“THE SOUL TO FEEL THE FLESH, AND THE FLESH TO FEEL THE CHAIN”:
THE ANTICIPATION OF NIETZSCHE’S APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN
DUALITY IN THE WORKS OF THE BRONTËS
by
HOLLY BURGIN WATSON
DANIEL J. SIEGEL, COMMITTEE CHAIR
LEONARD KYLE GRIMES
ERIKA HILLE RINKER
A THESIS
Submitted to the graduate faculty of The University of Alabama at Birmingham,
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA
2012
Copyright by
Holly Burgin Watson
2012
“THE SOUL TO FEEL THE FLESH, AND THE FLESH TO FEEL THE CHAIN”:
THE ANTICIPATION OF NIETZSCHE’S APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN
DUALITY IN THE WORKS OF THE BRONTËS
HOLLY WATSON
ENGLISH
ABSTRACT
From their earliest reception, the works of Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë
have been met with hostility and confusion as a result of their deviation from the
standards adopted by a majority of their contemporaries. While the works of the three
sisters are anomalous within the context of their peers, both reader and critic alike have
observed the similarities that exist among the family of works. As a result of their
departure from societal norms, the Brontës have been recognized for their harshness and
apparent rebellion; however, they were neither concerned with complete social upheaval,
nor were they opposed to the culture that ventured to offer a sense of stability to their
world. Instead, they appeared to be concerned with both the attempts for transcendence
through cultural establishments such as religion as well as the innate human urges that
many of their Victorian contemporaries attempted to stifle. While this desire for balance
between culture and human nature may be easily traced through the Brontë canon, the
absence of a functional vocabulary through which to discuss this phenomenon often
results in a skewed perception of the Brontës’ motives in creating a schism between
culture and nature. The stigma associated with “culture” and “nature” often lends a
reading that implies a negative/positive relationship between the two opposing aspects of
iii
existence. In arguing that the Brontës were attempting to demonstrate the necessity of
culture and nature, this thesis attempts to demonstrate that to achieve an impartial reading
of their novels and the relationships at work therein, a new vocabulary must be adopted.
The Apollonian/Dionysian vocabulary of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy most readily
lends itself to the interconnection between culture and nature. By applying Nietzsche’s
interpretation of the Apollonian desire for transcendence through illusion and the
suffering of Dionysian reality to Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Wuthering
Heights one may come to a realization of the complex relationship between Victorian
culture and human nature.
Keywords: Friedrich Nietzsche, Charlotte Brontë, Anne Brontë, Emily Brontë, culture,
nature, fiction, novel, Victorian
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... iii
CHAPTER
INTRODUCTION NIETZSCHE, THE BRONTËS, AND VICTORIAN CULTURE ..... 1
Transition and the Victorian Concept of Culture ................................................... 2
Culture and Restraint ........................................................................................... 10
The Brontës and Victorian Art ............................................................................. 15
Nietzsche, the Brontës, and the Need for Balance ............................................... 19
1 THE APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN CONFLICT IN JANE EYRE ..................... 28
Nietzsche and the Aesthetics of Religion in Jane Eyre ........................................ 28
The Dionysian Child: Opposing Authority .......................................................... 34
A Transition: Realizing the World of the Apollonian Vision ............................... 39
Dionysian Temptation: Suffering and Passion ..................................................... 43
Female Madness: The Suppression of the Dionysian Impulse ............................ 47
Rejecting Apollo’s Call: The Necessity of the Flesh ........................................... 51
2 NIETZSCHE’S RELIGION AND THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL ................... 54
“The Daimonion of Socrates”: Nietzsche and Christian Morality ....................... 54
The Embodiment of Christian Morality and Socratic Virtue: Religion in The
Tenant of Wildfell Hall ................................................................................... 61
“The Dionysian Abysses”: Arthur Huntingdon and the Rejection of Socratic
Knowledge ..................................................................................................... 69
Virtue and Temptation: Gilbert Markham and the Apollonian Relationship ....... 75
3 NIETZSCHE AND THE SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS OF WUTHERING
HEIGHTS ................................................................................................................... 82
v
“More Romantic than a Fairy Tale”: Wuthering Heights and Nietzsche’s
“Redemption of Mere Appearance” ............................................................... 82
The Honeysuckle and the Thorn: The Apollonian and Dionysian Conflict ......... 89
“I’ll Give You a Feeling of How I Feel”: Dionysian Abstraction and Apollonian
Language ........................................................................................................ 99
“An Absurd Termination”: Dionysus’s Failure and the Second Generation ...... 102
CONCLUSION THE EMBRYO OF A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH:
APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN INTERDEPENDENCE ................................ 105
WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................ 110
vi
1
INTRODUCTION
NIETZSCHE, THE BRONTËS, AND VICTORIAN CULTURE
Under certain circumstances I love what is human... man is
to my mind an agreeable, courageous, inventive animal that
has no equals in earth; it finds its way in any labyrinth. I
am well disposed towards him: I often reflect how I might
yet advance him and make him stronger, more evil, and
more profound than he is.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Writing in mid-nineteenth century England, the Brontës were faced with the
dilemma of great social and cultural change that affected their works and the works of
many of their contemporaries. Unlike some of their contemporaries, however, the
Brontës demonstrate a sense of rebellion in their novels that speaks of their unwillingness
to accept societal norms and their desire to question the social structure that was built
around them. In her introduction to the Brontës, Heather Glenn argues, “the Brontës are
somewhat different from other Victorian novelists, they are different... in their passionate
individualism, their defiance of social and moral convention, their focus on religion and
desire” (2). She also explains that the sisters were more liberal in their representations of
vital aspects of human nature, claiming, “It is clear that in their dealings with sexuality
and with religion all three are more searching, more exploratory than most of their
contemporaries were prepared to be” (2). While Glenn may offer a modern
interpretation, it is interesting to note that her awareness of the individuality of the
2
Brontës’ writings was also possessed by Victorian critics who were familiar with the
Brontë novels as they were being produced. Prior to the revelation of the Brontë sisters’
identities and gender, a review appeared in The Spectator in which the Bells’ novels were
criticized for their “ill-chosen subjects, alike singular and coarse” (Davies 175).
Similarly, Fraser’s Magazine noted the “coarseness and vulgarity” of The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall, and Matthew Arnold said of Villette, “Why is Villette disagreeable?
Because the writer’s mind contains nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore
that is all she can, in fact, put into her book” (Davies 175). In an environment in which
“sweetness and light” are valued and poetry must strive to possess “the idea of
conquering the obvious faults of our animality,” there is no room for “hunger, rebellion,
and rage” in literature (Arnold, CA 23, 24).1 By questioning social conventions and
expressing aspects of humanity which many Victorians such as Arnold would have been
striving to suppress, the Brontës set themselves apart from their contemporaries and
unabashedly demonstrated their preference for a truthful representation of the human
experience over the familiar didactic art of the Victorian period.
Transition and the Victorian Concept of Culture
The opposition against basic human impulses and desires in favor of restraint may
be traced through the evolution of the concept of culture at the close of the Romantic
1
In his essay, “Sweetness and Light,” Arnold states that “sweetness and light” are to be considered as
characteristics of perfection, and he claims that art and culture are analogous in that both strive to
accomplish the perfection of humanity. He also argues that religion is “yet a more important manifestation
of human nature than poetry” (23) as a result of the failure of poetry to accomplish its goal of defeating
human faults. He does claim, however, that “the best art and poetry of the Greeks, in which religion and
poetry are one,” are characterized by the ability to provide instruction for the perfection of humanity (24).
3
period and throughout the often turbulent Victorian period.2 The transition from an
agrarian society to an industrial one at the onset of the Industrial Revolution forced early
Victorians to adopt a new attitude about themselves and their relationships with one
another while adapting their perceptions of society to suit their new environment. While
the move towards industrialism greatly affected the Victorians, its impact was also
influential in the works of the Romantics. Robert Langbaum argues that “[Wordsworth
and Coleridge] are... to be understood as the first Victorians, in that they realized long
before Queen Victoria’s accession that the nature of the enemy had changed—that the
enemy was no longer feudalism but rather laissez-faire industrialism that threatened to
destroy the countryside and men’s souls” (39). Wordsworth’s recognition of
industrialism and in turn the move from nature as a threat to “men’s souls” is apparent as
early as 1798 with the publication of “Lines Written in Early Spring” in which he grieves
over the shift from an agrarian way of life:
To her fair works did nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it griev’d my heart to think
What man had made of man. (lines 5-8)
These lines demonstrate Wordsworth’s discontent over the separation between nature and
humanity and the sense of loss concerning a former way of life as a result of rising
industrialism that was to be echoed throughout the nineteenth century.
