Passion Without Boundaries
Re-experiencing the Brontë Sisters, Part Two
I am re-reading Wuthering Heights, and doing a slow study of the Bronte Sisters. I have decided to give myself no deadline and maintain personal permission to read whatever I please between my studies. (Part One to this little blog series I am attempting may be found here.) I learned long ago, when it comes to a blog series, not to force myself into a formulaic mold or dictate a strict schedule or I would set myself up to fail. I love my readers and want to respect their time and curiosity, but also, I write for me as a thinking process and this blog has been (over the years) a way to grow as a writer, a way to grow as an author, a way to grow as a human, and sometimes a way to pay an electricity bill. It hasn’t done that last bit in a long, long time, as I went un-monetized for nearly a decade, but once upon a time I did rely on my blog to keep on the lights.
Although I hadn’t picked up Wuthering Heights to read in quite some time, I had several copies in various editions on my personal shelves, none of which were the copy I read out of in high school or my early twenties. I have a tendency to donate things I’m not reading and acquire different copies with different editorial essays than the other editions, because I happen to enjoy reading essays. Even bad ones with bad takes I will find entertaining sometimes. This time I am reading out of The World’s Popular Classics Art-type Edition. They were inexpensive hardbacks made in the 1940s and 1950s, printed in New York, and mine has a little burgundy spine. I plucked it out of a library sale for $2. It used to belong to one Carolyn Coppock. She left her bookplate on the front endpapers. It opens with a 1930 Editor’s Introduction that discusses its uniqueness in literature, describing “the peculiar quality of its power.” (pg 7)
As an older adult, I am having a much harder time getting into Wuthering Heights. As a child and teen the intrigue for me was: Will this be a Human Redemption story? Or a Kill the Monster story? And it is, in fact, neither. (Or both?) Well, not in the expected way, at least. I remember loving it because it was neither and it managed to surprise me. I didn’t see the cautionary tale coming and I didn’t recognize the redemption arc for the secondary characters. As a child, I wanted the redemption story, the knowledge that everyone can be saved tucked neatly in my back pocket. As a teenager I was more of a cynic and wanted the monster vanquished and judgments doled out. As a forty-one year old, I’m just too tired for all these people. I don’t want anything to do with any of them… I don’t want to save them or slay them. I want to walk away, close the book, and read something else. For that reason, I have been camped out re-reading Wuthering Heights for nearly a month, when normally it would take me a few hours. I keep putting it down in annoyance rather than feeling the rush of curiosity I had when I read it for the first time. I keep ping-ponging away from the characters to see what others have to say about them in essays. An easy task because the author herself didn’t give us personal access to them, but told us the story through the gossip of several first person narrators, with varying levels of reliability. This writing tactic is equal parts annoying and clever.
“Not Nature, but Fate, seem to take the pen from the writer, and write for her,” H.W. Garrod states. Pinning down a “review” or even a “literary criticism” of Wuthering Heights that feels true and accurate is a struggle because the entire work feels feral, but it’s obviously a controlled feral, so you know there is a purpose if only you can step away from the roller coaster ride long enough to look at it clearly. The characters seem to fight against the pen itself, wriggling and writhing under the documentation of their actions. Perhaps that is why everyone focuses on the madness of the Brontës, even Currer Bell (the brother) touches upon Emily’s taste for the grotesque and praises Sidney Dobell for recognizing his sister’s ability to look into the human psyche, her desire to see things that are criminal as not necessarily rooted in evil. The sisters not only attacked “societal norms” (as so many critics say) but also seemed to have a complicated relationship with the literary tradition, flirting with it while attempting to disregard it. “Neither Emily nor Anne was learned; they had no thought of filling their pitchers at the well-spring of other minds; they always wrote from the impulse of Nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such stores of observation as their limited experience had enabled them to amass.” (pg 20)
The Editor’s Preface is also written by Currer Bell. There he discusses the wildness of the moors and the story. He warns the reader of the “perverted passion and passionate perversity.” He goes on to explain that “the single link that connects Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw–the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-implied esteem for Nelly Dean. These solitary trains omitted, we should say he was child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life–a Ghoul–an Afreet.” (pg 25) Indeed, the work itself is “swarming with ghosts and goblins!” despite no goblins or ghosts in the traditional sense being present, but simply grotesque carvings in the architecture, bitter swirls of wind, and intrusions in dreamscapes. In typical Gothic fashion, there is “atmospheric tumult” and hints at the black arts, while the moors (symbolizing hell, the wilderness, the damned, the otherworldly) intermingle with the depictions of the characters’ souls.
