 Hello, fellow followers of Christ, and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the primes and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praised their writing, and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce, and this is The Authority. Hello, I'm Joseph Pierce, and welcome to this episode of The Authority, where this time, actually, we are going to break the mould, so to speak, because all of the other episodes, thus far, and I think henceforth, at least for the time being, are going to be about individual authors. This particular episode, however, we are devoting to three separate authors, the Bronte sisters, so Emily, Charlotte, and Anne. We'll be looking at their works, the three sisters, but let's begin with the mother and father. Their mother died when they were very young, so they never really knew their mother. Their father was the Reverend Patrick Bronte, and this is significant. When they were young, when the sisters were young, the Bronte's moved to Howarth, which is a small town on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales, beautiful town, if you ever get a chance to go there. A natural fact, if you do get a chance to go there, there's a wonderful walk you can do from Howarth Parsonage, which is where they lived, and which has now become a museum to the Bronte's. You can walk from there across the moors to the ruined farmhouse, which is alleged to have been the model for Wuthering Heights, and then you can walk from Wuthering Heights, that ruined farmhouse, to the larger house that's alleged to have been the inspiration for Thrush Cross Grange in the novel Wuthering Heights, and then you can make that make the whole thing a circle and come back to Howarth Parsonage again. You get a feel of walking across the moors, you can really get a feel of being in the novel. You will not feel in situ. That's a way to do it. But the Reverend Patrick Bronte served as a good, loyal, and devout Anglican vicar, Anglican parson, to the people of Howarth in Yorkshire for 40 years. So the Bronte's were raised in a good, solid, devout Anglican family. So their Christianity is not in doubt in spite of the efforts of many modern, postmodern, ideology-driven critics and historians to say otherwise. I've spent quite a lot of time writing about this. I'm not going to spend too much time talking about it today. You can take my word for it, or you can check out what I have written about it, especially Wuthering Heights. I wrote the introduction to the Ignatius Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights, and in that I go into the nonsense spoken about the Bronte sisters in general, and Emily in particular, at some length. So if you want to dig deeper, that's how you can do it. But this will not be the topic of our conversation today. We're going to be more, not going to spend time with such nonsense, rebutting such nonsense. So what we see that the Bronte's are, I would say, as Christian, as Jane Austen, who was the author that was the focus of the previous episode, but they are more romantic in, shall we say, questionable, even bad sense of the word. They are somewhat delirious. They really do allow passions to, I would say, I don't get the better of them. I'm not sure if that's true, as we shall see. But they do allow that passion its head, that's for sure. They create monstrous characters who fling themselves about following their heart heedlessly and headlessly. But then the key thing here is that the Christian morality prevails, and usually this headless, heedless passion is exhibited in a manner to show its destructive qualities. So they do allow passion its head, but only to show the danger and destructiveness and self-destructiveness of so doing. So in that sense, we should see a novel such as Wuthering Heights in the same way in which we should see a play such as Romeo and Juliet, that what Shakespeare does in Romeo and Juliet is to show the destructiveness and self-destructiveness of allowing our passions to rule our reason. In the sense of the older generation, the Capulets and the Montagues, they allow their passion of hatred towards the other family to distort and pervert their understanding of things. In the case of the young lovers, well, one's very young, Juliet, whose Shakespeare makes only 13 years old at the age of his daughter when he was writing it, and Romeo, we find that their heedless, headless idolatry and idolatrous relationship, literally that the so-called love of the other becomes a quasi-religion which exercises the divine from their lives, and it results in self-destruction. Wuthering Heights needs to be seen the same way that we need to see Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights in the same way we see Romeo and Juliet if we're seeing the play as Shakespeare wrote it, and if we're seeing the novel as Emily Bronte wrote it, both of whom, of course, profoundly devout Christians. And how do we find the Christian presence in Wuthering Heights? We find it primarily in the voice of Nellie Dean, and she is the narrator for most of the novel, so the novel opens with Mr. Lockwood being the narrator, but then Mr. Lockwood has the center stage she likes to Nellie Dean. Nellie Dean tells Mr. Lockwood the story, and then it's in her voice, and it stays in her voice right until near the end of the novel. So she's the narrator, and up to a point we see the novel through her eyes, through her perspective, and she is a very devout, and I would even say holy Christian voice and a holy Christian presence. She's not the least bit taken in by the wild, mad, passionate relationship that Heathcliff and Cathy have for each other, which is destructive of both of them and of everybody that comes into contact with them. So I'm