2
Robert Langbaum emphasizes the transitions that were occurring in England during, before, and after the
Brontës were writing. He explains that “The characteristics we think of as Victorian were well established
by the time of the Queen’s accession in 1837. Some historians consider the era as starting with the 1832
Reform Bill” (40). He also acknowledges the aspect of instability that marked the nineteenth century by
pointing out that “the Evangelical spirit had triumphed by 1833,” but by the 1890s the “cultivated minority
was in full rebellion against prudery” (41).
4
While Coleridge did not display the same level of emotional distress over the
progression of society as did Wordsworth, he also indicated that the transition of the
Industrial Revolution might have a negative effect on the nation. In Church and State,
Coleridge differentiates between culture and civilization, stating that the members of a
society must understand “this most valuable of the lessons taught by history, and
exemplified alike in her oldest and her most recent records—that a nation can never be a
too cultivated, but may easily become an over-civilized race” (50, emphasis mine).3
From this perspective it appears that Coleridge is dissatisfied with the “most recent
records” of his society’s “ordinary progress” towards industrialism. In response to this
threat of becoming “over-civilized,” Coleridge recommends the concept of
institutionalizing culture.4 Faced with the dilemma of “radical change,” Coleridge
appears to have lost faith in humanity’s ability to establish their “personal
qualification[s]” on an individual level and feels that it is necessary to rely on the
establishment of an institution to pursue “perfection” or transcendence. Unlike the
Brontës, whose works demonstrate a desire to internalize cultivation through selfexploration, Coleridge, when confronted by transition, strove to implement a structure
3
Raymond Williams explains that to Coleridge, cultivation represented “the highest observable state of
men in society,” while civilization was simply “the ordinary progress of society” (68).
4
Williams explains, “Coleridge’s emphasis in his social writings is on institutions. The promptings to
perfection came indeed from ‘the cultivated heart’—that is to say from a man’s inward consciousness—
but... Coleridge insisted on man’s need for institutions which should confirm and constitute his personal
efforts. Cultivation, in fact, though an inward was never a merely individual process. What in the
eighteenth century had been an ideal of personality—a personal qualification for participation in polite
society—had now, in the face of radical change, to be redefined, as a condition on which society as a whole
depended. In these circumstances, cultivation, or culture, became an explicit factor in society, and its
recognition controlled the enquiry into institutions” (68).
5
that would rely on the strict instruction of theologians to determine the course of
perfection for his society.5
With the progression from an agrarian to an industrial society, the early Victorians
were also forced to adapt their vocabulary to suit their new environment and the
structures that were beginning to be implemented to combat the instability of the
transition. The word “culture” became a vital part of the way in which the Victorians
would express themselves and their attempts to make sense of the changes occurring
around them. Terry Eagleton points out that it was during this time of change that the
word “culture” began to take on a new set of implications, which it still carries today. He
explains, “‘Culture’ at first denoted a thoroughly material process, which was then
metaphorically transposed to affairs of the spirit. The word thus charts within its
semantic unfolding humanity’s own historic shift from rural to urban existence” (1).6
While Eagleton does explain the connection between the Industrial Revolution and this
semantic shift when he states that “Kultur or Culture... became the name of the Romantic,
pre-Marxist critique of early industrial capitalism” (10), he does not outline the way in
which the new meaning was utilized to demonstrate a dependence on the former way of
life. Langbaum explains:
5
Coleridge explains in Church and State, that his desire for the theologians to take the lead does not stem
from his spiritual belief system, but rather from theology’s role in the acquisition of human knowledge. He
states, “The Theologians took the lead, because the SCIENCE of Theology was the root and the trunk of
the knowledges that civilized man, because it gave unity and the circulating sap of life to all other sciences,
by virtue of which alone they could be contemplates as forming, collectively, the living tree of
knowledge” (49).
6
Williams also traces the semantic evolution of “culture” throughout the Victorian period by relying on the
use of the word in the works of prominent writers. He states, “[Culture] came to mean, first, ‘a general
state or habit of the mind’, having close relations with the idea of human perfection. Second, it came to
mean ‘the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole’. Third, it came to mean ‘the
general body of the arts’. Fourth, later in the century, it came to mean ‘a whole way of life, material,
intellectual and spiritual’” (xvi).
6
One has to understand that the word culture was from the
beginning charged with a world-view and a battle cry. In a
revolutionary age, the word was used to define a principle of
continuity underlying political, economic and even social change.
It was used in an industrial age, which measured progress by
numbers, to ask about the quality of life—especially since quality
seemed to be declining. Since the economy required specialization
and dehumanization, the word culture was invoked as an argument
for the harmonious development of all of our human faculties. (45)
Langbaum’s explanation of the semantic shift of “culture” demonstrates that Victorians
such as Coleridge were not simply utilizing the word as a means by which to discuss the
“perfection” of humanity, but instead, they were using it as a defense mechanism against
the changes that they saw taking place around them. In a world marked by upheaval and
progression, “culture” often came to denote a desire to cleave to the values of the past by
creating a human reliance on established knowledge. 7
By depending on “culture,” Victorians were capable of addressing the sense of
fragmentation that they felt. Being faced with the changes of the new era while
maintaining a living memory of the former one created an unstable world for early
Victorians. Matthew Arnold addresses the displacement of the Victorian period in
“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” in which he mourns the loss of an outdated world:
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side. (lines 64-69)
7
Langbaum explains that “the concept of culture was the product of the literary mind when it was turned
upon the unprecedented conditions of the nineteenth century. Indeed the literary mind, with its memory of
other world-views and of ‘the best’ [in Arnold’s words] ‘that is known and thought in the world,’ offered
the one hope of escape that was not a mere return to state orthodoxy” (46).
7
As evidenced by this stanza, the sense of fragmentation created by the changes of the
Industrial Revolution caused Victorians such as Arnold to feel displaced, trapped between
two worlds, neither one existing to its fullest. Langbaum emphasizes that the
fragmentation that the Victorians were experiencing was a result of their continued
reliance on the ideal culture of the past. The outdated world of the eighteenth century had
passed away, but as long as members of the nineteenth century continued to cling to
former ideals, the new society was incapable of fully developing. Langbaum argues:
Victorian writers dealt with the fragmentation of life in the
nineteenth century, just because they carried in their heads an ideal
of cultural unity. But the ideal in their heads was itself a result of
fragmentation, of their being forced to internalize those values of
the superseded agrarian, aristocratic and Christian society, the loss
of which in the public domain produced the feeling of
fragmentation. Thus the Victorian writers established what
remains the special knack of modern intellectuals—the knack of
inhabiting two or more cultures at the same time. (49)
In an attempt to implement the reform necessary to accommodate the transitions of the
Victorian period, Arnold chose to create a structure that would harness the “best”
elements of the past while embracing the potential improvements of the future. By
imposing an institution onto the emerging society, however, he created an environment in
which the new world was “powerless to be born.” Arnold created for himself a nonexistent world, hovering between two ideals, by fragmenting the present into the
traditions of the past and the hopes of the future,.
While the instability of fragmentation would have been an uncomfortable
dilemma for Arnold, the changes of civilization were troubling beyond the psychological
effects of displacement. As a result of the declining quality of life and frequent riots and
8
protests, Arnold felt the threat of an anarchical uprising. Williams explains, “it was not
Arnold’s best self which rose at the sight of [the Hyde Park Railings]. Certainly he
feared a general breakdown into violence and anarchy” (136).8 From this perspective, it
is apparent that Arnold did not offer the concept of culture simply for the betterment of
mankind, but instead, he saw it “quite explicitly... as the alternative to
‘anarchy’” (Williams 123). Like Coleridge, Arnold also differentiated between “culture”
and “civilization,” and like Coleridge he also felt that the progression of civilization,
unchecked by culture, might result in a negative outcome for society. In Culture and
Anarchy, Arnold states that “Faith in machinery is... our besetting danger,” and he
emphasizes the fact that “in our modern world... the whole civilization is... mechanical
and external, and tends constantly to become more so” (16, 15).9 The danger of
machinery, however, lies not in the services it provides both literally through
industrialized processes and metaphorically through the privileges offered by the wealth
and freedom of a modern bureaucratic society, but in society’s gradual preference for the
convenience it offers over personal improvement. In such a state, the focus is moved
from the internal to the external, and physical comforts are valued over human perfection,
which may result in the rise of violence and anarchy in protest as the quality of life
decreases, as was occurring in the Industrial Revolution. In response to this perceived
8
While Arnold expresses a fear of violence and anarchy, it is important to note that from its origin in the
Industrial Revolution, the British working-class movement was characterized by “its conscious and
deliberate abstention from general violence, and its firm faith in other methods of advance” (Williams 136).