I tossed the book in a bag and abandoned it for a week or so while I laid out Geometry lessons in my mind. One of the hazards and joys of being a homeschool mom is having many ideas crashing around in your head at once. I love continuing my education by educating my children and was willing to abandon Wuthering Heights completely as something “been there, done that” in my life, but was spurred on by the atrocities of the new movie trailer, featuring Margot Robbie and various other actors, sticking their fingers in each other’s and their own mouths, I had to revisit this “greatest love story ever told.” (The algorithm has me all wrong on this point, because I keep seeing these ads on the internet and I do not want to be seeing these ads on the internet.) I needed to understand where the disconnect lay between the story I thought I read and the one being advertised, because to me Wuthering Heights is as much a love story as Romeo & Juliet. Making that comparison it how I figured out why so many people have conflicting reactions to Wuthering Heights.
I suppose it is time for me to clarify. My hot take on Romeo & Juliet is that it is equal parts cautionary tale and satire. Romeo & Juliet, I think Shakespeare is telling us, is what happens when two teenagers deep dive into feelings without restraint or wisdom: everybody dies.
Wuthering Heights reads the same way for me. Unbridled passions, “love” without boundaries, destroys everyone around you and leaves destruction in your wake. The only hope of redemption is for the future generations after you’re dead because your passions gave way to chaos. Wuthering Heights remains, for me, a cautionary tale. It’s not a romance at all, as good, truth, and beauty was never part of the Heathcliff and Catherine equation. Instead, Heathcliff and Catherine embody toxic power struggle dynamics, passion for the sake of passion, and the two being in remotely the same vicinity of each other makes everyone worse.
We see Catherine’s passion being set up for sinful rage in the first hundred pages as Catherine “never had the power to conceal her passion, it always set her whole complexion in a blaze.” (pg 96) It reminds me of Susanna Kaysen’s observations in Girl, Interrupted: “Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.” Catherine seems to enjoy her manic episodes and passionate rages and reminds me of my toddler who screamed at me mercilessly the other day because she wanted to wear her shirt on backwards. The character has bought the lie that feeling of any kind is what makes us alive, even if what we’re feeling and how we’re choosing to show that feeling to others, is leading us down the road to death.
Then we have Heathcliff, neither man nor monster, but for sure a monstrous man. “Heathcliff to me is a sort of sprite of the bergs, a cousin to Mary Shelly’s monster, a creature of the northern mists, a gnome,” Philip Larkin wrote to Monica Jones in 1955. Mary Shelly’s Monster was created. Beowulf’s Grendel simply was, Heathcliff, we could argue was both born monstrous and created to be more monstrous (“total depravity of man” theology plus abuse and ill treatment he received). Heathcliff is where the monster metaphor meets the psychological truth of human nature. Having re-read Count of Monte Cristo last year with my oldest daughter, I now see a lot of the similarities in the revenge stories. Both go away and return better educated and financially stable, but that education and financial gain combined with their anger becomes weaponized and ruthless. On page 130 on my edition, Heathcliff is described as “not a rough-diamond–a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.” As humans we want so badly for education and money to refine character, but character is refined by Jesus Christ, not worldly gains.
What makes the book worth reading is the redemption of the next generation. Despite Heathcliff’s abuse, the cycle was broken, generational curses do not have to exist. Human beings are free to choose the gift of peace. I’m not done re-reading the book, but I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel while recalling what I do remember of each character’s ending.
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“Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair, and depression.
