Falstaff and Me
Three Wëird Sisters From The Other Heath

by Paul Bailey

…Or, Confessions of a Brontësaurus

In which I revive my unwholesome obsession with the Brontë Sisters.

Introduction

Those obsessed with Dream of Red Chamber are called “Redologists,” at least among English speakers. Since Red Chamber tends to be raised above the rest in the pantheon of Chinese literature, its Western counterpart is naturally Shakespeare. The term “Bardolatry” has come into use, though I would prefer to call it “Bardurbation.” It follows that one guilty of Bardolatry is therefore a “Bardolator”. But after Shakespeare, the literary fandom demonyms get a little inconsistent. Jane Austen fans are called “Janeites.” What about Dickens fans, then? A young Dickens fan recently told me they’re called “Dickensianists,” but that seems a little unsatisfying, since Austen has both Janeite and Austenian (ie. Austen-like). Shouldn’t Dickens fans be called—well, I guess they don’t want to be called “Dickheads,” but surely there’s something more fitting.

And what of me? I am a Brontë fan. Which one? That’s almost beside the point. Some authors are as interesting as their works, but the Brontë sisters have attained an entire mythos unlike any I’ve seen by another writer. In reach, it is perhaps only matched by Ernest Hemingway. Others, like Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and J. R. R. Tolkien have created popular mythoi of their own with perhaps even broader scope, but that is of their works, not of the authors themselves. Not so with the Brontës, or so goes the myth. It is so strong that, although only two of their seven novels regularly get adapted for the screen, the sisters have themselves become the subject of multiple movies and miniseries (to name a few: Devotion and Emily, both quite awful; To Walk Invisible, rather good; and The Brontës of Haworth, unseen by me, liked by others).

Like with Austen, the Brontë sisters’ fans are disproportionate and a little unsettling. The Brontës’ home town of Haworth has been a fandom mecca since the 1850s. Poor Patrick Brontë not only had to cope with losing all six of his children, but he also had to spend his final years enduring tourists. Nowadays, I pity the poor souls who actually call Haworth their home. It must be terrible to live where out-of-town secular pilgrims keep saying “Brontë” all over the place while roaming free off their leash.

Well, maybe I am not that much of a fan. I have never made a pilgrimage to Haworth or even purchased any Brontënilia, like, say, a “From Gondal With Love” postcard or a “Reader, I Brewed It” coffee mug. (Hmm, after thinking up that joke, I kind of want one…) Of the following cycle…

  1. Read the two novels everyone talks about.
  2. Read the other five novels.
  3. Read the poetry.
  4. Read Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte.
  5. Read the dregs (letters, juvenilia, Charlotte’s embarrassing fanfiction).
  6. Read the guilty dregs (Charlotte’s letters to Constantin Heger, which I really have no business reading).
  7. Watch as many TV and movie adaptations as I can find.
  8. Resort to reading whatever scraps Branwell had to write.
  9. Go into withdrawals, because there’s nothing left (the Brontës didn’t live long enough to write more words).
  10. Return to step 1, repeat.

…I am the sort of fan who would only cycle through the first three steps—what I’ll call Corpus Brontëlicum Minor (as opposed Major, which will take you all the way to step 10), but that’s still enough, I think, to merit a demonym. Since no one has assigned one for us, I shall claim one. We are the BRONTËSAURUSES! (I considered “Glass Town Federation,” but it’s too obscure a reference and it smacks too much of British imperialism.)

I somehow skipped Wuthering Heights my first time reading through the Corpus Brontëlicum. That was thirteen or fourteen years ago, roughly when Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre hit theaters. The second time around was during March-April 2024. Skipping Wuthering Heights on the first pass made me have to completely reevaluate the sisters’ artistry during this second pass. There’s something staggering about discovering such a novel unprepared, and boy do I have things to say about it.

In such a spirit, here are the thoughts of an unwholesomely obsessed Brontësaurus…

The Novels of Anne Brontë

Anne Brontë is often considered the “forgotten” Brontë sister. People typically blame this on Charlotte, because of her suppression of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and her well-meaning but poor mismanagement of her sisters’ legacies after their deaths. People also tend to overcompensate for this snub by declaring Anne to be best writer of the three sisters. I disagree with both of these opinions. Wildfell Hall was back in print by 1854, long before either it or Wuthering Heights were regarded as classics. The real reason for Anne Brontë’s obscurity relative to her sisters is, except for a basic ability to formulate a good plot, she was a poor novelist. Among her sisters she was the most sententious and the least subtle about it, yet somehow she was also as tonally neutral as an instruction manual. She lacked her siblings’ gift for mise-en-scène and did not seem to understand the show-don’t tell principle.

On the other hand, she would have been a great polemicist. Her writing was clear and lucid, and its meaning was unmistakable. She had a way of formulating arguments that were too simple and self-evident to refute. And she did not shy away from the issues pressing on her mind, regardless how uncomfortable they were to readers who would rather she did not stir the pot. Her true talent, then, was nonfiction. What influence would she have had as a feminist and a moralist if she had lived longer and, secure in her income due to the success of Wildfell Hall (which among the Brontë books was initially second only to Jane Eyre in sales), had become a leading essayist? She may have even been hankering for the inevitable Victorian backlash; her writing had a “bring it on” pluckiness, which runs contrary to Charlotte’s characterization of her as a sweet, docile snowflake.

Her two books, Agnes Grey and The Tenant Wildfell Hall, have in common a plot which serves as a reality check against some delusion that the heroine initially fosters about herself. But while Wildfell Hall is grave and upsetting, Agnes Grey is hilarious. Perhaps that is because Agnes Grey is shorter, or perhaps it was intentional. Try not to smile at the long paragraph in the first chapter where Agnes fondly ponders what amazing good she will accomplish as a governess, analogous to Hank Hill’s sentimental speeches about propane and propane accessories on the TV show King of the Hill.

