How to be a “poet of furniture”: Brontë’s Settle in Wuthering Heights

This essay considers the unique aesthetic significance of massive household furnishings in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Using Gaston Bachelard’s notion of “infinite quality of the intimate dimension” associated with furniture, the essay focuses on the relationship between humans and objects that play such a large role in both the poetics and plot of the novel (86). If human touch and human trace can be said to vivify cornices, knobs, and rims; if cabinets and drawers model ideas of secret knowledge and intimacy, Wuthering Heights, this essay contends, is at least equally interested in an inverse and heavier truth as well: furniture presses back. It presses into humans in return, resisting any psychological modeling or symbolic meaning we might like it to perform. Like the iron weight that Heathcliff as a boy bids Hareton hurl at him, Brontë’s domestic objects stagger our theories of interpretation of them by virtue of their mass.