Isn’t there some other way to look at this? After all, angst of these dimensions is a luxury item. You need to be well fed, clothes, and housed to have time for this much self-pity.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
Dracula
I walked my fifteen year old through Bram Stoker’s Dracula this October. I thought it would be a fun way for a ninth grader to celebrate Halloween. I also thought it would be a neat one to cover with my newly developing book club: The San Salvatore Book Club, primarily made up of my older mentors in my Baptist church. There were gasps of “Are you sure?” and polite “I think I’ll bow out of that one” to which I promptly said, “Why? It’s such a beautiful Christian allegory!”
Side note: I’ve been listening to the Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford for about two years now, caught up on most the episodes and sometimes use them to supplement my home school when I need to be doing something other than teaching literature. My number one complaint to my husband is, “they act like no one knows this and everyone knows this!” to which I am learning every day that, actually, no Angelina Stanford is right: not everyone knows this. I’m not always claiming to have the correct most perfect reads, but I have been shocked to learn I have been reading differently than mainstream society since childhood. So my Angelina Stanford grumbles have ceased now that I know she is operating from the experience of people genuinely not knowing about the material she shares and I’ve been operating under the experience of not sharing because I thought everyone knew. That being the case, my apologies if some of what I share simply sounds like it came from her podcast. It is unintentional, though, yes I listened to her Dracula episodes back in February to make sure when we discussed it in October, I would not have skipped over anything that I assumed “everyone already knew.”
While I was teaching Dracula, I realized I had never written about Dracula on my blog. My blog began, I think, during the height of the Twilight series and I spent so much time focusing on how we shouldn’t be romanticizing vampires with chests that sparkle and misplaced teenage angst, I forgot to write about the roots of vampire lore and my love for Stoker’s classic work, which is in fact a Christian medieval quest to kill a dragon disguised as a techno-thriller. I also realized that I don’t remember what of my essays, stories, and discussions over the years ended up in my journal or my blog, or was relegated only to bookstore employee discussions as we cleaned the store each night. I have spent years reading C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, all the classics, yet my blog is mainly limited to home school material and book reviews sent to me by authors and publishers. Therefore, as I begin to teach high school literature to my oldest, I imagine there is a lot of who we are as readers not documented on Anakalian Whims.
To read Dracula well, I think you need a foundation in Genesis, specifically 1:26-4:16. It’s important to read John 1 where the New Testament is clear that Jesus is the Word. It’s important to know a little bit about Jewish and Mesopotamian mythology regarding Lilith, who was a demon and seductress, the disordered first wife of Adam who feeds on children and relishes in child sacrifice as opposed to feeding and nurturing children from her own body as God designed. “Lilitu” was a “night monster.” In my teaching notes, I recommend re-reading the book of Revelation (so you can remember how the bible used imagery of dragons and oceans) and Beowulf. While reading Dracula, you might need to recall stories like Hansel & Gretel, Bluebeard, Homer’s The Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s easy to enjoy Stoker’s work without these tales fresh on your mind, but it might also be easy to fall victim to Freudian false interpretations if you’re not reading from the framework that Stoker was actually writing during the Gothic revival of the 1800’s. You’ll be limited to the Victorian techno-thriller, which is still awesome, and see all the wrong “imagery” of suppressed sex, which is inaccurate and not awesome.
You have to keep in mind the quote from Devendra Varma: “During the period when the forces of Christianity were nearly spent and materialism had dislodged spiritual values, the Gothic novelists planned their novels with an awareness of the Deity and the consequences of a just fate. The villains learn in due course that the wages of sin is death.”