Agnes Grey has a thesis of sorts, but the author had the (probably accidental) tendency to contradict what is told with what is shown. She presented two rich families. One is bourgeois: materialistic, possessive, and neurotic. The other is aristocratic: idle, decadent, and ignorantly supercilious. While telling their stories, she frequently digressed from the narrative to express very strong opinions on how the families’ children ought to have been raised, but Parable speaks louder than Sermon: Instead of instructing the reader, Agnes Grey makes the reader never want to have children, for in this book, children are demonstrable proof that God hates adults.

Fortunately, this failure in intent is the most entertaining thing about Agnes Grey. The book’s conceit is that it warns us about a social ill, but I don’t buy it. Like her protagonist, Anne Brontë was also a governess, and during parts of the novel I had to ask, was she even writing a novel or was she just venting? Narration paused for entire chapters so that the author could instead blow off steam.

Perhaps I should be ashamed to find sport in such matter, but I promise I am laughing with her, not at her. My first job, when I was seventeen, was at Taco Bell. Most customers were the kind whose only ambition getting them out of the house for the day is to pick up a lottery ticket and cigarettes, then go to Taco Bell because that is one place where they consider the employees to be even lower than they are, entitling them to take their own self-loathing out on whoever has the misfortune of being on shift. (I would not want to be a family pet in the household of such a customer.) Most of us have had at least one job in our lives like that, and Agnes Grey is a novel for anyone who has ever burst into a breakroom crying out “oh my GOD!!! Just kill me already!”

⁂

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is poorly written for many of the same reasons as Agnes Grey, except that it’s longer, therefore the author’s faults stand out more. Much of the book reads less like a novel and more like the Cliff’s Notes for a novel, with its ideas and themes flatly spelled out and summarized. Whenever two characters fight, they speak in long block paragraphs, with plenty of well-organized arguments, and even scripture quotations to back up their points—more akin to Plato’s dialogues than to a private conversation between family members. On the other hand, though Wildfell Hall is not as inexhaustible as Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, it has a lot to unpack. I have not read it for the last time.

To the book’s misfortune, much of its brilliance does not reveal itself to the reader while it is being read; rather it becomes clear after the book is finished. Surely for some, this makes it difficult to finish.

One example was the book’s narrative structure—not the plot structure, but rather the author’s decision how the plot should be told. While reading it, I thought it would be better served by an omniscient third-person narrator, or by letting the protagonist’s diary span from cover to cover. This would better focus the story, and keep the protagonist’s close proximity to the reader more consistent. But in the final few chapters, after Gilbert resumed narration, I changed my mind. Wildfell Hall isn’t really about the protagonist, who has only one lesson to learn and learns it very early on. It was more about the men in the book, especially Arthur Huntingdon and his posse of degenerates. Rather than judge them, the author was judging the system that made them what they had become.

Consider Arthur Huntingdon. A very telling scene occurred early in his marriage with Helen. She tried to interest him in wholesome activities to keep him home and out of trouble. Noticing his interest in music, she tried to teach him piano. It takes a lot of effort and patience to learn a musical instrument, however, and Arthur was conditioned only for immediate gratification, so he shortly gave it up and returned to his more low-effort forms of diversion, namely debauchery. He was a gentleman from birth, and never had to work hard a day in his life. He never received any of what we now call “tough love.” Indeed his wife was the first person who ever truly loved him, but since he was unaccustomed to any adversity, even the adversity of mere disapproval, he could not recognize it as love. He never had a good male role model in his life, and he was conditioned to think of a wife as more or less a pet dog: She would live only to please him, but he need not please her. All these things led to a vicious positive feedback loop wherein she could not approve of his behavior, therefore she would chastise him or be cold towards him, and he, interpreting this as her failure to act the part of his wife, would cope by behaving even worse.

The plot layout is an ingenious misdirect. By beginning in the middle, at Wildfell Hall, the story leads the reader to wonder if Gilbert will follow the advice of the good Reverend Millward, or if he will instead be corrupted by the mysterious Helen. It naturally inculcates prejudice in the (Victorian, at least) reader. The remainder of the book shocks those prejudices, turns them inside out, and challenges the reader to second guess them. It’s a very powerful teaching tool, and I bet the author used it frequently while working as a governess: “If ABC, then XYZ, correct?” “Correct.” “Wrong! [ruler slap] and here’s why…”

Unfortunately, one effect came at the cost of another. Had the story been told chronologically, it would have been more poignant with its readers by taking them along for the full journey of the Huntingdons’ tragic failed marriage. Since most of the “scandalous” nuances about Helen at the beginning of the story will fly right over the head of a modern reader—what’s so shocking about a woman who pays the bills by being a landscape painter?—an adaptation would be wise to tell the story chronologically instead. (A 1996 miniseries attempted to repeat the book’s nonlinear plot structure, but in my opinion that was a mistake.)

If I had to complain about the substance of the plot, it’s that Gilbert seemed too easily a reward for Helen at the end of the story. Helen’s only human weakness was her tendency to poorly judge a man’s character while infatuated with him, and Gilbert, though very likeable, still had some growing up to do. She made a reckless mistake giving him her diary, and the novel failed to punish her for it. It was the perfect setup for something Thomas Hardy would eventually explore in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a novel which ruthlessly deconstructs the idea, popular in fiction, of the “good” man being the heroine’s reward after enduring the “bad” man. Helen did not lead Gilbert on romantically, but he was just immature enough to have concluded she did lead him on in another way: She was not the perfect marble statue he constructed in his mind. The shattering of that image could have been enough of a “betrayal” to give him a lapse in judgment—one that is temporary, but long enough to do something he’d regret, like reporting her to the authorities. (By the letter of the law she was a kidnapper.) It takes very little imagination to see how Wildfell Hall could have ended in a much more tragic, much more memorable, and—since I think this was the author’s intention—much more didactic way.

Wuthering Heights

Of course I have always heard that Wuthering Heights is a classic, but people tend to say that about any book that’s old enough and still in print. As Noah Cross pointed out in Chinatown, “politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” I had to read Wuthering Heights and discover it for myself. My second reading of Wuthering Heights came less than a week after my first reading; no other piece of long-form literature has ever compelled me to do that, outside of a school assignment.

