Landscapes in Emily Bronte, Lawrence and Mansfield

LANDSCAPES

Tonight, I am thinking a lot about landscapes.

It has come about because I have recently read the ultimate landscape novel ‘Wuthering Heights’. The landscape, or the setting, is of course the moors surrounding the Bronte Parsonage near Haworth, in Lancashire. I don’t have the book with me, but some of the vocabulary I am left with in my memory is craggy, rocky, heather, black frost, fleecy cloud, abundant rain, temporary brooks, shadows and sunshine, transient mist, wintry drifts, primroses & crocuses, impassable roads, and so on. It is a tough environment which suited only the toughest of people. And Emily Bronte must have been one of the toughest young women who ever lived. The novel is extraordinary for its power, cruelty, violence and menace. It paints a visceral world of loneliness, imprisonment, and despair, as well as other gothic elements like madness, imprisonment, the supernatural and mysticism.

 It must have been thrilling for EJB to apply her imaginative world to such a ‘fantastic’ and surreal story, dark and foreboding, although in the case of Heathcliff and Cathy, and younger Cathy and Edgar, her father, full of romantic love and filial bonding as well. My impression of EJB is that of someone who could be ruthless like her characters, hard-nosed and wilfully independent and determined and capable of cruelty. Filled from top to toe with the ‘romantic imagination’ but understanding of the uncompromising tenor of her times and the people who inhabited remote areas of the wild countryside in the nineteenth century.

The landscape of D H Lawrence’s childhood never left him. He grew up in Eastwood, Nottingham, semi-rural with a fairly short distance to town (Nottingham) but also enclosed by woods and country paths and farms and wild nature. His landscape crept into novels his whole life, from the beginnings with ‘The White Peacock’ and ‘Sons & Lovers’, to latter works such as ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘’The Lost Girl’. Despite the fact that he spent a good deal of his fertile writing career living abroad in places like Australia, New Mexico and Italy, Lawrence also came back to the world of his childhood in his latter books like ‘The Virgin & The Gypsy’ and ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’. Just like a venture into Bronte territory is manna from heaven for me, it is similar with the Lawrence world of Eastwood, Moorgreen Reservoir, Cossal (Cossethay in ‘The Rainbow’).

Lawrence’s favourite place of his childhood was Hagg’s Farm, where he would walk several miles to visit the Chambers family, all of the Chambers family who were a second family, and in particular the love of his youth, Jessie Chambers (Miriam in ‘Sons & Lovers’) who he might have married but for the fact as he later said ‘she would have destroyed (my) genius’ (not a feminist-friendly afterthought). Lawrence wrote Jessie’s brother a letter near the end of his life about the joy of visiting The Haggs, which never left him. He called it ‘the countryside of my heart’. The closest, perhaps, to experiencing these feelings of joy and comfort and landscape again were probably whilst living in New Mexico with his wife and friends, baking bread, writing novels, riding horses, visiting ancient places like Guadalajara…

Katherine Mansfield came to hate New Zealand, her birthplace, as enclosed, smothering, provincial. As an adolescent she had a taste of life in London, and on return she had a miserable period in Wellington with her parents where she felt listless and angry. She was the archetypal bored young adult in her restlessness and feelings of confinement and restlessness. On her return to Queens College London, she blossomed in an environment more conducive to her study of music, imagination and literature, in particular Oscar Wilde and other so-called ‘decadents’.

 This is not to say that NZ did not feature in her writing as she grew to become a highly talented and revered writer of short stories. We see Wellington and its environs crop up in stories like ‘The Voyage’ and ‘At The Bay’ and ‘Prelude’ and ‘The Garden Party’. These are some of her best stories. It is just that when we think of Katherine Mansfield, we sometimes forget she is from New Zealand because she embraced Europe and everything it had to offer in the 1920’s so wholeheartedly, and never seemed to entertain thoughts of ever going back there.

Landscapes feed writers’ imaginations. I doubt that Virginia Woolf would ever have said that Katherine Mansfield was the only writer she was jealous of if KM had have stayed in NZ all her life. Lawrence’s books and stories and poems and plays are much more vivid and varied for having the thirst to travel and experience life in some of its extremities on his so-called ‘savage pilgrimage’ to far flung places in Europe, America and Australia. As for EJB, who lived until only 30, what might she have created had she travelled more, and lived on the continent or the US or some island for a period of time. When she died it is said that she was busy with a second novel. It is difficult to imagine Emily Bronte attached to anywhere other than her beloved moors that seem such an intrinsic part of her psyche and her life. And I want to go back there and search for Cathy and Heathcliff.

Holidaying by the sea, and thinking of Wuthering Heights

It is January, 2020. It is another new year. I am holidaying on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria at a tourist spot Apollo Bay called Skene's Creek.

The shoreline below us at Skene’s Creek is filled with rocky plates. These are mostly thick but flattened and easy to walk upon in their smoothness. They create a magical, moon-like atmosphere, except for the choppy waves that sometimes plummet on them. Occasionally you see tendrils of seaweed or lime-green sea plants growing on them, but they are mostly bare. Yesterday we saw some birdlife, or rather death, in the form of a gull and a fairy penguin.