going to just say a few words about Nellie Dean because I think understanding her is the key to understanding Wuthering Heights. It is she who attempts to bring the plot's protagonist to their senses. She warns Heathcliff that, quote, proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves. That, by the way, could be a motto for the whole novel. These words of wisdom these words of wisdom will serve as the very defining moral and motto of the novel. The whole story is the weaving of the sad sorrows brought upon the main protagonists by their own pride. The wisdom of Nellie's words and the suspicion that they are the words of the author speaking vicariously are present in an exchange with Catherine in which Nellie emerges as an incisive Christian theologian. If I were in heaven Catherine says I should be extremely miserable. The reason says Nellie is because, quote, all sinners would be miserable in heaven. Her axiomatic repost should be borne in mind as the dialogue continues particularly in the light or darkness of Catherine's obsession with Heathcliff. So these are Catherine's words. My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries and I watched and felt each from the beginning. My great thought in living is himself. If all perished and he remained I should still continue to be and if all else remained and he were annihilated the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks a source of little visible delight but necessary. Nellie I am Heathcliff. He's always always in my mind not as a pleasure any more than I am always a pleasure to myself but say my own being so don't talk about separation again. These are not the words of devotion in any in any healthy sense they're the words of demonic possession quite frankly. In this well-known passage Catherine is confessing the infernal nature of her love for Heathcliff who is not merely her idol but her demonic god. She not only worships him she is possessed by him. This demonic dimension was not lost on G.K Chesterton who wrote that Heathcliff quote fails as a man as catastrophically as he succeeds as a demon. The demonic is further suggested by the fact that Catherine's words I am Heathcliff echo those of Milton Satan myself am hell. Like Satan she is exiled from heaven because everywhere even heaven would be a mighty stranger to her if Heathcliff were not there she would not seem a part of it. She would rather be with him in hell than without him in heaven nothing will separate her from the love of her god not even the love of god. She will be with Heathcliff forever not merely till death to us part but beyond death itself. Heathcliff is the eternal rock upon which she builds her church. He is a source of little visible delight but on the contrary is darkness visible like Milton Satan and the source of all her suffering yet she will not be separated from the hell she has chosen. She gets what she chooses. This is profoundly orthodox Christian theology in the finest tradition of Dante's Inferno and indeed for lovers of C.S. Lewis C.S. Lewis's book The Great Divorce. The towering influence of Dante is once more evident in the scene between Heathcliff and Catherine when the latter is on her deathbed. Catherine's love for Heathcliff is so disordered that it seems indistinguishable from hate. I shall not pity you not I she says you have killed me and driven on it I think. The moment of death for Heathcliff and for Catherine is not a time for reconciliation either with God or with each other it is a time for bitter reproach a time for venting one's spleen in one final act of self-destructive abandonment. I wish I could hold you till we were both dead Catherine exclaims I shouldn't care what you suffered I care nothing for your sufferings why shouldn't you suffer I do Catherine still has no desire for heaven preferring the hell of Heathcliff she makes her choice and is self-condemned by it. Heathcliff for his part spits his venom at Catherine but would prefer to rise with her in the Inferno and in eternal love hate embrace than live without her in heaven or on earth. This is a quote from Heathcliff are you possessed with a devil to talk in that manner to me when you are dying do you reflect that all those words will be branded in my memory and eating deeper eternally after you have left me it is not sufficient for your infernal selfishness that while you are at peace I shall rise in the torments of hell I shall not be at peace moaned Catherine. With the voice of Nellie Dean in mind and with the self-destructive possessed demoniacal love of Heathcliff and Cathy you would think that the Christian morality of the novel is off obvious enough but it won't stop as Chesterton said of his own novels it doesn't matter how much I make the point of a story stick out like a spike the critics will go and carefully impale themselves on something else or the critics have impaled themselves on anything else but the obvious Christian morality of of Wuthering Heights and one thing they cling on to and impale themselves upon is the character of Joseph. Now Joseph is so he says a Christian he's a Calvinist Puritan and we have to understand that that the Bronte sisters were brought up as the daughters of a pious Anglican parson and the Anglicanism in certainly in Anglicanism basically is not Calvinistic except with the lowest church parts of it and the Reverend Patrick Bronte was not of that that that persuasion so there's this divide in Anglican Christianity between what we might call the high church or even the Anglo-Catholic wing which which basically embraces free will and then and then the most the low church part of the Anglican church accepts Calvinistic predestination what we actually see in the novel if anything is Emily Bronte's dislike for and