Emily’s Belgium essays

Thanks to a poster on this sub mentioning it, earlier this year I read Emily’s essay The Cat for the first time and fell in love with it. It is two paragraphs of pure, delicious, irreverent misanthropy, with some well-placed mockery of sentimentality, conventional morality and the English genteel class. I’ve quoted it here many times before, but it bears repeating. Here it is in this totality:

I can say with sincerity that I like cats; also I can give very good reasons why those who despise them are wrong.
A cat is an animal who has more human feelings than almost any other being. We cannot sustain a comparison with the dog, it is infinitely too good; but the cat, although it differs in some physical points, is extremely like us in disposition.
There may be people, in truth, who would say that this resemblance extends only to the most wicked men; that it is limited to their excessive hypocrisy, cruelty, and ingratitude; detestable vices in our race and equally odious in that of cats.
Without disputing the limits that those individuals set on our affinity, I answer that if hypocrisy, cruelty, and ingratitude are exclusively the domain of the wicked, that class comprises everyone. Our education develops one of those qualities in great perfection; the others flourish without nurture, and far from condemning them, we regard all three with great complacency. A cat, in its own interest, sometimes hides its misanthropy under the guise of amiable gentleness; instead of tearing what it desires from its master's hand, it approaches with a caressing air, rubs its pretty little head against him, and advances a paw whose touch is soft as down. When it has gained its end, it reseumes its character of Timon; and that artfulness in it is called hypocrisy. In ourselves, we give it another name, politeness, and he who did not use it to hide his real feelings would soon be driven from society.

"But," says some delicate lady, who has murdered a half-dozen lapdogs through pure affection, "the cat is such a cruel beast, he is not content to kill his prey, he torments it before its death; you cannot make that accusation against us." More or less, Madame. Your husband, for example, likes hunting very much, but foxes being rare on his land, he would not have the means to pursue this amusement often, it he did not manage his supplies thus: once he has run an animal to its las breath, he snatches it from the jaws of the hounds and saves it to suffer the same infliction two or three more times, ending finally in death. You yourself avoid the bloody spectacle because it wounds your weak nerves. But I have seen you embrace your child in transports, when he came to show you a beautiful butterfly crushed between his cruel fingers; and at that moment, I really wanted to have a cat, with the tail of a half-devoured rat hanging from its mouth, to present as the image, the true copy, of your angel. You could not refuse to kiss him, and it he scratches us both in revenge, so much the better. Little boys are rather liable to acknowledge their friends' caresses in that way, and the resemblance would be more perfect. They know how to value our favours at their true price, because they guess the motives that prompt us to grant them, and if those motives might sometimes be good, undoubtedly they remember always that they owe all their misery and all their evil qualities to the great ancestor of humankind. For assuredly, the cat was not wicked in Paradise.

In the second paragraph especially, we see the seeds of what in Wuthering Heights would evolve into the portrayal of the Linton family in general and the socially-constructed genteel femininity in particular, whose pernicious effects on women are examined in different but complementary ways in Wuthering Heights though Isabella and Catherine(s) Linton.

Out of the surviving essays collected in The Belgian Essays: A Critical Edition (edited and translated by Sue Lonoff), The Cat is the best. But many others come close, offering a glimpse into Emily’s sense of humor and her signature unconventional and non-conformist ways. You will also recognize those seeds of ideas she would further develop in Wuthering Heights in most of these essays.

 After The Cat, my personal favorite is Letter (Madam). I’ll quote that one in its entirety too.

Madam,
Tomorrow, there will be a small musical party at our house, to which I am directed to invite you. The execution of that order gives me great pleasure, because I can assure you that the pieces are well chosen, that most of the musicians are skillful, and therefore, that you will spend some pleasant hours here. Beyond the pleasure of seeing you, your friends expect from your hands a [contribution] to the evening's amusements. Thus I hope that you will not refuse to come, since that would be a deprivation, both for you and for them.
I am, Madam,
your respectful student

Dear Miss,
It would have been, in truth, a great pleasure for me had I been able to accept your invitation; but in a life like mine, our inclination cannot always be followed, and unfortunately the day of your party is, of all the days of my week, the busiest. Thus I find myself obliged to give up the pleasure of seeing my friends and of contributing whatever I could to their amusement. But when I suffer a disappointment, I ordinarily seek some compensation in return; and at present, I console myself with the thought that if I am denied the opportunity to exhibit my small talent, at least, I will not undergo the mortification of witnessing the poor results of my work with you; because I have heard that you are to play a piece on this occasion, and forgive me if I advise you (out of pure friendship) to choose a time when everyone is occupied with something other than music, for I fear that your performance will be a little too remarkable.
Still, I would not want to discourage you. Good day, and good luck with all my heart.