This is the time of year of the after effects of bushfires. They have spread wildly and devastatingly across several states, and in particular in NSW and Victoria. The atmosphere is fogged with a thick, grey cloudy haze. The sky is smoke-grey, even white in places, and it looks like it will bucket with rain, but we are only getting intermittent, brief showers. I spoke to a neighbour that I saw at the beach. His teenage boys have coloured hair. One of them, the tallest one, has a mop of bright red, curly hair. He looks like Thing One or Thing Two from ‘The Cat in the Hat.’ When I said ‘it’s not great holiday weather!’, he looked surprised at my defeatism, and in optimistic fashion, replied ‘at least it is seldom raining.’

Despite our smoggy, smoky environs, and the fact that it is a bit too cold to swim in the choppy ocean, it is enough that we have this glorious moon-scape not far from the bottom of our garden. It is like another prehistoric world and I gaze into little or large rock pools expectantly for mysterious ocean dwellers, dead or alive. The roaring sea is absorbing to watch. I like the lovely emerald green of the sea just as it is about to curl or roll into another flashing wave. You also have the sensation of the soft sand under your feet or the smooth plates of rock you can stand on in order to look imperiously over the water. It is amazing how free you feel. In the distance, in the murky haze at night, the Otway Lighthouse has a steady beam to the right. It is just you, the distant beam, the incessant waves crashing on the moon plates, a white bird or two with stork-like legs, the grey, unfriendly mountains, the thick, mysterious haze, silver sky. And besides the muted roar of the hungry sea, it is so quiet. I imagine I am on a big ship with friends and wine, flooding across the seas, looking for an uninhabited island, without responsibilities and expectations.

Then I remember I am immersed in ‘Wuthering Heights’ and I think of ghosts, and Heathcliff, and Cathy calling, cold and shut out on the moors, and I think of the sea as being like a huge wet version of the moors, and how EJB, or Emily Bronte, would have wandered these moors time and time again, like me, bewildered, and charged and exhilarated by her surroundings, feeling other wordly and looking for whatever nature might fling up to you in the wildest spaces. Not a penguin or some other seabird for her, or a strange cream-coloured shell, or random rock pools housing who knows what. For her, wild dogs and various birds, a massive array of plant life, moss and heather blazing in the late Lancashire light, the plot of Wuthering Heights forming in her mind, the slow emergence of Cathy and Heathcliff, their second carnation, Hareton Earnshaw and Hindley, kindly Nell and steady Edgar and the strange and often hostile communications between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the violence and desperate lives, their frustrations and forced limitations and the cruelty and aggression. And it must be said smaller snatches of love, and hope as well and very real longing such as Earnshaw has for the younger Cathy at the end of the novel. EJB understood somehow the whole range or gamut of emotions that make up the human experience despite her relatively insular life.

The birthplace of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall- oh, to be there again now, very now… and just now it also occurs to me- and I find this very interesting- I have never thought much about the landscapes of Jane Austen. I guess this is because her novels are much more interior- still, the settings of Barton Hall, and Pemberton and the other great mansions- the lovely hills and valleys and dales of the English countryside, the sparkling streams where the men fish, the broad spaces where their hunting is done- I don’t care as much for.

I can remember vaguely Charlotte being dismissive of Austen. Perhaps she didn’t understand her, or her world. It is very different to Haworth (even so Charlotte was the one Bronte who became reasonably travelled and experienced with polite society through the success of Jane Eyre and introductions to people like Thackeray and Dickens).

It is not to say I don’t value Jane Austen. I like her. I esteem her. I like some of her novels, in fact, more than most of Jane Eyre, which I think is too long and needed more polish. Austen certainly does not lack polish or craft.

But I come back to Wuthering Heights. The attractiveness of the rawness of everything. There is not one in Austen like Heathcliff, the dirty orphaned boy who is dragged back to the Heights by his master and grows up to be cruel and vindictive and full of resentment about his place in society. No-one in Austen like Earnshaw, who is desperate to drag Catherine to bed and tear her clothes off. You can just feel this seething sense of sexual menace which is so surprising and compelling. Emily Bronte must have been so shocking for her time. Austen undoubtedly shocked too. She was full of subtle, clever criticism of her society and her best heroines were intelligent and resourceful and you can’t help but feel moved by the way things were so heavily stacked against them. But this sense of gender imprisonment is so much more powerful in Wuthering Heights. Elizabeth Bennett would have been shocked by Cathy. You could only imagine her take on Heathcliff and Hindley and Earnshaw. Perhaps Elizabeth would have coped better than some of the others.

It’s the language too, that is the great difference. I was enthralled by Bronte’s language of the gutter. Whilst Austen is cynical about everything, it is polite cynical. EJB however captures the attitudes of her people with devastating force, looking the reader straight in the eye and telling us exactly how her desperate people feel and think. And somehow she still directs our affection towards them.