirit swells elate, Strong, in thy strength, to anticipate Rewarding destiny! (vii: 37–52)

Jurgen Moltmann, one of several prominent theologians to have challenged a limited conception of last things as an adequate account of Christian eschatology, argues that hope refuses to accept the world as it is but, rather, brings to light ‘how open all things are to the possibilities in which they can live and shall live’.20 In Brontë’s poem, hope offers consolation for the second speaker’s own suffering and for the pain that she sees in the world around her by imagining the future redemption and transformation of suffering into new life. Living in a present charged with meaning by its relation to an ending, the second speaker challenges the other’s experience of disenchanted, chronological time by holding to her perception of kairos. The imaginative aspiration towards the kind of ending that offers redemptive meaning to the disappointments and suffering of mortal existence is explored in ‘I see around me tombstones grey’ (1841). As she wanders among tombstones that ‘[stretch] their shadow far away’ (124: 2), the poem’s speaker turns from contemplation of the ‘silent dead’ (124: 4) in the earth beneath her feet to a series of eschatological speculations. Thoughts of the mortal remains that lie in the earth awaken grief that responds not simply to the empirical fact of death but, also, to the thought that as the body returns to dust the spirit might depart to a distant heaven incompatible with memories of mortal suffering: And my eyes cannot hold the tears That memory hoards from vanished years For Time and Death and Mortal pain Give wounds that will not heal again – Let me remember half the woe I’ve seen and heard and felt below And heaven itself – so pure and blest Could never give my spirit rest – Sweet land of light! thy children fair Know nought akin to our despair – Nor have they felt, nor can they tell

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What tenants haunt each mortal cell What gloomy guests we hold within – Torments and madness, tears and sin! (124: 7–20)

This grief is prompted not by an inability to believe in heaven but, rather, by the suspicion that to leave the earth is to surrender the memories – including the painful ones – that have shaped identity and experience. This version of eschatology is figured as hopeless because it denies the integrity of mortal existence and violates the sacred human bond with the earth. Brontë imagines the possibility of spiritual survival in a distant heaven, but is unable to identify the spirit that inhabits a ‘long eternity of joy’ (124: 22) as continuous with the mortal self. This version of heaven, Janet Gezari points out, is ‘a vale of soul un-making’;21 it is a prospect that offers spiritual survival without redemptive hope. The poem posits an ontological discontinuity between the spiritual children born of heaven and the embodied children of the earth. The light of the ‘dazzling land above’ (124: 35) is blinding, obscuring heaven’s gaze of earth and of mortal suffering. Brontë’s poem resonates with Mark Knight’s observation that ‘[a]ny eschatological account that ignores the pain and suffering of history is hopeless, for our experiences in the world are part of who we are and cannot be ignored’.22 The poem’s turn away from an otherworldly heaven is an affirmation of the integrity of mortal being and of the significance of human pain. Indeed, the speaker claims that the common human response to death is to cling to the fading vision of earth rather than to embrace the passage into another world. Addressing the earth as mother, Brontë argues that: We all in life’s departing shine Our last dear longings blend with thine; And struggle still, and strive to trace With clouded gaze thy darling face We would not leave our native home For any world beyond the Tomb No – rather on thy kindly breast Let us be laid in lasting rest Or waken but to share with thee A mutual immortality – (124: 37–46)

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Eternal rest in the earth, figured in the poem as a return to the mother, can be embraced in a way that the distant heaven cannot. In the grave, the speaker will remain part of the earth with which she shares a sacred bond of identity and experience. There are suggestions elsewhere in Brontë’s poems that rest in the grave might be imagined both as ‘tranquil sleep’ (vi: 23) and as union with the life of the earth: Blow, west-wind, by the lonely mound, And murmur, summer-streams – There is no need of other sound To soothe my lady’s dreams. (vi: 25–8)

Perhaps, as Lockwood suggests in a similar graveside scene in the final chapter of Wuthering Heights, there is no need to ‘imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’ (WH: 258); perhaps it is sufficient that the dead are returned to the earth upon which breathes the wind that, in Brontë’s poems, unites humanity with the spiritual and creative life of the eternal. Several of Brontë’s poems, like the image of tranquil graves at the end of Wuthering Heights, suggest that the return of dust to dust – of the mortal self to the organic and spiritual life of the earth – might be a more desirable end than the departure of the human spirit to a distant heaven. Some critics have seen in ‘I see around me tombstones grey’ a rejection of  ‘conventional views of Heaven in favour of a Paradise that was as like earth as possible’.23 Yet in challenging a constrained notion of a wholly otherworldly eschatology, the poem echoes the emphasis that much of the Christian theological tradition has placed upon a redemptive future for the whole of creation. Inga-Stina Ewbank notes the resonance of Brontë’s language of immortality with biblical texts such as Paul’s discussion of resurrection in  1 Corinthians 15: 53: ‘[f]or this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality’.24 The poem carries several further echoes of biblical eschatology. The suggestion that human ‘longings’ blend in death with the longings of the earth itself recalls the New Testament insistence that the whole of creation ‘groaneth and travaileth in pain together’ in anticipation of renewal (Romans 8: 21–3). The poem’s image of sleepers in the earth waking to immortality carries still clearer echoes of a biblical language, one that is also common to Victorian burial services,

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epitaphs and literary representations of death. The New Testament scholar N. T. Wright explains the eschatological significance of the biblical language of awakening: It involves, not a reconstrual of life after death, but the reversal of death itself. It is not about discovering that Sheol is not such a bad place after all. It is not a way of saying that the dust will learn to be happy as dust. The language of awakening is not a new, exciting way of talking about sleep. It is a way of saying that a time will come when sleepers will sleep no more. Creation itself, celebrated throughout the Hebrew scriptures, will be reaffirmed, remade.25

John Morley reminds us that ‘[t]o the Victorians, as to their predecessors, the glory and hope of Christianity was the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, of life everlasting’.26 Brontë’s poem employs the language of awakening, of the mortal putting on immortality, in order to imagine an eschatological future shared with the earth and to set this future in opposition to the hopeless, distant heaven contemplated earlier in the poem. Like the apocalyptic hope of a new heaven and earth articulated in ‘The Butterfly’, the image of immortality in ‘I see around me tombstones grey’ rejects the redemptive potential of a wholly otherworldly heaven in favour of an eschaton based upon resurrection and recreation. The sense of a meaningful ending provided by these intimations of immortality is thus predicated upon an affirmation of the integrity of mortal being, of human suffering, and of the sacred bond with the earth. Staking a tentative hope in a future awakening, ‘I see around me tombstones grey’ insists that, should this hope fail, rest in the maternal embrace of the earth remains preferable to the severing of the spirit from its mortal history and from its ties to the familiar world. In Brontë’s poems, the aspiration towards an ending that offers the possibility of redemptive meaning is always inflected by her sense of an intimate bond between the human subject and the earth. Resisting the notion that a redemptive ending can be identified with the departure of the human spirit to a distant heaven, Brontë draws instead upon images of transformation, renewal and spiritual liberation. In several poems, death is re-imagined as the final collapse of boundaries between the human subject and the numinous life that animates the whole of the creation, a union with the eternal that begins in mortal life and anticipates its consummation in the

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release from mortality. In this respect, Brontë’s writing echoes and further subjectivizes John Wesley’s understanding of religion as ‘a participation of the divine nature, the life of God in the soul of man . . . heaven begun upon earth’.27 This eschatological orientation of faith is articulated most fully in ‘No coward soul is mine’, in which ‘There is not room for Death’ (167: 25) because the ‘God within my breast’ (167: 5) is also the divine spirit whose ‘wide-embracing love . . . animates eternal years’ (167: 17–8). Nothing will be lost to death, not one ‘atom  .  .  .  render[ed] void’ (167: 26), because all existence is inhabited and contained by the eternal. As I argued in Chapter 2, eschatological language in Brontë’s writing tends to resist the separation of the eternal from the natural world and thus resonates with a Christian sacramental theology in which, as N. T. Wright observes, there is a ‘sense of overlap between heaven and earth, and of God thereby being present on earth without having to leave heaven’.28 This sense of the convergence of the finite and the eternal is reflected in several poems in which the eschatological sense of an ending is figured as the final union of the human subject with the vital spiritual life that inhabits and animates the natural world. A poem composed in 1841 describes the awakening of a lost feeling and the renewal of liberating, numinous encounter: Aye there it is! It wakes tonight Sweet thoughts that will not die And feeling’s fires flash all as bright As in the years gone by! – And I can tell by thine altered cheek And by thy kindled gaze And by the words thou scarce dost speak, How wildly fancy plays – Yes I could swear that glorious wind Has swept the world aside Has dashed its memory from thy mind Like foam-bells from the tide – (123: 1–12)

This poem follows ‘Shall Earth no more inspire thee’ in the compositional sequence and suggests a thematic sequel to the earlier text. In ‘Shall Earth no

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more inspire thee’, the voice of personified nature addresses a ‘lonely dreamer’ (122: 2) who has turned from nature in order to pursue other desires. The earth calls upon the wanderer to return and to open herself again to nature’s ‘magic power/To drive thy griefs away’ (122: 19–20). ‘Aye there it is!’ describes a renewal of imaginative encounter with the natural world and the return of feeling that ‘flash[ed] bright . . . in the years gone by’. Brontë depicts a spiritual awakening figured in Pentecostal imagery: imaginative feeling and spiritual vitality come to the visionary in the elemental symbols of wind and fire (cf. Acts 2: 1–3). John Maynard sees in the poem a recurring spiritual theme of Brontë’s works, in which ‘powerful feeling in the souls of speakers finds answering power/powers in the universe’.29 The ‘glorious wind’ blows in the external world and in the subjective consciousness, collapsing boundaries between inside and outside. The world that is ‘swept  .  .  .  aside’ by this wind is not the earth itself, with which the visionary is connected ever more vitally as the poem continues, but, rather, the ‘world’ of disorder and fragmentation; the fallen, corrupted world that hardens human hearts against the sacred. Brontë here echoes a particular New Testament usage of ‘world’ that might best be understood as ‘worldliness’: it refers to the world that ‘passeth away, and the lust thereof ’ (1 John 2: 15–7); the world that must ‘go’ as liberating spiritual vision awakens in ‘How Clear She Shines’. As the influence of the fallen world is swept away, the renewal of spiritual and imaginative perception – of participation in the enchanted world – draws the visionary back to nature and to the ‘principle of life intense’ that effaces boundaries between the human subject and the universal life of the creation. Enid L. Duthie tells us that ‘[i]t is primarily through the action of the imagination that the poet now experiences union with the rhythm of the universe and mystic anticipation of the freedom that comes with release from mortality’.30 The imaginative encounter is always incomplete in mortal life, always awaiting a consummation ahead of itself: Thus truly when that breast is cold Thy prisoned soul shall rise The dungeon mingle with the mould – The captive with the skies – (123: 21–4)

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The poem celebrates the renewal of feeling and of imaginative encounter, yet it also represents this experience as incomplete, a fragment of a union the consummation of which can be imagined only in the final release from mortality. The experience points beyond itself, as a type of an ending and a fullness as yet deferred. Margaret Homans sees the thoughts of death in the poem’s final stanza as a turn from the building vitality of the preceding lines, a turn for which the poem has left us unprepared.31 Yet the poem represents death not as a turn away from this building vitality but, rather, as its final consummation. The release from mortality is anticipated as the absolute union of self and other, the liberation of the human spirit into the life of the eternal. Visionary awakening becomes a type and anticipation of the final collapse of boundaries between the human subject and the eternal life that inhabits and animates the creation.

