Evading "Earth's Dungeon Tomb": Emily Brontë, A.G.A.

, and the Fatally Feminine

Author(s): Teddi Lynn Chichester
Source: Victorian Poetry , Spring, 1991, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 1-15
Published by: West Virginia University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/40002050

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Evading "Earth's Dungeon Tomb":
Emily Bronte, A.G.A., and
the Fatally Feminine
TEDDI LYNN CHICHESTER

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
Wallace Stevens

BRONTE, WHO LOST HER OWN MOTHER AND TWO OLDER SISTERS WITH-
in the first six years of her life, creates - and often destroys - in her
poetry and in her one surviving work of fiction an array of "earthly
mothers," including Gondal's Queen Augusta Geraldine Almeda, Catherine
Earnshaw, and Nature herself, who emerge from Bronte's imaginative
grapplings with mortality as inextricably linked with the forces of death and
only sporadically with beauty. Bronte's most capable biographer, Winifred
Gerin, tells us that the lives of Maria Bronte's widower and orphans were
"profoundly, lastingly, affected by her loss," and pretty much leaves it at
that, while she underplays the effect of her two sisters' deaths on the then
six-year-old Emily. l However, the fact that Emily Bronte's first momentous
encounters with death robbed her of beloved female family members and
thus suggested femininity's particular vulnerability to mortality significantly
colors her presentation of the feminine, and especially of the maternal, in her
poetry, which, rather than Wuthering Heights, will be the focus of this essay.
Taking their cue from Charlotte Bronte's famous remark, "Stronger than a
man, simpler than a child, [Emily's] nature stood alone,"2 many critics have
discerned in Emily Bronte a rather masculine cast of mind; and C. Day
Lewis went so far as to claim that "the source of [her] proud recalcitrance,
her preoccupation with themes of captivity, exile and freedom was her sex;
the limitation of not being a man."3 Outrageously sexist as Lewis' essay
often is, he is not altogether wrong - he just does not go far enough; for
Bronte's desire for alternative selfhoods, as expressed in her poetry, prompts
her to embrace a variety of roles, including men, spirits, Nature, and, most
importantly, a fiery and eloquent Queen, who herself takes on as many

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2 / VICTORIAN POETRY

identities as lovers. Whereas such celebrants of feminine multiplicit

Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous consider what Cixous calls the "gift
alterability"4 to be a joyous and playful expression of female sexuality a
emotional openness, Emily Bronte's "concert of personalizations called I"
fluctuates between a positive and creatively fluid sense of identity and
more importantly - an extreme anxiety about death, which she associat
with the female body, be it Nature's or the highly sexual Augusta's.
In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," when T. S. Eliot writes o
the "continual extinction of personality" necessary for artistic creation
remarks, "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape fr
emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape fro
personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotio
know what it means to want to escape from these things."6 To Elio
attributes of "personality" and "emotions" I would add in the case of Em
Bronte gender and the "home of clay,"7 the (feminine) "body of this deat
(Romans 7.24) which urges her toward poetic strategies that allow her, i
essence, to elude or bravely embrace death by trying on different selve
different genders, different philosophies.
Too often even Bronte's most perceptive readers dismiss her ambitio
Gondal saga as "mere scaffolding"8 for personal lyrics, as a childish game
as a crude precursor to Wuthering Heights. Margaret Homans, for examp
who has greatly illuminated the troubling equation of death and feminini
that Bronte and various other women writers seem to make, calls the sag
"melodrama" full of "heroic posing" and ranks it far beneath "the poem
about [Bronte's] own mind"; however, the saga, which captivated the po
most of her life, offers much insight into Bronte's psychology and creat
processes.9 The Gondal myth embodies Bronte's brilliant attempt
"contain" death by imaginatively becoming the indomitable August
morally ambiguous woman who serves as death's agent, elegist, and e
victim, but who always endures, outliving most of the men she encounte
Both the saga and its central figure stubbornly resist closure (Augusta m
a violent death but is resurrected a few poems later) and thus allow Bro
continually to step in and out of fictive roles, continually to revise her no
of feminine mortality, continually to defer death itself. Christine Galla
who recognizes the intricate connections of the Gondal poetry with Bron
gender, and acknowledges its artistic worth, views the saga as a celebration
the "chthonic Feminine," embodied by Augusta, whom Gallant regards a
mythic nature goddess of the underworld, when actually the A.G.A. poe
reveal that Bronte fears - and thus fervently denies - that the world of de
is woman's proper sphere.10 However, even as Augusta and her crea
evade - within the world of Gondal - the finality of death, they remain
surrounded and desolated by it, isolated by their own immunity to mortal

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 TEDDI LYNN CHICHESTER / 3

and often yearning for their lost place within the natural cycle, within
"Earth's dungeon tomb" (N 158). In creating a female persona who never
succumbs to death, Bronte overcompensates for her identification of
mortality with the feminine; Augusta represents in part Bronte's attempt to
recuperate her gender, to deny its powerful associations with death, but
Gondal's Queen, in fact, emerges from the poems as an emblem of mortality,
destructive and isolated - an unusual femme fatale who suffers as well as
torments, an "earthly mother" who exposes her infant daughter to a
snowstorm.

