Date of Award
Spring 4-30-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Barbara Black
Second Advisor
Nicholas Junkerman
Abstract
Emily Brontë’s infamous 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights, is a revolutionary text. While Brontë is deeply appreciated by contemporary scholars for the complexity of Wuthering Heights, this was not always the case. Her initial audience took her political and religious commentary as blind endorsement of harmful behavior, and found her themes nigh disturbing, despite the text’s placement in the gothic subgenre. However, by tracing her own religious education, and early poetic efforts alongside Wuthering Heights, clear thematic preoccupations on the part of the author can be observed as she passed through adolescence and her worldview solidified. These recurring themes, particularly in her novel, which portrays complicated and potentially unlikable characters who do not always make the “correct” decisions, showcase her intellectual concerns. When understood together, Brontë presents a uniquely imagined spirituality. In her only published novel, Brontë explores complex topics such as race, gender, and cycles of familial abuse with nuance. Underlining all else, she critiques Victorian culture and the Christianity that informed it in radical ways. Within her own body of work, Wuthering Heights demonstrates the culmination of subjects that possessed Brontë’s imagination and literary endeavors long before she published the novel. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë develops most completely the literary themes that haunt her earlier work by depicting Christianity as a moralizing cultural force that creates and reinforces a strictly hierarchical, exploitative, and punitive society. She sets this in direct contrast with an alternative kind of spirituality–one more personal, freeing, and mystical, that she ties to the natural world rather than the human world of Victorian England, characterizing it as one that encompasses all, rather than imposing a rigid and “othering” binary.
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Recommended Citation
Urban, Elizabeth, "Finding the Holy in Nature: Emily Brontë’s Revolutionary Conception of the Transcendental Religious Experience" (2024). English Honors Theses. 87.
https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/eng_stu_schol/87