Absence and presence For all of their significance as an aspect of Brontë’s persistent wrestling with mortality, apocalyptic themes and affinities in her writing are not limited to overt consideration of events after death or at the end of history. They emerge in texts concerned with the possibilities of authentic spiritual experience in the context of a world from which intimations of eternity often seem absent. The phenomenon known as eternal life, argues Keith Ward, should be understood primarily as ‘life lived in relation to the eternal’ and not simply as ‘life going on for ever’.32 Moments of epiphany and revelation in Brontë’s writing speak to the desire for imaginative awakening and for the renewal and redemptive transformation of experience within time. The apocalyptic ‘sense of an ending’ is modulated in several poems into glimpses of – or aspirations towards – restored wholeness and spiritual fulfilment. Responding to a persistent sense of loss, fragmentation and futility, several of Brontë’s poems imagine revelatory moments by which perceived absence might be transformed into renewed presence. Yet these moments remain contested, challenged by the competing claims of reason. The poems remain suspended between presence and absence, resolving finally into secure positions of neither belief nor unbelief. In his pathfinding study The Great Code (1983), Northrop Frye argues that in the apocalyptic vision of the book of Revelation, ‘[w]hat is symbolized as

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the destruction of the order of nature is the destruction of the way of seeing that order that keeps man confined to the world of time and history as we know them’.33 The images of recreation and renewal with which the Bible ends do not point in any simplistic way to a series of bizarre events set to take place shortly before the end of time but, rather, to a new creation that begins within the reader, who is asked to accept the text’s invitation to drink freely of the water of life (Revelation 22: 17). The vision of universal apocalypse is thus followed by a transformation in the consciousness of the reader: The panoramic apocalypse gives way, at the end, to a second apocalypse that, ideally, begins in the reader’s mind as soon as he has finished reading, a vision that passes through the legalized visions of ordeals and trials and judgments and comes out in a second life. In this second life the creatorcreature, divine-human antithetical tension has ceased to exist, and the sense of the transcendent person and the split of subject and object no longer limit our vision. After the “last judgment,” the law loses its last hold on us, which is the hold of the legal vision that ends there.34

The biblical apocalypse is thus both an end and a beginning; as Paul S. Fiddes observes, ‘[i]t is a closure with openness at its heart’.35 It ends in images of renewal and transformation, inviting participation in the new life of which it speaks. Frye’s reading of the apocalypse as the end of a legalistic vision and the collapse of antithetical tensions has a particular resonance with the judicial imagery of Brontë’s poem ‘Plead For Me’ (1844). The poem aspires towards a moment of decisive revelation, a textual closure that is also the opening of a new reality beyond the antithetical tensions and oppositions that shape present experience. The visionary is on trial, her commitment to the life of the imagination mocked by the figure of personified Reason that serves as both accuser and judge. With the courtroom stacked against her, the poet calls upon her sole advocate, the only voice able to speak the vindicating Word: Oh, thy bright eyes must answer now, When Reason, with a scornful brow, Is mocking at my overthrow! Oh, thy sweet tongue must plead for me And tell, why I have chosen thee!

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Stern Reason is to judgment come, Arrayed in all her forms of gloom: Wilt thou, my advocate, be dumb? No, radiant angel, speak and say, Why I did cast the world away. (xiv: 1–10)

The poet pleads for vindication of her choice to renounce worldly ambitions – ‘glory’s wreath and pleasure’s flower’ (xiv: 15) – in order to pursue the different fulfilments of the visionary life. Her call for her ‘radiant angel’ to speak in her defence is animated by the competing voice of a rationalism that defines her choice as an ‘overthrow’, an abandonment of the real in pursuit of an illusion. The desire to hear the voice of the ‘angel’ is also the longing for presence, for the renewal of connection with the other that also belongs to the self. Yet this ‘angel’ remains an absence throughout the poem. Absence, Lucy Irigaray tells us, is characteristic of the elusive figure of the angel as mediator between the world and an order of reality that is always veiled: ‘the angel always returns to heaven, goes home, to the other side of the ultimate veil. Unless he stands there, if only for a fragment, a flight, a detached soar that is sent, addressed, to announce what comes after’.36 ‘Plead For Me’ enacts the encounter with absence, the profound silence of the voice for which the visionary longs. Winifred Gérin argues that the poem articulates the diminished confidence of a visionary who, ‘even while calling on her “God of Visions” for protection, trembles lest he should desert her’.37 The visionary anticipates the moment at which her advocate will speak and her pursuit of the visionary life will be vindicated. Yet this moment of decisive revelation remains always yet to come, always beyond the last line of the text: And am I wrong to worship, where Faith cannot doubt, nor hope despair, Since my own soul can grant my prayer? Speak, God of visions, plead for me, And tell why I have chosen thee! (xiv: 36–40)

At the end of the poem, to borrow a line from Robert Browning, ‘God has not said a word’.38 The poem’s ending remains open and unresolved, poised

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between a present moment in which the legitimacy of imaginative vision is always threatened and a decisive, vindicating revelation – which is also an assurance of presence – that will renew the visionary life and break down the structures of opposition within which the visionary’s present experience is contained. Yet the God of Visions, it seems, might also be the Deus Absconditus or the God who, in Hillis Miller’s account, has ‘slipped away from the places where he used to be’ and ‘can only be experienced negatively, as a terrifying absence’.39 The decisive revelation and textual closure remains, like the apocalypse itself as described by Paul Ricoeur, ‘a prediction that is continually invalidated without ever being discredited’ and thus ‘an end that is itself constantly put off ’.40 Similar tensions between reason and revelation animate ‘The Philosopher’ (1845), enacted this time in a dialogue between two speakers. The eponymous philosopher is confronted by a figure identified only as a seer and is challenged to seek enlightenment beyond the physical and intellectual enclosures of his chamber and his metaphysics. The poem offers no narrative context for their conversation and, indeed, the details of time and place are largely irrelevant. The philosopher and the seer are types, embodiments of the tensions between reason and visionary perception by which Brontë’s poetry is often animated. The seer begins the dialogue by calling the philosopher away from his speculations and into the natural world where, he suggests, true enlightenment is to be found: ‘Enough of thought, philosopher! Too long hast thou been dreaming Unenlightened, in this chamber drear, While summer’s sun is beaming! Space-sweeping soul, what sad refrain Concludes thy musings once again? “Oh, for the time when I shall sleep Without identity, And never care how rain may steep, Or snow may cover me! No promised heaven, these wild desires, Could all, or half fulfil; No threatened hell, with quenchless fires, Subdue this quenchless will!” ’ (iii: 1–14)

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The seer’s call for the philosopher to leave his ‘chamber drear’ associates the latter character with those figures in Brontë’s poems who seek enlightenment ‘In cell and cloister drear’ (138: 35) rather than in the natural world where it is more often to be found. Maureen Peeck-O’Toole argues that the philosopher represents ‘intellection without vision’.41 Yet Brontë’s representation of the philosopher as one given too much to thought rather than vision does not suggest that he is devoid of powerful feeling. Brontë does not construct him as a representative of mind without heart but, rather, as an individual unable or unwilling to glimpse possibilities beyond the limited horizons of his theological metaphysics. He can imagine no fulfilment of his desires in heaven while the quenchless fires of hell, he asserts, will meet their match in his equally quenchless will. Responding to the seer’s gentle mockery of the perpetual outcome of his speculations, the philosopher describes his inner torment: ‘So said I, and still say the same; Still, to my death, will say – Three gods, within this little frame, Are warring night and day; Heaven could not hold them all, and yet They all are held in me; And must be mine till I forget My present entity! Oh, for the time, when in my breast Their struggles will be o’er! Oh, for the day, when I shall rest, And never suffer more! (iii: 15–26)

Several critics have seen the three warring gods that torment the philosopher as a dark inversion of Trinitarian theology. Irene Tayler, for example, argues that ‘as a warring threesome they offer a kind of infernal, repudiating parody of the mystery of the Christian Trinity’.42 Stevie Davies calls them an ‘apostate’s trinity’.43 These readings, however, tend to overlook the extent to which the Christian tradition itself has employed triadic patternings in its representations of and reflections upon inner struggle. Hugh Connolly notes such a patterning in the work of Augustine, for whom human sin was rooted in three sources:

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‘pride, curiosity and carnal desire’.44 Whatever specific sources Brontë might have had in mind, the philosopher’s warring gods are images of fragmentation and inner turmoil: they give symbolic form to the ‘wild desires’ for which he believes heaven can hold no satisfaction. They are also, the seer suggests, more open to reconciliation and transformation than the philosopher believes. The seer responds to the philosopher’s nihilistic pronouncements not with an argument, but with an unveiling. He bears witness to a vision of transformation in which the philosopher’s warring gods are reconciled, cleansed and transfigured into unity and wholeness: ‘I saw a spirit, standing, man, Where thou doth stand – an hour ago, And round his feet three rivers ran, Of equal depth, and equal flow – A golden stream – and one like blood; And one like sapphire seemed to be; But, where they joined their triple flood It tumbled in an inky sea. The spirit sent his dazzling gaze Down through that ocean’s gloomy night Then, kindling all, with sudden blaze, The glad deep sparkled wide and bright – White as the sun, far, far more fair Than its divided sources were! (iii: 27–40)