9
While Arnold would have valued an agrarian society over an industrial one, he is not simply deriding the
mechanical aspects of an industrial society in this instance. Instead, he explains that the purpose of
machinery, “if it is to do any good at all, is to serve” (CA 16). He goes on to explain that from this
perspective, machinery may be taken to mean a variety of societal benefits not limited to coal, and railroads
but also freedom, wealth, and religious organizations (CA 16).
9
threat, Arnold offers culture as the alternative to civilization. Rather than valuing the
external aspects of life, “culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each raw person
may like, the rule by which he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of
what is indeed beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like
that” (17-18). From this perspective, Arnold goes on to argue that culture strives to
convince the individual that wealth is but a type of machinery and should not be viewed
as an indicator of the worth of a nation. Instead, the focus must remain on the “spiritual
standard of perfection... and thus culture begets a dissatisfaction which is of the highest
possible value in stemming the common tide of men’s thoughts in a wealthy and
industrial community, and which saves the future, as one may hope, from being
vulgarized, even if it cannot save the present” (19-20).10 Through the institution of
culture, Arnold hoped to provide an alternative to the “mechanical” value system of
civilization and offer discontented members of society the ability to internalize their
energies into a perfecting of humanity rather than focusing on the declining quality of life
in the new social system.
According to Arnold, culture is concerned with achieving the transcendence of
man by balancing the various aspects of his nature. He explains, “Culture... leads us... to
conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our
humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society” (CA xvi). He
also goes on to speak of the way in which culture encourages growth, saying, “Not a
10
Langbaum recognizes the importance of understanding the implications of the semantic evolution of
“culture” as a value system for a society, saying, “‘culture’ [is] the elusive name given of the nineteenth
century to describe ‘a principle based on more complex criteria than the rise in national wealth and
population’” (42).
10
having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as
culture conceives it... [culture] is an harmonious expansion of all the powers which make
the beauty and worth of human nature” (13). From this perspective, one may easily
recognize the way in which the semantic shift of “culture” evolved from human
intervention to encourage natural growth in an agricultural setting to a metaphorical
pursuit of encouraging the growth of various aspects of human nature to create a more
perfect society. Eagleton explains, “If culture means the active tending of natural growth,
then it suggests a dialectic between the artificial and the natural, what we do to the world
and what the world does to us” (2). Culture, therefore, becomes the medium through
which the artificial or ideal may communicate with natural reality.
Culture and Restraint
By utilizing culture to restrain what he feels to be the negative aspects of human
nature, Arnold contradicts his own claim that culture is interested in “developing all sides
of our humanity.” He states, “culture... places human perfection in an internal condition,
in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our
animality, in the ever-increasing efficaciousness and in the general harmonious expansion
of those gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and
happiness of human nature” (CA 13). From this description of the role of culture, it is
apparent that Arnold recognizes the dichotomy of humanity in which a desire for
transcendence or perfection co-exists with a natural aspect of animality. By valuing the
aspirations for transcendence over animality, Arnold contradicts himself concerning the
11
importance of the “harmonious” development of every aspect of human nature. Instead,
he appears to want to stifle natural human desires such as “hunger, rebellion, and rage”
which he criticizes Charlotte Brontë for possessing, in favor of an impossible ideal of
perfection. Eagleton explains the way in which culture creates a division between
transcendence and natural human passions:
Once culture is grasped as self-culture, it posits a duality between
higher and lower faculties, will and desire, reason and passion,
which it then instantly offers to overcome. Nature now is not just
the stuff of the world, but the dangerously appetitive stuff of the
self. Like culture, the word means both what is around us and
inside us, and the disruptive drives within can easily be equated
with anarchic forces without. Culture is thus a matter of selfovercoming as much as self-realization. If it celebrates the self, it
also disciplines it, aesthetic and ascetic together. (5-6).
By comparing the “disruptive drives within” to the “anarchic forces without,” it becomes
apparent why Arnold would want to use the idea of perfection to stifle the “appetitive
stuff of the self.” Just as he uses culture to restrain what he perceives as the anarchic
tendencies of civilization, he attempts to use the idea of perfection to restrain the anarchic
tendencies of the self. Rather than recognizing the value of human nature and
questioning its role in a new society as the Brontës did with their novels, Arnold chooses
to retreat behind the idea of perfection in an attempt to stifle anything that may increase
the instability of his already fragmented world. Rather than taking his own advice
concerning the need for balance by nurturing every aspect of humanity, he attempts to
destroy the natural realm in hopes that the idea of perfection will supply a refuge against
the chaotic transition from the Romantic world to the Victorian one.
12
Many of Arnold’s ideas concerning the institutionalization of culture and its role
in restraining human nature harken back to the writings of Edmund Burke who also
recognized the role of culture in controlling natural human impulses. Williams explains
that “[Burke’s] position, quite unequivocally, is that man as an individual left to himself
is wicked; all human virtue is the creation of society, and is in this sense not ‘natural’ but
‘artificial’... The rights of man include the right to be restrained” (8). In Reflections on
the Revolution in France, Burke stresses the importance of institutions to restrain man’s
natural desires. He explains that “government is a contrivance of human wisdom to
provide for human wants” and “among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of
civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions” (88-89).11 As a result of the
creation of the “artificial” construct of society or culture, the natural self must be silenced
so that human virtue may prosper. Burke explains, “Society requires not only that the
passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as
in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will
controlled, and their passions brought into subjection” (89). Burke concludes that as a
result of the abstract nature of human wants, a development of human virtue is necessary
in conjunction with the stricture of government to ensure the stability of the power of the
state. He explains that since “the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and
circumstances...It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and
of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the
11
Even the century’s most famous liberal endorses a kind of restraint. In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill also
voices the typical Victorian interpretation of culture. Like Burke, he too felt that the members of a society
received certain benefits from having their wants met by that society, and, that in return, “each should be
bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest” (134).
13
mechanism of civil institutions” (89). Culture, therefore, serves as an institution in which
standards concerning human nature and the quality of certain behaviors and ideas are
canonized, and must necessarily work in conjunction with the state to maintain order.12
Where government fails to meet the irregular patterns of humanity, culture must be
evoked, utilizing the knowledge of human nature and virtue to maintain the necessary
restraints on human passions.13
The Brontës were not unfamiliar with the transitions that were taking place in the
Victorian period. As a result of the emergence of faulty biographical information on the
part of Elizabeth Gaskell, many readers have mistakenly imposed an inaccurate sense of
isolation on the Brontë family. Juliet Barker explains that upon the Brontë family’s
arrival to Haworth in 1820, the small wool trade town was already showing signs of the
changes typical of the Industrial Revolution with thirteen working mills for producing
worsted and woven clothing (16). Over time, the town continued to grow, and by 1850
Patrick Brontë requested that an investigation be conducted by the General Board of
Health as a result of the declining quality of life for many of the citizens of Haworth. The
investigation report showed that Haworth possessed the same squalid conditions that
were typical of manufacturing towns during the Industrial Revolution. Infective lung
12
Burke felt that society or culture was the only means by which man could attain perfection (146).
Williams points out that Burke relied on previously accepted standards of knowledge to serve as the
cultural means of perfection: “the idea of society was only available in the form in which [he] inherited
it” (10).
13
Mill explains that while the institute of government cannot force a sense of culture onto its subjects,
those who deviate from the rules of the society “may then be justly punished by the opinion of the members
of that society” (140). Much like his contemporaries, Mill expressed the accepted Victorian position
concerning the role of human nature in modern society. He argues that “A person who shows rashness,
obstinacy, self-conceit—who cannot live within moderate means—who cannot restrain himself from
hurtful indulgences—who pursues animal pleasures at the expense of those of feeling and intellect—must
expect to be lowered in the opinion of others, and to have a less share of their favorable sentiments” (140).
