Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- PART I NEED AND RECOGNITION
- PART II COMPASSION
- PART III ASCENTS OF LOVE
- 9 Ladders of Love
- 10 Contemplative Creativity: Plato, Spinoza, Proust
- 11 The Christian Ascent: Augustine
- 12 The Christian Ascent: Dante
- 13 The Romantic Ascent: Emily Brontë
- 14 The Romantic Ascent: Mahler
- 15 Democratic Desire: Walt Whitman
- 16 The Transfiguration of Everyday Life: Joyce
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments
- Name Index
- Subject Index
13 - The Romantic Ascent: Emily Brontë
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- PART I NEED AND RECOGNITION
- PART II COMPASSION
- PART III ASCENTS OF LOVE
- 9 Ladders of Love
- 10 Contemplative Creativity: Plato, Spinoza, Proust
- 11 The Christian Ascent: Augustine
- 12 The Christian Ascent: Dante
- 13 The Romantic Ascent: Emily Brontë
- 14 The Romantic Ascent: Mahler
- 15 Democratic Desire: Walt Whitman
- 16 The Transfiguration of Everyday Life: Joyce
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
THE LEAP OF DESIRE
“‘If I were in heaven, Nelly,’” she said, “‘I should be extremely miserable.’”
I dreamt, once, that I was there … [H]eaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy.
Cathy's soul cannot live in the Christian Heaven. For her soul, she explains, is the same as Heathcliff's soul, and the heavenly soul of Linton is as different from theirs “‘as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire’” (95). Much later, as she lies on her deathbed, now the wife of Edgar Linton, thinking the Linton thought that what she wants is an escape into “‘that glorious world’” of paradise and peace, Heathcliff watches her with burning eyes. At last she calls to him:
In her eagerness she rose and supported herself on the arm of the chair. At that earnest appeal he turned to her, looking absolutely desperate. His eyes, wide and wet, at last flashed fiercely on her; his breast heaved convulsively. An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive: in fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. […]
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- Information
- Upheavals of ThoughtThe Intelligence of Emotions, pp. 591 - 613Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001