The Charm of the Brontë Gloom

 

 Brontë Museum, Haworth

Leading the list of the umpteen places that I would love to visit is Haworth of the Brontës. Haworth is a village in England where the three illustrious Brontë sisters lived until their premature deaths. Two of the sisters and their only brother died when they were only 29, 30 and 31 respectively. The other one managed to live to the age of 39. Their unfortunate father, Rev Patrick Bronte, endured all that along with the death of his wife much earlier. It was a gloomy life for all of them. On a gloomy landscape. The landscape where Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Anne’s Agnes Grey and Emily’s Catherine lived out their passions, dreams and frustrations.

All the four Brontë children were brilliant. The boy, Branwell, was considered to be a genius by his father and sisters. He was tutored at home rigorously by his religious father. His poetry earned much praise. He painted admirable portraits. A talented man he was. But he ended up as a drifter. Addicted to alcohol and drugs, he succumbed to death at the age of 31. In his last moments, he wanted to demonstrate the power of the human will and insisted on dying standing up.

The Church, Haworth

The sisters were a little more successful. Or less unfortunate, let’s say. Their novels and poems drew much attention though the orthodox Victorians were not very happy with characters like Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw.

However, England liberated itself from the absurd Victorian morality. Today the birthplace of the Brontës, Thornton village, is like a pilgrimage centre. The place they lived out their tragic lives, Haworth, is a tourist centre that people like me put on the top of their post-Covid destinations.

It’s not Jane Eyre or Catherine Earnshaw that attract me to the place, however. It’s the Brontës themselves. These three sisters and a brother who seemed to carry existence as an unbearable burden within themselves. The land on which they walked. The ghosts that conversed with them in the gloom of their loneliness. There are ghosts in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and probably in many other works of these sisters. I long to feel those ghosts.

This longing of mine has become so intense that ghosts have once again started haunting my dreams. No, I don’t call them nightmares anymore. They were nightmares earlier when Shillong clergy and some Delhi godman’s women were inhabiting the landscapes of my nocturnal adventures. Not when the Brontës choose to populate my dreams.

And when (and if) I do visit Haworth, the cemetery of St Michael and All Angels Church there will enchant me more than the Brontë Museum, perhaps.

xZx