"Within" and "Without" : crossing the limits of the worlds in Emily Bronte's poems

of the worlds in Emily Bronte's poems

著者（英） Nobuyoshi Saito

journal or

publication title

Doshisha studies in English

number 90

page range 119‑148

year 2013‑01

権利（英） The Literary Association, Doshisha University URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000013266

Crossing the Limits of the Worlds in Emily Brontë’s Poems

Nobuyoshi Saito

In itself, that is to say, the individual in his essential nature is the totality, not the inner alone, but equally the realization of this inner through and in the outer.

― Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art

In the epigraph above, Hegel is commenting on the relationship between the subjective and the objective, or content and form, in a work of art.

According to him, the subjectivity achieves its totality by realizing its interiority per se as an exteriority, thus achieving a work of art as a form inextricably permeated with content. A mere subjectivity, a mere content, is something negative to be sublated into a work of art by an impulse to transcend its delimited confines.

If tangentially transposed, Hegel’s philosophical concerns about the relationship between interiority and exteriority of a work of art could be said to bear some analogy with what concerned Charlotte Brontë in three short pieces she wrote on her sister Emily for the second edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey published in 1850. Charlotte’s concerns were with a series of similarly tense relationships between social and literary inside and outside, with Emily inside, and she offered herself to be a mediator between the two.

In the first of the three pieces, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell [Emily and Anne Brontë]” (Wuthering Heights, Appendix 1, 300-306),

Charlotte sets out to clarify the “obscurity” and “mystery” surrounding Emily as a person and as an artist. First, she emphasizes Emily’s “perfectly secluded life” in “a remote district where . . . there was no inducement to seek social intercourse beyond our own domestic circle” (301). Living in the local community of Haworth in Yorkshire, Emily had learned “no worldly wisdom; her powers [were] unadapted to the practical business of life”

(306). Even in her own “domestic circle,” Emily was not a person “on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed” (301-2). Charlotte recalls that “it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made [of a MS volume of Emily’s verse], and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication” (301-2). Emily’s relationship with literary critics was fraught with misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and “unjust and grievous error”

on the critics’ side. This was partly because of Emily’s adoption of a

“positively masculine” pseudonym, Ellis Bell, in order to preclude critics’

prejudice against her unfeminine mode of writing, as Charlotte explains, and partly because of her lack of artistic maturity and sophistication. Charlotte concludes that Emily was an insider completely isolated from any outsiders – from her own fellow villagers, family members, and critics: “Her nature stood alone” (305). Just as “an interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world,” so only “a true seer” could have read the

“‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’ of [her] original mind” and its “secret power and fire” (306, 304).

Charlotte Brontë’s attempt in her “Biographical Notice” to perform “a sacred duty to wipe the dust off [Emily’s gravestone] and leave [her dear name] free from soil” (306) was deeply ambivalent in its motives and results. Charlotte tries to mediate between Emily and the outside world, and

thereby to preserve her name and her truth, as Charlotte understood them as one of the closest to her. However, her very act of mediation defines, and confines, Emily in her pure interiority severed from the external world, by binding her negatively to her indigenousness and immaturity, and positively to her originality and power, at the same time. The result is a myth of a peculiar genius incomprehensible and impervious to the outside common world, which is now defined as a pure exteriority to that genius. Charlotte writes: “I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it [Emily’s suffering in life]; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything” (305). Charlotte’s “anguish of wonder and love” is genuine enough, but it betrays that she herself is the one who needs “an interpreter” and “a true seer” to help her understand her dear younger sister.

The two other pieces by Charlotte on Emily show the same ambivalence as found in the “Biographical Notice.” In “The Prefatory Note to ‘Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell’” the keywords are “liberty,” “home,” and “nature”

in that order of ascending importance, and in the “Editor’s Preface to the New [Second] Edition of Wuthering Heights,” “rusticity,” “unintelligibility,”

and “evil.”

In the “Prefatory Note” (Wuthering Heights, Appendix 1, 310-12) Charlotte first opposes Emily’s “upright, heretic, and English spirit” against

“the gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system” experienced in Brussels, and then opposes Emily’s “liberty” at home with “unrestricted and inartificial mode of life” against a school – Law Hill School – where

“disciplined routine” reigned. Even at home, Emily would go out of “the absolute retirement of a village parsonage” into the moors outside like “a solitude-loving raven.” Finally Charlotte relocates Emily out of the moors which are in themselves “barren of poetic as of agricultural interest,” into an

internal world of love and imagination which is “innate and self-sustained,”

a world in which “the eye of the gazer must itself brim with a ‘purple light’”

of heather on the moors, for “from the hill-lover’s self comes half its charm”

(310-12). Thus Charlotte had seen a “home” for Emily being successively internalized and interiorized out of Belgium into England, out of school into the home, out of the parsonage into the moorland, and out of nature into imagination. Charlotte sees Emily’s movement, both as a person and as an artist, as a process of self-purification into pure interiority.

As Emily is simultaneously enthroned and confined in the world of pure interiority, the outside world becomes a world of pure exteriority, as Charlotte’s “Editor’s Preface” (Wuthering Heights, Appendix 1, 307-10) shows. Rereading Wuthering Heights has given Charlotte “a clear glimpse of what are termed (and, perhaps, really are) its faults . . . [and] a definite notion of how it appears to other people.” Her “glimpse” and “notion” allow her to explain the reasons for Emily’s alienation from the world writ large, and, by explaining them, establish them at the same time. Charlotte now knows that Wuthering Heights, which is “rustic all through . . . , [m]oorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath,” will alienate those who are unfamiliar with the customs and nature of the West-Riding of Yorkshire;

therefore, “a large class of readers” will find the novel “unintelligible, and – where intelligible – repulsive.” Even the local inhabitants of Yorkshire will be alienated by the work filled with “detail, minute, graphic, and accurate,”

because its author, a “homebred country girl,” shunned everyday social intercourse with the local people, and her concern with “the real” was “too exclusively confined to those tragic and terrible tracts [of the local family histories] . . . the secret annals of every vicinage.” Fired with those tracts and annals, Emily’s imagination let “a horror of great darkness” brood over

her novel. Minor characters showing some virtues of domestic fidelity or tenderness such as Nelly Dean or Edgar Linton, or a butt of satirical humor such as old Joseph are ineffectual in dispersing the darkness emanating from the central character, Heathcliff, “the bad essence of some evil genius.”