The most striking account of what Margaret Homans calls Bro

"mobile adoption of fictive roles"11 not surprisingly involves the Go
saga, which absorbed Bronte since girlhood, fourteen years before she
this 1845 "birthday letter," to be opened by Anne at a later date:
Anne and I went [on] our first long journey by ourselves together

broken we enjoyed ourselves very much, except during a few hours at

excursion we were, Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Angust
Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaph
palaces of instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at
Republicans. The Gondals still flourish bright as ever

as long as they delight us which I am glad to say they do at present.

Bronte's absolute identification with the Gondals ("

played") suggests the self-transformational power that C
have compellingly and provocatively linked with the fem
fulness and joyous sense of liberation associated with fe
ity, with the refusal to "become fixed, immobilized"12
and Irigaray emphasize (and link - problematically - wit
ogy and libidinal drives) reveal themselves in Bronte's "d
"rascals" and with her own gift for entering into their
particular subjectivities, regardless of whether or not she
the Gondal text.
However, when we turn to the Gondal poems themselves, the
lighthearted spirit which characterizes Bronte's "birthday note" disappears,
while her capacity for sympathetic identification with her characters remains
conspicuous. In order to comprehend the essential lack of jouissance with
which Bronte expresses her particular "gift of alterability" in much of her
poetry, we must look beyond Irigaray and Cixous to the more "humanistic"
approach of certain Anglo-American feminists, to whom such terms as "the
self," "experience," and "anxiety" are not the anathema they seem to be
to many French theorists. Psychologist Carol Gilligan, for example, con-
trasts "a self defined through separation" with "a self delineated through
connection," and convincingly argues that the former best describes mas-
culine identity and the latter feminine.13 Gilligan's analysis of "images of
relationship" in male and female subjects illuminates through its focus

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4 / VICTORIAN POETRY

on the permeable ego boundaries more evident in women than men - both
Bronte's mercurial poetic identity and her obsession with isolation as ex-
pressed in both her Gondal and non-Gondal poems. Partially because
Bronte saw herself and her Gondal characters as "members of a network
of relationships," she regarded isolation as particularly horrible, never
embracing it in the way that such (male) Romantic precursors as Wordsworth
and Shelley often do (Gilligan, p. 30). Throughout her "personal" (non-
Gondal) poetry, Bronte laments severed connections with nature,14 with
humanity,15 and with her own version of "Intellectual Beauty," her "God
of Visions" (N 176), while her Gondal poetry, especially Augusta's mono-
logues, is rife with broken relationships, destroyed by death and betrayal,
and full of imprisoned speakers suffering both physical and emotional
solitude.16
Yet Bronte rarely shies from exploring the feelings of isolation and
bereavement which she and her personae share; and her willingness to
remain "in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact & reason" reveals her affinities with Keats's poet of Negative
Capability. 17 Adrienne Rich's strong admiration for Keats and for his notion
of Negative Capability, and her connection of the latter - and, implicitly,
Keats's remarks on the "camelion Poet" - with the Jungian concept of weak
ego boundaries suggests Keats's "poetical Character" which "is continually
. . . filling some other Body" as a feminine mode of imagination, while
identifying the "wordsworthian or egotistical sublime" with the phallus,
which "stands alone," stubbornly unified, and impervious to the external
world, except where it reflects its own concerns.18 Although I am not sure
that Emily Bronte would agree with Keats that the ideal poet has no identity,
no self - not even her Gondal poetry is purely dramatic, objective - her
ability to create and to imaginatively coalesce with a variety of characters of
both genders, many in situations utterly foreign to her own, allies her with
Keats's "camelion Poet." Moreover, Bronte seemed to take "as much
delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen" (Perkins, p. 1220), which brings
us to Gondal itself, rather more full of villains than angelic heroines, and
ruled by a remarkable Queen who embodies, if neither extreme Keats cites, a
whole range of positions within the moral spectrum he implies.
As Fanny Ratchford and others have told us, the Gondal saga
originated from a box of wooden soldiers that Bran well Bronte received from
his father when the boy was nine and Emily eight. 19 Under the leadership of
Branwell, all four Bronte children wrote and acted out a series of plays
revolving around characters identified with the various soldiers. Eventually,
Emily and Anne broke from Branwell and Charlotte's masculine and
military "Young Men's Play" to create Gondal, a North Pacific Island in
which the feminine reigned: generally the male characters played secondary