Emily Brontë took a trashy, hackneyed genre which by 1847 had fallen way out of fashion, and—I won’t say that she breathed new life into it, because she neither revived it nor created a new subgenre for others to follow. Instead, she made a standalone work for which the very word “genre” is an insult. To borrow from obnoxious Hollywood marketing types, she gave it her “bold new vision.” Starting from a garden-variety template—a Gothic Romance containing a Byronic Hero—she added a fresh new setting, brought some of the genre’s undercurrents closer to the surface, mashed it up with Elizabethan revenge plays and Senecan tragedies, probably threw in a sprinkle of Yorkshire and Scottish folklore for local color, and used a richness of language that was somehow even more poetic than her actual poetry. Her Late Romantic forebears—Byron, Keats, and the Shelleys—only wish they could write so well. Yes, I really did just write that, and I will not retract it. Standing on their shoulders, she pushed the romanticist, anti-classical aesthetic further than ever before, and with a combination of grandeur and extreme grotesque, created a masterpiece that excites its readers at an entirely visceral, subconscious level. At an intellectual, conscious level, then, readers are left to wonder why they cannot shake such a transgressive novel out of their mind. It’s a masterpiece all right…but a masterpiece of what exactly? Gall?

Meh Versus Evil

Wuthering Heights has a keen insight into the darker side of pride and desire. Heathcliff’s, Hindley’s, and Edgar’s pride is the kind which renders a rich man insecure with himself and a poor man resentful of any slight, and all the abuse, schadenfreude-seeking, and vindictiveness that results from it. Elder Catherine is an amazing statement on duality of desire: she equally desires opposite and mutually incompatible things, though she never can pin down in clear language what they are. In a years-long vicious cycle, this combination of characters’ desire and pride grows out of mothballs into an obsessive hatred. But one has to ask, to what end? Surely not to teach a moral lesson, the way the author’s sister Anne would have done. For Wuthering Heights has no pathos, therefore no catharsis, therefore it fails to be a tragedy or a cautionary tale. Pathos requires more than just bad things happening to people; it requires the reader to empathize. Who could care if any of these characters meet a bad end?

Certainly the number one complaint that readers make about Wuthering Heights is something like “the characters are all horrible people.” This is not true; some characters are better than others. I suspect, however, these readers’ real problem with the book is less how bad everyone is, and more that no one has the opportunity to be good beyond a superficial level, because it seems that ‑GOOD‑ does not and cannot exist in the godless morass of Wuthering Heights. It’s civilization versus wildness, which is a form of good versus evil I suppose, but for many, civilization is a means, not an end. A strong feeling of nihilism pervades the novel. For many readers, then, the book is worse than unpleasant, it’s depressing.

With the possible exception of Nelly Dean (who operates on planet-earth logic while the others operate on nightmare logic), characters barely pass for human. The closest second is Edgar Linton, who, despite being very guilty of prejudice, nevertheless maintained some degree of continence. But continence is not virtue. Edgar’s worldview was bleak—to him, the veneer of civilization is the end-goal of life. In this sense, the world and characters of Wuthering Heights are not immoral, because they are amoral; they see no point in being moral unless it materially benefits them somehow. Near the end, when Nelly chastises Heathcliff for having forgotten the contents of the Bible, she may as well have been speaking to any one of the novel’s other characters (besides Joseph, who is a different beast altogether). I am reminded of the ending of Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark, in which a blind man was walking down a road which illogically led to a lethal mud trap. “Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.”

Wuthering Heights does have a few expendable Ophelias who are innocent enough (well, just one, Frances), but even the author does not care about them; we are to care about the more dramatic characters, since they are more intenserant 1. Perhaps the most transgressive thing about Wuthering Heights is the way Brontë toyed with the most “innocent” characters. She seemed to take a perverse pleasure in presenting us with some innocent new character, and then shocking us with the character’s own innate cruelty, attraction to violence, or just plain pettiness—and in younger Cathy’s case, a heavy dose of gullibility as well—not a moment after the reader had just finished saying “Finally a character I could at least care about!” I cannot help but wonder if she thought her readers would find this sort of thing delicious.

Instead of despairing over the novel’s seeming amorality, I keep in mind that Emily Brontë was an Anglican minister’s daughter, and that Anne, her sister and closest intimate, reputedly wore her faith on her sleeve. There is value to this story beyond grotesque sensationalism.

In a contradiction to everything I previously said about how bad (or at best non-good) everyone is in Wuthering Heights, no character was a constant. Thomas Wemyss Reid put Wuthering Heights in company with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, but it better sits with Shakespeare’s late romances like Coriolanus, Cymbeline, or The Tempest. In those plays, the traditionally tragic character undergoes some change of heart, thereby modulating the story into its not-tragic (though rarely happy) finale. This was the book’s greatest misdirect. If Wuthering Heights had truly been a tragedy like Titus Andronicus, the totality of Heathcliff’s revenge would leave everyone either dead or desolate. I certainly assumed that the plot was heading in that direction, and Heathcliff even told Nelly that it was his original plan. But like Coriolanus he backed off.

How did this come about? Since the characters lacked any moral anchor (except for Nelly and, in a strange way, Joseph), they allowed their always-changing states of affairs to point their moral compass this way or that…that is, until the last few chapters, when something refreshing happened: Cathy began to change against the grain of her circumstances rather than with it. This had an influence on Hareton, who always just needed a little push to bring out his latent ambition for self improvement. Heathcliff changed, too, although it is not clear how much this was due to Cathy and Hareton. What is clear is that all of the characters’ interpersonal dynamics had completely transformed in the final chapters, and Heathcliff had lost almost all of his dominance. Though he was hardly redeemable by this point, he at least had finally mellowed out, to everyone’s benefit. Emily Brontë’s first biographer Agnes Mary Frances Duclaux had an eloquent way of putting it, saying that the author revealed “the force of evil, only conquerable by the slow-revolving process of nature which admits not the eternal duration of the perverse.” The operative word is “eternal.” Cathy’s unexpected good influence gave the readers their first taste of hope for the world of Wuthering Heights, revealing that even in the darkest, most unpropitious environments, life goes on and some kind of healing can be achieved.