disdain of this sort of puritanical Calvinism Joseph the character lacks charity he he's judgmental he he's not happy even at the end of the novel when when the demonic has been exercised he thinks singing is a sin and Nettie Dean reproaches him at the end of the novel to read his Bible like a Christian in other words just to learn what the Bible actually says and beginning with charity living with charity which Joseph lacks so if anything this is this is Emily Bronte's giving her doctrinal position as a as an Anglican a high church Anglican as distinct from from this judgmental non-charitable puritanism of Joseph the overarching moral of of of Wuthering Heights however is that cruelty breeds cruelty the abused become abusers one of the saddest realities of life is you would think that if someone suffered abuse as as a child for instance whether it be physical abuse or sexual abuse they would they would be the least likely to become abusers themselves but sadly that's not the case that the in being in being abused they are they become abuse victims and actually abusers themselves that's really what is happening in in Wuthering Heights is that the cruelty of one generation plays itself out in the cruelty of the next generation the abuse becoming abusers but what what's the overarching moral behind that is if we won't have virtue we would have nothing but viciousness there's no middle path there's no relativistic understanding of things if we refuse sanctity we will have the inferno that ultimately sanctity and sanity are the same things and if you want to live in a sane healthy society we have to have holiness so we the choice is between virtue or viciousness and there's no middle path if we won't have virtue we will have nothing but viciousness that's what's showing the novel although we should say without necessarily spoiling it it doesn't end that way it has a happy ending and perhaps perhaps we'll end on the happy ending before we want to to Charlotte Ponte's novel Jane Eyre so Wuthering Heights ends on ends on a light note in both senses of the word following Heathcliff's death the darkness lifts and the emergent light lightens the burden of evil that has loomed doom laden over the whole work as mr. Lockwood returns to Wuthering Heights we are almost dazzled by light and lifted by light-heartedness love true love is in the air not its infernal inversion this happy ending serves as the final judgment on the novel itself confirming the Emily Bronte like the indomitable netty dean is on the side of the angels so now move on to Jane Eyre and Jane Eyre is what has become known literally so because of Bildung's roman a right of passage where we follow one character in her first person narrative so she's telling the story of her should we say progress through life which is also a pilgrim's progress or a spiritual progress it's very different this first person narrative by the protagonist from the approach of Emily Bronte where the the the the the narrative voices mr. Lockwood and then within the mr. Lockwood's narrative is frames netty deans narrative so we hear about the the the principal characters such as Heathcliff and Kathy in through the voices of others first person observers of others well but in Jane Eyre we actually have Jane Eyre speaking to us directly what she goes through and she goes through a lot so she has a very unhappy and abusive childhood um and then when she goes away to school her school days she has makes friendships and some of the very valuable friendships but she also suffers abuse and unhappiness at school but she meets someone and you know we have a Nelly Dean or Ellen Dean and we have a Helen Burns uh as as the sort of uh the voice of sanity and sanctity in in Jane Eyre she doesn't have a major role well she has a major role she has a long-standing role she only appears in part of the novel but she's very holy she dies young she actually dies in Jane's arms but but prior to that death and and at that death we see her acceptance of suffering and um you know it's a it's a key ingredient a key component in fact um uh it's the crux uh the very cross if you like on which on which life hangs that we we cannot avoid suffering suffering is going to happen to all of us it's what we do with it when it happens is what matters and there's a character in a novel by Maurice Bering who perhaps will be a subject of a of a future episode of The Authority a great uh convert catholic novelist from between the two world wars great friend of G.K. Chesterton and Hillebeloch and a great novelist but in one of the characters is a priest character in his novel Darby and Joan which is his final novel um that said uh that the acceptance of suffering the acceptance of sorrow is the meaning of life when you understand that you will understand everything so the acceptance of sorrow the acceptance of suffering being the meaning of life i would go deeper and say that that we all that when we receive suffering we either accept it or we reject it and we can't reject the suffering in sense of avoiding it but we can resent the fact that we have it we can blame others for the fact that we're suffering we can we can make it a source of of a cankerous resentment and bitterness it can it can destroy us or we can accept suffering and and in consequence grow in wisdom and virtue but i would say that that's that's something which we all we all are called to do but there's something deeper that the saints at least manage and that they move beyond the acceptance of suffering to the embrace of suffering and i would say that Helen Burns is one of these rare individuals uh that we can canonize if you like um uh that as being saints Helen Burns does not really accept the suffering in her life and and conveys the