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 TEDDI LYNN CHICHESTER / 5

roles, the land's capital was dubbed Regina, and a dynamic Queen replaced
Branwell's "Master-men." Although the Gondal saga became a collaborative
project, Emily initiated the epic and remained highly engaged with it even
after Anne's interest flagged. As Fanny Ratchford points out, Augusta
herself was Emily's creation; and Anne's 1845 birthday note implies that
Emily kept her Gondal poetry, in which she sympathetically fuses with her
central character, separate from the prose chronicle on which the sisters
worked together.20 Through Augusta, Bronte could explore, in private, her
need to create a powerful, even indestructible, female figure, though the
resilient A.G.A. ultimately reinforced the disturbing connection between
mortality and the feminine which Bronte's childhood losses of mother and
sisters helped compel her to make.
In "There shines the moon, at noon of night" (N 9), the first extant
utterance of Bronte's primary persona according to Hatfield's chronology,
Augusta is engaged in what will become a typical activity for her: mourning
the death of one of her lovers, in this case, Alexander, Lord of Elbe, a
shadowy Napoleon of sorts, exiled, like most male Gondals, to the isles of the
dead. Several years after Elbe's death, Augusta has returned to Lake Elnor,
where she recalls the last moments of her lover's life and comments on
how nature even now seems to share in her grief and isolation: the moor
is "lonely" and "drear" and "still the fern-leaves sighing wave / Like
mourners over Elbe's grave." Yet Augusta deliberately contrasts rather than
identifies herself with the Earth when she exclaims, "And Earth's the same
but oh to see / How wildly Time has altered me!"; and her insistence on her
own mutability dissociates her both from her former self ("Am I the being
who long ago / Sat watching by that water side, / The light of life expiring
slow ?") and from the constancy of the Earth which, she and Bronte believe,
links it not with life but with death. As the Gondal saga continues, Augusta's
alterability, decried as cruel infidelity by betrayed lovers in such poems as "I
knew not 'twas so dire a crime" and "Light up thy halls!" (N 81, N 85), often
represents a kind of insuppressible life force, as opposed to the (stagnant)
stability that others seem to demand from her and that she herself explicitly
connects with death when she describes a lover's heart as "changeless as the
grave" (later altered to "faithful as the grave," N 110). Although Augusta
expresses genuine grief and empathy in her elegy "There shines the moon,"
the poem in fact concludes with Elbe's pitiful realization that his beloved
"will soon return / Back to that land [Gaaldine] in health and bloom," an
accusation that Augusta never denies.21 Bronte deliberately closes the poem
with a striking juxtaposition of images - the beautiful and flourishing
heroine and the "mouldering corpse" of her "Lord" - in an attempt to
dissociate herself, through her persona, from "the lonely grave" that seems
to long for a female companion.

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6 / VICTORIAN POETRY

Only in the context of other Gondal poems does Augusta's fir

monologue seem somewhat sinister in its treatment of the relation
femininity to mortality. At this point in the saga, Augusta's sympathy
Elbe, her vitality, and her eloquence can be seen as positive aspects
Bronte's creation of a strong female protagonist. Augusta's role as elegi
here and elsewhere, and as nature poet in "To a Wreath of Snow" (N
which Bronte, in a unique move, labels "By A. G. Almeda,"22 suggests th
she functions in part as her creator's surrogate as Bronte struggles to find
poetic voice and her place as a woman in an overwhelmingly mascu
tradition. Moreover, if we accept the argument, propounded by Sherry
Ortner, Gilbert and Gubar, Margaret Homans, and others,23 that wome
identify - because they are traditionally identified with - nature, and th
fore have trouble seeing themselves as (speaking) subjects, we could
Augusta's eloquent laments over the absence of various, usually lifeless
as a bold reversal of the masculine/feminine dynamic that Wordswo
presents in, for example, "A slumber did my spirit seal." Bronte's Augu
who, as we have seen, distances herself from (mother) Earth in orde
survive, to renew herself and - most importantly for the poet Bronte -
speak, remains alive and articulate throughout most of the Gondal s
while she presents her men as having "no motion," "no force," and no vo
they now roll round in the earth with rocks and stones, elegized by a fem
bard.24

As she develops her persona, however, Bronte almost obsessive

surrounds her with death, until Augusta no longer represents a vital an
independent poet-Queen, admirably able to regain her "health and bloom
after experiencing a tragic loss, but a kind of succubus figure whose exist
depends on the demise of those around her. Bronte rather compulsively k
off her heroine's husbands and lovers, allowing Augusta to grieve awhil
eloquent verse before she gathers her formidable strength and reenters "
World's tide" (N 182). In an early draft of "Lord of Elbe, on Elbe H
(N 16), Augusta's second monologue, Elbe is alive, and Augusta imagi
him "thinking and grieving and longing" for his homeland and for her;25
in the revised version of the poem, Augusta is the only one capable
thought or action, for Elbe has died and "Death never yields back his vict
again." Bronte deliberately revokes Elbe's life in order to ensure Augusta
exclusive privilege of consciousness and speech; even an absent Lor
traveling a "desolate sea" would seem to threaten Augusta's own vitality a
autonomy. "O wander not so far away!" (N 61) finds Augusta murmurin
over the fast-expiring body of either Lord Elbe or Lord Alfred, her fir
husband. In light of her amazing ability to "shake off the fetters, break
chain" of former relationships or of disturbing experiences and to "live a
love and smile again" (N 15), her protestations of despair in this eleg

