Dalbertisdarknature

Chapter 3 // UNPUBLISHED PAPER NOT FOR CITATION OR DISTRIBUTION Dark Nature: A Critical Return to Brontë Country Deirdre d’Albertis This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s heaven—and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us!1 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights So begins the tale of one of literature’s most self-regarding, critically obtuse narrators: Emily Brontë’s Lockwood invites readers of Wuthering Heights to share in his metropolitan traveler’s gaze as he familiarizes himself with Yorkshire and its inhabitants, strange and wild as they turn out to be. An outsider’s view of Brontë country as both “completely removed” and a “misanthropist’s heaven” has been reflected in critical commentary ever since the novel’s original publication in 1847. In her Editor’s Preface to the 1850 edition, Charlotte Brontë characterizes Wuthering Heights as “moorish, and 1 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (ed. Dunn), 3. Further references will be cited parenthetically. wild, and knotty as a root of heath.”2 The book, she suggests, shares aspects of the land that are hard to appreciate: what Lockwood refers to as “a beautiful country” would not have seemed so to many of his contemporaries.3 As Lucasta Miller points out, the now iconic landscape of the Yorkshire moors came into view only as reception of Brontë’s novel changed over time” (154). Elizabeth Gaskell opens her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) on a similar note: it was this hostile, nonhuman terrain that shaped the imaginative resources shared by the three Brontë sisters. Haworth, writes Gaskell, is situated against the “wild, bleak moors—grand, from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the feeling which they give of being pent-up by some monotonous and illimitable barrier, according to the mood of mind in which the spectator may be” (55). The moors paradoxically “suggest” a “feeling” both of being lost in too much space and of being intolerably hemmed in by the earth itself. Isolation and oppressive confinement in relation to this “illimitable barrier” are subject to the spectator’s “mood of the mind”; consciousness in (and of) the environment functions like a Möbius strip, contributing to the notorious unreliability of Brontë’s multiple narrators. This selfsame atmosphere of removal and desolation has the power to seduce. Lockwood insists on kinship with Heathcliff until events cause him to rethink easy identification with his landlord and his “bad nature” by the middle of chapter two (10). Just as quickly, readers of the novel begin to dissociate themselves from Lockwood and 2 [Charlotte Bronte], “Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights” (1850) qtd. in Wuthering Heights, ed. Dunn, 313. 3 See Susan Pyke’s lyrical approach to the “eco-divine” in Bronte’s writing of the moor as reimagined in latter-day interpretations by Anne Carson and Kathy Acker. his shallow romanticism: narcissistic and condescending, he is “incapable of appreciating things that are so important here” (McCarthy 50). “His gracelessness makes readers feel infinitely more comfortable” in a strange text about a strange land, observes Laura Gruber Godfrey, not least because “Lockwood embodies the worst qualities of the Victorian tourist” (6, 9). Learning precious little from the narrative he transmits, he rhapsodizes, “there is nothing more divine than those glens shut in by hills, and those bluff, bold swells of heath” and wonders in the final sentence, “how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (WH 233, 258). No reader could be as oblivious as the tenant of Thrushcross Grange—or so it would seem. Lockwood’s self-congratulatory, “misanthropist” reading practices, I want to suggest, far from being exceptional, point to persistent problems in interpreting Wuthering Heights and to the limits of what Timothy Morton has theorized as our own “ecological imaginary” (1). In this essay, I propose that we return to Brontë country and the harsh, unforgiving horizon of the moors as it appears in Wuthering Heights. Christopher Heywood has described the landscape in Wuthering Heights not as a detailed mapping of a “real” place but as a hybrid of locations in Yorkshire (Heywood 1998), coterminous with western, northern, and southern Pennine landscapes also found in Jane Eyre (Heywood 2001). It is this imaginary geography/topography that I refer to here as Brontë country. Countless readings have explored the expressionistic role of landscape in Wuthering Heights and indeed in all the novels of the Brontës.4 Yet this text is rarely if ever mentioned in literary ecocriticism or in cultural histories of the origins of environmentalism in nineteenth-century Britain.5 I am interested in pushing hard on that omission. As Charlotte Brontë’s Preface demonstrates, landscape or “setting” in the novel has been read