14
disease was prominent as a result of poor ventilation; on average, the largest room in a
house was seven feet by twenty-four feet and slept eight men in four beds; water closets
were non-existent; the entire town was serviced by sixty-nine privies (an average of one
to every four houses); drinking water was polluted by waste; and 41.6% of the population
died before reaching the age of six (Barker 17). The Brontës would have been all too
familiar with the conditions that affected those around them. Like Coleridge and Arnold,
they would have been aware of the instability and injustice of their changing society, but
instead of retreating into the safety of an institution, the Brontë sisters chose to question
the social structure that had created the environment with which they were faced while
exploring the emotional repercussions of such conditions on the human psyche.
While the Brontës were anomalous in that they gave expression to aspects of their
natures that were most often denied or restrained during the Victorian period, they did
share some common convictions with other Victorian writers. Raised as children of a
curate ordained by the Church of England, the Brontës were familiar with religious
practices; however, their works often demonstrate a rebellious attitude towards traditional
Christian values. The Brontës were not alone in their reservations concerning the
mystical aspects of Christianity. John Maynard claims that “[the Brontës] provide a
major scene for the secularization of culture... and they, like Matthew Arnold, show ways
in which a liberalizing religion could also be reinscribed within a more secular culture,
with inner experience replacing institution, ritual, and myth as the location of the
sacred” (193). While Arnold would be opposed to the idea of “an inner experience
replacing institution,” he does express a desire to “secularize” religion by shifting one’s
15
priorities from superstitious, ritualistic ceremonies towards elevation through culture and
education.14 The Brontës, however, seemed to be more interested in secularizing religion
by connecting it to a “living force within the self” that is expressed through human nature
and relationships (Maynard 196). Like Arnold, they were aware of the necessity of a new
form of spiritual belief; but unlike Arnold, they were not interested in replacing an
outdated, confining system with an equally restricting structure. Instead, as their works
imply and as Maynard argues, “their energies were devoted to a somewhat subversive
project—the subversion, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not—of converting [the
religious] tradition: most often into secular, usually psychological, tropes” (196). While
Arnold sought to sanctify the concept of the perfection of man through culture, the
Brontës were demonstrating the way in which the sacred resides within human nature as a
whole. By emphasizing the complex duality of the human psyche, the Brontës redirect
the focus of their audience on human existence rather than human elevation.
The Brontës and Victorian Art
In an attempt to understand the way in which the Brontë novels work in
opposition to traditional Victorian standards, it is important to note the way in which not
only “culture” evolved but also the way in which “art” began to take on new meanings as
14 Arnold
speaks against self-indoctrination in his preface to Culture and Anarchy, when he states, “One
may say that to be reared a member of an Establishment is in itself a lesson of religious moderation, and a
help towards culture and harmonious perfection. Instead of battling for his own private forms for
expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable, a man takes those which have commended
themselves most to the religious life of his nation; and while he may be sure that within those forms the
religious side of his own nature may find its satisfaction, he has leisure and composure to satisfy other sides
of his nature as well” (xxii-xxiii).
16
it formed a relationship with the newly founded concept of culture. 15 Williams
emphasizes this relationship between art and culture, saying, “An essential hypothesis in
the development of the idea of culture is that the art of a period is closely and necessarily
related to the generally prevalent ‘way of life’, and further that, in consequence, aesthetic,
moral and social judgements are closely interrelated” (140). To many Victorians, the
purpose of art was “to judge the quality of the society that was producing it” (Williams
142). If the “art” of a certain period were characterized by its “hunger, rebellion, and
rage,” for which Arnold criticized Villette, it would demonstrate a failing on the part of
culture to perfect the society in which it was produced. Instead, to the Victorians, art
must uphold the virtues that their culture sought to canonize as evidenced by Ruskin’s
argument that the purpose of art is “to reveal aspects of the universal ‘Beauty’ or
‘Truth’” (Williams 146).
The Brontës too saw art as serving a critical moral function, but its function was
to express, not to perfect, the many facets of human nature. Carol Block explains of their
juvenilia, “Clearly, writing was a refuge from reality for Charlotte, and we have good
reason to believe that it served the same purpose for Branwell, Emily, and Anne as
well” (34).16 By utilizing an artistic platform for self-expression, the Brontë children
15
Williams explains, “From [art’s] original sense of a human attribute, a ‘skill’, it had come by the period
with which we are concerned to be a kind of institution, a set body of activities of a certain kind... Further,
and most significantly, Art came to stand for a special kind of truth, ‘imaginative truth’, and artist for a
special kind of person, as the words artistic and artistical, to describe human beings, new in the 1840s,
show” (xv-xvi).
16
The Brontë children began to show signs of artistic self expression as early as 1826 when their father,
Patrick Brontë, presented Branwell with a set of toy soldiers. The toy soldiers quickly became a means of
expression for Branwell, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. The Glass Town Saga of the juvenilia originated with
the imaginative play with the toy soldiers. By 1831, Emily and Anne broke away from Glass Town and
founded Parry’s Land and Ross’s Land, which would eventually evolve into Gondal. By 1833 Charlotte
and Branwell had also created Angria, another source of much of the juvenilia (Block 35-36).
17
were capable of exploring their personal desires and their relationships with one another
in a controlled environment. Block explains that Charlotte and Branwell’s often biting
imaginary articles that they wrote as children in response to one another, mimicking the
articles that they read in Blackwood’s, “validated their rivalry by giving it expression and
cultural authority at the same time that it displaced their competition from the
problematic context of family to the safer arena of public life and professional
experience” (49). From their childhood, they were utilizing culture in a way in which
many Victorians would disapprove. By expressing their natural human sensations such as
jealousy and anger through an artistic form, they used culture to control their impulses
while still giving voice to human nature. Rather than using culture as a means of stifling
their emotions, they used it as a means of self-exploration, giving voice to the very
emotions that many Victorians were attempting to suppress.
In an attempt to express what they viewed to be a vital part of humanity, The
Brontës often used culture as a medium through which to give voice to their experiences,
instead of using it to suppress human nature. In the preface to the Lyrical Ballads,
Wordsworth explains “that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it
takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till
by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to
that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself
actually exist in the mind” (307). One may interpret Wordsworth’s explanation
concerning the creation of poetry as a process by which culture or art is applied to the
emotions that are a result of human nature. It is a meeting of the two faculties of
18
humanity—one the desire for transcendence and an image of beauty or perfection, and
the other the naturally occurring passions of humanity.
I would argue that the Brontës take the Wordsworthian approach to art in their
own works, applying culture to their natural impulses (whether that be hunger, rage, and
rebellion or a desire for transcendence) and using an art form to express human nature
and emotion. While Glenn argues that the Brontë novels are set apart from the writing of
their contemporaries as a result of their “concentration [that] is less on a world of social
interaction than on intense subjective experience; less, it sometimes seems, on culture
than on nature,” I would argue that their abandonment of culture in favor of nature is not
what characterizes their works as being different from those of their contemporaries, but
rather their works are atypical as a result of the way they choose to employ culture.
Instead of using culture to restrict human emotions, they use it to explore them and give
expression to human nature. Joseph Carroll provides a similar argument concerning
Wuthering Heights. He states, “Wuthering Heights operates at a high level of tension
between the motives that organize human life into an adaptively functional system and
impulses of revolt against that system” (254). I would argue that this is the basic premise
of a majority of the Brontës’ works. Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë use their fiction
and poetry to demonstrate the necessity of a social system that manages to bring order to
human existence while questioning the integrity of such a system. Stevie Davies says of
Wuthering Heights, “The novel criticizes neither woman’s lot in society nor Catherine’s
resistance to gender norms: it criticizes nothing. It brings everything into dispute, tearing
open consensus norms to reveal their subterfuge and casuistry” (94). While I disagree
19
with Davies in that Brontë does appear to take a position concerning questions of gender
roles as evidenced by the relationship between Isabella and Heathcliff, I do agree that “it
brings everything into dispute.” Wuthering Heights along with its sister novels is
concerned with the way in which human nature is controlled by social and cultural
constructs. They are also concerned, however, with the way in which these constructs are
necessary and life promoting “when the light of life seems to go out and existence
becomes a barren desert where we wander, exposed to all the tempests that blow under
heaven, without hope or rest of shelter” (E. Brontë, “The Butterfly” 176).