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 TEDDI LYNN CHICHESTER / 7

"how can I live lonely here?/' "Too dark . . . / Are the hours to come . . . /
That Time is treasuring up for me" - echo with rather hollow irony. Her
command that the dying man "call Death - yes, Death, he is thine own!"
enables her to dissociate herself from mortality by identifying it with her
(masculine) mate.
Bronte's need to transfer the "doleful imagery" (N 34) of death from
her own gender to the masculine sphere is once again evident in the poems
ascribed to F. De Samara, which include "Light up thy halls!" (N 85) and
"Thy sun is near meridian height" (N 133), both addressed to an absent
A.G.A. By taking on the persona of one of Augusta's betrayed lovers,26
Bronte can explore the essential ambivalence toward her heroine which
often erupts in the Queen's own monologues. Because she imaginatively
participates in De Samara's anguish and suicide in these poems, Bronte can
glorify neither Augusta's multiplicity (or, in this case, duplicity) nor her gift
for survival. After a last remembrance of Augusta's "pictured face," De
Samara furiously dismisses the image and cries:

There, go, Deceiver, go! My hand is streaming wet;

My heart's blood flows to buy the blessing - To forget!
Oh could that lost heart give back, back again to thine,
One tenth part of the pain that clouds my dark decline! (N 85)

While Augusta's presence at the death and at the grave of Lord Elbe seems
vaguely sinister, she is not literally responsible for his death; but her
presence in the mind of her "raving, dying victim" De Samara is "dark" and
"deadly" (N 1 33, N 85), powerful enough to lead the young man to an "early
tomb" (N 1 33). Once again, the Gondal saga presents a masculine victim of a
mortal wound, but this time Augusta is not thereby lifted above death but
implicated in it.
In the saga's most dramatic example of Augusta's complicity with
death, "A Farewell to Alexandria" (N 108), Bronte's central persona aban-
dons her infant daughter, perhaps an illegitimate "child of love," to a violent
snowstorm:

Wakes up the storm more madly wild,

The mountain drifts are tossed on high -
Farewell, unblessed, unfriended child,
I cannot bear to watch thee die!

Augusta's intense need for freedom - from human ties and from her own
(mortal) nature - compels her to reject motherhood, though not without
regret.27 Had Bronte allowed Augusta to embrace maternity, her "natural"
role, she would have forfeited her heroine's apparent immunity from
"Nature's sad reality," the death sentence which hovers over each of her
children (N 174). The poem "Geraldine" (N 150), written two years after
"A Farewell to Alexandria" but depicting an earlier episode, focuses on

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8 / VICTORIAN POETRY

Augusta "lonely in her distant cave" singing and talking to her child, h
words framed by the speech of, presumably, one of her retainers. Bron
decision not to present this scene as an A.G.A. monologue suggests
desire to distance herself from Augusta, though not as completely as she d
in the F. De Samara poems. Fanny Ratchford finds that "Geraldin
records "A.G.A.'s resolution to commit infanticide" (GondaVs Quee
p. 22), a convincing reading in light of both Bronte's impulse to return t
obviously troubling subject - the (brief) motherhood of her persona - lo
after introducing it in her saga and her recent composition of another po
dealing with motherhood, "I see around me tombstones grey" (N 149
which she explicitly feminizes Earth for the first time in her poetry a
stresses the heritage of death she has left her children.28
Through the anonymous speaker's eyes we see Augusta (Geraldin
"bending o'er her beauteous child" as "she clasped its sleeping form," bu
this lovely image of maternity is undercut by the rest of the scene in
"cavern wild." Observing his "lady," the speaker discerns somethi
unnatural in her communion with her infant:

Yet I could hear my lady sing:

I knew she did not mourn;
For never yet from sorrow's spring
Such witching notes were born.

