Absent Emily: Ecstasy, Transgression, and Negative Space in Three Emily Brontë Poems

This paper examines three Emily Brontë poems—"Stars," "No coward soul," and "I am happiest when most away"—to argue that, formally and theoretically, Brontë's purposeful dissolution of poetic identity arrives at ecstasy, a paradoxical source of feminine power and ubiquity. The interpretation situates "ubiquity in absence" among writings by Anne Carson, Dutch mystic Hadewijhch II, and Jack Halberstam's queer theory to assert that sacred space, for Brontë, is interior, multiplicitous, dynamically transformable, and feminine. Furthermore, God, for Brontë, is an interior capacity for self-creation or self-immolation rather than an external force of morality. These re-envisionings of Brontëan poetics allow for increasingly complex understandings of the fluid gender and power dynamics within Brontëan identity.