‘Addresses from the Land of the dead’: Emily Bronte and Shelley By Patsy Stoneman.

‘Addresses from the Land of the

dead’: Emily Bronte and Shelley

By Patsy Stoneman

Percy Bysshe Shelley influence Emily Bronte?

• Note that Emily and Shelley often used the idea of ‘Twin Soul’ and can be seen as a link between Wuthering Heights and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Epipsychidion.

• This idea of ‘Twin Soul’ is linked with ‘Free-love’. Shelley uses his love for Emilia as an example, where he wishes that she could exist in conjunction with his wife Mary. Mary and Emilia accept this concept whereas Heathcliff and Edgar refuse to do this for Catherine in Wuthering Heights. Catherine’s ghost (being heartbroken) is left begging to enter W.H. and her memory lives on as a motivation for revenge.

Shelley and Emily Bronte:

“We have seen that [Emily] and Anne Read ‘Epipsychidion’, in which the

surprising addresses to ‘Emily’ refer to Aemilia Viviani. To Emily Bronte, they may have sounded the direct

addresses from the land of the dead.” (Edward Chitham, A Life of Emily

Bronte, pp.133-4)


“…several critics who have argued that Emily Bronte was influenced by the

writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and particularly his poem, Epipsychidion…”

• Percy being an atheist had strong views on religion, politics and was in opposition to war-mongering. He rebelled against the “convention of marriage”. Essay explores how Percy’s views may have influenced Emily.

Epipsychidion: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1886.html This site links to the whole poem and the poem is the focal point of this essay and its connections between Emily’s writing and her influence by Percy Shelley. There are obvious connections between Wuthering Heights and Epipsychidion. •Focuses on how a focal part of Shelley’s life influenced Emily’s Wuthering Heights, this is the concept of ‘free love’

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1886.html

Excerpt from poem: In one another's substance finding food,Like flames too pure and light and unimbu'dTo nourish their bright lives with baser prey,Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:One hope within two wills, one will beneathTwo overshadowing minds, one life, one death,One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,And one annihilation. Woe is me!The winged words on which my soul would pierceInto the height of Love's rare Universe,Are chains of lead around its flight of fire--I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!

Background info on Shelley:

“…Harriet Shelley committed suicide and Mary became Mary Shelley.

During this time, Mary was working on her early novel Frankenstein,

which contains a scarcely concealed criticism of Shelley’s early obsessions with electrical

experiments, ghosts, charnel houses and the pursuit of extremes…”

Background info on Shelley: • Eldest of six children, telling gothic,

scientific and terrifying stories to his four younger sisters. He hated the authoritarian outlook of his school Eton and was expelled from Oxford for being an Atheist.

• 1819- wrote The Mask of Anarchy, Prometheus Unbound and Ode to the West Wind.

Background info on Shelley:• 1821- he became obsessed with

Emilia Viviani (19 year old Italian girl) and made her a poem title Epipsychidion, some take it to mean “a song to the soul outside the soul.” Declaring them as ‘Twin-souls.’

• Shelley was seen as unorthodox and was an advocate for a non-violent revolution. He lived with a woman who was not his wife and was in the constant company of younger women.

Background info on Shelley:• Shelley had a tarnished reputation and is

compared to his rival whom was also his friend, Lord Byron.

“…While exile had brought Byron fame and literary obscurity and personal disrepute.”

• Shelley-Emily connection is explored in depth by Edward Chitham within Bronte Society transactions (1978), Bronte facts and Bronte Problems co-author Tom Winnifrith (1983) and lastly in the biography he wrote about Emily Bronte (1987)

Background info on Shelley:

• Emily may have encountered Shelley’s works in her early teenage years, whether or not this is true Chitham has claimed that Shelley's life and death made an impression upon Emily. She was at the young age of four when he passed.

“The excitement of these events was, however, crucially reinforced for Emily by the attraction of his ideas and images- his hatred of tyrants and

prisons, his impatience with forms of conventions, his love of the imagination and his

pursuit of extremes of experience.”


• John Hewish is a critic that compared Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind with Emily Bronte’s poem Aye, There it is!

• Mary Visick’s novel The Genesis of ‘Wuthering Heights’ idea of oneness of universal sprit and that universal feeling with another human being.

• Wuthering Heights compared to “No Coward soul is mine”


“‘No coward Soul is mine.’ Because the poem refers to a spirit of life in terms so

similar to those in which Catherine refers to Heathcliff, Visick argues that the relationship between Catherine and

Heathcliff should be read as a metaphor for ‘a communion of the individual beign

with vitality itself’” (Visick p.41)

No Coward Soul is Mine

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/262.html, This site for the poem by Emily Bronte. Wuthering Heights. •Visick talks about ‘social position’ and its correspondence with ‘romantic love.’ Falling in love with someone who is not marriageable and who are outside the social structure. Romantic is with a capital R as it is tragic by nature and therefore love is more like a dream, such as Emilia Viviani and Shelley.

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/262.html

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/262.html


• Compare “No coward soul is mine” to the passage from Wuthering Heights (Chpt 9). Where Catherine proclaims her love for Heathcliff “ kind of manifesto declaration of her love.”

• Important that people see that:“Catherine betrays what amounts to a

mystical vocation, for social positions and romantic love.” (Visick p.9)


• Psychoanalysts see this type of love as an attempt to recreate a childhood and its securities whereby:“The gaze of a mother or sibling reflects back one’s own sense of existence and

importance. It is thus interesting that Shelley’s childhood was spent in the

company of four adoring younger sisters…”

Connections between W.H. and Epipsychidion:

• Catherine and Heathcliff were brought up as being a brother and sister. Shelley writes of Emilia line 45: “would we two had been twins of the same mother.”

