Skip to main content

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

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    I have visited this place (some forty years past!) and can vouch for the atmosphere that is held there. My sister recently made a visit and her experience was as similar as mine even after all that time. Therefore I can be reasonably confident in assuring you that, in the event of making a visit, you will not be disappointed! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. I got jitters reading this. Will it be spooky when I visit it in future ? Or will it be interesting ? may be I will find out :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It will be definitely worth visiting the place, spooky or not.

      Delete
  3. I'll wait to read the post that you'll write after your visit. Perhaps, it'll be the beginning of a book by you.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...