Emily Brontë’s ‘Sense of Place’ as Portrayed in Her Literary Works

Abstract

‘Sense of Place’ is a theory that defines the emotional attachment individuals develop with specific locations, encompassing both positive and negative feelings. It can be directly applied to the analysis of the Victorian writer Emily Brontë’s portrayals of her house in Yorkshire moors where she grew up. It is reported that she loved her house, and it provided her with a constant back drop for her imaginative thinking and creative writing. It is assumed that the landscape seen through its windows and the sounds heard while being inside it frequently inspired most of the locational portrayals in her poetry and fiction. In consideration of Emily Brontë’s romantic attachment to her home, the present study intends to explore her own sense of place as portrayed in her works. Accordingly, it pursues the research questions, “How is Emily Brontë’s sense of place portrayed in her works, ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Remembrance’ and ‘Fall, leaves, fall?’ The methodology involves a thematic analysis of her biography by Edward Chitham, ‘A Life of Emily Brontë’ under the three themes, ‘Emily Brontë’s sensitivity towards nature and the environment,’ ‘Emily Brontë’s emotional intensity,’ and ‘her imaginary encounters with recurring patterns of the orphans and abandoned characters.’ The findings of the present study foreground that Emily Brontë’s was heavily influenced by her romantic perception of the beauty of nature and her identification of the therapeutic power of nature as portrayed through her characters. According to her, nature tends to improve the quality of relationships among humans while showing the ways in which their deterioration starts due to the imbalance of their emotions including the sense of being abandoned.