Conclusion: Emily Brontë’s Udolphics: The Gondal and Non-Gondal Poems

Summary

In this book, I have proposed, and hopefully shown, that reading 1790s Gothic novels helps to make us better readers of Victorian poetry. The claim is a challenging one because it demands reading long, eight-hundred-page Gothic novels seriously—reading them closely, and formally—without necessarily reverting to familiar patterns of paranoid reading or suspicious hermeneutics. Nor does it lean on statistical reading from a distance, counting off the number of Minerva titles published or tallying the salaries of women writers in a single decade. The crux of this study, in suggesting we read these baggy containers for their formal value, undercuts the prominence of Gothic themes to focus instead on Gothic forms and structures. Such a formal approach unifies disparate shapes across seemingly non-complementary units and containers. Moving from novels to poems, crossing from Romantic to Victorian, Gothic forms travel and transform as they do their work. Those Gothic forms—of confinement, guilty overhearing, shock and swap, and wavering, as discussed in each of the preceding chapters—embody constructs of restraint and excess. As we have seen, the machinery of confinement and liberation are often bound together in tangible, embodied ways: Where the characters stand, hidden from view, enact triangulation. How a poem’s lines wrap around the page can seem to stifle a poem’s speaker. The physical experience of close reading Gothic form becomes inextricable from its content, where the stuff that fills unwieldy “lyric buckets” and “well-wrought urns” asks readers to undergo contortions. The speaker, poet, and reader, all parties involved, might twist, writhe, and waver. That Gothic reading experience prevails in readings of even the most canonical Victorian poems.

The argument of this book has progressed chronologically across the nineteenth century, chapter by chapter, to explore the Gothic forms hidden in plain sight, often within poems where Gothic themes may not be detectable at all: in Browning’s early dramatic monologues (contemporaneous with Tennyson’s) from the 1830s; in metasonnets by Elizabeth Barrett and Christina Georgina Rossetti from the 1840s; in picture poems and doubled works from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1860s second phase; and in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the 1870s and 1880s. For this concluding chapter, I break the chronology to visit an earlier moment, turning our attention to the poetry of Emily Brontë.