The seer glimpses a vision of life called from death: not life after death but, rather, the redemptive transformation and renewal of a life already resigned to the grave. His vision challenges the philosopher to look beyond his constrained notions of heaven and towards the transforming encounter with the wholly other. Rowan Williams, discussing an Augustinian tradition of Christian spirituality, tells us that ‘the confidence of the believer never rests upon either his intellectual grasp or his intellectual control of his experience, but on the fidelity of the heart’s longing to what has been revealed as the only finally satisfying object of its desire’.45 Brontë’s philosopher remains bound by the horizons of his philosophy, unable or unwilling to locate the transforming revelation glimpsed by the seer. His speculations return him relentlessly to

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the same nihilistic conclusion that the fragmentation and disorder of present experience can end only in death. The seer challenges him to leave philosophy behind and to open himself to a reality beyond reason. The seer’s vision echoes the apocalyptic invitation to drink of the water of life – the ‘glad deep’ that ‘sparkled wide and bright’ – but the entry into this transforming encounter remains beyond the philosopher’s intellectual horizons. Unable to locate the reconciling spirit to which the seer bears witness, the philosopher resigns himself to negation in the grave, where ‘conquered good, and conquering ill/ Be lost in one repose!’ (iii: 55–6). ‘Plead For Me’ and ‘The Philosopher’ revisit the persistent tensions between reason and imaginative vision that animate many of Brontë’s poems. They address the aspiration towards authentic spiritual encounter in the context of a present reality in which the eternal often seems silent or hidden. Rather than arriving at a secure position of belief or unbelief, they occupy a liminal space between presence and absence, open perpetually to the vindicating Word that is not yet spoken, the transforming spirit that is always beyond the horizons of reason. ‘Alone, always alone’, writes Lucy Irigaray, ‘the poet runs the risk of moving outside the world and turning over what it opens up until touching the bottom of the bottomless, saying yes to something calling him from beyond the horizon’.46 Aware of the risk of opening the self to the absolute that might yet prove to be nothing other than absolute absence, Brontë’s poems remain poised on the cusp of the decisive revelation that remains deferred but, perhaps, not discredited.

An existence of yours beyond you As we have seen in various ways throughout this book, apocalyptic language, echoes and affinities in Emily Brontë’s writing are concerned not simply with doctrinal accounts of ‘last things’, whether these are understood as referring to the fate of individuals after death or to events at the end of history, but, also, with the imaginative aspiration towards communion with the earth and with the recovery of a lost innocence. Apocalyptic vision allows the earth to be perceived in the context of its eschatological renewal; it opens glimpses of possibility that the disorder and fragmentation of present experience might be

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transformed into restored wholeness and offers a language in which to imagine authentic spirituality in a world that often seems characterized by absence and alienation. For Brontë as for the Romantics, the language of apocalypse inflects and is inflected by the aspiration of the imagination towards wholeness and integration. David Jasper points out that by the early nineteenth century, ‘[n]ot only society, but the very nature of how things were perceived and understood, were changing radically and rapidly, so that the Romantic stress on imagination, the symbol and organic form, were themselves responses to the sense of ruin and disintegration’.47 The final section of this chapter considers apocalyptic affinities and resonances in Wuthering Heights, and argues that the ‘sense of an ending’ in the novel is interconnected with the aspiration of Brontë’s literary imagination towards integration and communion. The grave is the literal ending of the narrative, yet it is an ending characterized by hermeneutic proliferation, loaded with open symbols of reconciliation and renewal. As Paul S. Fiddes observes of literary endings that enable the reader to ‘make order where the author denies it’, ‘[t]his is the kind of end that opens possibility; like the ends in Christian apocalyptic it will have an openness about it, but it is the opening of hope’.48 One of the clearest illustrations of the interconnectedness of theological discourse and the Romantic emphasis upon integration in Wuthering Heights occurs in the scene in which Catherine confesses her divided feelings for Heathcliff and Edgar. Catherine’s theologically inflected language suggests that her love for Heathcliff has become synonymous with the need for authentic spiritual wholeness and liberation that is absent from the religious climate in which she was raised. She stakes a claim not only to union with Heathcliff but, through him, to the awakened consciousness of herself as part of the totality of being: I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff ’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will

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change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees – my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath – a source of little visible delight, but necessary. (WH: 64)

W. David Shaw points out that throughout this confession scene Catherine ‘has to use Nelly’s biblical vocabulary to express reversals that profoundly alter Nelly’s values’.49 Catherine describes human love in terms that claim it as an encounter with the infinite. Religious feeling, writes Friedrich Schleiermacher, is ‘most complete when we identify ourselves in our selfconsciousness with the whole world’; this identification ‘can only succeed in so far as in thought we unite everything that in appearance is scattered and isolated, and by means of this unifying association conceive of everything as one’.50 Catherine construes her love for Heathcliff as the precondition of this imaginative apprehension of the unity of creation. What Catherine calls the ‘existence of yours beyond you’ is not only Heathcliff himself but the totality of being of which she feels a part in and through her love for him. This love, Hillis Miller argues, gives her ‘possession not merely of Heathcliff, but of the entire universe through him, in an intimacy of possession which obliterates the boundaries of the self and makes it an integral part of the whole creation’.51 Catherine’s account of her feelings for Heathcliff appropriates the language of religious experience: it identifies the human with the fuller life of the eternal and effects the liberating release of subjectivity from the confines of the bounded self. In the same scene, Catherine describes her dream of expulsion from the heaven in which she does not feel herself to be at home. Michael Wheeler points out that despite the this-worldly perspective of nineteenth-century realist fiction, the language of apocalypse facilitates such instances of ‘vertical’ movement, figured in ‘moments of stress or fracture in the narrative [that] can  .  .  .  allow the other-worldly to be issued in, usually through visionary or some other spiritual experience’.52 For Catherine, the vertical ascent to a distant heaven represents removal from the earth and the loss of the wholeness and integration for which she longs.53 This heaven provides an apocalyptic metaphor for the marriage to Edgar Linton that will divide Catherine from the wholeness that she locates in her union with Heathcliff. She will subsequently describe her marriage as a condition of exile and estrangement from the earth: as Mrs Linton, she understands herself to be

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‘an exile, and outcast . . . from what had been my world’ (WH: 98). Like the distant heaven from which she dreams of being joyfully cast out, marriage to Edgar represents for Catherine not only a loss of Heathcliff himself but, also, of the union with the life of nature of which she feels herself a part in and through him. As Catherine nears death, her thoughts are drawn towards images of a remembered wholeness: towards release from the physical confines of Thrushcross Grange and, as Elisabeth Bronfen argues, from her adult identity as Mrs Linton.54 ‘I wish I were out of doors’, Catherine tells Nelly; ‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage, and hardy, and free . .  . I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills’ (WH: 98). Catherine construes this imagined edenic return as synonymous with the renewal of identity and the recuperation of authentic selfhood. ‘In the [Romantic] sublime’, writes Charles Taylor, ‘something greater breaks through our self-absorption in a too narrow mode of gratification’: ‘[t]he rediscovery of what I really am within is made possible by the resonance I feel with the great current of nature outside of me’.55 Catherine frames her desire for liberation and return in terms that both recall the images of imprisonment and confinement in Brontë’s poetry and appropriate the language of Christian eschatology: “And,” she added musingly, “the thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I’m tired, tired of being enclosed here. 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.” (WH: 125)

Catherine longs for the restoration of communion with the universal other, the reintegration of the self into what has ceased to be ‘my world’ (WH: 98). Her desire for liberation and renewal is freighted with echoes of Pauline eschatology: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known’ (1 Corinthians 13: 12). She desires a Blakean cleansing of the doors of perception, the renewal of herself in unmediated communion with the life of the universe. Catherine longs to escape from Thrushcross Grange, from the adult identity that she experiences as a condition of exile, and from the confines of the embodied self. She seeks to pass through the window and into the ‘glorious world’ that

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disrupts polarities of heaven and earth, rendering the infinite present within the finite. Yet Catherine’s death leaves Heathcliff in his own hell, a condition of separation that he describes as ‘this abyss, where I cannot find you’ (WH: 130). ‘Where is she?’ he asks Nelly: ‘Not there – not in heaven – not perished – where?’ In death, Catherine can be located only by reference to where she is not. Heathcliff ’s hell is formlessness, absence, death in life. Like eternity, absence and negation push language to and beyond its limits, to a point at which all that can be said is that ‘it is unutterable’ (WH: 130). The novel articulates Heathcliff ’s pursuit of the absent Catherine in images of spectrality that echo the persistent tensions between presence and absence in Brontë’s poetry; tensions that construct presence and absence not simply as opposing polarities but, rather, as fragments of each other, states that converge and overlap. This apocalyptic convergence of presence and absence, the use of spectrality as a trope that paradoxically reasserts the very boundary between life and death that it simultaneously disrupts, is illustrated in the early Gondal poem ‘The night of storms has passed’ (1837). In the speaker’s dream, a tomb becomes the site of a spectral encounter that marks an ontological and epistemological ambiguity figured in language of spatial and temporal indeterminacy: And still it bent above Its features full in view It seemed close by and yet more far Than this world from the farthest star That tracks the boundless blue Indeed ‘twas not the space Of earth or time between But the sea of death’s eternity The gulf o’er which mortality Has never never been (11: 31–40)

Kevin Mills tells us that a position of liminality, a situation between two worlds or two orders of reality, is integral to the genre of biblical apocalyptic. The book of Revelation situates its narrator in ‘an indefinable cosmic embrasure from which he can look out on two worlds, seeing beyond the

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confines of time and space into the eternal’.56 Mills identifies in the fiction of the Brontës multiple echoes of the ‘manifold edginess of the Apocalypse, its isolated geographical matrix, its relationship to the canon, its plying of the boundary between human and inhuman worlds’.57 This ‘edginess’ is reflected by the persistent interest in boundaries, and the ways in which they might be disrupted, in Wuthering Heights. In several instances – most notably the broken window through which the ghost-child seeks entrance in Lockwood’s dream – these disrupted borders admit glimpses of the otherworldly: they ‘mark not only architectural and social definitions, but also that ultimate human margin – the line between life and death, between this world and another’.58 The novel’s images of spectrality, its location of Catherine at the interstices between presence and absence, thus become indicative of moments of aporia or fragmentation in the novel’s realist frame. They suggest a lifting of the veil between worlds or between different but overlapping orders of reality, yet their location of these moments of unveiling in dreams or in visionary experiences related at second- or third-hand allows them to remain, albeit uneasily, within the horizons of realist narration that they also threaten to disrupt. Though Heathcliff pleads with Catherine to haunt him in the aftermath of her death, his experiences of spectrality fail ironically to fulfil his desire that she should ‘take any form’ (WH: 130). Heathcliff experiences Catherine’s spectre as a disturbing formlessness, a presence that paradoxically reaffirms absence. Indeed, his multiple attempts to enter her grave seem to suggest the continuing need to give form and physical presence to the formless and immaterial. The language in which he articulates his decision to open Catherine’s coffin on the night of her burial – ‘[i]f she be cold’, he tells himself, ‘I’ll think it is the north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep’ (WH: 220) – both suggests his continuing need for embodied presence and echoes the usage of sleep as an ambiguous image of death that anticipates resurrection in biblical literature and in nineteenth-century discourses of mourning.59 Heathcliff abandons his attempt to open Catherine’s coffin when he hears (or ‘seemed’ to hear) a ‘sigh’ from above the grave. This ghostly sound turns Heathcliff away from the grave and towards the earth: he claims that ‘I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by – but as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned,