Nietzsche, the Brontës, and the Need for Balance
The Brontës’ recognition of the dual aspect of humanity regarding, on the one
hand, the desire for transcendence and perfection, and on the other the necessary
existence of the natural impulses, anticipates Nietzsche’s explanation of the duality of
humanity in The Birth of Tragedy. While the Brontës were writing some decades before
The Birth of Tragedy, their analysis of human nature and culture resonates strongly with
Nietzsche’s. In fact, Nietzsche’s argument about the dual character of the human
experience reflects a particularly Victorian view of the world, though Nietzsche’s
understanding of this duality completely undermined the conventional Victorian
response. While Nietzsche intends for the division between Apollonian and Dionysian to
be applied to the human condition in general, these terms as defined in The Birth of
Tragedy are particularly applicable to the Victorian period, and, by using these terms as a
filter through which to interpret the works of the Brontës, one may come to a better
20
understanding of the complex relationship between nature and culture that is often a
predominant feature of their novels.
According to Eagleton, Nietzsche, like the Brontës, was aware of the dilemma
created by the tension between culture and nature, and he sought a solution for this
dilemma in the artistic process. Eagleton explains, “When Friedrich Nietzsche looked for
a practice which might dismantle the opposition between freedom and determinism, it
was to the experience of making art that he turned, which for the artist feels not only free
and necessary, creative and constrained, but each of these in terms of the other, and so
appears to press these rather tattered old polarities to the point of undecidability” (5).
Art, like human existence, therefore, may be viewed as a process through which one may
enjoy the freedom of self-expression while being confined by the restrictions of the form.
From this perspective, the art form itself is representative of cultural restrictions while
human nature becomes the means that supplies the content. Culture’s role, according to
Nietzsche, therefore, is not to stifle human nature, but rather to provide the necessary
platform for its exploration. As Nathan Devir explains, “looking at human existence as
an aesthetic phenomenon is the only viable way in which Nietzsche can reconcile his
philosophy of art with his perspective on humanity—the same kind of perspective,
incidentally, that is characteristic of (Attic) Greek tragedy” (61). Arthur Scherr also
recognizes Nietzsche’s convictions concerning the importance of art to human existence:
“Nietzsche implied... that each person should live his/her life as if it were a work of art,
deriving as much beauty and ecstasy as possible from a superabundance of pain” (262).
While Scherr acknowledges the importance of art to Nietzsche’s interpretation of
21
humanity, I would argue that he does not stress Nietzsche’s view of the role of art in
human existence to the extent to which it should be understood. Rather than viewing art
as a means by which to simply understand humanity, Nietzsche considered human
existence to be an art form in and of itself. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche states, “the
Apollonian and its opposite, the Dionysian, [are] artistic energies which burst forth from
nature herself, without the mediation of human artists—energies in which nature’s art
impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct ways” (38). As innate qualities of
human existence, the Apollonian and Dionysian naturally supply an artistic quality to
humanity. The tension between our natural impulses and our desire for transcendence is
more than the means which supplies human artists with the material necessary for their
art; it is a type of universal art that eternally plays out through the very existence of
humanity. Devir explains, “Just as Nietzsche treats the pre-Socratics as archetypal
philosophers who embody primal savoir (as opposed to thinking based on reason), he
does not treat Dionysus and Apollo as mere mythical creations; rather, he sees in them,
respectively, the archetypal manifestations of the primordial will and rational
measure” (74). The Dionysian and Apollonian, therefore, are not simply human
constructs of culture and perceived “animality”; rather, they are intrinsic human impulses
that give rise to the creation of ideas such as transcendence through culture and the
tension that must therefore necessarily exist between the desire for elevation and the
22
impulse to act on passions that may threaten the success of achieving perceived
perfection.17
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche explains the way in which the primordial force
of the Dionysian expresses itself in human art. He states that in Dionysian art, “We are
really for a brief moment primordial being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence
and joy in existence; the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear
necessary to us, in view of the excess of countless forms of existence which force and
push one another into life, in view of the exuberant fertility of the human will” (104).
While the Dionysian may be classified as animalistic or natural as a result of its brutal
and often violent desire for survival and existence, it also connects man with one another
and with nature. Nietzsche explains, “Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the
union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile,
or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man” (37). The
Dionysian force, therefore, offers a sense of unity between man and man and man and
nature. As a result of constructs such as culture, nature is often subjugated, creating a rift
between humanity and the natural world. This is the very sense of loss and displacement
that Wordsworth expresses in “Lines Written in Early Spring” in which he grieves over
the severed link between nature and humanity as a result of “What man had made of
17
Joshua Foa Dienstag explains the relationship between the concept of the vital, inherent Dionysiac and its
manifestation in human constructs such as art: “Dionysian suffering is essentially human suffering. In
tragedy, this is indicated by a connection between the various elements involved in the public performance
of the drama. The tragic hero, to Nietzsche, simply personifies the ‘Dionysian state’ of the chorus as a
whole (BT 73). The chorus is likewise ‘the mirror-image in which the Dionysian man contemplates
himself’ and also ‘a vision of the Dionysian mass of spectators’ (BT 63). Thus, actor, chorus, and public are
all connected in tragedy through their Dionysian character (PT 165). Each is a fragment torn from the
whole” (88).
23
man” (8). The Dionysian, however, has the ability to mend that link, once again creating
a sense of harmony between man and nature.
While Nietzsche valued Dionysus and the natural impulses of reality, he also
recognized its inability to offer a complete understanding of human existence. The
Dionysian represents only a portion of humanity. In order to fully observe the
complexity of the tensions inherent to human existence, one must also take the
Apollonian into consideration. Scherr explains Nietzsche’s realization of the
shortcomings of the Dionysian, saying, “Despite his admiration, Nietzsche views the
Dionysian as impotent, unable to affect his/her environment or his/her ultimate destiny in
a universe and society riven by pain, suffering, and death” (264). The Apollonian,
therefore, is necessary to offer a sense of stability and purpose to a chaotic world as
Nietzsche explains when he argues that the “Apollonian illusion... aims to deliver us from
the Dionysian flood and excess” (BT 129). While the Dionysian mode may be defined as
natural impulse or “intoxicated reality,” the Apollonian mode, by contrast, is identified by
“measured restraint” (BT 38, 35).
Although the Apollonian and Dionysian function as opposing forces, Nietzsche
recognized the importance of balance in the relationship between the two polarities. As
previously stated, Nietzsche was aware of the impotence of the Dionysian in creating a
functioning existence and aware that the “Apollonian intellect had to absorb the
Dionysiac message that one must suffer before he/she could achieve the ‘redemptive
vision of contemplation’” (Scherr 260). Like the Brontës before him, Nietzsche believed
in the necessary relationship between natural human impulses and the human desire for
24
elevation. Just as the Brontës’ works demonstrate a complex relationship between
expression and constraint as evidenced by their attempts to portray natural human
impulses through the confines of a culturally acceptable medium, Nietzsche emphasizes
the fact that a balance must be met between reason and desire, impulse and restraint. The
Apollonian and Dionysian must work together in order to produce an accurate
representation of existence. In The Birth of Tragedy, he states, “the intricate relation of
the Apollonian and the Dionysian on tragedy may really be symbolized by a fraternal
union of the two deities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo, finally the
language of Dionysus; and so the highest goal of tragedy and of all of art is
attained” (130).18 Art, therefore, cannot effectively exist without this relationship
between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The success of art is dependent upon the
conflict between the two opposing forces of existence.
While Nietzsche may express a personal preference for the Dionysian, he makes
it evident that one deity cannot fully function without the other. Unfortunately some
critics continue to argue in favor of the Dionysian while undervaluing the Apollonian.
Dienstag inaccurately attributes the Apollonian “power of transfiguration” to the Socratic
movement and forces a negative interpretation of the Apollonian onto the Nietzschian
duality. He argues:
The Greeks of Socrates’ generation could no longer bear to live
with the brutal truths of the human condition and sought refuge in
an optimistic philosophy. To Nietzsche, this was “morally
speaking, a sort of cowardice... amorally speaking, a ruse” (BT 18).
18
Bart Bryant further explains that “Nietzsche does not simply praise the Dionysian as expressive of true
reality and the Apollonian as expressive of mere appearance, and leave it at that... the Apollonian impulse
to beauty was necessary for humankind to overcome meaningless suffering and despair amid the barbarous
Titanic world of nature.”
25
Either way it was an active self-deception that made life more
tolerable but less genuine. It was a retreat from a real look at timebound existence to a pleasing fantasy of progress and happiness.
