-
13. Ghostly Voices and Arctic Blanks: From Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
13 Ghostly Voices and Arctic Blanks: From Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven Catherine Lanone She wants to write a book about the wind, about the weather…. She wants the breath of the wind in her words, to hold its invisible body in her arms. She wants the again and again of that revenant, the wind—its evasiveness, its tenacity, its everlastingness. – Jane Urquhart, Changing Heaven From Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, there have been many rewritings of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, but few writers have dared to tackle Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, just as few women writers have chosen to write about the Arctic.1 Changing Heaven, the novel Jane Urquhart published in 1990, rises up to the challenge, as she seeks her own intertextual Northwest Passage, to borrow the metaphor of Michel Serres (Passage), building the novel by weaving three plotlines, the nineteenthcentury British world of Arianna the aeronaut and her lover Jeremy, the fictional world of Wuthering Heights, and the twentieth-century world of Ann, a Canadian Brontë specialist. In this case, the passage connects, if not science and humanities, at least two different concepts or worlds—the Brontës and the Canadian Arctic—resembling “a jagged shore, sprinkled with ice, and variable,” less “a juncture under control than an adventure to be had” (Serres and Latour 70). By doing so, Urquhart pays a tribute to 215 Brontë’s novel, but also highlights spatial representations as gendered constructs , showing where voice and vision come from. As John Thieme has it, in “its self-conscious use of Wuthering Heights [in order to] comment on the romantic psychology and along with it the discourse of transcendental romantic love” (94) and focusing on “inter-cultural relationships” (95), the novel seems steeped in postmodern irony. Ann may retrace Emily Brontë’s steps, reading the landscape of the moors, the sky, and earth expanding around her, sensing below the earth the “[s]ecret deathless fires, spontaneous and inexhaustible” (Urquhart, Changing Heaven 132),2 but she is only an academic writing a thesis. Emily Brontë herself returns, in the guise of a surprisingly light ghost: “Yes, I was quite morbid,” she confesses; “It’s amazing how much I’ve cheered up since I’ve been dead” (42).3 Bouncing about, the once bitterly secretive Emily chats with the ghost of a woman who has just died, Arianna Ether, giving her a tour of the moors. As for her brother, Branwell—who drank himself to death—he has been turned into an angel, and begs Emily to scratch his licecovered wings.4 Thus the playful novel may be seen as a parody of Gothic fiction and of Wuthering Heights, bearing in mind Linda Hutcheon’s complex definition of the ethos of postmodern parody.5 For all their flimsy flippancy, the ghosts of Arianna and Emily are indeed “revenants,” as the title of the third section points out. Just as the two ghosts dissolve and reappear, just as their cries blend into the whisper of the wind (“The wind passes through Emily’s mouth, hissing the word listen” [247; emphasis in original]), Urquhart’s text neither discards nor mingles with the hypotext; it slips in and out of it, quoting it then straying from it.6 Thus the novel may be ironic, but there is “the equally strong suggestion of complicity and accord (para as ‘beside’)” (Hutcheon 53). For Linda Hutcheon, irony “functions, therefore, as both antiphrasis and as an evaluative strategy that implies an attitude of the encoding agent towards the text itself, an attitude which, in turn, allows and demands the decoder’s interpretation and evaluation” (53). As Urquhart strays from the plot of Wuthering Heights, she transposes motifs, such as Lockwood’s vision of a ghost outside his window, a lost waif with a haunting , cold little voice begging to be let in. In Urquhart’s version, when Ann becomes sick, she hears a man’s voice, rather than a child’s, calling “let me in” (144); before she dies, Arianna gazes at the dark window, watching her own ghostly face, her “white face floating in the center—light, airborne, balloonlike ” (14), a face that the ghost of Emily also identifies as her own later on in the novel. As Hutcheon points out, there is a comic but also a serious side to 216 SPACE, PLACE, AND CIRCULATION [23.20.220.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03...