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so certainly I felt that Cathy was there, not under me, but on the earth’ (WH: 221). Heathcliff ’s words carry echoes of the biblical language of resurrection. ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?’ the mourners at Christ’s tomb are asked; ‘He is not here, but is risen’ (Luke 24: 5–6). Yet the resonances of Heathcliff ’s words with the resurrection narrative signify the failure of incarnation; Catherine is ‘not here’ – not in the grave – yet  also not risen. W. David Shaw observes that there could be ‘few more arresting metaphors for the failure of bodies to incarnate spirits or for the failure of words to incarnate their meanings’.60 Catherine’s spectrality is figured as an ontological lack, a failure of incarnation. If she is on the earth, as Heathcliff believes, then she has returned as ‘no living thing in flesh and blood’: not the risen body, but a spectral return that leaves her suspended between presence and absence, form and formlessness. The spectral return seems to signify the need for a further renewal, a union unattainable in mortal existence. Registering something of the ambiguous hermeneutic and epistemological status of the apocalypse in the nineteenth-century literary imagination, Wuthering Heights brings its narrator and its reader to an ending that juxtaposes the horizontal flow of chronos with the eschatological anticipation of kairos. I want to suggest that these different construals of time offer a useful way of thinking about the different kinds of ending towards which the two generations of the novel’s protagonists are orientated and, indeed, the ways in which those endings might interact with one another. The narrative itself hints at a generational tension between chronos and kairos. Edgar Linton describes his wife and daughter as opposing poles, one pulling him towards eschatological consummation in the grave even as the other holds him to life: Ellen, I’ve been very happy with my little Cathy. Through winter nights and summer days she was a living hope at my side. But I’ve been as happy musing by myself among those stones, under that old church – lying, through the long June evenings, on the green mound of her mother’s grave, and wishing, yearning for the time when I might lie beneath it. (WH: 196)

Edgar’s description of Cathy as a ‘living hope’ is reflected in the novel’s conclusion. Cathy and Hareton provide the narrative with a version of resolution that occurs within the horizontal, linear flow of chronological time. Unlike that of their predecessors, their relationship is established securely within social and legal reality. They are able to resolve the antithetical tensions between

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Heights and Grange that remained unreconciled for their parents’ generation. The novel’s final glimpse of the second-generation couple leaves them on multiple literal and symbolic thresholds, situated between inside and outside, nature and civilization, moorland and domesticity. They are preparing for a marriage that is to take place, appropriately, on New Year’s Day, an occasion that signifies the ongoing flow of chronological time within which their story takes place. The novel’s final paragraphs allow this version of chronological resolution to be juxtaposed with a final symbol of the kairotic anticipations that have shaped the stories of the first generation. Leaving Wuthering Heights for the last time, Lockwood walks to the churchyard at Gimmerton and the graves of Heathcliff, Catherine and Edgar: I sought, and soon discovered, the three head-stones on the slope next the moor – the middle one, grey, and half buried in heath – Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf, and moss creeping up its foot – Heathcliff ’s still bare. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. (WH: 258)

In Wuthering Heights, as in many of Brontë’s poems, the grave is (literally) the end of the story. Yet it is a remarkably open ending, a textual ‘closure’ that seems to close little or nothing. Brontë’s novel presents its reader with an end that is also a site of hermeneutic proliferation; a graveyard loaded with symbols, many of them uninterpreted within the text, which seem to mark a beginning rather than an end of meaning and possibility.61 It resonates with Paul S. Fiddes’s claim that eschatology is ‘the basic mood of theology and literary creation’: ‘[a]ll texts are eschatological, both in being open to the new meaning which is to come to them in the future, and also in being “seriously” open to the horizon which death gives to life’.62 The tranquil graveyard offers both an ending constructed within the epistemological horizons of realist narration and a series of symbols that hint at an excess of meaning that pushes beyond those horizons and into mystery. The graveside at which Lockwood now stands is a liminal site, a ‘green slope, in a corner of the kirkyard, where the wall is so low that heath and

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bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor’ (WH: 131). It is a space that disrupts boundaries between the sacred and the secular, echoing the orientation towards reconciliation and integration that characterizes many of the novel’s symbols and imaginative aspirations. The wind that blows through the churchyard is a recurring symbol in Brontë’s writing of the numinous life that animates the creation. The tranquil graves become symbols of what J. Frank Goodridge calls ‘the final harmony which Nature’s economy has woven out of the conflicting heavens and hells’.63 We cannot know whether the sexton has followed Heathcliff ’s instructions to remove the adjoining sides of Heathcliff ’s and Catherine’s coffins, but it is possible that beneath Lockwood’s feet their corpses are dissolving into one another, the final boundaries between physical selves collapsing into union. Yet if they are, then Heathcliff ’s attempt to exclude Edgar would seem to have failed. Around her neck, Catherine wears a locket that contains locks of Heathcliff ’s and Edgar’s hair, entwined together by Nelly Dean: evidence of Nelly’s sentimentality or, perhaps, a symbol that even the fiercest of mortal conflicts can find some resolution in death. The names of both Heathcliff and Hareton are echoed in the ‘heath and hare-bells’ above the graves, continuing the novel’s association of both men with the natural landscape. Perhaps the moths that Lockwood sees ‘fluttering among the heath and hare-bells’ are just moths; or, perhaps, they are symbols of resurrection and renewal as is the butterfly of Brontë’s essay. Like the rumours of ghostly returns that Lockwood’s doubts cannot quite contain, the ending of Wuthering Heights brings its reader to a point at which the epistemological horizons of reason and realist narration co-exist with the perpetual openness of symbol. In at least one respect, then, Lockwood’s response to this hermeneutic proliferation is singularly appropriate. He stands beside the three graves, and he wonders. Like the apocalyptic echoes and affinities in Brontë’s poetry, the ending of Wuthering Heights resonates with the ambiguous epistemological, hermeneutic and ontological status of the apocalypse in the nineteenth century. Brontë recognizes that the apocalypse offers a rich and compelling image of transformation, renewal and restoration. Yet her writing also illustrates the persistent sense in nineteenth-century literature that apocalyptic renewal remained out of reach, located beyond the horizons of reason and outside of the perpetual flow of chronological time. The language of apocalypse in

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Brontë’s writing explores moments of fragmentation, paradox and aporia in the epistemological structures of reason and realist narration. It is often characterized by the convergence and overlap of presence and absence, figured in glimpses of otherness and excess – a transforming revelation beyond reason; a vindicating Word that remains unspoken – that resolve finally into secure positions of neither belief nor unbelief. In this respect, it seems to me that the apocalyptic affinities of Brontë’s writing speak both to the wider theological and religious inflections of her writing and to the renewed emphasis upon paradox, excess and incompletion that has characterized much of the contemporary ‘return’ of the religious. They probe the boundaries between and the convergence of presence and absence, time and eternity, life and death, immanence and transcendence. They hold in unresolved suspension the perpetual flow of chronological time and the finite horizons of mortality and reason with glimpses of irreducible imaginative and hermeneutic excess and of a lovelier life called from death.

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Afterword ‘The relationship between the categories of the sacred and the secular’, writes Andrew Tate, ‘is far less secure than believers or sceptics sometimes claim’.1 It is increasingly apparent that the religious ‘turn’ in contemporary culture has not simply resurrected the dead God of Enlightenment modernity but, rather, has witnessed the fragmentation of the philosophical orthodoxies that first gave birth to and subsequently dispensed with that God. By the end of the nineteenth century, Janet Martin Soskice observes, ‘[t]he divine clockmaker was redundant’; the methods of scientific rationalism, upon which the apologetics of eighteenth-century natural theology were predicated, had conspired to saw off the epistemological branch upon which its God now sat.2 Yet if the application of postmodern scepticism to the grand narratives of modernity has opened new cultural space for the religious, it has also facilitated the re-evaluation of previous attempts to write the sacred outside of the frameworks of onto-theology. There is little evidence in Emily Brontë’s poems and novel to suggest that she would have mourned the divine clockmaker had she lived to read his obituary. Yet her writing remains animated by a sense of the numinous nature of much human experience and, indeed, by the possibilities that the divine might be reimagined outside of the theological and philosophical frameworks of modernity. This book has attempted to demonstrate that Brontë’s poems and novel engage with religious questions, themes and texts not as fixed and indivisible bodies of received truth but, rather, as fluid traditions available for the telling of new stories and, indeed, for the exploration of points of tension, uncertainty, openness and paradox. Brontë’s work is consistent with the Romantic turn towards subjectivity as the site of religious authority and experience. Her refusal of the ‘thousand creeds’ of the Christian denominations might be understood not as a rejection of religion itself but, rather, as a recognition of excess, otherness and incompletion as integral to religious experience. Brontë’s work resonates with a postmodern critical perspective for which ‘literature is neither an alternative to, nor a substitute for religion, but a way

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in which religious experience can happen’.3 The divine in Brontë’s poems is encountered not in the forms and doctrines of institutional religion but, rather, in the enchanted world outside of the walls of the churches. It is in the natural world that heaven’s light seems to overflow the sky and to inhabit the sacred in nature and in human love. Nature becomes a site of immanent presence figured as a ‘principle of life intense’ or a ‘sweet influence’ that unites the human subject with the vital spiritual life of the creation. Imaginative perception opens the subject to numinous experiences that escape the rational structures of language: the eternal is encountered in the expressive silences of ‘mute music’ and ‘unuttered harmony’. Indeed, Brontë hints at the inadequacy of language, predicated upon differentiation, to describe experiences in which the boundaries between self and other collapse into communion. Paul S. Fiddes has described the potential of the ‘creative play’ of the imagination to break open doctrinal concepts and, indeed, to illuminate theological ideas by striving towards an openness that resists the closure to which doctrine aspires.4 Brontë’s poems and novel resist the closure sought by doctrine, yet they also suggest that this resistance might open creative space into which the religious might flow. Brontë’s work is animated by dialectic tensions: between faith and despondency; hope and despair; presence and absence; reason and imagi­ nation. Her writing displays a willingness to suspend both belief and disbelief, opening glimpses of redemptive hope that remain held in tension with more despondent perspectives. Brontë imagines the natural world both as a site of divine immanence and as the place from which God is absent; the world that sometimes ‘seems made of light’ becomes a tragedy, defined by the perpetual cycle of ‘earthly change from pain to pain’. Imaginative vision offers a breaking of the cycle in glimpses of renewal and, sometimes, in apocalyptic unveilings. Yet these glimpses of redemptive possibility are often embraced with only the most tentative confidence. Virginia Woolf has described Wuthering Heights as ‘a struggle, half thwarted but of superb conviction, to say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely “I love” or “I hate,” but “we, the whole human race” and “you, the eternal powers . . .” the sentence remains unfinished’.5 Brontë’s writing suggests that faith and despondency, presence and absence, are not merely opposites but, rather, states that are always ready to converge with and become the other. She depicts the spiritual life as