What changed in Cathy? Had Jane Eyre been in her place, it would have been no mystery: Heathcliff never would have stood a chance against Jane, short of resorting to extreme violence. But Cathy, unlike Jane, was naïve, gullible, prejudiced, and bratty. Had she realized that the only way to effectively rebel against Heathcliff—the only way to deny him victory—is to not rebel, but to rather submit to her lot with Cinderella-like good cheer? Was it a simple matter of her (never actually suggested) attraction to Hareton? What changed in Heathcliff? Had his digging up of Catherine’s grave set loose her ghost to haunt him (she is the younger Cathy’s mother, after all), at least in his mind? Had seeing Cathy’s decayed corpse given Heathcliff his first realization of the impermanence of even his revenge? Had he succumbed to the changing mood in the house? Had he lost motivation as the winds began to change? Had he simply ran out of gas?

It’s hard to tell. Character was not Emily Brontë’s strong point. Any one of these interpretations could work. Except the case of a ghost, they are rather mundane, so spelling it out in the novel would probably fail to satisfy the reader. But not everything needs to be explainable to be believable. Heathcliff’s modulation from tragic to non-tragic does indeed feel organic and believable. Wuthering Heights avoids the artificiality of things like giving him a spontaneous change of heart or a conveniently-timed debilitating illness. (The latter was a lazy cheat code used by Jack London in The Sea Wolf). Instead, Wuthering Heights ends with something the reader can recognize—though not easily pin down—and say “yes, life sometimes does play out that way.”

Do You Even Novel, Bro?

After reading Wuthering Heights I did what naturally follows; I looked up what other people had to say about it. I have read that the elder Cathy came from the Wild (the Heights) and could not conform to Civilization (the Grange), that younger Cathy came from the Civilization and tamed the Wild, that the two Cathys’ stories have perfect symmetry right down to the changes in their surnames, that the Heights represent hell and the Grange represents heaven, and that the elder Cathy fell from of the freedom of hell down into the graceless straitjacket of heaven. (It must be the “we have [blank] at home” version of heaven.)

I do not disagree with these analyses per se; they do have their merit. The problem, though, is that they reduce the story to a collection of puzzle pieces which at most add up to the sum of their unimpressive parts. Anything can be “about” civilization versus nature, but not just anything can be Wuthering Heights. The book did not impress me due to some reduction of themes—many interpretations of which are so cerebral, abstract, Platonic, ideological, or hypothetical as to make one suspect literary critics of being lizard people,footnote 1 or at least wonder if they read the same book.

But an appreciation of Brontë’s craft cannot help but increase my admiration for the book. Consider how well she makes her world feel so confined. Although it spans generations, Wuthering Heights never leaves its tiny, walkable geographical setting. Some characters do leave, but the narrative does not follow; it waits for their return. When Heathcliff left for some years, he departed as if into another world, or even out of existence. What was his story in the interim? To a lesser extent, the same goes for Isabella and Linton; we are privy to none of their time spent away from either of the two estates. Does Wuthering Heights even take place on Earth, or is it someone’s claustrophobic nightmare world? (My thoughts turn to movies like Coraline or Dark City.) Thrushcross Grange is hardly my idea of heaven—it’s more like an office soiree I’m obligated to attend on a day off—but it is heaven by comparison with the Heights, which in the book may as well be the only other place that ever existed.

If the elder Cathy was from “the wild,” what impressed me is how—and how efficiently—she was made to seem that way. It was so cooked into the book’s language that I got the sense of it as early as chapter three (Lockwood’s reading of her marginalia), before she had even become a character, before I even knew what plot points to focus on. Something about her writings in the sermon books made her and Heathcliff seem like children who did not know proper boundaries and who, being on the cusp of self-awareness, were fated for trouble. I cannot explain how Emily Brontë’s choice of words gave me that sense…

…but frankly I do not want to explain it, and I am cautious against wading too deep. I never liked “close reading,” which is merely busywork for academics who write no fiction themselves but spend all day talking about people who do. My fear in overthinking something is that I will unwind a charm that cannot be wound back up. The greatest allure of most poetry is its mystery and magic, not its deeper meaning or clever construction. Close reading spoils that magic, as this video hilariously demonstrates.

Poetry is what separates Wuthering Heights from, say, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian—also a book of depraved cruelty which, due to the music of its narrative, is as difficult to put down as it is to pick back up. But while McCarthy was as good as Brontë at flowery language, he was mostly superficial; there was nothing under the surface. You could disassemble a poem all day long if you examine it closely enough, but the reason you would even want to do so in the first place is because great poetry works on you at a gut level even before you realize why. Once you have read it, you cannot stop thinking about it, therefore you begin to analyze it. Or so it is with me.footnote 2 footnote 3

The word I have been dodging all this time is sublime. As an aesthetic term, it has always been a little bit warped by people whose heads were in the clouds instead of on their shoulders. The romantics were too preoccupied with reacting against classicism to have a sufficiently inclusive definition for it. (The Hubble Ultra Deep Field image would probably be “sublime” to the romantics, but a technical marvel like the Space Shuttle would not.) More recently, the word has been hijacked by the late Harold Bloom, due to his popularity as a mass-published author.rant 2 The common feature of things sublime is that they inspire deep, fearful awe. Edmund Burke defined it best: “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror…[The mind] cannot…by consequence reason on that object which employs it” (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Part II, Section 1). My notion of what’s sublime is broader than either Burke’s or the Romantics’. It sits closer to Google’s layman’s definition: “Of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe.” The common ground between these meanings is how the sublime confounds us. At the end of the day, explaining what makes Wuthering Heights a great novel is futile, because as a sublime work of art, it beggars explanation.