Heathcliff, loveless and unloved, is a subhuman figure in “a man’s shape animated by demon life – a Ghoul – an Afreet,” doomed to “carry Hell with him.” If Emily’s defiance against conventional literary rules and principles antagonizes her critics, Charlotte points out that Emily is alienated even from her own “creative gift.” Emily was only a “nominal artist . . . work[ing]

passively under dictates [she] neither delivered nor could question.” Emily’s nature and genius, “so relentless and implacable, . . . so lost and fallen,” was simply “not amenable” to the influence of other intellects, including her elder sister’s, and her early death severed her forever from any healing process of time which would have made her and her artistic products maturer and mellower, more expanded and comprehensive, and, therefore, more comprehensible.

Charlotte’s writings on Emily are neither one-sidedly adulating nor denunciatory. In her attempt to define, and defend Emily’s peculiar nature and genius for the edification of the general readers out there in the world, Charlotte places Emily in an inside with its multifarious aspects in the light of successive oppositions to various kinds of outside. It is as if each time Charlotte tries to define Emily, her sister escapes further and further inside in a series of concentric circles, leaving Charlotte always as an outsider, a failed “interpreter.” Hence, Charlotte’s “anguish of wonder and love” over Emily, and perhaps a sense of hopelessness and fear for her intractable perversity.

*

Emily Brontë herself, in her poetry, has for her central theme an opposition between “within” and “without.” The opposition seems similar to the ones employed by Charlotte, but it is presented and pursued in a starker, more comprehensive and “philosophical” manner, and, quite significantly, in a more dynamic manner.

For example, in “To Imagination” (xi) the speaker apostrophizes Imagination as “my true friend,” and continues:

So hopeless is the world without;

The world within I doubly prize;

Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt, And cold suspicion never rise;

Where thou, and I, and Liberty, Have undisputed sovereignty. (7-12)¹

“The world without” is replete with “guile, and hate, and doubt, / And cold suspicion,” also with “Danger, and guilt, and darkness” (14). The ineffectual rulers of “the world without” can only deplore the universal state of things or crush the weakest: Reason “complain[s] / For Nature’s sad reality” and Truth “trample[s] down / The flowers of Fancy, newly born” (19-20, 23-24).

Under such regime of “the world without” the speaker suffers alone without hope: “weary with the long day’s care, / And earthly change from pain to pain, / And lost and ready to despair” (1-3). But when the day is done and the evening comes, the speaker frees herself from “the world without” to enter “the world within.” There she establishes another world and recovers

what she has been deprived of: companionship, “Liberty” and “sovereignty.”

“The world within” has another sky and season, life and reality: “a bright, untroubled sky” (16), “New Glories o’er the blighted spring” (27), “a lovelier Life [called back] from Death” (28), “real worlds, as bright as thine” (30). Apparently the schism between the within and without is absolute, and the speaker’s escape into a solipsistic paradise complete.

However, the speaker is aware that this dream of escape itself is one of “the flowers of Fancy,” and that the opposition itself between “the world within”

and “the world without” is in fact an alternation inevitable in an endless

“earthly change,” so that she also has to declare, “I trust not thy phantom bliss” (31). This does not mean that the speaker crawls back dejectedly to

“the world without”; rather, upon the daily alternations between the two opposing worlds, she envisions another, and higher world. She distinguishes Fancy and Imagination. Fancy may be a nightly comforter for “the long day’s care,” but its hope is transient and illusory, for “hope despairs” (36).

Imagination, on the other hand, is called “Benignant Power” which is “sure solacer of human cares” and “sweeter hope” (34-6). This power is capable of solacing “human cares” including the painful sense of schism and alternations of the two worlds themselves, and of reviving and sustaining hope destined to despair. Imagination is an eternal and creative principle of life and life-sustaining visions: “thou art ever there, to bring / The hovering vision back, and breathe / New glories” (25-27).

As has been shown above, the theme of “To Imagination” has a tripartite structure: the opposition between “the world within” and “the world without,” and a third world beyond the opposition itself. The relationships among the three worlds are not static or schematic, but vital and dynamic.

Static spatial images of the opposition between “the world within” and “the

world without” are always presented as moving phases in the dynamic temporal process of alternations: from day to night, and then back to day;

from reality to dream, and then awakening. The relationship between the world of opposition and the world beyond – that of eternity – is not static, either: the idea of eternity is vitalized as a “Power” breathing in a breath of life again and again. And the poet, at least, in the world of opposition actively envisions that Power and fervently awaits its visitations. The images of “within” and “without” are themselves continually transformed, reversed, and expanded dynamically. Escape from the harsh reality of “the world without” may mean the hope of “Liberty” and “sovereignty” in “the world within,” but that hope itself may be an illusory flower of a dreamer in the solitary confinement in “the world within.” And that confined dreamer, now an exile, may begin to dream about another “liberty” at “home” in “the world without” she had deserted before. And finally, the world of opposition between “the world within” and “the world without” can be imagined as a larger “world within” as opposed to a larger “world without”: the world of

“earthly change” where all humans are locked in, as opposed to the world of the eternal “hovering vision.” Emily Brontë’s artistic visions in her poetry may be found contained within this tripartite structure of the theme of

“within” and “without,” and expressed there always as dynamic movements.

