Logo of British Library.
Open book with cartoon portraits.
Book titled 'Goldsmith's Grammar Of Geography'.
Text — Wuthering Heights, Fantasy and realism.
Professor John Bowen, University of York, speaks within the Bronte Parsonage.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
The Bronte family is an exceptional family, but in a way it's Emily Bronte who's the most exceptional of them all, really — the most singular, the most independent-minded. And, um, her teacher, Monsieur Heger, in Brussels, said she should've been a great navigator. And she's got all that kind of spirit to her of independent-mindedness and finding new worlds. And so the wonderful thing about Wuthering Heights is the way that it… in one way, it the most disciplined and complexly organised novel. If you try and work out its back story and its time scheme, it's beautifully structured and organised.
Professor John Bowen leafs through novel.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
And the way it's told, it's got so many different narrators, it's like a little set of Chinese boxes set inside each other. So, in one way, it's wonderfully controlled and organised, and yet at the same time, it seems to touch the most kind of primitive and deep human feelings about the nature of human culture. What happens when human culture meets something beyond itself? And again, it's quite a realistic novel. So, Lockwood, at the beginning, he's like somebody from Jane Austen, and then he walks into Wuthering Heights and he keeps getting it wrong. He sees some dead rabbits and he thinks they're kittens. He thinks they all must belong to the same family. Well, they all do, but none in the relationships that he thinks that they do. So, he constantly misunderstands it, because he's in a world that touches much more powerful and primitive kinds of feelings. So, Emily Bronte, like her siblings, creates these fantasy worlds.
Page from Goldsmith's Grammar Of Geography.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
So, here, there's the little Grammar Of Geography that they have as children, and in it you can see that they've written the word 'Gondal' like it was a real place, and that was the fantasy world that she created with Anne. And again, like her sister Charlotte, she brings lots of Gothic elements, lots of fantasy elements, lots of fairytale elements into the novel, but within that very disciplined kind of framework.
Professor John Bowen speaks.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
So, if you think of Heathcliff, for example, in one way, he behaves in a totally realistic way — you can see where he lives, you can see the way he speaks and so forth — but in another way, he's deeply mysterious and seems to touch all sorts of supernatural or near-supernatural forces.
Monochrome watercolour of a young woman in white and a figure in a black cloak.
PROFESSOR JOHN BOWEN:
Nobody knows where he's born, nobody knows who his parents are, he's only got one name — he's just called 'Heathcliff'. Why should he have that? And people call him an 'afreet' or a 'ghoul', he seems to be in touch with satanic kinds of forces, he digs up Cathy at the end and wants to be buried with her, he seems to be able to choose his own death, people say that he's walking at the end. So, there are all these kind of Gothic elements, and yet they're never fully supernatural — they just seem to haunt the edges of the book, haunt the characterisation of it, so that it's constantly under control in that you get the power and the emotional force and the eroticism of Gothic in this novel, but at the same time with all the realistic power of a novel that seizes you as if it could really be true.
Filmed at the Bronte Parsonage.
Text — Directed by Anna Lobbenberg, Cinematography by Joseph Turp, Edited by Joseph Turp.
Images — The Bronte Parsonage, The British Library, Bridgeman Art Library.
Text — With special thanks to John Bowen.
Logo of British Library.