Jane Eyre

In the introduction to his Classic Critical Views on the Brontë sisters, the late Harold Bloom wrote that “no other fictive character is so given to cudgeling male readers as is Jane Eyre.” Mr. Bloom should speak for himself. I am a male reader, and I never felt “cudgelled” by the character of Jane Eyre. Bloom was very reactionary against all of the ideological ‑isms of literary criticism (except his own), especially against feminism. He called these ideologies the “school of resentment.” He was not altogether wrong; the modus operandi of most academics these days is to unselfconsciously retrofit their own modern values onto writers as ancient as Hesiod or Valmiki. Nevertheless, Bloom was wrong even if he was right, because in true reactionary fashion he overcompensated with a straw-man argument over Jane while overlooking a far more obvious argument in his favor: Modern feminists prefer to dismiss the strong, indomitable Jane and instead focus on the victimized, nearly feral Bertha Rochester, who in truth is a mere plot point rather than a character. In effect, feminists do not analyze the book at all, which is too positive and empowering for their taste, and instead analyze a more negative book that exists only in their minds. Is this not resentment?

I only bring this up because Harold Bloom, perhaps the most well-known literary critic/theorist due to his bestselling books, is the one many casual readers turn to first when looking for insight regarding a book they just read, yet he is invariably full of hot air. (In case you’re wondering, I got his book for the articles by other critics, not for his introduction.) While the ‑ists were being resentful of god-knows-what and Bloom was being resentful of the ‑ists, neither seemed like they actually bothered to read the book. Jane Eyre was definitely a feminist novel at the time it was written. But Jane Eyre appeals to me, a 21st-century male reader, because Jane seems so universal—too universal, in fact, to “cudgel the male reader” or be about “the triumph of the mythological entity that [William Blake] named the Female Will.” Nor is it about Jane’s “release of her will-to-power over Rochester,” which is “overwhelming: rhetorically, psychologically, all but cosmologically.” I’m not sure what that last sentence even means! Bloom had a tendency to load his sentences with the kinds of words that are only meaningful when placed in a context, but since he would never place them in a context, his sentences never made sense. Bloom spoke his own language, and expected you to learn it in order to know what he wanted to tell you. But neither Harold Bloom nor his “resentful” nemeses can take away Jane Eyre’s sublime beauty, which is too simple for sophisticated eggheads who can only understand sophisticated things.

The truth is, Jane Eyre is a wonderful novel, as great a masterpiece as Wuthering Heights, though in a very different—and to the casual reader, more palatable—way. Charlotte Brontë seems to have had the best combination of both of her sisters’ talents. She was neither as polemical as Anne nor as imaginatively intense as Emily, but whereas Emily and Anne could not emulate each other, Charlotte could emulate them both. Like Anne, she had a lot on her mind worth writing about, and like Emily, she had a musical, poetic way of writing it. Not that I think she was emulating her sisters. Her writing was too natural and seemingly effortless for that. Rather, I think that she just happened to be like a linear combination of the two.

It doesn’t take a deep think to see that Jane Eyre is a “journey” in a metaphorical sense, but it did take this guy to point out to me that Jane Eyre is in fact a literal journey, with meaningfully selected location names. I rarely decode books in this way—it doesn’t make me like the book any better—but in this case it’s a nice foil to all those who pretend to have a formula for writing a story.

Jane Eyre, you see, is one of the greatest “hero’s journey” stories, or monomyths, ever told. This is partly because it isn’t a monomyth, at least not after the restrictive pattern popularized by Joseph Campbell and then simplified by Hollywood into a hackneyed digest of a story template to be used in superhero movies. Ever since the 1970s, when Star Wars made Campbell hip with the kids, talentless hack writers have misinterpreted the monomyth to mean that they should stuff the trappings of mythology into their stories. That puts the cart before the horse. If a story is great enough, it will be its own myth, and contain the “trappings” organically rather than ornamentally. Jane Eyre, the runaway bestseller of 1847, certainly struck a chord with enough readers to become its own myth. It varies from Campbell’s template, but not in ways that matter.

To borrow from chapter and section headings in Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (of which, in full disclosure, I could only bear to read the first three chapters)… Jane has already passed the Threshold Guardian before the story begins, for her journey is life itself, so the closest thing to a Call to Adventure is the doctor’s prescription of school as an escape from Gateshead. Rather than enduring a Road of Trials, Jane endured something more like a road of hardships to prepare her for her One Great Trial, an inversion of the Woman as the Temptress, namely Man as the Tempter. Campbell meant it in terms of a woman being a “symbol of life,” but I mean it in a more obvious and less overstated way; after all, Rochester was no symbol of life. If The Magic Flight occurs anywhere in the novel, it’s Jane’s return to Thornfield upon hearing Rochester’s voice in the wind, calling her. The peril in Jane’s Crossing of the Return Threshold was not an aversion to banality after the adventure, as Campbell would have put it, but rather it was the peril of rushing back to Rochester too swiftly and too blindly. She had to first meet him on equal terms and make certain that both were clear on that matter, hence her (funny and rather adorable) banter with him at Ferndean. This did not make her Master of Both Worlds in Campbell’s sense, for the book concluded with her still in the perilous adventure-world of Life, but she was better equipped than ever before to face whatever the world threw at her.