Within a similar framework of the opposition of “the world within” and

“the world without,” one poem reviles “the world without” vehemently, and another analyzes the poetic polity, as it were, of “the world within.” “How Clear She Shines” (xii) repudiates Reason as helpless, Truth as weak, Treachery as strong, Joy as “the surest path to Pain,” Peace as “the lethargy of Grief,” and Hope as “a phantom of the soul” (34-38). Life in “the world without” can only be “a labour, void and brief” and Death is “the despot of

the whole” (39-40). The speaker dismisses “the world without,” saying, “The world is going; dark world, adieu! / Grim world, conceal thee till the day”

(9-10), and welcomes Fancy as her “Fairy love” (5). The speaker in “Plead for Me” (xiv), on the other hand, is on the defensive, under the attack of

“stern Reason” demanding an answer to its question “Why I did cast the world away” (10). The speaker calls for her “advocate,” first named “radiant angel,” then “ever-present, phantom thing,” and finally “God of visions” (10, 24, 39). The speaker explains the polity or regime of her “world within” – a structure similar to that of a joint “undisputed sovereignty” in “To Imagination” –, saying that “God of visions” is “my slave, my comrade, and my king” (25). These triple roles indicate the range of different evaluations of poetic faculty assigned to Fancy and Imagination, or of the poet’s states of mind: “a slave” to self-indulgent reveries, “a comrade” to solace solitude, or “a king” to command renunciation of worldly cares. The final apotheosization of the poetic faculty as “God of visions” is done under the authority of the ultimate sovereignty of the poet’s soul: “my own soul can grant my prayer” (38).

Thus, the relationships between “the world within” and “the world without” are always in dynamic interactions: a glorification of one is conditioned by a denunciation of the other, and followed by an accusatory command to return, which further calls for a stronger resistance and self- assertion. Moreover, the opposition itself between the two worlds is conceived as a process of endless alternations. For instance, the poem

“Stars” (ii) is based on the sharp thematic opposition between night and day, stars and the sun, but its thematic focus is on the horror of inevitable movement from one to the other, a terrible awakening, a horrible return of the sun, and a painful longing for the departed. Through the night, the poet

“revelled in [her] changeful dreams” (22) under “that divine watch” (8) of stars’ “glorious eyes” (5). Stars’ “cool radiance” (20) casts “so great, so pure, a spell” (18), under whose “one sweet influence” the speaker and her thoughts and dreams, stars and “petrel on the sea” (12) are all proved one.

But the daybreak breaks that spell. The sun’s “hostile light” extinguishes stars’ “solemn light,” “His fierce beams” striking “my brow” dispels “your [stars’] cool radiance” [italics mine]: the spell of unity of all beings is broken by the masculine sun. However, by breaking that spell, the “Blood- red” sun did nothing but “Restored our Earth to joy” (2) so that “The soul of nature, sprang, elate” (23). All nature quickens with life – dale and hill, birds, winds, and flies –, while the speaker desperately tries, but is unable, to

“call back night,” because “the pillow glowed, / And glowed both roof and floor” (33-4). The speaker is reluctantly aroused to movement by flies: “the wakened flies / Were murmuring round my room, / Imprisoned there, till I should rise, / And give them leave to roam” (37-40). All the speaker can do is to hope to “sleep through his [i.e. the sun’s] blinding reign, / And only wake with you [i.e. stars]!” (47-48).

In “Stars” the opposition of “the world within” and “the world without” is reversed. The speaker is forcibly brought out of the starry world of peace and unity, and is now an exile confined in the glowing house under the sun’s

“blinding reign.” However, she is also a jailer of flies imprisoned in her room. The flies “murmur” to get out to “roam” freely in “the world without”;

they are part of “the soul of nature, [which] sprang, elate.” They are

“wakened” to be with the living, while the speaker, now awakened, only wishes to “wake” with the dead. The ideal unity and peace of all beings in

“the world within” is in fact the unity and peace of the dead attained by total suppression of individual identities and movements. The speaker’s wish to

remain in “the world within” is a form of death wish, a desire to kill “the soul of nature” in herself. Such wish is mocked by the flies whose flying sounds and movements rouse the speaker to open the window; it is also belied by her own pillow, by the roof and floor of her own room, all glowing and burning the speaker. The room is clearly a metaphor for the body, and

“the soul of nature” imprisoned there awakens to get out and roam “blood- red” and “elate” as individualized and gendered beings in quest of their companions and mates. “The world within” and “the world without”

mutually imprison each other, dreaming of escape from or return to each other. Such is the process of alternation repeated day and night endlessly.

In the poem “Death” (xvi) the world of alternations – daily and seasonal alternations between “the world within” and “the world without” – is conceived simply as the world of time. The sufferings and pains caused by alternations are replaced with those caused by the impossibility of alternation itself. Alternations, which cause an individual’s painful experience of the loss of peace and unity, are a principle of life – “the soul of nature” in “Stars” – ever restoring and renewing itself for all beings in nature as a whole. From this principle of the whole, an individual part is expelled by its own inevitable death in time. The speaker in the poem notes that “Leaves, upon Time’s branch, were growing brightly, / Full of sap, and full of silver dew” (5-6), and observes birds gathering nightly and bees flying daily beneath the shelter and around the flowers of “Time’s branch.”

The passage of time does “[pluck] the golden blossom” and “[strip] off the foliage” (9, 10), but it is part of “Life’s restoring tide” (12) flowing for ever, one of its alternating temporary phases repeated in eternal movements. So hope is grounded on the inevitability of alternation itself: winter should be always replaced with the “second May.” “Sorrow,” “Guilt” and “Sin,” which

are both causes and effects of alternations, are to be atoned for and healed by “Love, and its own life” which have the “power to keep it / From all wrong – from every blight” (23-24). But the speaker knows that even Love cannot overcome the blight of Death, an inevitable death of her own particular individual life in time: “Time, for me, must never blossom more!”

