- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: The Women's Press Ltd (1 Aug 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0704344017
- ISBN-13: 978-0704344013
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 957,042 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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A look at the life and times of one of Britain's most intriguing and exceptional women writers.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Was Emily Brontė a lesbian?,
By
This review is from: Emily Bronte: Heretic (Paperback)
For Stevie Davies she was (although not a practising one): "My intuition is that Wuthering Heights is not a heterosexual's book" (199). She concedes that she cannot prove this, but "its intense pledging of itself to the idea of likeness" - e.g. "Nelly, I am Heathcliff!" - implies for her "a lesbian consciousness". Which is a sweeping claim to be making so boldly (can you really conclude lesbianism from a text? Is there really such a thing as a lesbian text?). Many gender scholars have spent the last few decades strongly criticising French structuralist concepts of écriture féminine - the (supposed) inscription of the female body and difference in language and text, as made popular in the 1970s by Cixous, Irigaray and Wittig - which makes Davies's hunch about Brontė-as-lesbian seem somewhat outdated now.
But she does have some interesting things to say about Wuthering Heights. The central names used in the book are, for example, clearly anagrammatic, she argues: both Catherine and Hareton contain "heart" and "earth" (a favourite word of Brontė's and the one with which she closes the novel); Catherine contains most of the word "heath" and Earnshaw most of "earth" and "heath" while Heathcliff not only compounds "heath" and "cliff" but also contains "Cathie". Finally, it is true that Catherine and Earnshaw also contain most of "Hareton" (65). Brontė uses these complex mirror-tricks to hint at common ground and identity, without guaranteeing it (which Davies understands as a kind of sexual teasing of the reader). Davies is also good at debunking the myth of Emily as a heroine of unambiguous courage: Brontė retreated into a dreamworld and the parsonage, angrily avoiding strangers, and felt compelled to "brag" (her word) about having "no coward soul". The tone of that poem is defensive, Davies argues: "Serene self-confidence does not have to boast" (145). She also has a refreshingly relaxed writing style, describing James H. Kavanagh's claim that Penistone Crags could mean "penis stone" and "stone" testicles as "cock and balls atop the Heights" (199)! But while Davies ridicules post-structuralist Freudian critics for "discovering a phallus on nearly every page", her own speculations about Emily Brontė's (supposed) masturbatory practices and their influence on her texts sound conspicuously "post-Freudian" themselves. This is her third academic text on Emily Brontė and it's intended as a "culmination" (Davies would probably say "climax") of the two previous ones. She also published a Brontė-inspired novel, Four Dreamers and Emily, in 1996. (3.5 stars) Recommended> 1. The Complete Poems of Emily Brontė (Penguin) 2. The Infernal World of Branwell Brontė by Daphne du Maurier
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