WUTHERING HEIGHTS, by Emily Brontë, is said to have been the 20th century’s favourite Victorian novel. Yet, in 1847, its sophisticated “Chinese box” narrative structure, its radical investigation of the primitive and the pagan, and its use of Yorkshire dialect baffled the reviewers, most of whom were metrocentric men.
Writing in our post-feminist culture, Karen Powell has her own version of Emily narrated in the first person, as in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s Agnes Grey. This gives a sharp focus to the events described, but also imposes a limit to their interpretation by the sole narrator.
Much scholarly ink has been spilt over the sources of Wuthering Heights, such as Scott, Byron, and the Gothic stories in Blackwood’s Magazine; and Powell reminds the reader of the importance to Emily of seminal works such as King Lear and Paradise Lost. But, for all its literary freight, which the theorists would call “neo-Victorian intertextuality”, Fifteen Wild Decembers succeeds as a free-standing narrative, casting its spell over the reader, whether or not she has read the Brontës’ novels and their sources, and having the creative audacity to offer a clue to the “true” source of Emily’s classic.
From start to finish, much of the energy generated by this narrative is related to movement — on board ships, in trains and coaches, and on foot, as we are taken briskly across the moors. Even in interior scenes, a sense of imprisonment leads to nervous pacing to and fro. The tension between movement and stasis, between the narrator’s longing for freedom and love of home, is expressed physically, in her selective mutism, for example, and her propensity for lying on the ground. She is blocked, thwarted, hemmed in, even by the siblings she loves the most.
Christian readers will notice that most of the clergy who populate Emily’s world are unprepossessing. The sisters “made a point of despising” Papa’s curates at Haworth, according to Emily, who is of the earth, earthy. In Chapter 8, the boy who throws something at her at Ponden Clough, cutting her cheek, is “bare-foot, goat-sure, dressed in rough, country clothes the colour of mushrooms”. Longing to retaliate, she haunts the place that spring and summer, but fails to see the boy “rising out of the heather again”.
Two chapters and five years later, she collapses on a walk beyond Top Withins, finding herself down on her stomach, her whole body “cleaving to the earth”. On her way home, she encounters a man dressed in “the muted colours of the moors, mudstone, bleached grass”. He pushes back his shirtsleeves as if they are an irritation, and she sees his forearms, “tanned from outdoor work”. She remembers the “milk-white arms” of a visiting clergyman at the parsonage: “The sight had revolted me, made me wonder how any woman could bear to marry and be subjected to that every day of her life.” The girl is now a woman (there is talk between the sisters of “monthlies”), and the boy is now a man, his eyes “peat-dark, uncivilised”.
The author, Karen Powell
When her sisters find employment away from home, Emily becomes mistress of her own kingdom, with her textbooks propped up in the kitchen. Walking her dog, Keeper, on the moors, she is increasingly drawn to Top Withens, scene of the narrative’s and its narrator’s moment of crisis, when she is aroused by witnessing a sex act between the farmer and a woman who, on departure, brings her riding whip hard across the man’s cheek. The circle is complete.
After a night of strange dreams, she announces to her sisters that she will write about a family “living up on our own moors. Something like the tales Tabby used to tell us when we were small.” No longer afraid of the future, she has firmer ground beneath her feet as she writes. She is always aware of her own body and those of others, including her brother Branwell’s, which she often has to clean up as he destroys himself with drink and drugs. When she is dying, she sees herself revisiting the swell of Penistone Hill. The moon is over Keighley. The feminine principle is in the ascendant. The goddess Diana reigns.
In her acknowledgments, Powell singles out Juliet Barker’s group biography of the Brontë family as a source of inspiration. Barker’s achievement was to separate the myth from the reality, achieved by long and painstaking archival work. Powell emulates Barker by covering the whole family in her chronological narrative, including the servants and the much misunderstood Papa, that redoubtable pastor and reformer.
She also stands in a line of women writers of neo-Victorian fiction, such as Sarah Perry in The Essex Serpent, who draw on the four elements in their exploration of the unconscious. Charlotte Brontë married one of Papa’s curates and ended Jane Eyre with the word “Jesus”. The last word of Wuthering Heights is “earth”.
Dr Michael Wheeler is a Visiting Professor of English at the University of Southampton and author of English Fiction of the Victorian Period, 1830-1890 (Longman, 1985).
Fifteen Wild Decembers by Karen Powell is published by Europa Editions at £9.99 (Church Times Bookshop £8.99); 978-1-78770-545-6.
Listen to Sarah Meyrick in conversation with the author, Karen Powell, in this week’s Church Times podcast. This is a monthly series produced in association with the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature. Listen here.
FIFTEEN WILD DECEMBERS — SOME QUESTIONS
- To what extent is a reading of this novel enhanced by knowing the Brontës’ books and biographies beforehand?
- How does the novel compare with other neo-Victorian fiction you may have read, such as John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, or Antonia Byatt’s Possession: A romance?
- Could a man have written this novel?
- Realism versus romance: to what extent are these terms that are applied to Victorian novels helpful when thinking about this one?
- Do you consider the literary references in the novel to be enhancements or distractions?
- To what extent does the first-person narrator’s view of her siblings match your own?
IN OUR next Book Club page on 5 July, we will print extra information about our next book, Struggling with God: Mental health and Christian spirituality, by Christopher C. H. Cook, Isabelle Hamley, and John Swinton. It is published by SPCK at £14.99 (£13.49); 978-0-281-08641-2).
THE BOOK
Struggling with God focuses on the mental-health challenges facing Christians, and looks at how these issues relate to spirituality, prayer, and church life. This is an accessible book by three academics. The authors address the stigma attached to mental health in church communities, and look at the problems arising from some church settings in which mental health is connected with a lack of faith. Each of the six chapters ends with a biblical reflection with questions for individual or group study.
THE AUTHORS
The Revd Christopher C. H. Cook is Professor of Spirituality, Theology and Health at Durham University, and he worked as a psychiatrist in the NHS for more than 25 years. The Revd Dr Isabelle Hamley is Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and a theological adviser to the House of Bishops. The Revd John Swinton is a Scottish theologian, and holds the Chair in Divinity and Religious Studies at the School of Divinity, History, and Philosophy, at the University of Aberdeen.