(28). The speaker dies twice: first, when she finds that her “faith of joy” (2) is killed by the fact of unavoidable earthly changes, and, for the second time, when she finds that her own mortal life can never be “restored” even by the eternal “Life’s restoring tide.” If death is a fall into nothingness below the world of alternations, it can also be a return to the world of eternity. The speaker tries to negate her own death as a fall and accept it as a return, by her vision of eternal life, out of which her individual life has come and toward which it should return: “Strike again, Time’s withered branch dividing / From the fresh root of Eternity!” (3-4), so that “Thus, at least, its mouldering corpse will nourish / That from which it sprung – Eternity” (31- 32).

In “No Coward Soul is Mine” (167) the speaker is resolved to make herself a tree trunk, as it were, connecting “Time’s withered branch” and “the fresh root of Eternity” presented in the poem “Death.” The tree connecting the two would embody a whole world of Being comprising all the living and dying beings, all beings ever potential, realized, and vanishing; it would be the ultimate “world within” of existence, against which an ultimate “world without” of nothingness alone can be imagined.

O God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity Life, that in me hast rest

As I Undying Life, have power in thee (5-8)

Here is the final form the tripartite structure of the poet’s visions of “the world within” and “the world without” takes. “God,” “Almighty ever- present Deity,” or “Life” comes to dwell “within my breast,” comes to rest in a particular, temporary form of life which is “me,” and this host is made part of “Undying Life,” being allowed to participate in its power. By becoming a grateful dwelling place for God of Life, the speaker – one of the leaves on “Time’s withered branch” – finds herself rooted, anchored: she becomes “one / Holding so fast by thy infinity / So surely anchored on / The steadfast rock of Immortality” (13-16). God of Life dwelling inside the speaker’s breast emanates itself and its power as “love” through her particular individual life, creating and uncreating all beings in time: “With wide-embracing love / Thy spirit animates eternal years / Pervades and broods above, / Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears” (17-20). As long as the speaker believes in God dwelling within her, she no longer fears the fact that she herself is a particular being created only to be dissolved in time: “No coward soul is mine / No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere” (1-2). Her faith in God within prepares her to face the withering of all leaves of life including her own, and even the annihilation of the universe, because God can create out of nothing an infinite number of fresh dwelling places for Him: “Though Earth and moon were gone / And suns and universes ceased to be / And thou wert left alone / Every Existence would exist in thee” (21-24). With that faith, the speaker repudiates “the thousand creeds” (9), which are products of cowardly fears of death and are intended to move cowardly unbelievers with vain hopes for a false heaven or with equally vain fears of a false hell. With that faith, the speaker can

deny Death, even the death of a particular “atom” of her individual life:

“There is not room for Death / Nor atom that his might could render void / Since thou art Being and Breath / And what thou art may never be destroyed” (25-28).

In the poem above, the tripartite structure of the relationship between “the world within” and “the world without” can be described, in the vertical images of above and below, as a tree rooted in eternal life with dying leaves above, with the speaker in the middle connecting the two. In the horizontal images of within and without, it can be described as a triple concentric circle with the eternal life at the center and dying leaves on the periphery, with the speaker in the middle participating in and mediating the two. And, of course, the phrase “God within my breast” indicates the image of concentric circles is predominant in the poem. If this suggests a restitution of the original opposition between “the world within” and “the world without,” then the opposition now is between “my breast” and “the thousand creeds,” between a God as the speaker feels within and a God the conventional religious doctrines posit, or between the different degrees, or rather, different natures of the conviction of the certainty and reality of a divine being.

A similar kind of vision of “God within” is presented in more concrete imagery of spatial confinement in “The Prisoner (A Fragment)” (viii). The captive is “darkly lodged” (5, 8), “confined in triple walls” (11) of a dungeon-crypt, guarded by a “jailer grim” serving his master whose soul is

“hard as hardest flint” (26). Thus physically confined within the dungeon, the captive begins to dream first of “a world without,” awaiting a visitant from there coming to solace and sustain her: “A messenger of Hope, comes every night to me, / And offers for short life, eternal liberty” (35-36). Since the messenger comes with “western winds,” “evening’s wandering airs,”

and “clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars” until “visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire” (37-38, 40), it is known that the messenger comes not only from “the world without” at night – now during the day the heaven seen from the vault window is specified by the jailer’s master as “more grey than blue” (6) – , but mostly from “the world within”;

the land of eternal liberty is an internal land of the captive’s poetic visions.

Then the messenger, specifically referred to as “he” – as opposed to the neutral and plural “they” in the poem “Stars” – , is a male muse for the female captive poet.² Visions bring “a hush of peace” (45) and “unuttered harmony, / That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me” (47-48). The captive withdraws further into the innermost of her “world within,” a locus of poetic inspiration and ecstasy:

Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;

My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels:

Its wings are almost free – its home, its harbour found,

Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound. (49-52)

The captive’s “inward essence” has been imprisoned in her “outward sense”;

the dungeon’s triple walls have been reproduced in the prison-house of the captive’s mind itself: her “essence” has to break through the walls of her physical and carnal “sense” to regain its eternal home and harbor. But her dream of transcendence, of a flight home to eternal liberty, fails:

Oh, dreadful is the check – intense, the agony – When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;

When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again,

The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain. (53-56)

Only by shattering the flesh to death can she unchain her soul and send it back home – this is the message she hears and affirms in the vision: “And robed in fires of hell, or bright with heavenly shine, / If it but herald death, the vision is divine!” (59-60).

The “triple walls” exist both outside and inside: the dungeon-crypt as a setting of the poem, and the prison-house of the flesh as its thematic center.