You may think such an analysis to be geeky and puerile, like a junior high school book report, but I like that it requires confirmation bias in order to even make sense. No one could have used Campbell’s reductive formula as the starting point to write a story like Jane Eyre. In order to make sense why ABC is good art and DEF is bad art, theory must trail art. It cannot precede art, except to give future artists some brass-tacks guidelines (e.g. do not try composing music if you cannot tell why Beethoven thought that diminished seventh chords are “little back doors”). Jane Eyre was written by an artist, not a theorist. It is original on nearly every level, too many to name…but I will name a couple anyway:

Many talk about the novel’s originality in terms of being a woman’s point of view. In this regard, Jane’s “automaton” speech to Rochester has more in common with Cathy Earnshaw’s “I am Heathcliff” speech in Wuthering Heights than I have so far read of. Both speeches depict a woman taking her own (wise or otherwise) counsel, full of original thought, with considerations that strikingly defy the role of class, financial business, and family connections in determining one’s fate, especially concerning marriage. This was groundbreaking for the time. Both speeches also smack of the romantic concept of a soulmate. I have heard many people denounce the soulmate as a toxic idea, which fosters unrealistic expectations. Being a bachelor, I have little opinion on it, except to observe that calling something “toxic” nowadays is about as meaningful as calling something “unprecedented”.

Jane Eyre is revolutionary in another important way, but be warned that it requires more use of the word “moral,” which you must be sick of by now. I do not apologize. Morality is too central a theme in all three sisters’ writing for me to dismiss it. Jane Eyre is often called a romance, I suppose due to its similarities with the Gothic romances of the 18th century. But those romances had a stock character which Jane Eyre lacks: a beautiful, languorous young woman for a protagonist—though the word “protagonist” hardly suits her—who was pure and innocent, but also gullible and lacking in willpower, due to what back then was considered the weakness of her sex. The story would place her in some compromising or dangerous situation, and then maintain the suspense for a ridiculously long time, before either her hero or a badly-contrived circumstance rescued her. The idea of a beautiful, innocent woman being so vulnerable to corruption or physical harm must have been titillating to Georgian-era readers, hence the genre’s reputation for being trashy. (Jane Austen deserves a lot of credit for diverging the paths of romance and novel, bringing the latter into more respectable territory.) I mentioned earlier that a character like Jane Eyre would be unsuitable for younger Cathy’s place in Wuthering Heights, because Heathcliff would not stand a chance against her, short of resorting to murder. This is because, unlike those “heroines” of 18th-century romances, Jane was moral rather than innocent; her virtue was supplemented and informed by strength, knowledge, and wisdomfootnote 4. These gave her the backbone to take a stand not only against tyrants like Heathcliff or tempters like Rochester, but also against all authority figures who are in the wrong but whom society deems to be in the right, merely due to their higher station in life. Fully immune to gaslighting, a moral woman can defy such men and still sleep soundly at night with a clean conscience. I suspect that this, not the book’s Gothic elements, is what made Jane Eyre such a scandal when it came out.

Bonus Wuthering Heights Rants

The Retrial of Nelly Dean

That Nelly Dean is the “real villain” of Wuthering Heights is one of the dumbest “theories” I have encountered about the novel. It began in the 1950s with a paper by James Hafley, and it has since managed to escape the abstruse confines of literary criticism, trickling its way into places like Reddit and BookTube. It is propagated nowadays, I suspect, by two sorts of people: those who have seen too many movies by M. Night Shyamalan or Christopher Nolan and think that every story needs a gimmicky mind-blowing plot twist, and literati who have read so many works of fiction that they are no longer able to think like normal human beings or make sense. Why does this theory bug me so much (besides its resemblance to the meme-stupid Darth Jar Jar theory)? I suppose it’s because Nelly, for all her imperfections, is the only really good person throughout the novel. She stands alongside Marion Halcombe and Dr. John Watson on the short list of literary characters who from one end of a book to the other never get their due appreciation, neither from the other characters nor even from the very author who created them. Nelly is also one of the only characters in Wuthering Heights, male or female, who isn’t an insufferable Miss Nancy.

The first argument to the Villain-Nelly theory goes that she is an unreliable narrator. But this ignores the way narrators were used at the time. In Moby Dick, Ishmael described scenes he neither participated in nor found out about later. In The Brothers Karamazov, the narrator was someone who attended the trial, yet he also knew who the real culprit was, as well as his means, method, and motive. Are these unreliable narrators? No. They simply serve as the medium through which an author tells the story. From my own reading experience, this phenomenon appears peculiar to the 19th century. A lot of 19th-century novelists seem to have felt the need to “explain” how their story is known, and that led to them awkwardly shoehorning their narrators into their plots. This would eventually develop into the narrative devices of later novels, such as James Joyce’s interior monologues in Ulysses, Bram Stoker’s newspaper clippings in Dracula, and yes, even the intentional device of an unreliable narrator; but during the early-to-mid 19th century, these first-person narratives were clunky. They naturally lack verisimilitude to a modern reader whose hindsight includes those later developments. (Not all writers had this problem, of course. Dickens and Thackery seemed right at home with the tried-and-true ancient device of an omniscient third-person narrator, and Jane Eyre impressively contains only scenes where the first-person narrator can be present without any shoehorning.)

The closest parallel I can think of are the early talkies. For about a year or two after the introduction of sound, movie producers were uncertain if audiences would accept music playing on the soundtrack as if from thin air, so they found now-laughable ways to visually “explain” the music. Suppose a scene involves two lovers in the woods. It’s a romantic scene, so romantic music is playing. The scene might end, then, with the camera panning to the side to reveal a shepherd passing by while playing his flute, thereby explaining the twenty-piece orchestra you hear. Likewise, Ishmael and the anonymous Karamazov narrator raise more questions than answers, nevertheless they are the author’s way of saying “There now, this (fictional) story can be told, because someone (fictitiously) is present who witnessed it or at least heard it from someone else.” Readers need to suspend their disbelief the same way they do for a movie where someone hands uncounted bills to a store clerk or orders “whiskey” at a bar without specifying the type or label.

I doubt that any of this was on Emily Brontë’s mind when she wrote Wuthering Heights. She was probably just following precedent. The sisters’ juvenilia are rich with this sort of mimesis, imitating the magazines they read right down to the tables of contents, advertisements, and superfluous usage of “&c.” The model for the narrative format of Wuthering Heights was Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. John Lockwood is analogous to Robert Walton and Nelly Dean is analogous to Victor Frankenstein. Wildfell Hall follows more or less the same pattern.