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characterized by struggle and incompletion: she shows doubt to be not the opposite of faith but, rather, integral to it. Brontë’s refusal of final meaning, enacted most fully in Wuthering Heights and in her mature poetry, is inseparable from the creative vitality of her work and, indeed, its enduring ability to challenge the orthodoxies and assumptions of secular as well as religious readings. Attuned to the failings and corruption that are endemic to human nature and community, Brontë’s novel exposes the potential for readers to be complicit with and to repeat the acts of judgement and exclusion that exercise a corrosive influence upon human relationships in the world of the text. Representatives of the Christian denominations are most dangerous in Brontë’s works when they lose sight of the otherness of God, when they forget that ‘man cannot read the Almighty mind’ and seek both to pronounce judgement and enact retribution on God’s behalf. Rowan Williams writes: ‘[w]hen religious commitment is seen first as the acceptance of propositions which determine acceptable behaviour – the kind of religiousness we tend now to call fundamentalist – something has happened to religious identity. It has ceased to give priority to the sense that God’s seeing of the world and the self is very strictly incommensurable with any specific human perspective, and is in danger of evacuating religious language of the pressure to take time to learn its meaning’.6 I have attempted to demonstrate in this book that Brontë finds in religious texts and traditions a language that is always available for new interpretations and for the discovery of new and often subversive meanings. Her work confronts the conflicts and tensions of the spiritual life, the seeking after sacred meaning through the exploration of paradox, incompletion and aporia. Yet Brontë’s writing also remains open to redemptive possibility, glimpsed in the imaginative re-enchantment of nature and the renewal of encounter with the sacred; in visions of edenic return and apocalyptic transformation; and in moments when human conflicts are healed by acts of forgiveness. Brontë challenges us to imagine the spiritual quest, like religious reading, as always incomplete, always open to new meanings and new acts of literary creation. The sentence remains unfinished.

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Notes Chapter 1 1 Readers interested in biographical and detailed contextual studies of Emily Brontë and nineteenth-century Christianity would do well to consult Juliet Barker’s biography The Brontës (London: Phoenix, 1995) and Marianne Thormählen’s The Brontës and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 2 Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 10–11. 3 For a detailed reception history of religious readings of Emily Brontë, see Micael M. Clarke, ‘Emily Brontë’s “No coward soul” and the need for a religious literary criticism’, Victorians Institute Journal 37 (2009), 195–223. 4 Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler, ‘Introduction: grace under pressure’, in Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler (eds), Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 1–23 (p. 1). 5 See, for example, the discussion of liberation theology in Luke Ferretter, Towards a Christian Literary Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 37–82, and of feminist theory and theology in Serene Jones, ‘Companionable wisdoms: what insights might feminist theorists gather from feminist theologians?’, in Graham Ward (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 294–308. 6 Andrew Tate, Contemporary Fiction and Christianity (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 2–3. 7 Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), p. x. 8 Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, second edition (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 161. 9 John D. Caputo, On Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 17. 10 Hopps and Stabler, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 11 Arthur Bradley, Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate, ‘Introduction: writing post-secularity’, in Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate (eds), Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 1–8 (p. 3).

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12 Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 13 For a useful account of the intellectual and cultural history of nineteenthcentury natural theology, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 192–225; Alister E. McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 47–182. 14 Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, ed. by James A. Secord (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 26. 15 Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution (London: SPCK, 2007), pp. 372–7. 16 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971). 17 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 156. 18 J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers, second edition (Cambridge, MA and London; Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 1. 19 Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 1–47. 20 Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 3. 21 Ibid. pp. 1–22. 22 John Keats, ‘Lamia’, II.231–8, in Keats’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Jeffrey N. Cox (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2009), pp. 413–29. 23 See, for example, Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (London: Penguin, 1999). 24 Alister E. McGrath, The Order of Things: Explorations in Scientific Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 54–62. For a discussion of the broader cultural and intellectual patterns that have shaped theological discourse and secularization in the contexts of scientific modernity and postmodernity, see Gavin Hyman, A Short History of Atheism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). 25 Karen Armstrong, The Case for God: What Religion Really Means (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 230. 26 See, for example, the discussion of the religious thought of Coleridge and Wordsworth in Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

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27 Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 14. 28 William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’, 42–9, in William Wordsworth, ed. by Stephen Gill (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 132–3. 29 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, in Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. by Richard Poirier (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 5. 30 John Ruskin, Works, volume V, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1904), p. 333. 31 William Blake, ‘There is no natural religion’, in Blake’s Poetry and Designs, ed. by Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2008), p. 7. 32 Coleridge, ‘Religious musings’, 131, in Collected Works 16. I. 1, p. 180. 33 Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism, p. 3. 34 Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. by Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 96–101. 35 Ibid. p. 102. 36 Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, English translation of the second German edition, ed. by H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928), p. 68. For helpful readings of Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Christianity, see Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism, pp. 50–8: B. A. Gerrish, ‘Friedrich Schleiermacher’, in Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Patrick Sherry and Steven T. Katz (eds), Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 123–56. 37 Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 38 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’, 127, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald H. Reiman and Neil Freistat (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 100. 39 Shelley, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, 17, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 94. 40 Ibid. lines 25–31. 41 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Volume 16: Poetical Works. Poems (Reading Text): Part 1, ed. by J. C. C. Mays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 231–5. 42 Emily Dickinson, 657. 1, in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber and Faber, 1970).

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43 The minister of Haworth was, for historical reasons, a perpetual curate under the authority of the vicar of Bradford; see Barker, The Brontës, pp. 80–1. On Charles Simeon’s influence at Cambridge and upon nineteenth-century Evangelicalism, see Hugh Evans Hopkins, Charles Simeon of Cambridge (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1977). 44 Robert S. Dell, ‘Simeon and the Bible’, in Arthur Pollard and Michael Hennell (eds), Charles Simeon (1759–1836): Essays Written in Commemoration of his Bi-Centenary by Members of the Evangelical Fellowship for Theological Literature (London: SPCK, 1964), pp. 27–47; Charles Simeon, Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Charles Simeon, third edition, ed. by William Carus (London: Hatchard, 1848). 45 Charles Smyth, Simeon and Church Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). 46 Patrick Brontë, ‘The Pious Cottager’s Sabbath’, in Patrick Brontë: His Collected Works and Life (Bingley: T. Harrison and Sons, 1898), p. 123. 47 Deryck W. Lovegrove, Established Church, Sectarian People: Itinerancy and the Transformation of English Dissent, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 48 Faith Cook, William Grimshaw of Haworth (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1997); George G. Cragg, Grimshaw of Haworth (London: Canterbury Press, 1947). For wider-ranging histories of Methodist revival, see R. Davies and G. Rupp (eds), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain (London: Epworth Press, 1965); David Hempton, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion c. 1750–1900 (London: Routledge, 1996). 49 Cook, William Grimshaw of Haworth, p. 125. 50 Ibid. p. 165. 51 Cited in Cook, William Grimshaw of Haworth, p. 140. 52 Ibid. p. 140. 53 See Marianne Thormählen’s informative discussion of the Haworth religious context; The Brontës and Religion, pp. 13–23. 54 Barker, The Brontës, pp. 157–8, 355–7; cf. The Letters of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, ed. by Dudley Green (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005), pp. 89–94. Charlotte’s biographer was, of course, Elizabeth Gaskell: see her Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. by Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). 55 Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, ed. by Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 389. 56 G. E. Harrison, The Clue to the Brontës (London: Methuen, 1948), pp. 168–9.

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57 Cecil Day-Lewis, ‘The poetry of Emily Brontë’, in Charles Lemon (ed.), Classics of Brontë Scholarship (Haworth: The Brontë Society, 1999), pp. 64–80 (pp. 78–9). 58 Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), p. 228. 59 Lisa Wang, ‘The holy spirit in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and poetry’, Literature and Theology 14.2 (June 2000), 160–73. 60 Emma Mason, ‘The clue to the Brontës?: Methodism and Wuthering Heights’, in Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman (eds), Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 69–77 (p. 70). 61 Ibid. p. 73. 62 Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion, p. 43. 63 Clarke, ‘Emily Brontë’s “No coward soul” and the need for a religious literary criticism’, p. 218. 64 Ibid. p. 217. 65 Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 2. 66 Ibid. pp. 157–211. 67 Mark Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), p. 37. 68 Janet Gezari, Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 3. 69 Ibid. pp. 3–4. 70 Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 71 Valentine Cunningham, ‘Introduction: the necessity of heresy’, in Andrew Dix and Jonathan Taylor (eds), Figures of Heresy: Radical Theology in English and American Writing 1800–2000 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2006), pp. 1–18 (p. 3). 72 Ibid. p. 5. 73 Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë: Heretic (London: The Women’s Press, 1994), p. 19. 74 Francis Fike, ‘Bitter herbs and wholesome medicines: love as theological affirmation in Wuthering Heights’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 23.2 (1968), 127–49 (pp. 148–9). 75 Cunningham, ‘Introduction’, p. 14. 76 Ibid. p. 13. 77 Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory, p. 161. 78 Caputo, On Religion, p. 13. 79 Ibid. p. 31.

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80 Jacques Derrida, ‘ “My religion”: selections from Circumfession’, in John D. Caputo (ed.), The Religious (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 89–106 (p. 93). 81 Caputo, On Religion, p. 33. 82 Barbara Munson Goff, ‘Between natural theology and natural selection: breeding the human animal in Wuthering Heights’, Victorian Studies 27.4 (1984), 477–508 (p. 488). 83 Valentine Cunningham, ‘The novel and the Protestant fix’, in Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman (eds), Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 39–57 (p. 40). 84 Michael Edwards, Towards a Christian Poetics (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 12–13. 85 Gezari, Last Things, p. 124. 86 Ibid. pp. 106–25. 87 Colin E. Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 157. 88 Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature, p. 114. 89 Ibid. p. 128.