The outer prison enclosed the inner prison, but it is a mere externalized analogue of the central inner prison. Therefore, the captive is in fact her own jailer at the same time, and a hope of liberation can only be imagined as a release from life itself. The female captive could have been liberated “every night” by the male “messenger of Hope” if only she had not pursued her

“divine” vision so passionately to its radical solution. The poem “The Visionary” (unnumbered; p. 218) apparently represents a less radical and more domesticated version of the solution to the themes of imprisonment and of the relationship between “the world within” and “the world without.”

In this poem the dungeon-crypt becomes a “house,” and the jailer and his master become the speaker’s “haughty sire,” “angry dame” and their “prying serf,” all “laid asleep” (1) for the night. “Silent is the house” (1), “Cheerful is the hearth” (15), and “The little lamp burns straight” (7). It is as if the

“messenger of Hope” in “The Prisoner” has already arrived here with his gift of “a hush of peace.” The dungeon becomes a home, and the imprisonment, a protection. Safely protected in this “world within,” the speaker looks out to “the world without” as a complete antithesis to it: “the snow-wreaths deep” (2), “the wildering drift” and “groaning trees” (4) on the “waste of frozen snow” (12). And the speaker begins to dream of an

“angel nightly track[ing]” (12) the waste of snow, and resolves to become a star herself for him: “I trim it [the lamp] well, to be the wanderer’s guiding- star” (8). For the solitary male wanderer, the speaker with her “guiding-star”

is almost like a female “messenger of Hope” nightly beckoning him homeward.

This apparent reversal of genders of the “messenger of Hope” and “the wanderer” is quite confusing here. That the experience of the speaker in

“The Visionary” cannot be the same in nature as that of the captive in “The Prisoner” is made clear by the eight lines (13-20) at the end added by Charlotte Brontë at its publication in 1850. The relationship between the captive and the “messenger of Hope” in “The Prisoner” or between the speaker and “the wanderer” in “The Visionary” is here in the eight added lines fully humanized, domesticated, and sexualized to be that of a secret romance between a woman at home and a male wanderer: “What I love shall come like visitant of air, / Safe in secret power from lurking human snare; / What loves me, no word of mine shall e’er betray, / Though for faith unstained my life must forfeit pay” (13-16). The “visitant of air” is a mere simile for the male “wanderer” tracking in snow, just as “lurking human snare” is one for the “haughty sire” and “angry dame.” The speaker’s “faith unstained” is that her wish, if true and sincere, must be justified and fulfilled somehow by any means human or divine: “He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me; / Strange Power I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy”

(19-20). The speaker is not a visionary in the same sense as the captive in

“The Prisoner” is a visionary whose “visions . . . kill [her] with desire.” As a matter of fact, the tile “The Visionary” was at first “The Signal Light”

written in pencil by Charlotte on Emily’s manuscript, which would have been a good title for this poem about “the wanderer’s guiding star.” An

important point to notice here, however, is that the eight lines by Charlotte do not distort nor contradict the first twelve lines by Emily. Equally important is the fact that when read beside “The Prisoner,” “The Visionary”

reads bathetic, like a fall from verse to prose (or like a “fall” from Catherine and Heathcliff to Cathy and Hareton in Wuthering Heights, or from Wuthering Heights to Jane Eyre, if you like.)

The answer to the reader’s sense of confusion and bathos comes from a simple fact that “The Prisoner” and “The Visionary” are excerpted from the same, longer narrative poem in 152 lines, “Julian M. and A. G. Rochelle”

(165) transcribed by Emily into her Gondal Poems notebook. From this longer poem, the lines 13-44 and 65-92 were selected for “The Prisoner”

with four additional lines and the title by Emily to be published in Poems of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell in 1846, and the lines 1-12 were selected for

“The Visionary” with the eight additional lines and the title by Charlotte in the second edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey published in 1850.

Emily wrote the four lines at the end of “The Prisoner” in order to conclude it as a piece independent of the source narrative poem: “She ceased to speak, and we, unanswering, turned to go – / We had no further power to work the captive woe: / Her cheek, her gleaming eye, declared that man had given / A sentence, unapproved, and overruled by Heaven” (61-64). The conclusion is appropriate: it annuls the man-made external prison only to reveal the God- ordained internal prison for human existence, whose “home” and “harbour”

is never to be found in life.

In the first of those parts in “Julian M. and A. G. Rochelle” which were not lifted for the excerpts, the lines 45-64, the master and the captive encounter face to face, and recognize each other through memory. The master, Julian, wondering if the captive, Rochelle, is very near to death,

kneels down and parts her blond hair to recognize his childhood playmate:

“Alas, how former days upon my heart were borne / How memory mirrored then the prisoner’s joyous morn” (49-50). And he knows that her present dying state is “the wintry close of [her] celestial May” (52). Rochelle recognizes him, too: “She knew me and she sighed, ‘Lord Julian, can it be, / Of all my playmates, you, alone, remember me?’”(53-54). She is also reminded of all her other former playmates and professed suitors who are

“utter strangers” now, moving around “this living grave,” totally forgetful of her existence there (60). As a “conquered foe” now taken prisoner by Julian’s army, she remains proud enough to wish for nothing but a dignified and quick death in an open execution: “A quick and welcome pang instead of lingering woe” (64). While she goes on in the following passage to speak of her “divine” vision, Julian finds that “The dungeon seemed to swim in strange confusion round” (46). The “confusion” transforms the scene of confrontation between the captive and the master, the battleground between

“the world within” and “the world without,” into a shared common ground for memory, at least for Julian. The inevitable alternation – movement of oblivion – represented by the “utter strangers” is replaced by a backward movement, a return, from “without” to “within,” from “the wintry close” to the “celestial May.” And their counter-movement of memory “confuses” the rigid materialized penal opposition embodied in the dungeon walls as well as in Julian’s mind-set, which the jailer had asserted is “hard as hardest flint, the soul that lurks behind” (38). The relationship between “the world within” and “the world without” is made into a doubly dynamic one, first by the introduction of memory as a counter-movement to the merciless natural law of “earthly change,” and, secondly and more importantly, by its transformation into mutual interactions based on that memory between two

individual human agents, two speakers, two souls.