It reads hilarious on its own but even moreso when you remember that in Brussels there was a British ex-pat family who asked Emily to give their daughters classes. She agreed on the condition that they worked around her schedule. The family found her selfish and arrogant for this. One of the daughters later became friends with Charlotte but couldn’t stand Emily. Emily, the queen that she was, probably didn’t care at all. Deborah Lutz’s new biography recounts this incident. But this essay makes me think of another incident Lutz mentions at another point in her book. Namely, Lutz quotes Charlotte complaining about Emily not wanting to socialize more (not in Brussels, in general). But she counters it by a letter from Mary Taylor, on of the two most prominent friend characters in Bronte stories, alongside Ellen Nussey, in which Taylor says “Imagine Emily turning over prints or ‘taking wine’ with any stupid fop and preserving her temper and politeness!” Taylor was very likely right and had Emily humored Charlotte, I'm sure she would have eventually mortified her more people-pleasing sister by saying something inappropriate or offensive in polite society. After first ignoring the said people by not speaking to them at all probably.

The Palace of Death is another interesting essay. In short, Death wants to appoint a Prime Minister. Some Deadly Sins offer their services. At the end, Civilization appears, gives the most convincing speech and is chosen by Death. This obviously feels very Emily and very Wuthering Heights. Girl had a life-long feud with civilization it seems.

The Butterfly is also very Emily and very Wuthering Heights in its pessimistic outlook which can be summed up with a line she would later give to Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights - "the tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them." In The Butterfly there is this powerful line:

Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must cease to live, yet nonetheless we celebrate the day of our birth, and we praise God for having entered such a world.

The ending of the essay is optimistic and transformative, at least on the surface, but something just feels off. I thought it was primarily my own tendency towards pessimism that was influencing my reading there. But Lutz in her biography shares that she reads the ending of the essay as ironic and ambiguous, which hasn’t occurred to me. Though ambiguous is exactly where I landed with the ending of Wuthering Heights when I recently reread it and, taking Lutz’s comments into consideration, it fits well for The Butterfly too. Lonoff also mentions that most modern readers find the ending of The Butterfly unconvincing and cites several examples of scholars who’ve previously written about why it feels so off. Some speculate that the constraints of Hegar’s assignment are maybe why the essay had to end like that. almost making to many concessions to religious optimism. Which kinda mirrors how we don’t know if the publishing trends played any role in why Wuthering Heights has a seemingly happy ending, though undermined by ambiguity. But Emily being Emily, even when/if she compromises and works under constraints, she still finds a way to not compromise too much and still do what she wants.

(Letter) From one brother to another and Portrait: King Harold before the Battle of Hastings are beautifully written and you’ll recognize the Emilyness and WHness in the style and themes there too. Contemplative and emotional at the same time, they have past appearing in the present, characters stripped of their social status to find a more authentic self, loneliness caused by shallow, unsatisfactory connections and a complicated longing for a kindred soul (imo one of the consistent features Emily's writing that resemble P.B. Shelley's and possibly one of the reasons why she liked him, other than their shared interest in a more androgynous concepts of gender and gender relations and social justice), etc. These three passages from the Letter read particularly moving:

I have crossed the ocean, I have traveled in a number of countries, I have been the poorest of the poor, ill among strangers, without the power to offer the work of my hands in exchange for the bread that I was eating. Also, I have delighted in riches and all the pleasures that they can provide for their possessor; but always alone, always friendless, enough to flatter me, but no one to love me.

Nonetheless I never dreamed of being reconciled with you; I did not wish to enjoy again that erstwhile harmony of souls which formed the happiness of our childhood, or if the thought came to me sometimes I chased it away as an unworthy and degrading weakness.

At length my body and my spirit were weary of wandering; my bark was tossed by storms, I longed to come into port. I formed the resolution to end my days where they were begun and I directed my course toward the land and the house so long abandoned.

The Siege of Oudenarde has a possible Mary Wollstonecraft reference in the following line, “Even the women, that class condemned by the laws of society to be a heavy burden in any situation of action and danger, on that occasion cast aside their degrading privileges, and took a distinguished part in the work of defense.” Apparently, this was Emily’s response to Mr. Hegar wanting a more sentimental and conventional outlook on the role women during battles from his students.

(Letter) My dear Mama feels like Emily trying a perspective she doesn’t often write from. Lonoff notes that too and comments we can maybe see the seeds of Linton Heathcliff here in its delicate child character.

Filial Love is so and so. Conventional topic, Emily makes it darker and less conventional. But still not that interesting. She does much better with this topic in WH.

All the essays are short and worth a read if you’re interested in what Emily wrote in Brussels. Lots of Charlotte essays are accessible in this collection too, more of hers survived than Emily’s. Worthwhile reading is also the intro by Lonoff with a section dedicated to a lengthy explanation of Mr Heger’s teaching methods . Both the original French version and the English translation of Emily’s and Charlotte’s essays are provided, including their first drafts and corrections by Heger available alongside the editor’s comments further explaining the context of the essays. One part of the intro I found funny was when Lonoff cites a very phallogocentric-sounding Lacanian interpretation (no hate to Lacan and Lacanians implied, I have more patience for Lacanianism than for many other psychoanalytical and psych theories that are prominent in the psychology-driven and unfortunately often psychology reductivist and insidiously misogynistic, racist, classist, etc. lit interpretations) of Emily's life by David E. Musselwhite and pushes back against it (too politely for my taste, lol) while still acknowledging Musselwhite's better insights.