Chapter 2 1 Thomas Carlyle, Selected Writings, ed. by Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 78. 2 Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 13. 3 Ibid. p. 211. 4 J. Robert Barth, Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Religious Imagination (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003), p. 26. 5 Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 226. 6 Paul S. Fiddes, Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue Between Literature and Christian Doctrine (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p. 11. For a detailed discussion of mystery, metaphor and theological language, see Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). 7 Patrick Brontë, ‘Rural Happiness’, 1–8, Collected Works and Life, p. 91. 8 Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 207. 9 Barth, Romanticism and Transcendence, p. 26. 10 Alister McGrath, The Reenchantment of Nature: The Denial of Religion and the Ecological Crisis (New York: Doubleday, 2002), pp. 15–16.

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11 Patrick Brontë, ‘Rural Happiness’, 15–6. 12 Fiddes, Freedom and Limit, p. 31. Theological reflection on nature and revelation has been shaped significantly by Karl Barth’s rejection of the view that humans can arrive at any knowledge of God independently of revelation; see Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, Natural Theology, trans. by Peter Fraenkel (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946). 13 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. by John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1950) 14 Hyman, A Short History of Atheism. 15 Armstrong, The Case for God, p. 2. 16 Gezari dates the poem conjecturally to 1837; Complete Poems, p. 243. 17 This imaginative perception of expanded meaning is, perhaps, what Caroline Spurgeon has in mind when she remarks that Brontë’s mysticism is grounded in her awareness of the meanings of common things and that they ‘hold the secret of the universe’; Mysticism in English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922) p. 83. 18 Hillis Miller recognizes the theological implications of this image; The Disappearance of God, p. 172. 19 Edward Chitham discusses and challenges this view; A Life of Emily Brontë (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p. 126. 20 John Maynard, ‘The Brontës and Religion’, in Heather Glen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 192–213. 21 Marianne Thormählen usefully describes the Brontë sisters as possessing an ‘undenominational temper’ while suggesting that their Evangelical upbringing might have promoted their individualistic approaches to religious thought; The Brontës and Religion, pp. 39–43. 22 Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë, pp. 155–6. 23 Tom Wright, Simply Christian (London: SPCK, 2006), p. 56. 24 Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 228. 25 Emily Dickinson, poem 236, lines 11–2, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, p. 106. 26 Carlyle, Selected Writings, p. 74. 27 Throughout his life, Ruskin retained a view of nature based on an imaginative natural theology. See Michael Wheeler, Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 28 For detailed histories of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism, see Ian Bradley, The Call to Seriousness: The Evangelical Impact on the Victorians (London: Jonathan

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Cape, 1976); Elisabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979). 29 Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, p. 319. 30 Cf. Eithne Henson, Landscape and Gender in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 56–74. 31 Compare Coleridge’s ‘The Dungeon’, published in Lyrical Ballads in 1898, in which the redemptive power of nature is contrasted with the dungeon that serves only to further corrupt the prisoner. 32 Winifred Gérin, Emily Brontë (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 150. 33 Wordsworth, ‘The world is too much with us’, 1, William Wordsworth, p. 270. 34 Gezari gives a detailed account of the poem’s sources (Last Things, pp. 33–40), though her reading does not consider the apocalyptic associations of marriage in the New Testament. 35 Christina Rossetti, ‘A Better Resurrection’, 5–6, in The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. by R. W. Crump (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), p. 68. 36 Isidor Thorner, ‘Prophetic and mystic experience: comparison and consequences’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 5.1 (October 1965), 82–96. 37 On unveiling as a metaphor for revelation in the Victorian literary imagination, see Kevin Mills, Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), pp. 97–128. 38 Irene Tayler, Holy Ghosts: The Male Muses of Emily and Charlotte Brontë (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 44. Tayler regards this as an imaginative legacy of the Christian doctrine of resurrection rather than as evidence of continuing Christian faith on Brontë’s part. 39 Gezari’s reading of the poem as taking death as evidence of new life (Last Things, p. 38) seems to me to miss its particular dynamic of eschatological interpretation. On my reading, death is not evidence of resurrection but, rather, a fact to be reinterpreted by an eschatological expectation of resurrection. 40 Gerard Loughlin, Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 163. 41 McGrath, The Open Secret, p. 206. 42 Michael O’Neill, ‘ “Infinite passion”: variations on a romantic topic in Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, Swinburne, Hopkins, Wilde and Dowson’, in Andrew Radford and Mark Sandy (eds), Romantic Echoes in the Victorian Era (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 175–89 (p. 180).

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43 Avery Dulles, The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 172. 44 I have borrowed this phrase from Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of Self (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 59–60, which both charts and critiques the gradual removal of subjectivity, imagination and conscience from modern accounts of truth. 45 Shelley, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, 17. 46 Gezari, Last Things, pp. 3, 30–3, 36–9, 131. 47 Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’, 1–9. 48 Blakean parallels recur in Brontë’s works but are almost certainly coincidental. 49 Wordsworth, ‘The Tables Turned’, 19–20, William Wordsworth, pp. 130–1. 50 Barker, The Brontës, p. 364. 51 Wordsworth, ‘The Tables Turned’, 32. 52 Gezari, Last Things, p. 3. 53 Miller, The Disappearance of God, pp. 157–211. 54 Graeme Tytler, ‘The role of religion in Wuthering Heights’, Brontë Studies 32 (2007), 41–55. 55 Ibid. pp. 46–8. Tytler sees Lockwood as an atheist but, for the reasons that I have suggested, I think it preferable to regard Lockwood as an orthodox if somewhat half-hearted Christian. 56 Rebecca Steinitz, ‘Diaries and displacement in Wuthering Heights’, in Patricia Ingham (ed.), The Brontës (London: Longman, 2003), pp. 252–64; Simon Marsden, ‘Imagination, materiality and the act of writing in Emily Brontë’s diary papers’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28.1 (2006), 35–47. The diary papers themselves can be read in Juliet Barker, The Brontës: A Life in Letters (London: Viking, 1997). 57 Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 2. 58 Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, ‘Introduction: a future for haunting’, in Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (eds), Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (Basingstoke: Macmilla, 1999), pp. 1–19 (p. 5). Haunting as a disruption of stable self-identity has been further analysed by Julian Wolfreys in Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) and by Andrew Smith in The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2010); in common with most recent critical and theoretical work on ghosts,

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each of these writers owe much to Derrida’s concept of hauntology in Spectres of Marx (1994). 59 Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 128–31. 60 Alison Milbank, ‘The victorian gothic in english novels and stories, 1830– 1880), in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 145–65 (p. 162). 61 Valentine Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 213.

Chapter 3 1 Chitham, A Life of Emily Brontë, p. 156. 2 Davies, Emily Brontë, p. 144. 3 Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 211. 4 Wang, ‘The holy spirit in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and poetry’, p. 163. 5 Clarke, ‘Emily Brontë’s “No coward soul” and the need for a religious literary criticism’, p. 212. 6 Luke Ferretter, Towards a Christian Literary Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 36. 7 John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, ed. By Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 53. 8 Day-Lewis, ‘The poetry of Emily Brontë’, p. 65. 9 Otto, The Idea of the Holy, p. 21. 10 Robin Grove, ‘ “It would not do”: Emily Brontë as poet’, in Anne Smith (ed.), The Art of Emily Brontë (London: Vision, 1976), pp. 33–67 (p. 62). 11 John Milton, Paradise Lost, VII. 370–5, ed. by Alastair Fowler (Harlow: Pearson, 2007). 12 David J. Leigh, ‘Cowper, Wordsworth, and the sacred moment of perception’, in J. Robert Barth (ed.), The Fountain Light: Studies in Romanticism and Religion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 54–72 (p. 66). 13 Arthur Bradley, ‘“Until death tramples it to fragments”: Percy Bysshe Shelley after postmodern theology’, in Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler (eds), Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 191–206 (pp. 195–6). 14 Wang, ‘The holy spirit in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and poetry’, pp. 163–4.

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15 Mason, ‘ “Some god of wild enthusiast’s dreams”: Emily Brontë’s religious enthusiasm’, Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003), 263–277 (p. 265). 16 For a useful summary of the relationships between reason and enthusiasm in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religion, see Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 17–51. 17 Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 174. 18 Cited in WH, p. 344. Whether or not Charlotte was aware of Emily’s later poem ‘Why ask to know the date – the clime’, she neglected to mention that ‘No coward soul is mine’ is dated 2 January 1846, almost 3 years prior to Emily’s death on 19 December 1848. 19 For discussions of nineteenth-century traditions of good deaths and last words, see Jay, The Religion of the Heart, pp. 154–68; Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 17–38. 20 Matthew Arnold, ‘Haworth Churchyard’, 99, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. by Kenneth Allott (London: Longman, 1965), pp. 389–97. 21 Barker, The Brontës, p. 483. 22 Wang, ‘The holy spirit in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and poetry’, p. 166. 23 Clarke, ‘Emily Brontë’s “no coward soul” and the need for a religious literary criticism’, p. 211. 24 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, volume 1 (London: Nisbet, 1953), p. 280. 25 Ibid. p. 281. 26 Lawrence J. Starzyk, ‘The faith of Emily Brontë’s immortality creed’, Victorian Poetry 11 (1973), 295–305 (p. 299). 27 Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës and their Background: Romance and Reality, second edition (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), p. 66. 28 Davies, Emily Brontë, p. 145. 29 An exception is Derek Stanford’s observation that the poem’s scepticism is ‘the scepticism which some of the mystics have experienced when confronted with differing theological formulae’; Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford, Emily Brontë: Her Life and Work (London: Arena, 1985), pp. 228–9. 30 Wang, ‘The holy spirit in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and poetry’, p. 166. 31 Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 17. 32 Barker, The Brontës, p. 401. On the Brontës’ familiarity with Unitarianism, see Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion, pp. 2, 65; on Unitarian presence in the West Riding, see K. D. M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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33 James Martineau, The Rationale of Religious Enquiry; or The Question Stated of Reason, the Bible, and the Church: In Six Lectures, second edition (London: Whittaker and Co, 1836), p. 72. 34 Ibid. p. 79–80. 35 Francis William Newman, Phases of Faith; or, Passages from the History of my Creed (London: John Chapman, 1850), p. 2. 36 James Martineau, ‘The spirit of life in Jesus Christ’ [1843] in Endeavours After the Christian Life: Discourses, fourth edition (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867), pp. 1–12. 37 James Martineau, ‘Five points of Christian faith’ [1841], in Studies of Christianity: A Series of Papers (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1895), pp. 177–200 (p. 200). 38 James Martineau, ‘The besetting god’ [1843], in Endeavours After the Christian Life, pp. 13–22 (p. 14). 39 C. G. Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short and Roger Thomas, The English Presbyterians: From Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968), pp. 219–86. 40 Michael O’Neill, ‘ “Visions rise and change”: Emily Brontë’s poetry and male romantic poetry’, Brontë Studies 36 (2011), 57–63, (p. 60). 41 Paul S. Fiddes, The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 7. 42 For a detailed discussion of the various historical quests in biblical criticism and some important observations upon their limitations, see N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996), pp. 1–124. 43 Cf. Brian Ingram, ‘Evangelicalism and religious crisis: the experience of George Eliot’, in Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate (eds), Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 49–64. 44 Cited – with some useful contextual observations – in Wheeler, Ruskin’s God, pp. 25–6. 45 For an account of nineteenth-century Evangelicalism and the Bible, see Willis B. Glover, Evangelical Nonconformists and Higher Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Independent Press, 1954). 46 David Jasper, The Sacred and Secular Canon in Romanticism: Preserving the Sacred Truths (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 120. 47 Stephen Prickett, Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 264. 48 Ibid. p. 24. 49 Loughlin, Telling God’s Story, p. 139.

