Emily's Ghost: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Fiction, Folklore, and Photography

Abstract

This essay will read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights as part of a process that redefined the way in which educated Englishmen and women understood their place within a modern nation. The cultural change on which I want to focus occurred during the 1830s and 40s while Bronte grew up and did her writing. According to Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall as well as E.P. Thompson, the same period saw the entrenchment of the modern middle classes and established the way they would deal with an organizing urban proletariat.' During this period, according to Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and many others, English people also began to reconceptualize their relationship as a race to the peoples of Africa and Asia.2 Historical scholarship has given us two separate narratives to account for these changes in the semiotic behavior of class and race respectively. One narrative describes the class struggle that took place within England as the nation underwent industrialization, and the other tells of Western Europe's attempt to dominate nations that we now locate in the Third World. Bronte's novel, as I am going to read it, took part in a regional or ethnic remapping of British culture that is essential to both narratives and yet can be explained by neither one. This remapping divided the British Isles into a modern literate urban core and what sociologist Michael Hechter refers to as a celtic or ethnic periphery.3 To suggest how Wuthering Heights fit into this long-overlooked chapter of modern cultural history, let me turn to an example of a popular Victorian genre called spirit photography (figure 1). Now any photograph, as Roland Barthes