In the second part not selected for the excerpts, the lines 93-152, immediately after Rochelle’s speech on her “divine” vision, Julian remains kneeling before her, touching the “links of that iron hard and chill” (96). He feels her chain, his “outward sense” going and intensifying at the same time:

“I heard and yet heard not,” “I saw, yet did not see” (97, 98) either the jailer or the flagstone, and yet his “cheek glowed in flame” (101) in the chilly and moist prison cell. Julian obtains the dungeon key from the departing jailer, Rochelle is quick to notice his action, her soul is aroused to respond to it, and he notices her response: “a sudden lightning” (110) comes in her eye, telling that she now knows that “Earth’s hope was not so dead heaven’s home was not so dear” (111), a message he is quick enough to “read . . . in that flash of longing” still secretly held by her (112). Yet he hesitates for a moment, “like a tender child” holding a bird in his hand: once released from

“the world within,” Rochelle would fly away to roam freely in “the world without,” completely forgetful of him. His decision is made by his sympathetic and empathetic understanding that it would be unbearable now for him staying without to be remembering all the time her suffering locked within: “If I should break the chain, I felt my bird would go / Yet I must break the chain or seal the prisoner’s woe – / … / Short strife what rest could soothe – what peace could visit me / While she lay pining for Death to set her free?” (119-22). He unchains her, she embraces him, the smile lights her face now angel-like, and she stays. She is free now, but she does not want to be free from him. Julian cries joyfully, “And I was over-blest – aye, more than I could dream” (129).

Out of the opposition of “the world within” and “the world without” has been created a new kind of “the world within” now opposed to a new kind

of “the world without.” This new “world within” is a private space inhabited by two individual beings, each confined in a world of interiority, yet bound closely together and freely communicating with each other through the channels of shared memory and mutual sympathy and love. Time passes, yet it does not; it does not alternate, shedding leaf after leaf from “Time’s withered branch,” or closing “celestial May” by winter, or awakening night by day: “Through thirteen anxious weeks of terror-blend delight / I guarded her by day and guarded her by night / … / By never-doubting love, unswerving constancy, / Rochelle, I earned at last an equal love from thee”

(133-34, 151-52). Set against this new “world within” the new kind of

“world without” will be a collective, public space, peopled with “kindred”

and “kinsmen” (137, 144), patriots and rulers, fighting for the “banner” or

“renown” (145, 146) or some other “glorious prize[s] to gain” (147). It will be simply “the world.” Sacrificing his “rightful banner” and his “renown on Freedom’s crimson field” (146), while facing “the world’s disdain” with

“brave nerve” (148), Julian “love[s] his hearth and sheltering roof-tree well”

(138), as his kindred sneeringly point out, and “linger[s] still at home” (144).

It is not “home” where “dawns the Invisible, the Unseen its truth reveals” as in Rochelle’s deliriously divine vision, nor is it “the fresh root of Eternity”

mercilessly dividing “Time’s withered branch”; it is an earthly home dearer than “heaven’s home,” as Rochelle the desperate visionary now begins to see.

Obviously the ending of the narrative poem brings the reader back to “the House” at the beginning, which also begins the poem “The Visionary.” It is clear now that “the House” is Julian’s, and so are “the hearth” and “the little lamp,” and the “haughty sire” and “angry Dame” are his “kindred” and

“kinsmen.” The first-person speaker of the narrative poem is Julian, and the

present tense of the first twelve lines indicates that the scene is a sequel to the thirteen weeks of his care of the ex-captive. Then “the Wanderer” and the “angel” mentioned in line 12 can only be Rochelle, whereas she has been, and most probably is still, guarded by Julian by day and by night in his house. Therefore, it should be no one but Rochelle’s spirit who wanders, in response to its unforgotten “messenger of Hope,” still in quest of the divine vision, still dreaming of “heaven’s home,” in spite of the “guiding- star” of Julian’s lamp or “Earth’s hope” promised in his “House.” Charlotte’s additional eight lines in “The Visionary” are wrong in suggesting a woman inside the house waiting for a male lover wandering outside in the snow to come home to her, but they are right in articulating a prayer that the two should meet and join at home in the end. A “fall” from verse to prose, from Emily to Charlotte, which has been noted above, is in fact the effect of the shift of voice from Rochelle to Julian, and of the transference of thematic locus from the dungeon to the house. It is as if Emily were tentatively trying to make a soft landing onto an earthly prosaic home for human beings living day by day in time and in the flesh. This is precisely what the form of a narrative poem has made possible. There it is no longer that an isolated visionary, confined in the world of pure interiority, always soliloquizes about quasi-personalized abstract ideas, projecting and dramatizing the moments of her own consciousness as poetic visions of various “worlds within” and “worlds without.” Instead, in the narrative poem, two speakers encounter in dialogue and interact with each other, mutually affecting and being affected by actions, touch or embrace. Through actions, one’s interiority is expressed to be visible to the other; through sympathy and empathy, the other’s interiority is revealed to one. Time passes, but it does not pass away, nor does it alternate or repeat in an alienating, inhuman way.

It rather grows or accumulates, keeping one’s essential identity intact even through temporary changes: the thirteen weeks of care and recovery pass and do not pass, just as the blithe childhood is lost and is not lost in memory.

