Death and Desire: Unpacking the Romantic Morbidities of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights

I recently had the pleasure of seeing Brontë scholar and Guggenheim fellow, Deborah Lutz, present On Walking and Emily Brontë, where she shared some of her research, wealth of fascinating findings, and end excerpts from her works on Victorian paper crafts and practices. 

Lutz shared her process of embodying Brontë by exploring what her lived experience would have been, notably through walking in the moors, her personal effects, and recreating sensations such as smell, touch, and sound. 

One of the elements which particularly struck me (pun intended) was the haunting presence of death bells in Brontë’s home. Lutz visited the remote West Yorkshire village of Haworth, where Emily Brontë’s father, Patrick Brontë, served as curate for the parsonage and where Brontë herself called home. So not only was Emily Brontë’s life filled with death, from losing her mother to many of her siblings very early on, but her everyday routine was also shaped by it, the tone of death bells at her father’s parsonage serving as a constant reminder ringing throughout Brontë’s childhood home. 

Wuthering Heights reflects Brontë’s deep familiarity with and romantic attachment to death, and Lutz’s findings reinforce how her early childhood experiences were shaped by an inescapable nexus where life and death are intricately entangled, their boundaries blurred by the constant toll of the death bell, and help me to better understand the troubling and macabre codependencies of Catherine and Heathcliff. There are several instances of death of being romanticized in Wuthering Heights. When the Earnshaw patriarch passes, Nelly observes the children grieving:

“The little souls were comforting each other with better thoughts than I could have hit on: no parson in the world ever pictured heaven so beautifully as they did, in their innocent talk; and, while I sobbed and listened, I could not help wishing we were all there safe together.”

The children are comforted by the idea of their father being in an idyllic heaven and Nelly morbidly longs for them all to co-exist in that space together, indicating an exalted fantasy of death as an escape, one that Nelly later refers to as the “untroubled image of Divine rest,” as well as teasing the codependent attachments of the family. 

The enigmatic relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is the most exemplary instance of this glorification of death. When they reunite just prior to Catherine’s passing, Catherine proclaims:

“I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.”

Catherine yearns to transcend her mortal constraints and become one with the spirit of the moors that offered her and Heathcliff sanctuary from their cruel reality. After she’s gone, Heathcliff hopes she’ll haunt him, saying: “Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad!” Their uncanny hunger for one another, or extreme Sehnsucht as Lutz refers to it, fosters a romantic notion that life and death are not opposites, but intimately intertwined and perpetually binding, where they may seek solace in the unbridled autonomy of their souls. 

Lutz’s exercises in embodiment provide profound insight into some of the more nuanced recesses of Emily Brontë’s psyche, particularly her tendency toward “obsessive thinking about the beauty of loss” that Lutz observed in her poetry and a palpable “pining after infinity.” These themes, fostered by the haunting chimes of the death bells that marked her childhood, are deeply enmeshed in the morbid romance of Wuthering Heights, reflecting shifts in Victorian death culture regarding the corporeal form and the mysteries that lie beyond, and underscoring Brontë’s earnest interest in ultimate spiritual transcendence.

So, I highly recommend checking out Deborah Lutz’s work. She has a remarkable ability to uncover the deeply human qualities hidden within a text, which I truly appreciate, and can’t wait to explore more of her insights!