The Love Song of Emily Brontë, or Halloween With Heathcliff and Cathy
By Stuart Mitchner
The portrait of Emily is by her brother Branwell, as restored by Michael Armitage. It was originally painted around 1833-34 when she would have been 15 or 16. It is on view in The National Portrait Gallery, London.
Imagine a neighborhood dominated by bookish types who costume their children in the garb of their dark favorites every Halloween. Not for them the everyday Draculas, Darth Vaders, Freddy Krugers, and Norman Bateses. No, this is the domain of wee Lady Macbeths and Crookback Richards.
Hartley and Derwent, the twin sons of a Coleridge scholar, would go as The Ancient Mariner and the Albatross. The Miltonist down the block would slap a pair of satanic wings on his Johnny, while the Mary Shelley purist next door would send the Creature toddling into the October night, perhaps borrowing some ideas from Showtime’s Penny Dreadful. The married Americanists in the Cape Cod on the corner would answer with a pint-sized Captain Ahab.
Imagining Heathcliff
This Halloween fantasy came about when I was pondering the challenge of costuming Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff for Halloween, the problem being that most people know him as a brooding romantic hero type played by the likes of Laurence Olivier, Timothy Dalton, and Ralph Fiennes, or they associate the name, worse yet, with the wisecracking cartoon cat whose real-life alter ego wouldn’t last a minute in the company of his brutal literary namesake. To fathom how far from the truth of Brontë’s Heathcliff these filmic adaptations have traveled, it’s necessary to comprehend the character in all his lurid Wuthering Heights glory. For Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the novel and character are one: it’s “a fiend of a book — an incredible monster,” with the action “laid in hell, — only it seems places and people have English names there.” Harold Bloom sees Emily Brontë’s monster of love as “a hero-villain” with “the sublimity of Captain Ahab and some of the darkened splendor of Milton’s Satan,” his passion for Cathy Earnshaw “so monumental and so destructive that it seems inadequate and imprecise to call it love.”
But love it is, a mad mystic relentless possessive-to-the-outer-limits passion. And just as Heathcliff is nothing like Olivier or Fiennes, Cathy, that wild woman of the moors “wailing for her demon lover” (a Victorian critic once termed Wuthering Heights “a kind of prose Kubla Khan, a nightmare of the superheated imagination”) has little in common with Merle Oberon or Juliette Binoche. In fact, Cathy is Heathcliff, as she can’t help exulting in the novel’s most quoted line, and her creator is an elemental force, “a raven, not a dove,” according to Emily’s elder sister Charlotte, who considered Heathcliff “a man’s shape inhabited by demon life, a ghoul.” Another piece of Halloween rhetoric comes by way of the appalled American who reviewed the novel when it appeared under Emily’s pen name Ellis Bell: “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.”
Emily Dying
While one early biographer painted a pre-Raphaelite picture of the dying 30-year-old Emily “sitting by the hearth and combing her long hair, till the comb falls from her fingers and falls into the grate,” the harrowing truth was delivered by Charlotte in a biographical notice: “Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity …. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a pain no words can render.”
Liberty
Referring to Emily’s homesickness as a 16-year-old student boarding at Mrs. Wooler’s school, Charlotte describes her sister’s love of the moors. “Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; — out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side, her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best-loved was — liberty. Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it she perished …. She had only been three months at school; and it was some years before the experiment of sending her from home was again ventured on.”
That venture came in February 1842 when Emily accompanied Charlotte to school in Brussels for six months, where their teacher saw genius in the younger sister “impaired only by her stubborn tenacity of will, which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned. She should have been a man — a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong, imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have given way but with life.”
But there was no “should have been a man” in someone who, like her Catherine, was Heathcliff, as she was Linton and Nelly and old Joseph and the animal life and the landscape of her domain.
Virginia and Emily
Writing of Wuthering Heights in The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf imagines Emily Brontë looking out upon “a world cleft into gigantic disorder” and feeling “within her the power to unite it in a book.” It is the “suggestion of power underlying the apparitions of human nature and lifting them up into the presence of greatness that gives the book its huge stature among other novels.” For Woolf, “no boy in literature has a more vivid existence” than Heathcliff while Catherine and the daughter she gives birth to as she dies “are the most lovable women in English fiction. It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparences with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.”
In Our Time
Imagining a healthier incarnation of the Brontë sisters in our time, I can see Anne and Charlotte holding their own in the book chat/book club/book tour universe, but less so Emily. Already a poet of great power, “stronger-than-a-man” Emily would have sought a more dynamic outlet for the residual power enlivening her creations, Cathy, mystic maid of the moors, and love’s monster Heathcliff. Why not turn her poems into songs, performing them herself?
Speaking of other media, the perennial challenge of filming Wuthering Heights is that forces as wild and deranged as Cathy and Heathcliff can’t be captured on film. Even the most inspired director and actors would be hard put to sustain the magic for the requisite two hours of image and incident and assorted characters. What is needed is something like a cry from the beyond, the equivalent of that “prose Kubla Khan,” for in its essence Wuthering Heights is a poem. As Woolf suggests “it was not enough for Emily Brontë to write a few lyrics, to utter a cry, to express a creed. In her poems she did this once and for all, and her poems will perhaps outlast her novel. But she was novelist as well as poet …. And so we reach these summits of emotion not by rant or rhapsody but by hearing a girl sing old songs to herself as she rocks in the branches of a tree.”
No wonder then that it took a singer and a song to bring the Cathy-rapping-the-window excitement of Wuthering Heights into the 20th century.
Kate Bush’s Cathy
Born, like Emily, on July 30, some 140 years later, Catherine “Kate” Bush, age 19, sits down at the piano on a full moon night in 1977 and composes, sings, and eventually records a song sung by Cathy’s passionate spirit. It’s delirious, ghostly music, full of swirling movement, it comes at you with word-clusters “too hot, too greedy,” “hated you, loved you,” “bad dreams in the night,” of “windy moors,” of a voice crying “Heathcliff, it’s me, Cathy, I’m so cold, let me in your window.”
“I loved writing it,” says Bush, whose first glimpse of the tale came with the closing minutes of a BBC production of Wuthering Heights. After reading the book, “I thought the story was so strong. This young girl in an era when the female role was so inferior and she was coming out with this passionate, heavy stuff …. It was a real challenge to precis the whole mood of a book into such a short piece of prose. Also when I was a child I was always called Cathy not Kate and I just found myself able to relate to her as a character. It’s so important to put yourself in the role of the person in a song. There’s no half measures. When I sing that song I am Cathy.”
Sung by a Ghost
The people at EMI didn’t want “Wuthering Heights” to be the unknown singer’s debut single. A song based on a work of literature? A song about possession sung by a demonic spirit? As Lucasta Miller puts it in The Brontë Myth, this “unearthly single” was sung “in a freakishly high soprano.” Some listeners found it terrifying, others found it hard to listen to.
The original release date, between All Hallow’s Eve and Guy Fawkes Day 1977, was postponed to January 1978. Go figure. What better timing for a song sung by a ghost than the Halloween season?
Whatever the release issues were, a few weeks after it came out, Kate Bush’s distillation of Emily Brontë topped the U.K. singles chart and remains high in lists of the top British singles of all time.
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