However, Augusta herself insists, in her long inset speech, on the

unnaturalness of her child, and, in an eerie retelling of Wordsworth's
"Intimations Ode," she decides to prevent "shades of the prison-house"
from closing upon her daughter by sending her right back to "that imperial
palace whence [she] came."29 Augusta refuses to see her daughter as human,
calling her "divine" and an "angel," whose soul "pure as now . . . /Must go
to Heaven again" (italics Bronte's):
I was not tired my darling one,
Of gazing on thine eyes.
Methought the heaven, whence thou hast come,
Was lingering there awhile;
And Earth seemed such an alien home
They did not dare to smile.
Methought each moment something strange
Within their circles shone,
And yet, through every magic change,
They were Brenzaida's own.30

Augusta needs to regard her child as a kind of "strange" and "magic" change-
ling, longing for its original home, in order not only to justify abandoning
her duties as a mother but also to ensure that "sin shall never blanch that
cheek, / Nor suffering charge that brow." In creating a persona who
embodies feminine power and endurance, Bronte felt it necessary to detach
Augusta from Nature herself - the most generous and the most exacting of

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 TEDDI LYNN CHICHESTER / 9

mothers - as well as to punish her for her transgressions of the natural order,
which would expose her to the same fate - death - that continually surrounds
her but which usually leaves her unscathed. Haunted by a sense of inexpi-
able guilt (J. Hillis Miller calls her "a kind of female Manfred"), Augusta
hopes to remove her daughter from "earth's frenzied strife" (N 169) and thus
from the temptation to follow in her mother's footsteps, "feed[ing] on Death,
that feeds on men."31 The poem closes with the words of the original speaker,
who seems to intuit vaguely his Queen's resolution to kill her child: "/
watching o'er her slumber, wept / As one who mourns the dead!"
By temporarily forsaking Augusta as her persona and entering the
consciousness of someone close to her, Bronte can present a more balanced
view of Augusta than either the passionate monologues by Augusta herself
or by her enamored and/or betrayed lovers offer. Through the eyes of an
affectionate but not overly intimate observer, Bronte - and her readers - can
sympathize with, without endorsing, A.G.A.'s self-imposed, or rather,
Bronte-imposed rejection of community, of permanent ties, and of her own
mortality. That Bronte begins writing such pieces as "Geraldine" and "How
few, of all the hearts that loved" (N 171) - relatively objective poems which
focus on Augusta without assigning her the role of primary speaker - after
composing the fragmentary ballad "The Death of A.G.A." (N 143),
suggests the poet's desire to step back from the character who had inhabited
her imagination for more than four years. While an early poem such as
"Sleep brings no joy to me" (N 34), an A.G.A. monologue in which Augusta
bemoans her nightly torment by "the shadows of the dead" and yearns for
the "sleep of death," may seem self-indulgent (on the speaker's part) as well
as unconvincing, later works in which an onlooker perceives the tragedy in
Augusta's status as an "outsider," as "Sidonia's deity" in a "home of clay"
(N 154, N 44) evince Bronte's realization of what she has done to Gondal's
Queen: she has denied her, in the words of Tennyson's Tithonus, "the
power to die."32 Even "The Death of A.G.A.," with its moving lament by
Lord Eldred, possibly the speaker of "Geraldine" and "How few, of all the
hearts that loved," mythologizes Augusta, refusing her the role of a "mere"
woman that she herself has refused her daughter. Called a "fiend" by one of
her murderers, she meets her death like a valiant Amazon, and once dead,
she is referred to as an "idol," a "wild morn," and a "glorious sun" who had
been "so adored, so deified." After Bronte destroys her heroine, however,
she can reassess and then recreate her as a genuinely poignant and much
more human figure, who in our final glimpse of her, does not gain sustenance
from another's downfall, as in earlier poems, but who instead must struggle
against despair even fifteen years after her loved one's death.
Augusta's final monologue, "Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled
above thee!" (N 182), an elegy for her second husband Julius Brenzaida,

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io / VICTORIAN POETRY

stands out as the most accomplished of Bronte's Gondal poems.33 Re

the often monotonous or jarring tetrameter that she generally favo
conversational five- to six-beat line helps the poet control the emotio
more effectively than in other A.G.A. monologues. A gorgeous lyric
incantatory in its rhythms and repetitions, this poem is purged of bo
desperate desire for the grave which Augusta expresses in, for e
"Sleep brings no joy to me," and of the selfish survival instinct with
Bronte ordinarily endows her primary persona. While it would be dif
on the basis of this one poem, to argue that Bronte has rid herself
notion that the feminine is the more mortal, the more earthbound g
she has, after all, resurrected her heroine and required her to chant
another elegy to a dead male - the piece never elevates Augusta
expense of her mate, though he is "far, far removed, cold in the dr
grave." Unlike her protestations of love and misery in earlier e
Augusta's assertion that though "all [her] life's bliss is in the grave"
Brenzaida, she must remain awhile longer within the world of "chan
suffering" represents a responsible and belie vably human - not god
like, not fiendish - stance:

when the days of golden dreams had perished

And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened and fed without the aid of joy;
Then did I check the tears of useless passion,
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine!34