wisdom of that acceptance to Jane Eyre which she takes with her throughout her life um but she embraces suffering uh and it's that wisdom ultimately is the deepest element of what um we are meant to take from from the novel Jane Eyre but then we find that Jane falls hopeless in love with Rochester this charming uh character charming and disarming we might see parallels with uh perhaps mr Darcy this dark um melancholy mysterious morose and what other alliteration i can get for m's there um so she falls in love with Rochester we don't know much about him and we find out more about him as the novel uh continues uh he is deceptive uh he deceives Jane he is living uh essentially a morally decadent lifestyle and then he makes an immoral proposal to Jane because when Jane discovers that he is already married his wife has become insane the mad woman in the attic that's that um one of the most haunting figures if you like in in modern fiction uh the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre um but he suggests they just elope uh with each other um and Jane although she loves him has enough christian sensibility and sense to to uh to to not take him up on that immoral proposal instead before every anybody gets up she leaves uh and in leaving uh she is condemning herself uh not just to poverty but to penury uh and that's all that she can look forward to she has nothing and she's literally starving to death when she comes into an inheritance and uh this ensures that she uh is at least going to be materially secure but of course emotionally she is still uh in love with with Rochester but is not going to succumb to any immoral behavior in order to gratify or satisfy that love but they have a reconciliation at the end that that um that there's a conversion that's the important thing that Rochester has a conversion he sacrifices himself to save people from the fire including his own wife although unsuccessfully um he burns himself and is maimed in consequence so now he's not the dashing good-looking debonair man that he was and assumes that uh Jane will no longer be interested in him because of this but Jane of course is someone who marry who loves on a deeper level than that so he he has this conversion experience they have a reconciliation following the conversion experience and then uh are married all right so that's Jane Jane now I'll say a few words to finish with um uh the novel by the other sister Ambronte the tenant of White Worldfell Hall and here we see other aspects of perhaps of um of the same what we have a recurring motif I would say in all of these three novels and that is the Byronic hero and perhaps I should understand I should explain the adjective Byronic uh the name Byronic comes from Lord Byron the the dark romantic poet who coarse-gathered in his own lifetime because of his uh adulterous love affairs and uh even suggestion of uh an incestuous relationship uh he causes such scandal that he's forced into exile to the continent and this is this dark brooding Byronic figure becomes the uh the the epitome the the the archetype of the anti-hero of so much uh fiction and art and music in the uh in the 19th century well we see these Byronic figures um in in the novels of the Brontes uh and especially uh in in the uh tenant of Wellfell Hall in the character of Arthur Huntingdon who's the abusive alcoholic husband to the protagonist of the novel Helen Huntingdon and we see in this sort of uh alcoholism and we see you know hints of it in the in the wildness uh of Heathcliff um who certainly that Heathcliff's not not an alcoholic but he plays upon the alcoholic weakness of other characters um but he certainly has this this this wild aggressive violence that all three Bronte sisters experienced in reality in their life with their brother Branwell who was an alcoholic although he was a weak disillusioned man not a Heathcliff that's for sure but they lived with uh alcoholism and with the sins that accompany alcoholism including uh the adultery adulterous relationship that Branwell had for instance so there's this you know we talk about the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre but in some sense we can see Branwell the dark sheep of the family is the mad man in the attic in the lives of these three sisters and he presents himself in various manifests himself in various ways in various novels as we've said and not least and probably most obviously in the character of Arthur Huntingdon um so uh what we see I think however is the the the all three sisters align themselves morally and philosophically with the Christianity and virtue of their very devout um um father the Reverend Patrick Bronte who serves his parish has said 40 years it's his Christianity that informs the morality of the Bronte sisters novels and the the the darkness we see present might indeed be influenced by the darkness they experience in real life such as the the alcoholic disillusioned behavior of their son Branwell but also from their reading of of passionate romantic literature there's something of of the wildness of of of Frankenstein and Frankenstein's monster for instance in the character of Heathcliff ultimately in this in the novels of the Bronte's we are shown the sanity of sanctity as the only rational alternative to the insanity of sin and for that we should all be very grateful for the novels of the Bronte sisters thanks as always for joining me in this episode and in all the episodes of The Authority until next time goodbye god bless and good reading this has been an episode of The Authority with Joseph Pierce brought to you by Tan for updates on new episodes and to support The Authority and other great free content visit theauthoritypodcast.com to 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