Thus, Nietzsche concludes, it is the optimists who are the true
harbingers of cultural decline... The pessimistic vision of the world
as fundamentally disordered, untamable, unfair, and destructive is
the “truth” against which they close their eyes and withdraw to a
cave. (89-90)
While Nietzsche would agree that the Apollonian evocation of transcendence is an act of
“self-deception,” he would not likely consider it to be the decline of culture. In The Birth
of Tragedy, Nietzsche claims that the Greeks’ inability to “bear to live with the brutal
truths of the human condition” occurred prior to the Socratic movement, and, instead, can
be traced back to the origin of the Greek gods: “The Greek knew and felt the terror and
horror of existence. That he might endure this terror at all he had to interpose between
himself and life the radiant dream-birth of the Olympians.... It was in order to be able to
live that the Greeks had to create these gods from a most profound need” (42, emphasis
mine). Rather than criticizing the Greeks for retreating into an illusion, Nietzsche points
out that illusion was necessary for human survival. Not only does Nietzsche condone the
Apollonian mode by emphasizing its necessity, he also stresses the fact that the
Apollonian must be present in order to balance the destructive elements of Dionysus:
Of this foundation of all existence—the Dionysian basic ground of
the world—not one whit more may enter the consciousness of the
human individual than can be overcome again by this Apollonian
power of transfiguration. Thus these two art drives must unfold
their powers in strict proportion, according to the law of eternal
justice. Where the Dionysian powers rise up as impetuously as we
experience them now, Apollo, too, must already have descended
26
among us, wrapped in a cloud; and the next generation will
probably behold his most ample beautiful effects. (BT 143-144)19
The Victorians acknowledged the same fundamental division in the human condition that
Nietzsche describes; however, they would have utterly rejected the idea that the two
aspects of humanity could coexist in “strict proportion.” Victorian culture chose instead
to ignore the Dionysian while offering all of their praise to the dream god. The Brontës,
however, in their foreshadowing of Nietzsche, recognized not only the duality of man but
also the necessity for balance between the competing forces.
While the original Victorian concept of culture emerged as a means by which to
check the oppressive social mechanization inherent in industrial progress, it ultimately
evolved into its own kind of external restraint. The Brontës, however, in response to the
same social crisis, chose to embrace every aspect of humanity rather than creating a strict
cultural institution in an attempt to restrain human nature. By emphasizing the complex
duality of the human psyche, the Brontës redirect the focus of their audience onto human
existence rather than human elevation. Their work implies a desire to replace structure
with freedom and the truth of self-expression. Glenn argues that “The concentration [of
the Brontës] is less on a world of social interaction than on intense subjective
experiences; less, it sometimes seems, on culture than on nature—on what Charlotte
Brontë called... ‘what throbs fast and fully, though hidden, what the blood rushes through,
what is the unseen seat of Life’” (2). While the Brontë sisters may demonstrate an
interest in expressing human nature, they also rely on culture and the necessity of
restraint in their novels. In this aspect they are unique. One may clearly perceive this
19
James E. Force also stresses the Nietzschian importance of not valuing one mode over the other, saying,
“Overemphasizing any one of these contrasts is a perilous course” (180).
27
reliance on balance by examining the novels, poetry, and essays of Charlotte, Anne, and
Emily within the context of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte
Brontë explores the very human battle between passion and restraint, illustrating the
dangers of both unchecked animality and stifling self-control; with The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall, Anne Brontë challenges the effectiveness of extreme puritanical indoctrination in
balancing human impulses and desire; and Emily Brontë uses Wuthering Heights to
demonstrate the destructive power of Dionysian forces when left unchecked by
Apollonian reason. By applying Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian modes to these
three works as well as to a selection of the poems and essays, this thesis will demonstrate
the way in which the Brontës were working in opposition to Victorian culture by valuing
every aspect of the human experience. From this reading, it becomes apparent that the
Brontës were not concerned with complete social upheaval, nor were they satisfied with
their confined positions in life. The Brontës used their works, instead, to demonstrate
that the ideal existence involves a world in which the Apollonian and Dionysian may be
allowed to strive against one another in order to create a sense of humanity that is both
vital and real while being aesthetically appealing and tolerable.
28
CHAPTER 1
THE APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN CONFLICT IN JANE EYRE
Nietzsche and the Aesthetics of Religion in Jane Eyre
With The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche assumes that life and the struggles of
human existence create a perpetual art form through which the seeming contradictions of
desire and restraint are played out on the cosmic stage. Rebecca Bamford explains:
Nietzsche’s own version of aestheticism is constituted in the
deliberate application of aesthetic concerns to nonaesthetic
situations and arenas. It is not a term that he coined, but a way of
thinking. Nietzsche finds that we perceive the world and life as a
work of art continually being created and recreated. (66)
While Nietzsche’s application of aesthetic standards to human existence may create a
filter through which one may attempt to understand the purpose of life, to Nietzsche
aestheticism offered the only means by which existence could be justified and therefore
perpetuated. In his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche offers a clarification of his
intentions in The Birth of Tragedy. He explains, “In the book itself the suggestive
sentence is repeated several times, that the existence of the world is justified only as an
aesthetic phenomenon” (“ASC” 22). From this perspective, the struggle between the
Apollonian and Dionysian forces that create, for Nietzsche, the ideal art form are not only
applicable to life as art but are inherently vital to human existence. When Nietzsche
introduces the terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” at the beginning of The Birth of
29
Tragedy, he states, “the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollonian
and Dionysian duality—just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving
perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations” (33). This “continuous
development of art,” however, is not confined to the plastic energies or mere
representations of life; instead, to Nietzsche, it is vital to the reality of human existence.
“Apollonian” and “Dionysian” merely provide the terms necessary to interpret the innate
opposing forces of human nature and desire.
While both the Apollonian and the Dionysian are inherent to humanity, they
create, as Nietzsche stresses, a continual struggle as a result of their opposing qualities.
Nietzsche equates the “Dionysian mirror of the world” with passion, violence, and the
harsh realities of existence while the “Apollonian illusion... aims to deliver us from the
Dionysian flood and excess” (BT 119, 129). To Nietzsche, the Dionysian is
representative of reality, mirroring the physical sufferings of the world, while the
Apollonian provides an illusion through which one may escape the harshness of
Dionysian reality. In Nietzsche’s conception of the relationship between life and art, the
pain or suffering that is characteristic of the Dionysian is not only present in but also
necessary to human existence. He explains, “the tragic myth... has to convince us that
even the ugly and the disharmonic are part of an artistic game that the will in eternal
amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself” (BT 141). In order for life to be justified, the
pain which is inherent to existence must be viewed as aesthetically pleasing and valuable.
While Nietzsche argues that that which is “ugly” holds value, he also claims that the
purpose of art is to provide an illusion through which one may escape the pain of the
30
natural world: “That life really is so tragic would least of all explain the origin of an art
form—assuming that art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a
metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its
overcoming” (BT 140). Art, therefore, is the blending of the two forces to create a unit in
which the reality of existence may be both recognized and overcome. Human suffering
and transcendence meet to create a representation of the whole of human existence.
While Jane Eyre was published twenty-five years before The Birth of Tragedy
made its first appearance, it demonstrates a similar attitude concerning the aesthetic value
of human existence. Rather than dismissing suffering and rebellion as undesirable,
Charlotte Brontë’s novel implies that even the qualities of human nature which are often
viewed as negative aspects of existence and which should and must be overcome are
necessary for both an accurate and an aesthetically pleasing representation of life. By
recognizing the artistic importance of not only acknowledging every facet of humanity
but also attributing value to those qualities of life which are often viewed as undesirable,
Brontë foreshadows Nietzsche’s artistic interpretation of human existence. While Jane
Eyre does not employ the same classical vocabulary as does The Birth of Tragedy, it still
lends itself to an interpretation through the lens of the Dionysian and Apollonian. R. E.
Hughes also recognizes a connection between Brontë’s work and that of Nietzsche, and
he argues that an application of the Dionysian and Apollonian modes may serve to clarify
some of the issues of the novel. He claims, “In providing us with these two verbal
counters, Dionysiac and Apollonian, the Nietzschian hypothesis allows us to observe the
two levels of symbolism which underlie the romantic veneer of the novel, Jane
31
Eyre” (347). While Hughes recognizes the connection between the two texts as a result
of their treatment of human behavior, he is quick to qualify his argument, stating, “That
this symbolic pattern was conscious or deliberate is not the implication. Rather, Jane
Eyre involves a pre-rational insight into human personality, and the literal narrative of the
novel is one of those ‘mythic costumes’ adopted by the unconscious” (348). Hughes
accurately identifies Brontë’s striking insight into human nature; however, in his essay, in
which he applies Nietzsche’s terms to Jane Eyre, he often abandons this portrayal of
human nature in order to pursue the apparent symbolic connections between Greek myth
and Jane Eyre. While Hughes’s article offers an interesting interpretation of the novel, he
is ultimately forced to admit that many of the connections must be viewed as coincidental
as a result of the unlikelihood that Brontë would have been familiar with the
mythological realm that her work seems to mirror. In recognizing the coincidental
aspects of his argument, Hughes also undermines his thesis concerning Brontë’s insight
into human nature, saying, “The naïveté of the novel’s surface suggests that Charlotte
Brontë has touched an archetypal chord, unconsciously and perhaps unwillingly” (363).