When Bronte allows Augusta to rejoin "the World's tide" in this poe
does so in a completely different spirit than in "There shines the m
noon of night," Augusta's first lyric written almost exactly eigh
before.35 Whereas the earlier poem closes with Elbe's bitter realizati
Augusta will return home in "health and bloom" and "forget [his] lo
grave," "Cold in the earth" emphasizes Augusta's struggle to ove
"rapturous pain" and "divinest anguish" - both essentially self-in
emotions - and her willingness to accept "Time's all-wearing wa
longer gaining strength and stature from a vanquished male, Augus
retains her vitality and eloquence as she stands poised between the l
for "Earth's dungeon tomb" and her desire to live, part of the cycle t
eventually reunite her in death with her "sweet Love of youth."
If we label Emily Bronte's Gondal saga as derivative melodra
study it solely for its prefiguration of themes and characters in Wut
Heights, we lose an opportunity to explore with the poet - and
extraordinary persona - such central concerns as mortality, gender, is
and identity. Although "Cold in the earth" by no means signals the

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 TEDDI LYNN CHICHESTER / n

Augusta or of Gondal - as J. Hillis Miller points out, Gondal "char

and events proliferated endlessly" - we can trace in the A.G. A. poem
lead up to it a kind of progression as Bronte works out, but by no m
resolves, her anxieties about her gender's seemingly close kinship
death, anxieties triggered in part by her childhood losses of mother
sisters (Miller, p. 159). Moreover, the entire saga, along with many n
Gondal poems, displays Bronte's impressive versatility as an empathic a
who can take on a number of identities as she explores both "the
without" and "the world within" (N 174). Emily Bronte's poetic p
seemed to increase with each new poem as she neared the end of her li
can only speculate how much longer it would have expresed itself thr
the enigmatic Augusta, and we can merely wonder about other w
which Bronte's fertile imagination would have conceived (of) her
womanhood. c^>

Notes

1 Winifred Gerin, Emily Bronte: A Biography (Oxford, 1971), p. 4. Interestingly,

but probably unintentionally, Gerin seems to connect "the burdens of
maternity" Maria Bronte "came to realize" with her death from cancer at the
age of thirty-eight (pp. 3-4). See pp. 9-10 for Germ's account of young Maria
and Elizabeth Bronte's deaths. Edward Chitham's recent A Life of Emily Bronte
(Oxford, 1987), on the other hand, does acknowledge how devastating to Emily
the deaths of her mother and older sisters must have been (following Gaskell, he
calls Maria, the eldest sister, Emily's "mother-substitute" [p. 44]); but
Chitham's theory that Emily, supposedly a favorite at Cowan Bridge school,
failed to defend her older sisters from the schoolmistresses' "abuse" and thus
suffered from persistent feelings of guilt over the girls' sudden deaths seems
completely unfounded.
2 "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell (1850)," in Wuther ing Heights, ed.
William M. Sale, Jr. (New York, 1972), p. 7.
3 C. Day Lewis, "The Poetry of Emily Bronte," Bronte Society Transactions 1 3,
no. 1 (1957): 95. In Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Bronte Sisters as Early
Victorian Novelists (London, 1966), Inga-Stina Ewbank calls all three Bronte
sisters "unwomanly woman writer [s]" and singles out Emily for her astonishing
ability to detach herself from her womanhood (pp. 48, 204).
4 Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms: An
Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst, 1980),
p. 260. See also Cixous' "Sorties" and Irigaray's "This sex which is not one" in
the same volume.