• The image is likened to the myth Narcissus (died for his reflection of himself in a pool). This is seen as a regressive type of love that fails to see the social integration but can only see an escape from everyday life (sometimes through death). Laon and Cythna, two of Shelley's characters die together than reunite in a “visionary heaven”


• Wuthering Heights Chapter 9 pp. 81-2 is very similar to Epipsychidion’s Lines 407-15 and lines 573-91) The ideas regarding “oneness” of the soul is seen in the characters Catherine and Heathcliff most notably where she proclaims to Nelly:“Nelly I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my

mind…but as my own being.” • It is compared to lines from Epipsychidion such

as: “We shall become the same we shall be one…In

one another’s substance finding food…”


“One remarkable thing about Shelley’s notion of ‘oneness’, however, is that despite its

extravagant expression, it is not conceived as exclusive. His impassioned expressions of

oneness with Emilia – whom he calls ‘Emily’- includes a wish to assimilate her into his existing

relation with Mary.” • This is likened to Emily Bronte's character

Catherine, who wishes to ‘assimilate’ Heathcliff into her marriage with Edgar (can link this to Epipsychidion’s lines 41-52)


• Some critics liken the character Catherine to Shelley, as she tries to keep both Heathcliff and Edgar as her husband and her lover.

• Arnold Kettle in Introduction to the English Novel:

“Kid's] herself that she can keep them both” (p.225)


• Q.D. Leavis comments on Catherine's idea of being able to enjoy being a wife and having a lover on the side:

“That she would be able both to have her cake and eat it [is] a childish fallacy.”

• Edward Chitham:“critics who suppose that Emily allows Cathy to reject Edgar in favour of Heathcliff, or vice versa, have not read carefully enough. Cathy intends, in different ways, to love both; Emily obtained this

idea from Shelley.”


• Wuthering Heights is argued to relate closely to Epipsychidion, regarding this idea of ‘twin-soul’ and ‘free-love’

• Patsy argues that the idea arose from Shelley and that it is a tension present throughout the novel.

• Epipsidichion lines 149-73, this passage is infamous for talking about unconventional sexual experiments.


“Yet, just as Shelley’s declaration of oneness with Emily is placed in the context of his

existing relationship with Mary, so Catherine’s declaration of oneness with Heathcliff is prompted by her decision to

marry Edgar.” • Patsy argues that Catherine’s inability to

express what she means when talking of her love for Heathcliff shows that Catherine is struggling to keep both Heathcliff and Edgar.


• Shelley’s notion of identity in terms of love is that it is external to the normal social conventions. When Catherine is expressing how she and Heathcliff are essentially one, she talks of how Edgar and her relationship is different to that of hers with Heathcliff.


• The idea of free love was a different case for women as:“Men have always been more ‘free’ in this respect, and feminists were quick to point

out that Shelley’s practice of ‘free love’ left the women holding the babies. For a

woman to have more than one lover, however, challenges the normal

expectation that a man should be able to identify with his offspring with certainty.”

• This is evident with Wuthering Heights as Catherine desires to be with Edgar and Heathcliff yet is denied this by the men.


• Heathcliff uses young Cathy, Hareton and young Linton as objects where he can vent his frustrations unable to identify with them (Linton because he is a product of Isabella and his “love” , therefore because she is Edgar’s sister he cannot feel affection for Linton.) “In Wuthering Heights, it is impossible to say

whether Catherine has, or intends to had, a sexual relation with Heathcliff. What is certain, however, is that Catherine never achieves the kind of Ménage a trois which Shelley had with Mary and Claire, because the men would not

tolerate it.”


• Catherine’s idea about “childish” as they do not consider of the male and his traditional reaction. Catherine's expectations are in direct contrast to the men within Wuthering Heights. Upon Heathcliff’s return Catherine has already married Edgar. Catherine is ecstatic about the return of Heathcliff, though the men do not share in this response: “It is the men who refuse to co-operate, and Edgar who states the ultimatum: ‘Will you give up Heathcliff hereafter, or will you give up me? It is impossible for you to be my friend and his at the same time; and I absolutely require to

know which you choose’ (p.118)”


“…Catherine is bewildered by their refusal to share her attention. Even on her death-bed, she insists that ‘You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff! And you both come to bewail the deed to me, as if you were the

people to be pitied.’ (p.158)• Catherine’s ghost begs to be let into W.H.

and yet Heathcliff has to beg for Catherine to enter W.H. This is due to that fact that even after Catherine dies Heathcliff does not focus upon his love for Catherine rather he is vengeful and spiteful toward Edgar.


• When Catherine is pleading to be let into the window of W.H., Patsy takes it as meaning a plea for Heathcliff to be open-hearted and block out is vengeful nature

• The observation that Heathcliff makes of young Cathy with Hareton (whom are argued to be yet another object of revenge for Heathcliff) that they are in love and both bare a striking resemblance to Older Catherine (therefore he is essentially vengeful toward Catherine.)

• In giving up this constant need for revenge he “…dispels ‘anguish’ (p.331), and its is his

‘soul’s-bliss’ which ‘kills [his] body’”


• Wuthering Heights Is the remnants of a experiment of Emily’s in reversing the roles of genders within Shelley’s concept of free love.

“…the shepherd boy sees ‘Heathcliff and a woman’ (p.336) walking on the moors, but Lockwood looks at the graveyard…’How

anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for sleeper in that quiet earth.’ (p.338)

Lockwood’s sleepers, however, are not exactly the same as the boy’s ‘walkers’…we know that

Catherine in the middle, wears a locket in which Nelly had twisted the hair of both Edgar

and Heathcliff.”

‘Addresses from the Land of the dead’: Emily Bronte and Shelley By Patsy Stoneman.

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