in an explanatory or justificatory mode: harsh places create harsh people. Looking anew at Emily Brontë’s representation of inhospitable moorland, I want to reverse that equation. Discerning the “wild” or “animal” nature of not just a few but all of her human characters radically changes our understanding of earth as it is bodied forth in the novel. Focusing on humanity’s painful relationship to nature, I will draw on two recent, influential interventions in ecocriticism to limn Brontëan “Dark Nature”: theorist Tim Morton’s concept of Dark Ecology in Ecology without Nature: Rethinking 4 See for instance Jennifer Fuller’s “Seeking Wild Eyre: Victorian Attitudes towards Landscape and the Environment in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre,” and “Natural History and the Brontës” in The Oxford Companion to the Brontës (Alexander and Smith). 5 No mention, for instance, is made of Wuthering Heights in canonical works of environmental criticism in English Studies such as Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth (it is Austen and Hardy who appear alongside Clare, Wordsworth, and Keats among others) or Harriet Ritvo’s The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (which focuses on the romantic roots of the movement in the Thirlmere Defense Assocation). Nature and the environment are typically viewed either as backdrop to the events at Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange or as an opposing force to the cultural values exemplified by the Linton estate. Environmental Aesthetics (2009) and “Uncivilization,” a manifesto of the Dark Mountain Project begun by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine in 2009. Dark Nature as a concept stands resolutely apart from Lockwood’s anemic romanticism, refusing narrative shape and meaning in a novel structured to an obsessive degree around plotting and repetition.6 In Wuthering Heights nineteenth-century readers were affronted by not only its alien vision of “wild, bleak moors” but also by the unremitting brutality between and among humans and animals “all wildered like”(223), a vision that retains the power to unnerve and challenge us today. Violence, abjection, grief, and mourning are integral to this vision of Dark Nature. Bad Nature The tone in which the words were said revealed a genuine bad nature. I no longer felt incline to call Heathcliff a capital fellow. (10) Having nurtured a fantasy of fellowship with his saturnine neighbor, Lockwood returns after an unsettling initial visit to find himself trapped among the denizens of Wuthering Heights, forced by a winter storm to shelter for the night. Ill at ease in a house where it is possible to mistake “a heap of dead rabbits” for “an obscure cushion full of something like cats” (8), he becomes increasingly discomfited by the inhabitants’ speech (curses), behavior (clenched fists), and belligerent relations to one another (later referred to as “cat-and-dog combat” 25). Heathcliff’s unwillingness to provide a guide and indifference to his tenant’s plight eventually drives the outsider to risk “being discovered dead in a 6 See J. Hillis Miller, “Wuthering Heights: Repetition and the Uncanny.” bog, or in a pit full of snow” (13), striking out on his own in the blizzard, only to have the dogs set on him by a suspicious family retainer. Stranded at the Heights, Lockwood is bewildered, “lost in pathless places.”7 When a disgruntled “Mrs. Heathcliff” murmurs that “a man’s life is of more consequence than one evening’s neglect of the horses,” the narrator realizes that Heathcliff places more value on his draft animals than on his fellow man (14). Lockwood’s at first outraged and then terrorized response to his landlord’s obviously habitual brutality—the servant Zillah’s tepid reproach, “are we going to murder folks on our very door-stones?”(15) says it all—provides a suitable frame for the reader’s induction into the novel. Although no one wants actively to “murder” Lockwood, it is also true that no one will prevent him from perishing on the heath if it means defying the master of the house. Events unfold from this violation of Lockwood’s claim to special regard as a gentleman, a neighbor, and a human being. Closeted finally for the night in an old-fashioned paneled bed, Lockwood withdraws to the secret heart of the house: Zillah cautions him to be quiet, for Heathcliff would “never let anyone lodge there willingly” (15). In this most enclosed of spaces he discovers traces of writing left long ago by Catherine Earnshaw and he dreams her back into the phenomenal world. “The branches of a fir tree” beating on the window that forms the fourth side of this curiously self- contained bed/room are transmuted into the “fingers of a little, ice-cold hand” that seize upon his own, a revenant with the power to summon in Lockwood all the violent ruthlessness of his host.

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