Emily Brontë: Idolatrous Imagination
Ted Hughes (1979) wrote about the strengths and weaknesses of Sylvia Plath’s writing. He called her a “still-life graphic artist,” but she was apparently unable to “rearrange or see [the world] differently” (p. 12). Her genius lay in her powers of observation and articulation, but her imagination was lacking, according to Hughes. The Bell Jar (Plath, 2005) was autobiographical, with the names changed. Plath wrote what she knew better than anyone else, but she apparently couldn’t create worlds. She lamented this herself in the short story The Wishing Box (Plath, 1979). It concerns a woman who can’t dream, while her husband has fantastical dreams every night. She is eventually driven to suicide (pp. 48–55). Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had different skill-sets.
There are writers who can create worlds, who also possess the gift of observation. They act as historian and geographer to their own imagined countries. They are Hughes and Plath combined. Many writers have created a world over decades, starting in childhood.
Paracosms are different from other juvenilia or child’s fantasy play. Kristin Petrella (2009) wrote that paracosms are defined by their “longevity, secrecy, unity, and… control” (p. 84). They’re developed over years, without the intent to publish or share with others. The paracosmist author learns how to create a unified world and control all parts of it: “language… history, culture, geography, politics, military, and sometimes even deities” (ibid., p.3).
The Brontës’ father, Reverend Patrick Brontë, gifted Branwell a set of 12 toy wooden soldiers for his 9th birthday. Each Brontë sibling chose their favourite, named it, and used it in their games. Their play became stories. They wrote magazines in miniature, as if written by and for the toys. They created a history around them, as well as the geography, politics, etc. A whole world stemmed from those soldiers, multiple worlds (Alexander, 2010, xiv).
Together, they invented the imaginary world of Glasstown. Emily and Anne branched off by themselves and created another imaginary world named Gondal, while Charlotte and Branwell developed their country of Angria in parallel (Ibid.). More than honing their talents, they were crafting worlds over time, so their writings became more of a recording than an invention. The paracosms became a part of the authors’ psyche, a well of creativity upon which they could draw.
Petrella (2009) theorised that paracosmist authors “did not have to create characters for their published work or generate backstories to give their protagonists a realistic feel because they had been writing the background since childhood” (p. 18). There are many themes and elements typical of the authors’ work that first appear in their early writings. For example, in the Gondal myth, there are three generations each with their own war (Ratchford, 1977). Spiral storytelling is one of the features of paracosms. And it’s a feature that carries over into Wuthering Heights (Brontë, E., 1992).
The novel concerns two generations reliving similar events. It’s as though Emily Brontë couldn’t decide between a tragic or happy ending for Catherine and Heathcliff, so she gave them both. Her paracosm was her writing training, so she became accustomed to retelling stories and exploring multiple endings. “The same themes are elaborated upon, over and over, threading unity through each episode” (Petrella, 2009, p. 82). The first half of Wuthering Heights “rhymes” with the second, just as the stories set in Gondal “rhyme” with one another.
The Professor (Brontë, C,. 1994) was a more direct adaptation of paracosmist writing, practically “a rewrite of an early part of the Glasstown saga” (Petrella, 2009, p.33). But the worlds of Gondal and Angria weren’t just writing practice or early drafts. They were complete worlds.
“Paracosms display a certain integrity” (Silvey and MacKeith, 1988, p. 175). They must adhere to a set of consistent rules or they are no different to any other fantasy play. The Brontës were “playing, fantasizing, imagining; on the other hand, the fantasy is very logical. Events in the world had to follow rules” (ibid.). If they didn’t, it would’ve rendered their world hollow or flat. They honoured each other’s contributions.
For example, when Charlotte was away at school, Branwell killed off her favourite character, Mary. Charlotte “mourned [Mary] like she would a family member.” She then resurrected Mary, but it wasn’t “just an arbitrary authorial choice… Charlotte could justify the resurrection of Mary… By virtues of the rules the children had already created for Angria” (Petrella, 2009, p. 36). The world was real to them and to change things arbitrarily was to cheat, the kind of cheating that would be punished by Annie Wilkes (King, 1987).
To make the imagined worlds as “real” as possible, they needed internal consistency. That consistency, and investment in one’s own created world, are cornerstones of a writer’s artistry. S.P. Sanger (1926) praised Wuthering Heights’ consistency, especially Brontë’s mastery of the time-line and topography.
The imagined world was especially real to Emily. Fannie Ratchford (1997) made a convincing case that all of Emily’s poems pertain to Gondal (p. 31). Others say there’s no distinction to be made because “Emily lived the Gondals’ lives as intensely as her own” (Hinckley, 1947, p. 135). She even became homesick for her imagined world at one point. After six months away from Howarth, she returned “to healing for racked body and mind in the winds of the moors and of Gondal” (ibid., p. 210).