With that in mind, we enter a world where the monster in the night is indeed an evil to be vanquished, not to be loved for his sparkly chest and undying devotion to trying to get the girl. Traditionally, the villain in these stories is a symbol for Satan, a metaphor for evil itself. We see these villains portrayed as witches, monsters, vampires, and werewolves, who modern literature is now conflating with handsome boys who just need more hugs. Since the dawn of time, human beings have suffered from an evil that must be conquered, and in Stoker’s Dracula we have a group of Christians on a quest to conquer that evil… the “Son of the Dragon” or “Son of the Devil” named Dracula. The best literature will always remind us that the ultimate battle is between the Dragon (the monster) and the Savior (Jesus), and the Savior has already won. That is exactly what makes Dracula one of the best pieces of literature. The monster is the problem, the monster is not the love interest. As C. S. Lewis said, “Who is the witch? The witch is Lilith. The witch is Circe. Every child is born knowing who the witch is.” As Angelina Stanford said, “The monster is not the wounded person, the monster is the [cause of the] wound.”
I don’t want to repeat all the information already available to the public for free on The Literary Life Podcast, but I do want to share some of my favorite parts of the novel that get my skin all tingly when I read them. I’ll try not to repeat too much of what they focus on in the podcast.
In chapter two, we walk through an octagonal room. In Babylonian culture, the eighth realm is the realm of the gods, a realm where for Christians, false gods, fallen angels, and demons congregate. Eight, therefore, is often considered a number affiliated with the occult. Charlemagne’s Aachen Cathedral, where his tomb resides, is an octagonal shape believed to be a mesh of where God meets the secular as it is a circle with straight lines and points. I ask my students what they think Stoker is trying to tell us by Harker walking through an octagonal room as he enters Dracula’s residence, just after a wild carriage ride that resembles a descent into Hades.
Later in this chapter, Dracula throws a mirror out the window. It is absolutely chilling as the mirror in medieval tradition is a symbol of divine truth. It doesn’t matter how many times I read Dracula, the Adversary both literally and figuratively throwing Divine Truth out the window gives me chills every time.
The setting of Whitby, which has a castle or abbey with an extensive graveyard by the sea sets itself up for so much intense imagery and meaning. We have our Gothic trope intermingled with the real history of the Synod of Whitby, where two traditions were ended. Meanwhile Dracula is asking Harker if a man of England can have two solicitors or more? Stoker is tossing around ideas of can man serve two masters? Who will man choose? Dracula is basically asking, how can I trick England into abandoning God and worshiping me? Whitby Harbour had a history of ships crashing, which will offer up opportunities for both Tempest and Rime of the Ancient Mariner allusions.
Stoker offers layer after layer of symbolism with the names and social positions of the characters as well. The podcast talks extensively about the roles of women in Victorian society and how Stoker played with Lucy being the “Light of the West” and “angel of the house” and Mina being the modern woman (I’m not sure if they covered the meaning of her name which sums up to be “Resolute Protection of the Lord”), but my favorite is actually the role of the men in this allegory. We have a fellowship of knights on a quest, all devoted to one woman (Mina), headed off to kill a dragon (Dracula), interwoven with Aristotle’s classical elements: Abraham Van Helsing, the professor (Merlin/ father figure, fire); Arthur Holmwood, the future Lord Gadalming (nobility whose name means “Of God-helm” in the Surrey Kingdom where there is a village called Thursley, near Hammer Pond and Thor’s Stone… King Arthur/ Thor, thunder, or air); John/ Jack Seward, whose name means “Guardian of the Sea,” is a doctor and scientist (a knight on our quest, water); Jonathan Harker, Mina’s husband whose name means “The Lord has Given” (earth); and our fifth man Quincey Morris, a cowboy from Texas (the fifth element) and (spoiler alert) our “Good boy. Brave boy. […] all man.”
From a book review standpoint, Dracula is hands-down a five star book. Above I shared my favorite pieces of a very complex allegory, but there’s so much more to it covered in the series of episodes of the Literary Life Podcast, and even more in my teaching notes, imagery that covers the Eucharist, Anti-Eucharist, Passover, John the Baptist and Anti-John the Baptist imagery. The story is one of wars to fight devils and ends on All Saint’s Day, celebrating rebirth in Christ and the achievement of Heaven. If you’re not seeing these metaphors for yourself when you read please go listen to the podcast episodes so that you can enjoy this beautiful work of fiction (and truth) for yourself.
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Anakalian Whims 