The videos from British Library are short but deep enough to transport you to the world of literature. For instance, anyone who has read “Wuthering Heights” will remember its haunting landscape. There is a video which actually takes you to the Moors and Prof. John Bowen from University of York talks to you as you see the landscape you once saw sketched by words. “The landscape is so important for the Brontës. You know, they live in a house…(which) looks down onto this working, everyday town and then back to this absolutely unique landscape and it’s a landscape that is pretty harsh –– it’s not one that easily takes on human life. It’s not one that is pastoral or ideal in any way –– it’s harsh and it’s wintry. And it so structures the book –– it’s a world of contrasts in ‘Wuthering Heights’, between the Heights at the top and then Thrushcross Grange below…” Bowen says the sisters identified so much with the landscape that even when they went away from the Moors, they felt the wind that was blowing connected them to their home and their loved ones.
But, if the Moors exist, what about Gondal? Bowen says, “Emily Brontë, like her siblings, creates these fantasy worlds. So there is the little Grammar of Geography that they had as children and in it you can see that they've written the word Gondal, like it was a real place and that was the fantasy world that she created with Anne…”
They had the beautiful and inordinate capacity to bring fantasy to the real world and were detailed in their description of their characters. Bowen says about Heathcliff, the character you hate or love but definitely remember, “In one way he behaves in a totally realistic way. You can see where he lives, you can see the way he speaks and so forth, but in another way, he’s deeply mysterious and seems to touch all sorts of supernatural, or near supernatural forces…he’s constantly compared to the landscape –– he’s like a wind stone –– he’s like something harsh and stony, not something which anything can grow, so part of his destructiveness is related to the destructiveness or the coldness, or the difficulty of the landscape… it’s not one that’s easy for human beings to live in, but it’s one that matters a lot to the Brontës and they love it very much…Nobody knows where he's born, nobody knows who his parents are, he's only got one name –– he’s just called Heathcliff. Why should he have that? And people call him an afreet or a ghoul, he seems to be in touch with satanic kinds of forces….He seems to be able to choose his own death. People say that he's walking at the end. So, all these kind of Gothic elements and yet they're never fully supernatural –– they just seem to haunt the edges of the book, haunt the characterization of it…but at the same time, with all the realistic power of a novel that seizes you as if it could really be true.”
Of the keen mind which married fantasy to reality so dexterously, Bowen says, “…it’s Emily Brontë whose the most exceptional of them all really –– the most singular, the most independent minded…she’s got all that kind of spirit to her of independent mindedness and finding new worlds and so the wonderful thing about ‘Wuthering Heights’ is that –– in one way it is the most disciplined and complexly organized novel. If you try and work out its back story and its time scheme, it's beautifully structured and organized and the way it's told –– it's got so many different narrators –– it's like a little set of Chinese boxes set inside each other…at the same time, it seems to touch the most kind of primitive and deep human feelings about the nature of human culture –– what happens when human culture meets something beyond it, itself…”
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