Emily Brontë wrote many journal entries about Gondal which don’t survive today. Her Gondal poems, however, do survive. The poems “are the emotional peaks of a submerged mountain range of prose narratives” (Petrella, 2009, p. 83). The journal entries were groundwork: character biographies and histories. She then wrote emotional character-driven poems based on that groundwork. The poems were long-form world-crafting, so when Emily came to writing novels and poetry, she could pull from a world of characters and stories that were just as real as real life.
Paracosms “reflect an imaginative project perpetually in process; they adapt with their authors to suit their… interaction with the real world” (Darian-Smith and Pascoe, 2013, p. 91). They are an alternate universe created to help the author’s psychological development, to help them process the world. The Brontës would use the paracosm to escape the real world, even in their adult lives. In her job as governness, Charlotte lamented that the society she kept were “asses” and asked “What is there in all this to remind me of the ‘divine, silent, unseen land of thought?’” (Bock, 2002, p. 34). When socialising, Charlotte was not a “fiery visionary” but a “figure of gentle unassuming manners” (Miller, 2001, p. 27). She used her writing to compartmentalise aspects of herself that weren’t meant for the public. The paracosm was a part of her psyche, the “fiery” side she kept hidden.
Charlotte abandoned her imagined world because she was becoming “anxious about its idolatrous implications.” She “had been worshipping the creatures of her own imagination, allowing them to compete with God” (ibid., p. 183). Charlotte stopped writing about Angria because it was too real, so real that it was an affront to God. The “divine” land was too divine. She was concerned for her sister also, worried about the “compulsive imaginative drive behind Emily’s addiction to ‘the world below’” — Charlotte’s term for the world of imagination (ibid., p. 184). One reviewer, Sydney Dobell (1878), paraphrased Keats when he called Wuthering Heights the “large utterance of a baby god” (p. 29). After Emily’s death, Charlotte acted as her first mythographer. She defended the “God-given nature of [Emily’s] genius,” but admitted that “it had a rival in the false imagination sent by the Father of Lies” (Miller, 2001, p. 184). She was saving her sister’s soul, or at least, protecting her name.
Wuthering Heights has been treated like “a text uniquely and miraculously disconnected from the rest of literature” (Miller, 2001, p. 192). It seems to have appeared fully formed in the mind of the author without influence. It only seems this way because a lot of Emily’s early writings are lost, perhaps destroyed by Charlotte (ibid., p. 183), either to protect Emily’s privacy or to construct a particular legacy. If those writings existed, we could better understand the world of which Emily was god, see its construction. And her genius might seem less miraculous. Or more.
Wuthering Heights, inspired by Howarth, transformed how people experienced the real life town. “Life inspires art, life imitates art. It’s a cycle. No one visits Howarth without transposing the characters and events of Wuthering Heights onto the scene. And any art set there would need to depict the modern Howarth, inextricable from the novel. That new art may influence how new generations experience the place. And so on” (Bell, 2022, p.314). Among other things, the Brontës were inspired by the many ghost stories and legends in Howarth. “Emily alone gives any credence to the actual existence of ghosts, working them into the fabric of her narrative” (Sutherland, 2017, p. 54). And in turn, her fictional ghosts exist alongside those others, the likes of Captain Batt: the ghost of Oakwell Hall, Sandy McLaren: the Scots pedlar.
People oft report seeing a woman walking the moors, a woman in dark Victorian dress, whose hair blows wildly, even in mild weather, as if caught in a gale. She calls for Heathcliff. Or sometimes, she and her lover walk together, like in the novel: “There’s Heathcliff and a woman yonder” (Brontë, E., 1992, p.416). In this way, Emily Brontë’s imagination did spawn life, or unlife. And our reality is augmented, viewed through the spectrum of her reality.
The following account describes Katherine Hill’s aborted attempt to contact Catherine Earnshaw’s spirit, via ouija board, from beside the ruins of Top Withins, the house that served as inspiration to Wuthering Heights.
“The planchette twitched. It slid over the “H,” followed by the “E.” I reflexively removed my fingers. But the planchette continued to move without my touch. It slid towards the “A.” I kicked the board away from myself, and the planchette went rolling through the grass. It came to rest by the foot of four wooden toy soldiers, stood upright, staring ahead, right at me, though their painted faces had worn off. One of them waddled forward and raised its arm in salute. He didn’t salute me, but the woman behind me, his general. I turned as she strode from the stone doorway of Top Withins, what remained of it, not twenty yards away. She wore a funeral gown, and her hair whipped about her head, though there was no wind. I stood and near-ran down the hill back to town ” (Hill, 2022, p.313).
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