Moving together in “an equal love” in time, the two can create a mutually shared “world within” of constancy. Thus, the prison walls separating “the world within” and “the world without” – the prison walls of human consciousness separating one from the other, of human time separating humans from “the soul of nature” – crumble down. Home is found at last, here on earth now, at least, tentatively in the narrative poem about their

“equal love.” Julian, the ex-master, believes so, and he wants Rochelle, the ex-captive, to share that belief with him.³

*

As we have seen above, Charlotte Brontë insisted on Emily’s “immature but very real powers.” Emily’s immaturity and real powers are in fact two sides of the same coin. Her lack of “worldly wisdom,” her inadaptability to

“the practical business of life” are first her temperamental, and, ultimately, her artistic choice. What others take for granted – “the world” and “life” – are felt all wrong or false by her. Examining and questioning one after another most rigorously and radically the versions given by others of “the world” and “life” – those of the homeland, the home village, the family home, nature, and imagination – she finds them all deficient. Rejecting them all one after another, she becomes “homeless,” a solitary wanderer in quest of a real home. The wanderings expand the horizons, and intensify the urgency of her quest, making her a radical visionary of human existence in the universe, which she feels the same solitary wanderer as herself. The true

“business of life” is to face the eternal reality of the fact that human beings are born in the universe, and live only to die, alone in time. The true

“worldly wisdom” is to learn how to survive this reality. In the process of her questionings, the versions of “the world” and “life” are turned and re- turned inside out and outside in. The visions of “the world within” and “the world without” involve and revolve themselves, and she traverses them all, from their zenith to nadir, from heaven to hell. And yet she is unable to abolish a wall dividing one whole world into “within” and “without”: the ultimate “world within” is the human existence itself. It is the prison-house of human consciousness fettered by the knowledge of its own mortality. To release that consciousness would mean the destruction of selfhood, and yet it would also mean that death has been defeated, and the exile banished into selfhood has been liberated. It would mean simply that home has been found, and the goal of the quest attained. Here is the reason for the inseparable closeness, almost an identity, of the themes of love and death in Emily’s quest of home. This is “the demon-life” that animates Heathcliff, as Charlotte feared; this is the same essence of “evil” as Georges Bataille sees in Wuthering Heights. Rochelle in the narrative poem is to become Catherine Earnshaw in the novel, and Julian, Edgar Linton.

To conclude the present article, here are some remarks upon the dynamic movement of Emily Brontë’s texts. Her texts do not represent the results of any full self-realization of the internal in the external, or of content in form, as Hegel suggests. Rather, they only represent the failures of the very attempt of the internal at its complete and absolute self-realization. They are the records of persistent oppositions, schisms, and gulfs – the final “check”

on the attempt at “the final bound.” The very difficulty of finding a “home”

or “harbour” initiates a movement of a quest for it. The hopeful quest for a

real “home” creates and sustains a visionary “home,” but it also has to project that ultimate “home” at an infinitely remote region beyond and, therefore, as not yet attainable. This is precisely the secret for the never- ending dynamic movement of Emily’s texts. Earlier in the same paragraph from which the epigraph is taken, Hegel states as follows:

Now since the content of our interests and aims is present at first only in the one-sided form of subjectivity, and the one-sidedness is a restriction, this deficiency shows itself at the same time as an unrest, a grief, as something negative. This, as negative, has to cancel itself, and therefore, in order to remedy this felt deficiency, struggles to overcome the restriction which is known and thought. (96)

This “struggle” itself is the essence of art for Hegel, not any of finished end- products of successfully completed self-realization. This is why his aesthetics is at the same time and in its essence a philosophy of art history – a history of the spirit in continual struggle to overcome the material, a process of the inner (content or the subjective) in its endeavor to fight against and conquer the outer (form or the objective). In the passage immediately following the epigraph, Hegel continues, glorifying the process itself as the life of the spirit:

To go through this process of opposition, contradiction, and the resolution of the contradiction is the higher privilege of living beings . . . Life proceeds to negation and its grief, and it only becomes affirmative in its own eyes by obliterating the opposition and the contradiction. It is true that if it remains in mere contradiction without resolving it, then on contradiction it is wrecked. (97)

Emily’s texts – both verse and prose – are records of that “process.” And as such, it would repudiate any fixed, completed, stabilized result of any

successful “self-realization” of the internal, for it would simply mean death, or falsification, of the truth of the movement of the quest itself, forever unfinished, ever moving in time and in text.

Notes

1 All the quotations from the poems of Emily Brontë are from Janet Gezari’s edition (1992) of her Complete Poems, and are followed by each poem’s number, Roman for those published in the 1846 Poems, and Arabic for others, given there.

The choice of the edition is a complex and difficult issue for any reader of Emily’s poems. The most authoritative edition by C. W. Hatfield published in 1941, arranges all poems in a chronological order of composition based on the mss. As Gezari points out (Introduction, xv-xxxii), Hatfield’s chronological arrangement involves the four main moot points: 1) the dating of the undated mss by conjectures based on tenuous circumstantial evidence, such as the physical placement on the ms page, or on no evidence at all, 2) the strict adherence to the mss to the extent of treating those published in the 1846 Poems as mere variants tampered with Charlotte’s hand, 3) the blurring of the distinction Emily made when transcribing her poems in two separate notebooks, the Honresfeld Manuscript (Holograph Manuscript A) and the Gondal Poems Notebook (Holograph Manuscript B), causing confusing effects of the “Gondal notations” in the texts, and 4) excessive punctuation and other attempts at textual normalization at the expense of the authenticity of what Frank Bridart calls, as quoted by Gezari, “the pauses, emphases, urgencies and languours in the voice” (Gezari xxvi). The principle of Hatfield’s editorial work seems to be that of a genetic myth, a myth of a genius growing and expanding itself moment by moment in a ramifying, “rampant” manner. His edition was definitely a substantial academic achievement over the other editions available when it was published. Gezari’s edition, on the other hand, first gives full value to the 1846 text of Emily’s poems, and then separates the rest, both Gondal and non-Gondal poems into the dated and the undated, with their titles when given in the mss, and relegating all other “Gondal notations” and variants to end-notes. Roper and Chitham’s edition (1995) embodies a sort of compromise between Hatfield’s and Gezari’s editions: it divides all the

poems into the dated and the undated, with all the “Gondal notations” including the Gondal chronology, as attachments to the texts.

