Emily Brontë's Darkling Tales

Wootton, S.

doi:10.3366/rom.2016.0291

Emily Brontë's Darkling Tales

Wootton, S.

Authors

Professor Sarah Wootton s.e.wootton@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

This essay examines light and dark as coalescing and contradictory ‘opposites’ in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. The resonant interplay of light and dark in the novel, as captured and reworked to startling effect in Rosalind Whitman's series of etchings Black and White in Wuthering Heights, is conceived in the shadow of Romanticism. Subjecting Romantic ideals and anxieties to the pressure of Victorian prose darkens, if not quite eclipses, Keats's ‘truth of Imagination’, and thereby situates the novel at an interpretative crossroads. Wuthering Heights is poised on a literary fault-line, as an heir to the Romantic tradition that simultaneously heralds the advent of Modernism. As readers of Emily Brontë’s novel, we, like the gaunt thorns and stunted firs that cling to the landscape surrounding the Heights, are hardened by the inhospitable terrain of the text and yearn for the light amidst a dense and disorientating post-Romantic darkness.

Citation

Wootton, S. (2016). Emily Brontë's Darkling Tales. Romanticism, 22(3), 299-311. https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0291

Journal Article Type	Article
Online Publication Date	Sep 15, 2016
Publication Date	Oct 1, 2016
Deposit Date	Sep 16, 2016
Publicly Available Date	Sep 21, 2016
Journal	Romanticism
Print ISSN	1354-991X
Electronic ISSN	1750-0192
Publisher	Edinburgh University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	22
Issue	3
Pages	299-311
DOI	https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2016.0291