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Emily Brontë's Interrogations of Death

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Emily Brontë's Interrogations of Death University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository English Language and Literature ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Summer 7-13-2018 “ENOUGH OF THOUGHT, PHILOSOPHER!”: EMILY BRONTË’S INTERROGATIONS OF DEATH Katherine Marie Alexander University of New Mexico - Main Campus Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Alexander, Katherine Marie. "“ENOUGH OF THOUGHT, PHILOSOPHER!”: EMILY BRONTË’S INTERROGATIONS OF DEATH." (2018). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/235 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Language and Literature ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Katherine Marie Alexander Candidate English Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Gail Turley Houston, Chairperson Gary Harrison Aeron Haynie Carolyn J. Woodward i “ENOUGH OF THOUGHT, PHILOSOPHER!”: EMILY BRONTË’S INTERROGATIONS OF DEATH BY KATHERINE MARIE ALEXANDER Bachelor of Arts, Music, University of New Mexico, 2003 Master of Music, University of New Mexico, 2005 Master of Arts, English, University of New Mexico, 2009 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July, 2018 ii DEDICATION For my parents, my children, and my grandson My father Raymond is remembered as a “Steward of the Soil,” poet, and a man of wisdom, while my mother Marion is known for her great contributions as a teacher and innovator in education with a focus on children with special needs. My son Raymond David is an artist who works in multiple media in his renditions of people and places, and my daughter Michelle is a linguist, educator, and performing artist in both song and dance. Grandson Levi’s story is yet to be told. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to my studies with Professor Gail Turley Houston, preeminent Victorian scholar and former chair of the Department of English, I have been fortunate to expand my perspectives on both the literary and philosophical dimensions of Emily Brontë. Without Dr. Houston’s erudite insights and guidance, this study would not have reached completion. I wish also to acknowledge other faculty members from the Department of English Language and Literature at The University of New Mexico who provided invaluable advice. Included are Romanticism scholar and Professor of English, Gary Harrison, Carolyn Woodward, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century scholar and Director of British/Irish Studies, and Aeron Haynie, Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Victorian specialist. All provided invaluable advice. I gratefully acknowledge Sarah Laycock and Ann Dinsdale of the Brontë Parsonage Library in Haworth for the advice and assistance provided in my research of the Brontë archival material housed there. Another special acknowledgment is in order for the Joseph C. Gallagher Foundation in appreciation for grant awards providing for several research trips to Ireland to recover Irish connections of the Brontë family. While in Dublin at the National Library of Ireland and at The McClay Library at Queen’s University in Belfast, I gathered useful material supporting Irish folkloric inspiration for the multifaceted oeuvre of Emily Brontë. I extend my gratititude to the library staff at both locations for their help. Carolyn Black of the Brontë Homeland Interpretative Centre in Drumballyroney, Northern Ireland provided a plethora of anecdotal material about the Brontës in Ireland. Sources housed at University of New Mexico Libraries have also proven invaluable. I offer iv gratitude to the librarians and staff there and to all who provided guidance in the creation of this study. Finally, an emphatic thank you to the moors, on whose rolling hills I walked, and Emily Jane Brontë, whose spirit continues to wander there. v “ENOUGH OF THOUGHT, PHILOSOPHER!”: EMILY BRONTË’S INTERROGATIONS OF DEATH By KATHERINE MARIE ALEXANDER Bachelor of Arts, Music, University of New Mexico, 2003 Master of Music, University of New Mexico, 2005 Master of Arts, English, University of New Mexico, 2009 Doctor of Philosophy, English, University of New Mexico, 2018 ABSTRACT The year 1847 marked the appearance of Wuthering Heights on the literary scene. Writing under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë soon became known as the “Sphynx (sic) of Literature” following the publication of the culminating masterpiece of her literary career. Although she was not a trained philosopher, her drawings, poems, letters, devoirs, and only novel offer an organic approach to philosophical matters, particularly in her engagements with the meanings of time and space and her interrogations of death. Surrounded by the pervasive presence of death from her earliest years and beyond, Brontë moved to rigorous interrogations of the afterlife in her writing beginning with explorations of the Bible and organized religion. Not finding answers there, she turned to Nature and the tenets of Stoicism that self-sufficiency, delayed fulfillment, and an afterlife in which the spirit is not restricted to an unfathomable heaven. Ultimately, she envisioned a world where any gap between the spatio- temporal and spiritual could be traversed thus eliminating the barriers between the vi two realms. The cosmos that Brontë constructs is an immanent space where any divine presence is manifested in the random workings of Nature. The wild moors behind the Haworth Parsonage represented this space, both literally and metaphorically. She often features windows to mark permeable barriers between two spaces and powerful storms to move her characters through time and space. Thus, a powerful storm on the moors transports Catherine Earnshaw, Brontë’s conflicted heroine of Wuthering Heights, from the afterlife back to her childhood home where she discovers a male visitor in her ontological space. When he shatters the window glass, she grasps the opportunity to intervene in her own story. This is the extraordinary event that sets the tone for the discussion that features major developments in Brontë’s intellectual and artistic journey as well as her protofeminist and protomodern contributions to literature. No scholar to date has examined the life and oeuvre of Emily Brontë in this manner. This study offers an enriching exploration of the powerful framework that she constructs in her philosophical interrogations of death. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures .............................................................................................................. ix Preface.......................................................................................................................... xi Editions .................................................................................................................... xxiii Emily Brontë Chronology ........................................................................................ xxiv Epigraph ................................................................................................................... xxvi Introduction – “Let me in—let me in!”: “An Endless Search” ..................................... 1 Chapter One – “How well my spirit knows the path / on which it ought to wend”: Early Explorations of Death, Religion, and Nature ........................................ 28 Chapter Two – “Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars”: Emily Brontë’s Poetic Revolution ....................................................................................................... 59 Chapter Three – “There cast my anchor of desire / Deep in unknown Eternity”: Studies of the Dimensions of Time and Space ............................................... 96 Chapter Four – “So this globe is the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth”: Ontological Articulations of Death in the Devoirs ....................................... 130 Chapter Five – “I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth”: Dimensions of Love and Death in Wuthering Heights ..................................................... 161 Conclusion – “Its over now Ive known it all / Ill hid it in my heart no more” ......... 201 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 204 viii List of Figures Figure 1.1. John Martin. The Deluge. Oil on Canvas. 1834. Yale Center for British Art. Paul Mellon Collection. New Haven, Connecticut............................................ 34 Figure 1.2. “Brontë Parsonage Cemetery.” Katherine Alexander. Photograph. July 2013. JPG. ................................................................................................................... 36 Figure 1.3. “Sampler.” Emily Brontë. March 1829. The Brontë Parsonage Museum. Haworth, England. ...................................................................................................... 38 Figure 1.4. Katherine Alexander. “Storm on the Moors.” Photograph. July 2013. JPG. ............................................................................................................................. 47 Figure 1.5. Emily Brontë. “Mullioned Window.” January 19, 1829. Pencil on paper. Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth.
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