5 The phrase is Cixous'; "Sorties," p. 97 of New French Feminisms.

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12 / VICTORIAN POETRY

6 "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eli

ed. Frank Kermode (New York, 1975), pp. 40, 43.
7 "I'm happiest when most away," Poem 44 in The Complete Poems of Emily J
Bronte, ed. C. W. Hatfield (New York, 1941). All quotations from Bronte
poetry are from this text, which arranges the poems chronologically, and will
identified within the text by an N and the number of the poem. I am acceptin
Fanny E. Ratchford's ascription to A.G.A. of several poems found in th
Gondal notebook which lack Augusta's initials but closely resemble in ton
point of view, and subject matter other A.G.A. utterances. However, Ratchford
reconstruction of the saga in Gondal 's Queen: A Novel in Verse by Emily Ja
Bronte (Austin, 1955), which subsumes all of Bronte's verse into the Gonda
myth, remains a largely unconvincing piece of creative conjecture that insists o
a linear narrative, contrary to the synchronic nature of Gondal histor
especially as it concerns A.G.A.
8 C. Day Lewis, "The Poetry of Emily Bronte," p. 85. Lewis' comment th
Bronte's "Gondal people . . . were vehicles for the elemental forces with
herself" (p. 97) is typical (see also Denis Donoghue, "The Other Emily," in Th
Brontes: A Collection of Critical Essays [Englewood Cliffs, 1970], pp. 157-17
and Rosalind Miles, "A Baby God: The Creative Dynamism of Emily Bronte
Poetry," in The Art of Emily Bronte, ed. Anne Smith [London, 1976]
pp. 68-93); and ^ ignores Bronte's need - and ability - to create new identiti
within which to confront personal anxieties, passions, desires. Jonatha
Wordsworth's "Wordsworth and the Poetry of Emily Bronte," Bronte Socie
Transactions 16, no. 2 (1972): 85-100, offers a more sympathetic - and
convincing - reading of Gondal, comparing its lyrics to Wordsworth's notion o
the Lyrical Ballad, which "tells ... a story; but which is, despite this objectiv
basis, infused with personal emotion" (p. 93). The "personal emotion" th
marks Bronte's poetry, however, generates less from sublime egotism and mor
from dissatisfaction with her "present entity," her material - and feminin
selfhood (N 181).
9 Margaret Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordswor
Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, 1980), pp. 109, 110. Homans
detailed study of Bronte's poetry contends that a sequence of non-Gond
poems "forms the core of Bronte's canon" (p. 108); thus she does not examin
the poet's crucial, complex attachment to her primary persona, Gondal
Queen.
10 Christine Gallant, "The Archetypal Feminine in Emily Bronte's Poetry,"
WS 7, nos. 1-2 (1980): 89. Gallant's ground-breaking essay focuses on the
Gondal saga, which she calls "a matriarchal mythology" created "within the
traditions of the great chthonic world religions" (p. 80), and emphasizes
Augusta's kinship with Nature as "the devouring Great Mother" (p. 88); yet her
essay, which claims to examine how Bronte's experience as a "woman in
nineteenth-century England" shaped her poetry, catapults Bronte into the
realm of great "impersonal" mythmakers and overlooks the poet's intimate,
ambivalent connection to her heroine, whom Gallant sees exclusively in terms of
the Jungian archetypal Feminine. When Gallant, explicating "Fall, leaves, fall"
(N 79), describes Augusta's "joyous" descent into "her own realm, the
underworld," she fails to notice how desperately Bronte, throughout most of the
epic, prevents A.G.A. from entering this realm, where the seemingly invincible

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 TEDDI LYNN CHICHESTER / 13

Queen will become not the earth goddess that Gallant invokes, but a mere
mortal, subject to dissolution and decay (pp. 85-86).
11 Homans, p. 109. Homans rather enigmatically alludes to the "sinister effects"
produced by Bronte's "pattern of supplanting identity"; and I suppose she is
referring to what she believes to be Bronte's failure to establish her own poetic
voice as a result of her deference to various personae.
12 Irigaray, "This sex which is not one," in New French Feminisms, p. 103.
1 3 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women 's Devel-
opment (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982), p. 35.
14 Bronte felt intimately connected with the moors surrounding Haworth and she
records her longing for her beloved landscape in N 92, written when she worked
at Law Hill as a teacher in 1838. The homesickness Bronte suffered whenever
she left Haworth (her 1845 excursion with Anne seems an exception) sprang as
much from her attachment to "her" moors as to "the hearth of home" (N 92).
15 See, for example, Nil, which finds the speaker "As friendless after eighteen
years, / As lone as on [her] natal day."
1 6 Physical solitude in itself did not seem to bother Bronte; in fact, she often sought
it, taking long walks through the moors, accompanied only by her dog, Keeper.
17 John Keats, Letter to George and Tom Keats (December 21-27, 1817), in
English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York, 1967), p. 1209.
1 8 All quotes are from Keats's Letter to Richard Woodhouse (October 27, 1 8 1 8), in
Perkins, p. 1220. Rich's comments on Keats and Jung can be found in Adrienne
Rich 's Poetry: Texts of the Poems, The Poet on Her Work, Reviews and Criticism,
ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York, 1975), p. 1 1 5- In
his own discussion of Bronte's relation to Keatsian and Wordsworthian poetics,
Denis Donoghue in "The Other Emily" explicitly identifies her with the
"egotistical sublime," calling her Gondal poems "soliloquies" (p. 166). While I
agree with Donoghue that the Gondal poems are not pure dramatic monologues
in which persona and poet remain entirely distinct, his label of "ventriloquism"
and his charge that Bronte's speakers are "extreme functions of [her] own
personality" (p. 171) deny the diversity of characters whose consciousnesses she
enters both in the Gondal poetry and elsewhere, and underestimates her
impressive achievement in creating the central figure of her saga, Queen
Augusta, by no means merely an extension of Bronte's personality and a rich,
complex character despite the loss of the prose chronicle which might clarify her
position in the work as a whole.
19 See Fanny Ratchford, The Brontes' Web of Childhood (New York, 1941), esp.
chaps. 2, 9, 13, and 17. Winifred Gerin covers much of the same ground but
stresses young Emily's interest in representatives of female power, of whom the
(then) Princess Victoria was one, and discusses the Gondal epic as a "feminist"
revision of Branwell and Charlotte's plays (see her Emily Bronte, chaps. 2-3).
20 Anne's note, cited in Ratchford's GondaVs Queen, p. 194, suggests that Emily
kept her poetry not only separate from the joint project, but secret as well.
2 1 Augusta is recalling Elbe's final words before his death, so although he seems to
get in the last word, as it were, his speech is subsumed by Augusta's own: she is
in the position to quote him; he is in reality permanently silent.
22 Ordinarily Bronte merely writes the initials or an abbreviation of the name of
her Gondalian speaker at the top of each poem. Augusta is the only character

