Emily's Ghost

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in biofictions about famous novelists, the novelist must have an exciting life.  Often, of course, such excitement is almost always lacking from the historical record, so the author must invent some grand romance, swashbuckling bit of derring-do, or secret other life for their novelist of choice.  Bonus points if this biofictional plot turns out to parallel the novelist's own works, turning their entire oeuvre into a rather unimaginative transcription of their own biography. 

Denise Giardina's Emily's Ghost: A Novel of the Bronte Sisters does not deviate from biofictional convention.   The novel's core premise is that Emily, who, as far as we know, appears to have been totally uninterested in romantic entanglements, in fact met (and lost) her soulmate in the person of clergyman William Weightman.  Weightman, also as far as we know, seems to have been a handsome, flirtatious charmer, who definitely charmed Charlotte, possibly charmed Anne, and apparently made no impression at all worthy of note on Emily.  This doesn't stop Giardina, who explains away this minor historical problem by arguing that that nasty Charlotte torched all the evidence (334-35).   Given that what we know about Weightman suggests that he was a nice guy and...well...a nice guy, Giardina indulges in heroic efforts to inflate his intellectual attractions, the better to make him Worthy of being Emily's True Love.  ("Good Lord," Branwell comments when Weightman informs him of his passion.  "Is it not like being in love with a tiger?" [284])  Weightman turns out to be a political radical! Conducting secret correspondence with the Chartists! An admirer of women who buck social conventions! (This novel unapologetically tips over into Rule #3.)  All that plus unfailing courteousness to women, children, and animals!  In other words, it's not enough for Emily to have her Tragic Romance; she has to have it with an idealized "modern" man, who combines proto-feminism with suitably macho politics. 

Despite its praise for the heroically unconventional Emily, accompanied by disdain for thoroughly conventional Charlotte (represented here as an inveterate husband-hunter, a conformist, and--gasp!--a conservative), Emily's Ghost itself paradoxically displays little interest in challenging the conventions of either biofiction or romance.  The very decision to make Emily the heroine of a tragic, unconsummated romance already turns a woman who, by all accounts, was an unapologetic eccentric in the purest sense of the word, into someone more legible, more easily contained.  More to the point, to the extent that this novel takes any interest at all in Emily's writing--it's mentioned only occasionally--the romance plot turns out to be a gender-reversed Wuthering Heights, only without the sublimity.  When Emily angrily declares that "I am Heathcliff! I am!" Charlotte reasonably inquires, "'then who is Cathy?'" (321).   Weightman may be the man, but he's also associated with nurturing (children, an ancient dog) and refined culture; Emily may be the woman, but she warns Weightman that she would prefer "wandering the moors" to attending to everyday socializing (213), and cannot imagine surviving the "confinement" of motherhood (214).  Even though the two share their intellectual and emotional passions, Weightman's persona replays Cathy's domestication at the hands of the Lintons, while Emily's wilder nature suggests a successfully-raised Heathcliff.  Emily's self-identification suggests that this novel adheres to the Wuthering Heights-as-Grand-Romance theory, as opposed to either Victorian readings (which noted that Heathcliff was a Gothic monstrosity, not an admirable hunka burnin' love), or more recent responses (which similarly point out that Heathcliff's relationship with Catherine is, at best, mutually destructive).  Here, though, Emily's collapse of her identity into that of her fictional creation seems strangely askew, given that we are not otherwise invited to read her as an unreliable viewpoint character: she successfully manages her passion for Weightman, enjoys a strong relationship with her father (for once, Patrick Bronte comes off well), and is close to her sisters.  Moreover, unlike Heathcliff, raging for Cathy's ghost to come back to him, Emily gets reassuring psychic (and posthumous) visitations from Weightman, who does useful things like telling her not to murder somebody.   For that matter, Emily and Weightman may be trundling about the moors together at the end, no doubt with the same odds of Heathcliff and Cathy doing the same (329), but there doesn't seem to be anything disturbing about this, any more than there's anything disturbing about Emily's various hauntings.  This is safe Gothic, inhabited by loving ghosts.  There's a certain narrative violence involved in conflating Emily with Heathcliff, akin to her father's rather mind-boggling decision at the end to open up Weightman's and Emily's coffins to each other, a la Heathcliff and Cathy (332).  In effect, Emily's Ghost shoehorns Emily into her novel's famous plot, come hell or high water, even though the novel's characters never show any signs of existing on Wuthering Heights' plane. 

Even as Emily's Ghost manages to tame Emily in the act of casting her as a wild, free spirit (like her symbolic merlin, Nero), it does its best to cast itself as an anti-Charlotte narrative.  ("'Oh, Willie,'" Emily moans to a dead Weightman, "'Charlotte's vision will prevail.  She will be read and I will not be'" [325].)  Many years ago, someone reviewing a biography of Gladstone commented that it was getting rather wearisome to find biographers rehashing the Gladstone-Disraeli rivalry in their own work, and I can't help but think that this novel would unfold more successfully with less partisanship.   Giardina relentlessly turns Charlotte into everything that's wrong with the Victorian Woman: she enjoys sitting around talking in parlors, schemes to find herself a husband, develops crushes on every remotely eligible (and ineligible) man in sight, and firmly insists on being (relatively) proper.  Alas, Charlotte turns out to be unforgivably nasty to Emily's One True Love, especially once she realizes that Weightman isn't attracted to her.  Even worse, she concludes the novel by destroying anything that hints at Emily's relationship to Weightman, along with Emily's last novel.  (Oh, and I did point out that she was a Tory, right? That aligns her with the alcohol-sodden Branwell, rather than with Emily, Weightman, and the secretly Chartist-admiring Patrick.) In part, this conclusion develops from Charlotte's famous preface to the reissue of Wuthering Heights (see here), with its influential attempt to clean up (and romanticize) her deceased sisters' personalities.    And yet, one of the earliest moments in the novel involves Emily facing off with William Carus Wilson, a scene clearly adapted from Jane Eyre.  In a way, Emily's imaginary grand passion owes much more to Jane Eyre's and Rochester's deep spiritual union than it ever does to Heathcliff and Cathy...