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50 Ibid. p. 139. 51 Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion, p. 73; Gezari, Last Things, pp. 47–50. Thormählen sees the poem as articulating Brontë’s own faith; Gezari distances Iernë’s eschatological hope from Brontë’s own views. 52 T. R. Wright, Theology and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), p. 84. 53 Emily Dickinson, poem 501, lines 13–4, Complete Poems, p. 243. 54 Ibid. lines 19–20 55 Lisa Wang, The Use of Theological Discourse in the Novels of the Brontë Sisters, unpublished thesis, Birkbeck College, 1998, p. 85. 56 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 343. 57 Ibid. p. 344. 58 See, for example, Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word: Language, Poetics, and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 210–1; Terence R. Wright, ‘The word in the novel: Bakhtin on Tolstoy and the bible’, in Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman, Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 25–38. 59 Ruth M. Adams, ‘Wuthering Heights: the land east of eden’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 13 (1958–9), 56–62. 60 Edgar F. Shannon, ‘Lockwood’s dreams and the exegesis of Wuthering Heights’, Nineteenth Century Fiction 14 (1959–60), 95–110. 61 On typological reading in nineteenth-century religion and culture, see George Landow, Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought (Boston, London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). 62 Ronald E. Fine discusses this link to the story of Lamech in ‘Lockwood’s dreams and the key to Wuthering Heights’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24 (1969–70), 16–30. 63 Susan E. Colón, Victorian Parables (London: Continuum, 2012), p. 5. 64 Ibid. pp. 15–16. 65 Robert Morgan, ‘Does the gospel story demand and discourage talk of revelation?’, in Gerhard Sauter and John Barton, Revelation and Story: Narrative Theology and the Centrality of Story (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 145–73 (p. 170). 66 Wang, ‘The holy spirit in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and poetry’, p. 167. 67 Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (New York: Picador, 2005), p. 230.

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68 I have discussed further biblical allusions and their theological significance in my essay ‘ “Vain are the thousand creeds”: Wuthering Heights, the Bible and liberal protestantism’, Literature and Theology 20 (2006), 236–50.

Chapter 4 1 Marjorie Burns, ‘“This shattered prison”: versions of Eden in Wuthering Heights’, in J. Hawthorn (ed.), The Nineteenth-Century British Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), pp. 31–45 (p. 38). 2 Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 188. 3 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. by Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 52. 4 Ronald Paulson, Sin and Evil: Moral Values in Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 346. 5 Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature, p. 91. 6 Patrick Brontë, Collected Works and Life, p. 205. 7 For a detailed discussion of the biblical grammar of sin, see Gary A. Anderson, Sin: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). 8 Hugh Connolly, Sin (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 22. 9 Gunton, The Christian Faith, p. 61. 10 Ibid. p. 61. 11 Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature, p. 96. 12 Patrick Sherry, ‘The novel’, in Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason and Hugh Pyper (eds), The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought: Intellectual, Spiritual and Moral Horizons of Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 489–91 (p. 490). 13 Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, pp. 3–24. 14 Trevor Hart, ‘Redemption and fall’, in Colin E. Gunton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 189–206 (pp. 189–90). 15 For a detailed discussion of Eden in Clare’s poetry, see Sarah Houghton-Walker, John Clare’s Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). 16 Karen Armstrong, In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 21. 17 George Gordon, Lord Byron, ‘Manfred’, I. i.12, in Poetical Works, ed. by Frederick Page (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 390. 18 Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, p. 5.

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19 The paradigm of the fall has been employed by several critics in order to describe the division of the Heathcliff-Catherine relationship. Terry Eagleton sees the lovers as seeking to ‘preserve the primordial moment of pre-social harmony, before the fall into history and oppression’. For Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Heathcliff and Catherine are divided by the ‘concerted forces of patriarchy’ by which Catherine is pulled into the realm of social orthodoxy represented by Edgar Linton. See Eagleton, Myths of Power (London: Macmillan, 1975), p. 109; Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, second edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 276. 20 Connolly, Sin, p. 30. 21 Ibid. p. 107. 22 G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 154. 23 Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 6–7. 24 F. D. Maurice, Theological Essays (London: James Clarke, 1957), p. 136. 25 Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature, p. 99. 26 Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), p. 162. 27 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, part II, question 71, article 5 (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1927), p. 271. 28 Mary Visik, ‘The last of Gondal’, in Charles Lemon (ed.), Classics of Brontë Scholarship (Haworth: The Brontë Society, 1999), pp. 153–64 (p. 156). 29 On apocalyptic discourses in Romanticism, see Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993); Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). 30 Loyalty and Liberty suggest, respectively, monarchists and revolutionaries. 31 Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature, p. 96. 32 Ibid. p. 96. 33 Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 129. 34 Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion, p. 119. 35 Hartman, Saving the Text, p. 126. 36 Steven Vine, ‘The wuther of the other in Wuthering Heights’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 49 (1994–5), 339–59 (p. 343).

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37 John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, second edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1985), p. 13. 38 Lynne Pearce, Reading Dialogics (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), p. 121. 39 Hartman, Saving the Text, p. 132. 40 William A. Madden, ‘Wuthering Heights: the binding of passion’, NineteenthCentury Fiction 27.2 (September 1972), 127–54 (p. 131). 41 Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion, p. 134. 42 Judith E. Pike, ‘ “My name was Isabella Linton”: coverture, domestic violence, and Mrs. Heathcliff ’s narrative in Wuthering Heights’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 64.3 (2009), 347–83. 43 Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature, p. 58. 44 Michael S. Macovski, Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 135. 45 Ferretter, Towards a Christian Literary Theory, p. 183. 46 Miller, The Disappearance of God, pp. 180–1. 47 Among several critical readings that have seen Lockwood as a representative of the figure of the reader, see U. C. Knoepflmacher, Wuthering Heights: A Study (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1989). 48 Frederic W. Farrar, Eternal Hope: Five Sermons Preached in Westminster Abbey, November and December, 1877 (London: Macmillan, 1878), p. xiv. On the nineteenth-century debates about judgement and universal salvation, see Rowell, Geoffrey, Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies Concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). 49 Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 199. 50 Alister McGrath, Heresy (London: SPCK, 2010). 51 Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion, p. 141. 52 Connolly, Sin, p. 38.

Chapter 5 1 ‘Barker, The Brontës, pp. 130–3. 2 Patrick Brontë, ‘Sermon on the eruption’, Collected Works and Life, pp. 209–19 (pp. 215–16).

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3 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 8. 4 Ibid. p. 47. 5 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, p. 6. 6 Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 59. 7 Fiddes, The Promised End, pp. 9–10. 8 Mills, Approaching Apocalypse, p. 16. 9 Christopher Rowland, ‘ “Upon whom the ends of the ages have come”: apocalyptic and the interpretation of the New Testament’, in Malcolm Bull (ed.), Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 38–57 (pp. 46–7). 10 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam LVI.27–8, ed. by Erik Gray (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 42. 11 Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, 85–6, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, pp. 285–94 (p. 288). 12 Mills, Approaching Apocalypse, p. 30. 13 Ibid. pp. 13–32. 14 Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion, pp. 100–109; Gezari, Last Things, pp. 106–25. 15 Fiddes, The Promised End, p. 110. 16 Ibid. pp. 68–9. 17 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, p. 6. 18 Gunton, The Christian Faith, p. 158. 19 Emil Brunner, Eternal Hope, trans. by Harold Knight (London: Lutterworth, 1954), p. 50. 20 Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. by James W. Leitch (London: SCM, 1967), p. 32. 21 Gezari, Last Things, p. 118. 22 Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature, p. 125. 23 Barker, The Brontës, p. 364. 24 Inga-Stina Ewbank, ‘Emily Brontë and immortality’, Brontë Society Transactions 24.1 (April 1999), 41–9 (p. 43). 25 N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003), pp. 127–8. 26 John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (London: Studio Vista, 1971), p. 32.

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27 John Wesley, ‘“Awake, thou that sleepest”’, in The Works of John Wesley, vol. 1 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984), pp. 142–58 (p. 150). 28 Wright, Simply Christian, p. 58. 29 Maynard, ‘The Brontës and religion’, p. 206. 30 Enid L. Duthie, The Brontës and Nature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 214. 31 Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 122–4. 32 Keith Ward, Christianity: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000), p. 167. 33 Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 136. 34 Ibid. p. 137. 35 Fiddes, The Promised End, p. 287. 36 Lucy Irigaray, ‘Belief itself ’, in John D. Caputo (ed.), The Religious (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 107–27 (p. 114). 37 Gérin, Emily Brontë, p. 166. 38 Robert Browning, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, 60, in Robert Browning’s Poetry, second edition, ed. by James F. Loucks and Andrew M. Stauffer (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2007), pp. 101–3. 39 Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 2. 40 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, trans. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 23. 41 Maureen Peeck-O’Toole, Aspects of Lyric in the Poetry of Emily Brontë (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), p. 128. 42 Tayler, Holy Ghosts, p. 53. 43 Davies, Emily Brontë, p. 145. 44 Connolly, Sin, p. 50. 45 Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1979), p. 73. 46 Irigaray, ‘Belief itself ’, p. 124. 47 Jasper, The Sacred and Secular Canon in Romanticism, p. 11. 48 Fiddes, The Promised End, p. 50. 49 W. David Shaw, Victorians and Mystery: Crises of Representation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 59–60.