While Brontë may have been unaware of the details of the classical mythology which her
work seems to reference, Jane Eyre continues to provide a portrayal of human behavior
that demonstrates that the author’s understanding of the innate qualities of human nature
contradicted the interpretation that many of her contemporaries chose to adopt. Brontë
may not have had the same vocabulary at her disposal as did Nietzsche, but her work still
demonstrates a parallel sense of the value of the competing aspects humanity and an
32
understanding of the aesthetic value of the internal opposition of the Dionysian and
Apollonian forces.
Brontë’s lack of familiarity with the classical terms utilized by Nietzsche does not
prevent her from exploring a similar interpretation of human existence. Rather than
relying on classical vocabulary and symbolism to explore human nature, Jane Eyre
employs Christianity to demonstrate the validity of both the physical and the spiritual.
John G. Peters explains of Jane Eyre’s subversiveness, “Jane Eyre is subversive because
it advocates a Christianity in which all are equal before God, regardless of gender, class
or any other differentiations” (53). While Jane Eyre may advocate a sense of equality
among individuals, it also maintains a sense of equality between the physical and the
spiritual. Rather than condemning the physical in favor of the spiritual, Jane continually
maintains that both the spirit and the body are vital aspects of life. Peters emphasizes that
Jane Eyre does not offer one interpretation of Christianity, but instead demonstrates that
one’s approach to religion greatly alters its practice:
Robert Brocklehurst, Eliza Reed, St. John Rivers, and Helen Burns
present examples of religious sensibility in order to show the
reader various interpretations of Christianity. Too often,
commentators combine these four. Each, however, differs
significantly from the others, and each represents some aspect of
practiced Christianity that Jane rejects... Jane sees Brocklehurst,
Eliza, St. John, and even Helen as having misinterpreted, to a
greater or lesser degree, the purpose and meaning of Christianity,
particularly concerning the relationship between the temporal and
the spiritual. (59-60)
Rather than embracing a religion that prefers the spirit at the expense of the body, in her
relationships with the preceding characters, Jane continually demonstrates her rebellion
33
against a Christianity that denies the physical, and instead she seeks a balance between
the body and spirit.
By honoring both the physical and the spiritual, Jane demonstrates a desire to
worship both Apollo and Dionysus. Unlike many of the other characters of the novel, she
is unwilling to bisect herself and instead recognizes the existence of two deities who
represent the human struggle. While Nietzsche condemns Christianity as being
incompatible with the Dionysian elements of art, Jane’s Christianity, or more broadly
spirituality, is distinct from traditional Christianity in that Jane is willing to recognize two
gods—one spiritual and one physical. Jane’s willingness to acknowledge two gods may
be evidenced by her self-accusation concerning her attempt to stifle natural desires in
conjunction with her instruction to Rochester “to live sinless: and... to die tranquil” (474).
After denying her passion for Rochester, Jane condemns herself for committing a
“blasphemy against nature,” repenting of the sacrilegious denial of one of her gods;
however, she also recognizes the value of the Apollonian goal of transcendence when she
advises Rochester to stifle his passions so that he may experience tranquility (260).
Jane’s acceptance of two gods demonstrates a recognition of the duality of humanity that
Nietzsche stresses in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche claims that Christianity is
incompatible with Olympian art as a result of its monotheistic quality:
Whoever approaches these Olympians with another religion in his
heart, searching among them for moral elevation, even for sanctity,
for discarnate spirituality, for charity and benevolence, will soon
be forced to turn his back on them, discouraged and disappointed.
For there is nothing here that suggests asceticism, spirituality, or
duty. We hear nothing but the accents of an exuberant, triumphant
life in which all things, whether good or evil are deified. (41)
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Jane’s religion is atypical, however, in that it applies a Judeo-Christian vocabulary to the
Apollonian elements of transcendence while still recognizing the deity of nature. Rather
than searching for “moral elevation, even for sanctity, for discarnate spirituality, for
charity and benevolence” alone, Jane also strives to fulfill the desires of her physical self.
As a result of this unwillingness to sacrifice the physical to the spiritual, the progressive
movement of Jane Eyre is motivated by the Apollonian and Dionysian binary.
Throughout the novel, Jane’s convictions concerning natural impulses and cultural
restraints evolve as a result of her relationships with characters who represent, to varying
extents, the Dionysian and Apollonian forces that create the struggles of the novel. When
confronted by Apollonian transcendence, Jane reverts to Dionysian passion; and when
overcome by Dionysian suffering, Jane appeals to the Apollonian illusion. By attempting
to maintain a balanced relationship between the two forces, Jane Eyre advocates an
interpretation of humanity that recognizes and values both spiritual transcendence and
physical desire.
The Dionysian Child: Opposing Authority
Shortly after Jane Eyre is introduced to the reader, she demonstrates a fit of
passion in which she rebels against the cultural confines that have been placed upon her.
After repeated attacks from her cousin John Reed, she lashes out uncontrollably,
admittedly unaware of the full extent of her actions: “I don’t very well know what I did
with my hands, but he called me ‘Rat! rat’ and bellowed out aloud” (9). As Jane is
detained by Bessie and Miss Abbot for her actions, she continues to resist, and she
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recalls, “I was conscious that a moment’s mutiny had rendered me liable to strange
penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all
lengths” (11). In her fit of passion, Jane has rebelled against both class and gender
expectations. Miss Abbot says to her, “For shame! For shame!... What shocking
conduct, Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your benefactress’s son!” (11). Jane’s
actions at the beginning of the novel have already set her up as the Dionysian child,
unwilling to conform to the standards that are placed on her gender and social station.
Her behavior is marked both by violence and madness as she uncontrollable lashes out
against her oppressors.
Jane’s early Dionysian behavior is also evidenced by her violent response to Mrs.
Reed’s accusation that she is deceitful. After affirming that Mrs. Reed is “bad,” “hardhearted,” and “deceitful,” Jane experiences a sense of liberation: “Ere I had finished this
reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph,
I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into
unhoped-for liberty” (49-50). This sense of freedom as a result of her giving in to her
desire to rebel parallels Nietzsche’s description of the freedom associated with the
Dionysian: “Now the slave is a free man; now all the rigid, hostile barriers that necessity,
caprice, or ‘impudent convention’ have fixed between man and man are broken... he feels
himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw
walking in his dreams” (BT 37). No longer encumbered by the “impudent convention”
which has been placed on her, Jane is free to enjoy the sense of equality that she has
achieved in her triumph over her cruel aunt.
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While Mrs. Reed serves as an antagonizing force to Jane’s Dionysian self, she
does not attempt to force a sense of spirituality onto Jane. Mr. Brocklehurst, however,
represents a stifling sense of Christianity that seeks to destroy Jane’s physical impulses in
favor of spiritual aspirations. On recalling the first occasion that she met Mr.
Brocklehurst, Jane describes him as a “black pillar” with a “grim face at the top... like a
carved mask” (41). She repeats this stony metaphor when she recalls her second
confrontation with him, calling him a “piece of architecture” (87). To the Dionysian
child, Mr. Brocklehurst is devoid of humanity and is instead merely a piece of stonework.
This contrast of life and death between the Dionysian and the moral figure is reinforced
in The Birth of Tragedy:
There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn
away from such phenomena as from “folk-diseases,” with
contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own “healthymindedness.” But of course such poor wretches have no idea how
corpselike and ghostly their so-called “healthy-mindedness” looks
when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.
(36-37)
Brocklehurst is similar to the “corpselike” wretches who are blinded by their own sense
of morality in that he too appears to be void of the animation of life.
Brocklehurst’s denial of life is not limited to his stony façade, but is also
evidenced by his strict religious doctrine. In his essay concerning Jane’s attempts to unite
the physical with the spiritual, Peters claims that Brocklehurst’s faults lie in the fact that
he “denies the physical part of human experience, affirming only the spiritual life” (59).
