What Thou Art: Emily Bronte's Visionary Religion

The essay focuses on what it calls in its subtitle 'Emily Bronte's visionary religion'. The first section mainly explores the manifestation of this visionary religion in Wuthering Heights; the second section looks at the same topic in the poems released in 1846. The essay discusses the use of dialectic and divided perspectives in novel and poems, and looks at how this use permits heterodox utterances about religious matters and holds at bay the risk that the work might merely serve as the vehicle for preconceived ideas. What is of importance, the essay argues, is the acute artistry with which Emily Bronte's writing allows us to experience intimations of a redefining visionary religion that lays emphasis on, without wholly endorsing, a post-Romantic individualism.