The second argument to the Villain-Nelly theory goes that she facilitated some of the worst things that have happened in the book. There were many other characters doing the same: the lawyer Mr. Green, and a messenger boy of sorts passing letters back and forth between Cathy and Linton, to name just two. If Nelly had not been there, Heathcliff would have gotten help easily enough. But Nelly needed to be there for the story to happen, so Heathcliff kindly spared the author the effort of stacking on even more throw-away characters, by employing Nelly in his mischief. I admit that Nelly made some poor choices. But “choice” is a variable quantity, not a binary quality. Heathcliff was the instigator, and Nelly had to choose between a rock and a hard place. Who thinks it was more her fault than Heathcliff’s when she did his bidding under extreme duress? How many books does one have to read, how many Byronic heroes does one have to sympathize with, how drunk on ART does one have to be, before a reader can no longer discern that Heathcliff is immensely more at fault than Nelly?

If anything, Nelly was the hero of the story. In a rare moment of comic relief from the author, Lockwood swallowed a Nope™ pill and hightailed it out of there the second he realized what kind of people he was getting involved with. Nelly, being neither a relative nor the object of Heathcliff’s hatred, was no more tied down than Lockwood was, and could have done the same, finding a situation somewhere else. But she remained, because she clearly cared about these people, even those whom she tended to judge too harshly. All of her choices, good or bad, were motivated out of concern for the family she served, especially the two Cathys (though she insisted she disliked the elder one), and she made her choices with a heavy dose of pragmatism. She made judgment calls on some dilemmas that maybe she ought to have brought to Edgar’s attention, and she occasionally made the wrong choice. So she’s human. But she isn’t a villain.

Deconstructing Emily’s Deconstruction

Emily Brontë was a Druid Priestess—No no, that’s not quite right, how’s this? She was a Celtic Bard—No-no-no-wait, I got one better than that: She was a Wild Mystic of the Moors…

How tempting it is to romanticize about an author, even though we all have imaginations which bear no resemblance to our day-to-day lives and personalities. This temptation is more acute with authors who have left behind as small a paper trail as Emily Brontë has. Her biography must necessarily either be short or be dishonest. Besides a couple terse letters and some once-every-four-years “diary papers,” all we really have for evidence are remarks about her—to the public or to each other—from people who had interacted with her personally. Charlotte Brontë’s “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” a preface for new editions of Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights shortly after her sisters’ deaths, is the most famous—and unfairly, the most infamous—example of this. It is also the most exemplary, since other witnesses’ accounts mostly neither contradict nor embellish it. Basically, Emily was a homebody who didn’t like to talk to strangers, or as some witnesses saw it, she was just plain unsocial. So she was like me, but with better talent and worse health. Some may find that eccentric, but it falls easily within the bell curve of normal humanity.

And yet people refuse to believe that the author of a book like Wuthering Heights could be so…well, prosaic. Poor Charlotte Brontë has been downright vilified in the twentieth century over her “Notice.” Was she telling the truth? No one knows. However it is testimony from Emily’s own sister, mostly corroborated by all others who knew her personally. Yet people start with the assumption that Charlotte was lying. They suspect a cover-up: Charlotte is concealing Emily’s heathen wildness, to make her more palatable to the narrow-minded bourgeois readers of Victorian society. Or they do believe Charlotte’s “Notice,” but they believe a grossly overstated version of it, thinking Emily was the crazy cat lady of literary geniuses. Or they say Charlotte was mythologizing by characterizing Emily as shy and vulnerable, therefore setting her own self up as the glorious protector. Or they pretend, as this guy does, like they can psychoanalyze someone they have never met, who has been dead for more than a century and a half, and whose society was too removed from today’s for us assess any kind of spectrum to compare her against.

Now who’s really doing the mythologizing? The problem with all these theories is that they use evidence which does not exist to contradict evidence which does exist. You would think people are more logical than that, especially since by “people” I mostly mean scholars. But (1) literati and biographers constitute the least rational and most hero-worshipping of all scholars, making them the most vulnerable to fallacy; and (2) there are four powerful fallacies at play.

Fallacy 1: “Prove me wrong”: This is more formally known by a less self-explanatory name, “appeal to ignorance.” If you truly want to believe something which has no evidence to support it, tell the naysayers that their contradicting evidence is not a “smoking gun.” More often than not, this is correct, making a bad theory difficult to refute. Even greater difficulty lies in refuting a theorist who obstinately insists on a burden of disproof rather than of proof…nobody likes to argue with a mule.

Fallacy 2: Appeal to Sensationalism: This is technically not a fallacy; it’s a bias, a natural revulsion most of us have towards what I call the “disappointment principle”: Real life is such a letdown that a mystery’s correct solution is probably the most boring one. In his Principia, Isaac Newton guarded against this bias with his first rule of philosophical reasoning, basically “don’t overcomplicate your theory.” While I am on topic, I would like to go on record saying that the pyramids of Egypt were not built using acoustic levitation, no photograph you show me can prove that time travel exists, and the Stonecutters did not make Steve Guttenberg a star. There is no evidence to merit even investigating these things. People cannot accept the boring truth, so they invent a more excitingfootnote 5 theory and grasp at clues to support it.

Fallacy 3: Psychometric Reading: This is similar to the “appeal to fiction” fallacy, but it’s a little different. Emily Brontë’s poems and novel do not count as evidence about her life or personality, but people believe it does. Kyle Kallgren lampooned this idea in a video essay with a thought experiment: He sketched a speculative biography of Roland Emerich, using only Emerich’s Independence Day as a source. Naturally the biography was completely wrong, and that’s the point. You have only to take a moment to scan through the pre-1850 reviews of the Brontë sisters’ books—reviews written before the sisters’ identities were revealed—to see how absurdly wrong many of the reviewers were at guessing the gender, number of people, and work distribution of “Bell & co.” Edwin P. Whipple, for example, believed that while there were multiple “Bells,” one specifically was “the author of Wuthering Heights, The Tennant of Wildfell Hall, and, if we mistake not, of certain offensive but powerful portions of Jane Eyre.” Literary scholars who think they can glean real biographical history from fictional words are like psychics who claim that they can recall the “memory” of an inanimate object simply by holding it. A work of fiction, no matter how autobiographically inspired it may have been, is not an author’s token-object.

