![]() Yet, I was still surprised by the narrative and physical space Wuthering Heights allows books to occupy.īrontë uses diegetic books as tools for constructing and obstructing human relationships. Wuthering Heights demonstrates this point. Leah Price remind us, in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian England, that books served multiple, myriad, and layered purposes in nineteenth-century Britain. The diegetic book (“her book”) sparks Lockwood’s interest: “An immediate interest kindled within me for the unknown Catherine, and I began, forthwith, to decipher her faded hieroglyphics.” Captivated, Lockwood asks Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, to tell him (and thus also us, the readers of the novel) the story of Catherine and Heathcliff. This particular book introduces a novel about possessing (“her book”) and being possessed (it is a famous gothic ghost story, after all). The words identify the book as a possession of the dead mistress, a thing and relic of importance due to its attachment to a person who once occupied Lockwood’s domicile and whose ghost now lingers there. An inscription on the book’s fly-leaf sparks his interest: “Catherine Earnshaw, her book.”. He becomes fascinated by a book in that room. ![]() Lockwood shut up for the night, riding out a storm (at Heathcliff’s estate, Wuthering Heights). They are things that share space, and in very constrained spaces, with the humans around them. In Wuthering Heights, books are important due to their presence as material objects. And like my focus in Bookishness, in Brontë’s narrative books serve as plot devices not because of the content they contain (or how characters read them) but as physical things. I turned in my page proofs, and then I wanted to get as far away from the project as possible. The project had dominated my thoughts, time, and life. I spent the last decade thinking and writing about how books remain part of our lives when we shift to e-readers: through laptop and cell-phone covers made to look like books, art made from books, and literature that turns books into characters, and more. I just completed a book, Bookishness : Loving Books in a Digital Age(forthcoming from Columbia University Press this November!). I turned to the Victorians seeking relief not only from the news but also from my scholarly life. ![]() These days, Emily Brontë’s haunted and haunting tale from 1847 rings eerily familiar. And in May 2020, we know something about that. This is a novel about loneliness and anger, narcissism and madness, the surge of imagination and dreams of revenge, desires for human connection and the pull of the natural world. Nearly every character in this novel is trapped: due to weather, illness, class and gender positions, fear of the world beyond, and more. Wuthering Heights documents the detrimental effects of staying too long in constrained spaces and remaining too long with the same house-mates. I see the effects of sheltering-in-place. But reading this book today, I don’t see love. I remember thinking of Emily Brontë’s novel as a tale of love-love lost and love lingering, strange love (necrophiliac, incestual), but love nonetheless. I can’t recall when I last read it, but it was a long time ago.
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