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14 / VICTORIAN POETRY

who enjoys the status of "independent" author, in N 39 and in one version of

"To a Bluebell" (N 100).
23 See Ortner's "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in Woman, Culture
and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford,
1 974)3 PP- 67-87; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the
Attic (New Haven, 1979), chaps. 1 and 2; and Margaret Homans, Women
Writers and Poetic Identity, esp. chap. 1, and Bearing the Word (Chicago, 1986),
chap. 1 and, for a perceptive analysis of Bronte's relation to language as
manifested in Wuthering Heights, chap. 3. Ortner's remains the most sensible -
because the most cautious - treatment of women's relation to nature. Although
many critics have too readily accepted the female/nature analogy, I do believe
that it sheds light on many of Bronte's A.G.A. monologues as well as the
non-Gondal poem "I see around me tombstones grey" (N 149).
24 William Wordsworth, "A slumber did my spirit seal," in The Poetical Works of
William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1940-49),
2:216.

25 No matter that he is long dead in an earlier poem; as J. Hillis Miller points out
in The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteeth-Century Writers (Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1963), the Gondal saga comprises "a collection of eternal events.
... In one sense the Gondal saga was a sequence of temporally related events,
like history. In another sense it was the simultaneous existence of all its events in
a perpetual present outside of time" (pp. 160-161).
26 While we might wonder whether Augusta's reputation for treachery results
from "misreadings" of her by the men within the saga, Augusta herself alludes
to - and is tormented by - her own "deeds untrue" in N 169 and hints at
unspecified crimes that rob her of repose in N 34 and N 96. Even her second
husband Julius Brenzaida, whose death inspires in Augusta the most genuine
grief we witness in the saga, has occasion to curse her "faithless lips" in N 81
(I do not think the Irigarayan pun is intended).
27 Augusta's refusal of motherhood anticipates Catherine Earnshaw's "abandon-
ment" of her newborn daughter, though in the novel, the mother dies, while the
daughter survives.
28 Margaret Homans provides an insightful reading of this poem in Women Writers
and Poetic Identity, pp. 147-149, although she finds more bitter irony in the
speaker's rejection of Heaven in favor of Mother Earth than I can discern.
29 The line from Wordsworth's Ode is echoed in Bronte's phrase "the heaven,
whence thou [the infant Alexandria] hast come."
30 Julius Brenzaida, Augusta's second husband. The child may have been born
before the two were married, or, as Ratchford suggests in GondaVs Queen, chaps.
8 and 9, after Brenzaida's death. Piecing together the Gondal saga is always a
perilous enterprise.
31 William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 3rd
ed., ed. David Bevington (Glenview, Illinois, 1980), p. 1608. When discussing
Augusta's exploits, one generally would not consider "men" here as generic.
The remark by J. Hillis Miller is from The Disappearance of God, p. 185.
32 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Tithonus," 1. 70, in The Poems of Tennyson, ed.
Christopher Ricks (London, 1969).

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 TEDDI LYNN CHICHESTER / 15

33 In this poem, Bronte calls her heroine Rosina of Alcona, one of several names
the infinitely varied Queen of Gondal enjoys.
34 In his brilliant study, The English Elegy (Baltimore, 1 985), Peter Sacks utililizes
the Freudian concept of "the work of mourning" and singles out the latter
stanza as exemplifying how a female poet represents this process. Arguing that
"the woman's [as well as the man's] mourning . . . recapitulate [s] not only her
loss of the mother but also her internalization and identification with the
idealized parental figure," Sacks focuses on Bronte's word "weaned" and finds
that the speaker "repeats her separation from the mother but also adopts the role
of the mother" in order to resist "an illegitimate and regressive desire" for
union - through death - with the lost parent (p. 15). In terms of the dynamic I
have been discussing between Bronte and her persona, a dynamic considerably
influenced by the deaths of the poet's mother and sisters, this at least tentative
willingness to allow Augusta - and thus herself - a maternal role bespeaks some
progress in Bronte's own "work of mourning."
35 Bronte wrote "There shines the moon" on March 6, 1837, and "Cold in the
earth" on March 3, 1845.

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