Fallacy 4: The Other Holmesian Fallacy: Sherlock Holmes is given one piece of evidence, and out of the many things it may portend, he deduces the most likely. From that deduction, he repeats this step, over and over again, until there are four or five degrees of separation between the evidence and his final conclusion. In real life, he would have a one-in-a-million chance of still being right; but in the stories, he is always right. Don’t get me wrong, I love Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories as much as anybody, but they cheat big time. Literary scholars repeat Doyle’s fallacy. They are so used to the practice of close reading with fiction that they do the same for everything else, for example with the Brontës’ letters to Ellen Nussey or George Smith, which more often than not merely talk business. (Maynard Solomon’s close reading of Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved” letter is a more egregious example.) By excessively reading between the lines, they draw conclusions out of thin air. I pointed out in an earlier post how treacherous critical reading is for more academically rigorous historians.

Since this is turning into a rant, you may be wondering why it bothers me so much.

Ha! It doesn’t! Joke’s on you!

Now for a confession: I actually really like a certain mythologized version of Emily Brontë. When I read her novel and poems, I see her the way Sinéad O’Connor portrayed her in Peter Kosminsky’s Wuthering Heights from 1992: a mysterious, melancholy, hooded poetess wandering the moors, exploring ruins of ancient manor houses, and gleaning narratives from their crumbling walls. But I never forget that it is a myth.

Footnotes and Rants

FN 1. ^ No, I do not believe that literary critics—or anyone else for that matter—are lizard people. Shame on this world that I actually have to make such a disclaimer!

FN 2. ^ Academics, especially in the field of postwar classical music, tend to forget this and push mediocre institutional art onto us plebes, using all kinds of sophisticated theory to explain why it’s any good. The problem is, many “artists” are well schooled in theory yet have no talent for human expression through their chosen medium.

FN 3. ^ To illustrate this a little better, I have to abuse poor Cormac McCarthy a little more, but I promise you I really do like many of his books. In an interview, he disparaged Marcel Proust, who “doesn’t deal with issues of life and death.” If that is true, McCarthy is the wrong person to say so. His way of dealing with “issues of life and death” is merely to have a high body count; the same could be said of a mindless action movie like John Wick. Moreover, although I have only read the first half of Proust’s first volume, that was enough to know that McCarthy was wrong. How is it not about life and death! The English title of Proust’s magnum opus is In Search of Lost Time. How can the words “lost time” not trigger some thought—at the very least subconsciously—of our own mortality? Indirection is a fundamental element of poetry, and I find just the title of Proust’s novel to be more hauntingly about life and death than all the content of most McCarthy books I have read. As a concession to McCarthy, his overlooked Border Trilogy hits closer to the mark. His Blood Meridian is an overhyped Itchy and Scratchy cartoon but without the funny.

FN 4. ^ Jane’s virtue was also supplemented by the power of self-discipline, which she acquired at Lowood; however I don’t know how to put it briefly and parenthetically a the sentence without making it sound sadistic. It isn’t, though. Movie adaptations get this wrong about Lowood. Jane actually favored the school. It was her escape from Gateshead, where she was being punished for merely existing, in ways that were too arbitrary for her to “correct” herself to improve her situation. Life at Lowood was spartan and harsh, but there was method to it. It was at Lowood, partly due to their strict program and partly due to Helen Burns’s stoic example, that Jane learned the self-control she needed to get ahead there, and which she could then use as a tool throughout the remainder of her life. This self-discipline was liberating, not stifling; if it were the latter, then she would have beat herself down until she married St. John and went with him to India. It was quirky too, bootcamp-like; it manifest itself frequently enough that I consider it one of adult Jane’s personality traits. One sad-but-humorous example was her methodical way of combatting delusions over her chances with Rochester, by drawing portraits of Blanche Ingram and herself, the former flattering and the latter brutally honest, to keep for routine inspection and comparison. This has the same spirit as Bart Simpson’s “write it a hundred times” punishment that he repeats at the start of every Simpsons episode.

FN 5. ^ I should put “exciting” in quotes, because in the archaeological example I just gave, the ingenious methods that experts use to find out the truth—archaeological, radiological, geological, and more recently, genetic—are exciting enough. Crying “aliens” or “ancient advanced technology” to answer every mystery of antiquity is not just poor logic…it’s boring, too.

Rant 1. ^ Here I need to digress briefly about Byronic heroes. The Romantics expect me to pity these drama queens in spite of all the collateral damage they cause, because they are so passionate and feeling. But Emily Brontë’s own sisters call that notion out in their novels: It’s the collateral damage—those expendable Ophelias—who truly have the passion and feeling, only they do not selfishly hog all the attention. (Maybe Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are better suited to this analogy than Ophelia, who at least got some recognition from the bigger egos around her.) Byronic heroes have always reflected poorly on the Late Romantics who advocated them. Before you defend Lord Byron’s writing, consider that the technical writing of his non-poet, very non-Byronic daughter, Ada Lovelace, was way more interesting.

Rant 2. ^ Bloom’s entire pedagogy was based on the notion that a teacher should be as nebulous and unclear as possible; so even though he has written many books on the subject, do not expect him to clarify what “sublime” even means. He never defined his own terms as he used them, except in relation to other terms that also need defining. When I discovered Bloom, I first thought he was using trade jargon, which assumes the reader already knows the word’s clarifying context. Fair enough, so I got a dictionary of literary theory. But I was mistaken. Bloom simply spoke his own language, different even from that of his colleagues, and he expected his students to learn it in addition to the subject he was teaching—a practice that I find narcissistic. Nevertheless, he did get me to buy that glossary of trade jargon, which is more useful anyway.