{"id":1474,"date":"2018-08-01T08:31:06","date_gmt":"2018-08-01T07:31:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/?p=1474"},"modified":"2018-11-09T15:09:57","modified_gmt":"2018-11-09T15:09:57","slug":"emily-brontes-fierce-flawed-women-not-your-usual-gothic-female-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/2018\/08\/01\/emily-brontes-fierce-flawed-women-not-your-usual-gothic-female-characters\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s fierce, flawed women"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Clare Pettitt<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture, King’s College London<\/p>\n

Domestic violence, alcoholism, child abuse, neglect, sexual obsession and torture: Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s<\/a> 1847 novel Wuthering Heights<\/a> is nothing if not graphic in its depiction of the messy, frightening and chaotic lives of unhappy families. No wonder critics at the time were repelled by its \u201cshocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity\u201d and its \u201cdetails of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance.” But the women in the novel, trapped in these toxic, inter-generational cycles of abuse, are not passive but remain resolute and resistant.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether it is right or advisable to create things like Heathcliff<\/a>, I do not know,\u201d wrote Charlotte Bront\u00eb<\/a> in her apologetic preface to the 1850 posthumous edition of her sister\u2019s novel. But despite her misgivings, Heathcliff remains one of the most memorable and enduring characters in Victorian literature.<\/p>\n

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The boy adopted by the Earnshaws as a gypsy child grows up to hang his fianc\u00e9e\u2019s dog. He refuses a nurse or doctor to his dying son \u2013 crying: \u201cLock him up and leave him.\u201d And he frequently assaults and threatens others \u2013 \u201cI\u2019ll crush his ribs in like a rotten hazel-nut\u201d he says of Edgar Linton. Later he also threatens to rip out his wife Isabella’s fingernails and digs up his great love Catherine Earnshaw\u2019s coffin with necrophiliac fervour.<\/p>\n

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The ruins of Top Withens on Haworth Moor, scene of the fictional Wuthering Heights. Photo \u00a9 Shutterstock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Bront\u00eb\u2019s description of a fight between Heathcliff and Hindley, Catherine Earnshaw\u2019s elder brother, who has just tried to shoot him, the choreography is cool and exact:\u00a0“The knife, in springing back, closed into its owner\u2019s wrist. Heathcliff pulled it away by main force, slitting up the flesh as it passed on\u2026 His adversary had fallen senseless with excessive pain and the flow of blood that gushed from an artery or a large vein. The ruffian kicked and trampled on him, and dashed his head repeatedly against the flags.”<\/p>\n

Charlotte Bront\u00eb\u2019s preface famously excuses the book as the “rugged\u201d outpouring of her sister\u2019s untutored imagination as a \u201cnursling of the moors\u201d and suggests that Heathcliff is the focus of all the villainy in the book.<\/p>\n

But Heathcliff is not the only perpetrator of violence and abuse in a novel which bristles with attacks and injuries, both mental and physical…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n