After all, the choice of the edition might be for the reader a matter of taste for any one of the differing visual impressions of the printed texts given in each edition, and, in my case, it is Gezari’s edition which is the least cluttered with academic paraphernalia that has promoted the kind of free, “structural” reading of her poems attempted here, as opposed to the genetic / chronological reading, on one hand, and to the “organic” reading, as is to be noted below, on the other.

2 Margaret Homans and Irene Tayler discuss the problem of the male muse for the nineteenth-century female poets. According to Homans, within the predominantly male tradition of Romantic poetry, the masculine poetic subject speaks of nature as a silent object defined as feminine in order to articulate it and transcend it. Placed within this tradition, female poets had peculiar difficulties forging a self out of the materials of otherness: as poets they had to find a poetic voice on the masculine mode, yet, as women, they had to give that voice to the feminine which had been suppressed under the patriarchal system in the Romantic poetry. In the case of Emily Brontë, Homans argues, the difficulty shows itself in the ambivalence between the natural theory of poetry in which natural death is regarded as a return to nature and the visionary theory of poetry in which transcendental death is regarded as an attainment of heaven. Along the similar line of discussion, Tayler argues that Emily’s male muse, who embodies her inner perception of her own masculinity, is a masculine “Breath of God” blowing out of the mother-world. The impasse of Emily’s poetic voice is solved eventually by her shift to the novelistic genre;

according to Homans, the shift let her abandon the traditional identification of nature as feminine or maternal, and gave her the freedom to characterize nature, and, according to Tayler, it is a result of Emily’s conscious choice, urged by Charlotte, of an ambition to write for the public rather than for her private poetic muse.

Homans and Tayler have persuasively argued for the momentum for Emily’s inevitable move from poetry to novel, but still the present author does not regard the momentum as gender-specific. Rather, the momentum had been derived from the general Romantic-specific anxiety about the relation between the absolute sovereignty and the horror of solipsism of the same poetic subjectivity. Hence the importance given in the present article to the multiplicity of the poetic subjectivity and the interactions between two subjects, and to the themes of death, love, and memory developed through the form of narrative poem. (See also the note below.)

3 The strongest case for the importance of the form of narrative poems in Emily Brontë has been made by Fannie E. Ratchford in her Gondal’s Queen: A Novel in Verse by Emily Brontë. As the subtitle “A Novel in Verse” suggests, Ratchford considers that all the poems transcribed by Emily in her Gondal Notebook constitute together a consistently sustained larger narrative with the two main characters, Augusta Geraldine Alemeda or A. G. A., Prince of Alcona, and Julius Brenzaida, Prince of Angora. She argues that “no one piece stands alone but is part of a whole which in grandeur of conception and unity of meaning transcends the sublimest single poem” (Ratchford 11-12). For the evidence, she cites an outline map of the Gondal-Gaaldine world (18) and a list of Gondal characters written by Anne Brontë (195), and six diary notes by Emily and Anne in which they reported the present state of the Gondalians in their narrative in progress. Drawing a list of Dramatic Personae for Emily’s Gondal poems on the model of Anne’s list of characters with a full use of her system of “aliases” or various designations of the same characters (43), Ratchford rearranges the Gondal poems in what she regards as the proper plot sequence of the Gondal story, whose missing links of narrative prose she herself proposes to supply. In spite of the considerable gaps between the narrative sequence and the known dates in Emily’s compositional chronology, and also in spite of the purely unsupported conjectural nature of her system of characters’ “aliases,”

Ratchford pursues her “organic myth,” distinct from Hatfield’s “genetic myth,”

under the belief that “Gondal was a compact and well-integrated whole” (23). Her hypothesis of the supposed strict consistency of the characters and their actions enables her to call what is usually referred to as the Gondal saga “a novel” in the subtitle of her book.

In my opinion, Ratchford’s “organic myth” is not organic enough upon novelistic standards: she reconstructs the “plot” by mere rearrangements of the poems and scanty pieces of linking prose passages by her own, and discovers the “characters”

by her “reading” the initials and aliases. Her notion of “plot” is no more than a mere chronological sequence of external events, and that of “character” no more than name tags or ID numbers. Most importantly, she hardly analyzes the Gondal poems themselves, that is to say, she hardly tries to discover the novelistic structure in any of these narrative poems, nor its significance in the total output of Emily’s works, as I tried to do in the present article. I would argue that the Gondal framework with its rough sketch of characters, geography, and chronology had supplied Emily with convenient scaffoldings for her dramatic self-projections and reformulations of her

poetic visions in general into specific “fictional” characters placed in their specific dramatic moments, and that in that sense, there was no essential division between the Gondal and the non-Gondal poems for Emily. Or rather, if there is an essential difference, it is not between the different subject matters, but between the different modes of poetic subjectivity – the difference between the lyrical monologues at unspecified moments of poetic visions and the dramatic dialogues in specific narrative moments in time. (Cf. Rosalind Miles, “A Baby God: The Creative Dynamism of Emily Brontë’s Poetry” in Smith 68-93).

(For the Gondal poems as a compensatory psychological – fanciful -- outlet of Emily’s sense of frustration about the female power, see C. Day Lewis, “The Poetry of Emily Brontë” in McNees, Vol. I, 540-56.)

Works Cited and References Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. London: Abacus, 1994.

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Chitham, Edward. “‘Often Rebuked . . .’: Emily’s After All?” The Brontë Society Transactions: 18.3 (1983): 222-26.

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____ , and Edward Chitham. Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Macmillan Literary Lives.

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