‘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)
Shelley and Emily Bronte:
“…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’
Excerpt from poem:
In one another's substance finding food,
Like flames too pure and light and unimbu'd
To nourish their bright lives with baser prey,
Which point to Heaven and cannot pass away:
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two 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 pierce
Into 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.”
Shelley and Emily Bronte:
• 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”
Shelley and Emily Bronte:
“‘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/poem
s/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.
Shelley and Emily Bronte:
• 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)
Shelley and Emily Bronte:
• 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”
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
• 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…”
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
“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)
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
• 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)
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
• 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.”
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
• 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.
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
“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.
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
• 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.
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
• 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.
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
• 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.”
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
• 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)”
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
“…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.
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
• 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’sbliss’ which ‘kills [his] body’”
Connections between W.H. and
Epipsychidion:
• 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.”