Notes

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50 Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, p. 173. 51 Miller, The Disappearance of God, p. 174. 52 Ibid. p. 113. 53 I agree with Martha Nussbaum that Wuthering Heights rejects a vertical ascent to heaven in favour of a horizontal, Romantic movement towards nature and Heathcliff. I think, however, that this horizontal movement – which is also an affirmation of the created world – is more compatible with Christian sacramental theology and with the Romantic period’s subjectivization of religious reality than Nussbaum allows. See Nussbaum, ‘Wuthering Heights: the romantic ascent’, Philosophy and Literature 20 (1996), 362–82. 54 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 311. 55 Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 344. 56 Mills, Approaching Apocalypse, p. 164. 57 Ibid. p. 166. 58 Ibid. p. 166. 59 On the linguistic relationship between sleep and death, see Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology, pp. 16–21. 60 Shaw, Victorians and Mystery, p. 57. 61 As Hillis Miller has demonstrated, this hermeneutic openness is particularly convergent with deconstructionist theory. Describing the ending of Wuthering Heights as one that always marks a condition of repetition and return and thus the beginning of new readings, Miller argues that the best critical readings of the novel will be aware of their own incompletion. See Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 62 Fiddes, The Promised End, p. 6. 63 J. Frank Goodridge, ‘The circumambient universe’, in Thomas A. Vogler (ed.), Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Wuthering Heights (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), pp. 69–77 (p. 76).

Afterword 1 Tate, Contemporary Fiction and Christianity, p. 129. 2 Janet Martin Soskice, ‘The ends of man and the future of God’, in Graham Ward (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 68–78 (p. 70).

Notes

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3 Bradley, Carruthers and Tate, ‘Introduction’, p. 5. 4 Fiddes, The Promised End, p. 7. 5 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938), pp. 158–9. 6 Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), pp. 15–16.

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Ward, Keith, Christianity: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000). Weiskel, Thomas, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1976). Wesley, John, The Works of John Wesley (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984). Wheeler, Michael, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ___, Ruskin’s God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Williams, Rowan, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1979). ___, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). ___, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000). ___, Faith in the Public Square (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). Winnifrith, Tom, The Brontës and their Background: Romance and Reality, second edition, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). Wolfreys, Julian, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Woolf, Virginia, The Common Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938). Wordsworth, William, William Wordsworth, ed. by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God (London: SPCK, 1996). ___, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003). ___, Simply Christian (London: SPCK, 2006). Wright, T. R. Theology and Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). ___, ‘The word in the novel: Bakhtin on Tolstoy and the Bible’, in Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman, Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 25–38.

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Index Adams, Ruth M.  80–1 Aquinas, Thomas  97 Armstrong, Karen  9, 33, 91 Arnold, Matthew  66, 116 Augustine of Hippo  94–5, 132–3 Bakhtin, Mikhail  79–80, 85 Barker, Juliet  50, 66 Barth, J. Robert  30, 32 Bauman, Zygmunt  3 biblical hermeneutics  72–86 Blake, William  10, 91, 107, 137 Bradley, Arthur  63–4 Bronfen, Elisabeth  137 Brontë, Charlotte  15, 39, 66, 117 Brontë, Emily Essays ‘The Butterfly’  22–7, 75, 118–19, 125, 142 ‘Filial Love’  94, 106 Poems (by first line; 1846 titles in parentheses): ‘Ah! why, because the dazzling sun’ (‘Stars’)  60–2, 64, 71 ‘And first an hour of mournful musing’  34–5 ‘At such a time, in such a spot’  37–8, 41, 132 ‘Aye there it is! It wakes tonight’  126–8 ‘Come, walk with me’  118 ‘Enough of thought, philosopher!’ (‘The Philosopher’)  131–4 ‘Far, far away is mirth withdrawn’  58, 110 ‘High waving heather ‘neath stormy blasts bending’  35 ‘How beautiful the earth is still’ (‘Anticipation’)  119–22 ‘How clear she shines! How quietly’ (‘How Clear She Shines’)  40–2, 48, 127

‘I am the only being whose doom’  49, 87 ‘I’ll not weep that thou art going to leave me’ (‘Stanzas’)  118 ‘I’m happiest when most away’  60 ‘In summer’s mellow midnight’  52 ‘In the dungeon-crypts, idly did I stray’ (‘The Prisoner [A Fragment]’)  62–3 ‘I saw thee child one summer’s day’  92, 118 ‘I see around me tombstones grey’  122–5 ‘The linnet in the rocky dells’ (‘Song’)  124 ‘Listen! when your hair like mine’  39–40 ‘The night of storms has passed’  138 ‘No coward soul is mine’  21, 34, 66–72, 94, 126 ‘O Dream, where art thou now?’  49 ‘Oh, thy bright eyes must answer now’ (‘Plead For Me’)  129–31, 134 ‘O mother I am not regretting’  118 ‘On a sunny brae, alone I lay’ (‘A Day Dream’)  42–7, 75, 118–19 ‘Shall Earth no more inspire thee’  50, 126–7 ‘Shed no tears o’er that tomb’  94 ‘Sleep not dream not this bright day’  88 ‘The soft unclouded blue of air’  35–6, 93 ‘Tell me tell me smiling child’  92 ‘There was a time when my cheek burned’  118

182 ‘Well hast thou spoken, and yet, not taught’ (‘My Comforter’)  64–5, 71 ‘When weary with the long day’s care’ (‘To Imagination’)  46–8, 116 ‘Why ask to know the date – the clime?’  97–101, 105 ‘Why ask to know what date what clime’  97, 100 ‘Why do I hate that lone green dell?’  92–3 ‘The winter wind is loud and wild’ (‘Faith and Despondency’)  74–7, 118–19 Wuthering Heights  14–15, 17, 30, 50–7, 66, 72–3, 77–85, 87–8, 90, 92, 95–7, 102–12, 124, 135–42, 146–7 Brontë, Patrick  13–15, 17, 31–3, 39, 89, 113 Browning, Robert  130 Brunner, Emil  121 Burns, Marjorie  87 Byron, George Gordon (Lord)  92 Caputo, John D.  3–4, 21–2, 59 Carlyle, Thomas  29, 38–9 Chadwick, Owen  6–7 Chambers, Robert  5 Chitham, Edward  57 Clare, John  91 Clarke, Micael M.  17–18, 58, 67 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  10, 12, 42, 61 Colón, Susan E.  82–3 Connolly, Hugh  89, 93–4, 112, 132–3 Cunningham, Valentine  19–20, 25, 54 Davies, Stevie  20, 57, 132 Davis, Colin  53 Day-Lewis, Cecil  16, 60 Deism  6, 9, 11, 29, 33, 67 Derrida, Jacques  21–2 Dickinson, Emily  38, 77 Dulles, Avery  46 Duthie, Enid L.  127 Edwards, Michael  25–6 Eliot, George  73

Index Emerson, Ralph Waldo  10 eschatology  22–7, 37–8, 40–8, 74–7, 94, 113–43 Evangelicalism  9–10, 13–15, 17, 38–40, 73 Ewbank, Inga-Stina  124 Farrar, Frederic W.  109–10 Ferretter, Luke  59, 106–7 Fiddes, Paul S.  31, 33, 71–2, 115, 117–18, 129, 135, 141, 146 Francis Fike  20 Frye, Northrop  128–9 Gérin, Winifred  41, 130 Gezari, Janet  19, 26–7, 50, 123 Goff, Barbara Munson  23 Goodridge, J. Frank  142 Grimshaw, William  14 Grove, Robin  61 Gunton, Colin  26–7, 89–90, 121 Harrison, G. E.  15–16 Hart, Trevor  91 Hartman, Geoffrey  102, 104 Hick, John  103 Homans, Margaret  19, 128 Hopps, Gavin  2, 4 Irigaray, Lucy  130, 134 Jasper, David  73–4, 135 Keats, John  8, 30, 43 Kermode, Frank  114–15 Knight, Mark  19, 27, 74, 89–90, 95, 101, 106, 123 Lang, Bernhard  38 Leigh, David J.  62 Loughlin, Gerard  44, 74 Macovski, Michael S.  106 Madden, William A.  105 Martineau, James  69–71 Mason, Emma  17, 65 Mathewes, Charles  95 Maurice, Frederick Denison  95 Maynard, John  127

Index McDannell, Colleen  38 McGrath, Alister  5, 8, 32, 45, 110 Methodism  2, 13–17, 64–5 Milbank, Alison  53–4 Miller, J. Hillis  6, 18–19, 29–30, 51, 57–8, 66, 87, 107, 110, 131, 136 Miller, Lucasta  16 Mills, Kevin  116, 138–9 Milton, John  62 Moltmann, Jurgen  122 Morgan, Robert  83 Morley, John  125 mysticism  16–19, 43, 60 natural theology  5, 29–40, 145 Newman, F. W.  70 O’Neill, Michael  45, 71 Otto, Rudolf  33, 60 Paley, William  29, 32 Paulson, Ronald  88–9 Pearce, Lynne  104 Peeck-O’Toole, Maureen  132 Pike, Judith E.  105 Prickett, Stephen  74 Reardon, Bernard  1–2, 10–11 Ricoeur, Paul  88, 91–2, 131 Robinson, Marilynne  85 Rowland, Christopher  115–16 Ruskin, John  10, 39, 73 sacrament  10, 31–40, 126 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  11, 19, 69, 136 Shannon, Edgar  81

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Shaw, W. David  136, 140 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  11–12, 48 Sherry, Patrick  90 Simeon, Charles  13 Soskice, Janet Martin  145 Stabler, Jane  2, 4 Starzyk, Lawrence J.  68 Strauss, David Friedrich  73 Tate, Andrew  3, 145 Tayler, Irene  44, 132 Taylor, Charles  6–7, 30, 114, 137 Tennyson, Alfred (Lord)  116 Thomas, Keith  5–6 Thormählen, Marianne  17, 105, 111 Thorner, Isidor  43 Tillich, Paul  67 Tytler, Graeme  52 Unitarianism  15, 69–71 Vine, Steven  103 Visik, Mary  97 Wang, Lisa  16, 58, 64, 67, 69, 77, 84 Ward, Graham  3, 21 Ward, Keith  128 Weiskel, Thomas  9 Wesley, John  9, 14, 17, 126 Wheeler, Michael  136 Whitman, Walt  42 Williams, Rowan  32, 96, 133, 147 Woolf, Virginia  146 Wordsworth, William  10, 32, 41, 48–9 Wright, N. T.  125–6 Wright, T. R.  77

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