The Predicament Of Emily Bronte

Emily Bronte (1818-1848), an early Victorian woman writer, born in Thornton,. Yorkshire, differed from her elder sister, Charlotte Bronte, in having a more passionate and rebellious character. She left us 193 poems and one remarkable novel——Wuthering Heights. The story of her life has taken its place among the great literary legends of Britain and possesses an almost mythic quality. Emily was depicted by Elizabeth Gaskell as a cold, arrogant and strange heretic; her works were condemned by Victorian society as "coarse" and "evil". Many Emily's critics based their partial argument on Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte.In this paper, the author tries to interpret Emily Bronte and explore her works by applying psychological approach and the theory of psychoanalytic feminism. Beneath her calm and reserved character, Emily went through inner crises about the disharmony between joy in nature and the problems of her own life and of human life in general whose effects were as strong as those on the mind of Catherine Earnshaw.Due to industrial revolution and economic prosperity, the Victorian industrial society "only prized material values" and failed to appreciate self-sacrifice, love, and human nature. Emily was psychologically tortured by the repression and she created an imaginary world in her writing to escape from the patriarchal authority, Which evoked her awareness of pre-Oedipal Identification. The paper aims at showing the danger of over suppression from the morality principle of Victorian Utilitarianism (the superego) on the pleasure principle (the id), which will inevitably lead to imbalanced ego, and illustrating the failure and predicament of Victorian women to seek pre-Oedipal identification in the patriarchal society. Emily's predicament is the miniature of the Victorian women.