While Brocklehurst appears to be motivated by the pecuniary advantages of denying the
body more than he is inspired by spiritual transcendence, he does rely on religion to
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justify the physical treatment of the girls at Lowood. When he learns that Miss Temple
has privileged her students with bread and cheese after their breakfast was proven to be
inadequate, he states, “the incident ought not to be neutralised by replacing with
something more delicate the comfort lost, thus the pampering of the body and obviating
the aim of this institution; it ought to be improved to the spiritual edification of the
pupils, by encouraging them to evince fortitude under the temporary privation” (89). He
also demonstrates an opposition to nature when Miss Temple tells him that one of the
girls’ hair curls naturally, saying, “Naturally! Yes, but we are not to conform to nature: I
wish these girls to be the children of Grace” (90). Brocklehurst’s desire to stifle nature is
in direct opposition to the Dionysian as understood by Nietzsche. Nietzsche explains that
once the Dionysian is reaffirmed “nature which has become alienated, hostile, or
subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man” (BT 37).
From this perspective, it is apparent that Brocklehurst is lost in his own morality,
alienated from nature and therefore also from the Dionysian.
While the novel implies economic motives behind many of Brocklehurst’s
actions, he maintains that his decisions are dictated by his theology. He expresses a
desire to save his students from hell by invoking in them a disdain for the flesh and
natural life. When he first meets Jane, he asks her “where the wicked go after death” (42)
—to which she recalls her reply: “‘They go to hell,’ was my ready and orthodox
answer’” (43). Like Brocklehurst, Jane is familiar with Christian doctrine and
demonstrates an ability to provide the required answer when desired to do so. When
Brocklehurst continues his interrogation, however, she rebells against orthodoxy and
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reinforces the division between her Dionysian self and Brocklehurst. Brocklehurst asks
Jane what she must do in order to avoid the hell fire. Rather than subjugating her flesh
by offering a submissive reply, Jane relies on the flesh to save her spirit, saying, “I must
keep in good health, and not die” (43). Jane’s reliance on life and the body to save her
from Brocklehurst’s hell is in direct opposition to his “corpselike” morality that seeks to
subjugate the flesh and destroy life.
As Brocklehurst’s morality is stifling to Jane’s Dionysian spirit, it is not
representative of the beautiful illusion of Nietzsche’s Apollo. The two do not work in
conjunction with one another to create an aesthetically pleasing representation of the
struggles of life. Instead, Brocklehurst’s morality seeks to completely obliterate the
Dionysian aspects of Jane’s existence. Daniel Came explains that Nietzche’s negative
interpretation of morality stems directly from this aspect of morality to destroy the basic
impulses of life. He argues:
For Nietzsche’s antipathy to morality derives chiefly from his view
concerning its deleterious effects on our beliefs about the value of
existence. Indeed, life is rendered problematic largely because of
the particular set of beliefs and attitudes that morality has
inculcated in us. Most significantly, Nietzsche thinks that the
dominance of moral categories over all other values makes it
impossible for us to affirm life. (39)
In his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche explains that “confronted with morality
(especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitably be
in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral—and eventually, crushed by
the weight of contempt and the eternal No, life must then be felt to be unworthy of desire
and altogether worthless” (23). Nietzsche’s hostility towards morality and Christianity is
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based primarily on morality’s attempt to subjugate and destroy everything that exists
outside of its authority. He states, “nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic
interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in [The Birth of Tragedy]
than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be only moral and which relegates art,
every art to the realm of lies” (“ASC” 23). By focusing on Christian morality,
Brocklehurst may be seen as denying both the Dionysian and the Apollonian. He rejects
the wild pleasure and struggle of Dionysus while remaining blind to the beautiful dream
illusion of Apollo. Instead of embracing life as art, he remains focused on death and the
aftermath of existence in hell.
A Transition: Realizing the World of the Apollonian Vision
While Jane’s Gateshead experience is characterized by Dionysian struggle and
revolt, she remains blind to the Apollonian dream vision until she enters Lowood where
she meets Helen Burns. Like Brocklehurst, Helen also confesses to abide by Christian
doctrine. When Jane questions her about Miss Scatcherd’s unjust treatment of her, Helen
preaches endurance, which is difficult for Jane’s Dionysian mind to understand: “I heard
her with wonder: I could not comprehend this doctrine of endurance; and still less could I
understand or sympathise with the forbearance she expressed for her chastiser. Still I felt
that Helen considered things by a light invisible to my eyes” (78). Jane is similarly
confused by Helen’s doctrine of love in which she states that Jane must do as Christ says
and “Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you and
despitefully use you” (81). Jane responds to this message of love by saying, “I must
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dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist
those who punish me unjustly. It is as natural as that I should love those who show me
affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it deserved” (81, emphasis mine).
Although Jane is beginning to recognize that Helen sees “things by a light invisible to
[her] eyes,” she is still incapable of abandoning her natural Dionysian tendencies.
While Helen claims that her spirituality is based on Christian doctrine, Hughes
argues that her beliefs are founded on an innate aspect of humanity that predates
Christianity. He argues, “It is Helen’s opinion that hers is a Christian resignation; it is
certainly a resignation which Christianity absorbed, but its roots are pre-Christian, prehistory, pre-conscious” (353). Helen’s convictions are motivated by her desire to escape
from the harsh realities of her existence. Abandoned by her father after the death of her
mother and aware of her approaching death from consumption, Helen’s reality is marked
by a deep sense of suffering from which she wishes to escape through a spiritual illusion
of hope. Nietzsche explains that the Olympians were born of a similar need to escape the
horrors of life:
The Greek knew and felt the terror and horror of existence. That
he might endure this terror at all, he had to interpose between
himself and life the radiant dream birth of the Olympians... It was
in order to be able to live that the Greeks had to create these gods...
Perhaps we may picture the process to ourselves somewhat as
follows: out of the original Titanic divine order of terror, the
Olympian divine order of joy gradually evolved through the
Apollonian impulse toward beauty, just as roses burst from thorny
bushes. How else could this people, so sensitive, so vehement in
its desires, so singularly capable of suffering, have endured
existence, if it had not been revealed to them in their gods,
surrounded with a higher glory? (BT 42-43).
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Helen expresses a similar motive in creating a divine illusion through which she may
escape her suffering:
We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this
world: but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall put them
off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin
will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the
spark of the spirit will remain,—the impalpable principle of life
and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the
creature... I hold another creed; which no one ever taught me and
which I seldom mention; but in which I delight, and to which I
cling: for it extends hope to all: it makes Eternity a rest—a mighty
home. (82)
Rather than relying entirely on Christianity or a sense of spirituality for the sake of
morality as Brocklehurst does, Helen uses Christianity to justify the suffering of her
existence. Her condemnation of the flesh does not stem from a restrictive morality but
rather from an attempt to escape the cause of her suffering. For Helen, the flesh is
corrupt not as a result of “lust” (JE 91) but rather as a result of consumption, and in
death, she hopes to escape the suffering she has known in life.
While Helen may provide an introduction to an Apollonian escape from
suffering, Miss Temple serves as the reigning Apollonian force during Jane’s Lowood
period. Hughes says of Miss Temple, “The name, Temple, is obviously a pun: through
her, the Furies are appeased, and the chthonioi no longer swarm around Jane... Miss
Temple is the first indication that the Apollonian spirit will now be thrown against the
Dionysiac spirit” (352). Hughes’s interpretation may be accurate in his classification of
Miss Temple as an Apollonian character, but he chooses to ignore that she also
demonstrates Dionysian tendencies, alluding to a need for balance between the two
deities. Peters explains that Jane’s Christianity “resembles Miss Temple’s Christianity,
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which espouses Christian doctrine but also applies that doctrine to demonstrate value in
human life. Although Brocklehurst tells Miss Temple that the physical and the spiritual
are incompatible, she believes the two can comfortably co-exist” (59). Miss Temple is
obviously opposed to the harsh moral judgement of Miss Scatchered and Mr.
Brocklehurst. After both Jane and Helen are unjustly punished by the two moral figures,
she privileges their physical bodies with toast and seed-cake (104). She is also successful
in reviving a sense of animation in Helen. Jane recalls that in Miss Temple’s presence,
the powers within Helen “woke, they kindled: first, they glowed in the bright tint of her
cheek, which till this hour [she] had never seen but pale and bloodless; then they shone in
the liquid lustre of her eyes, which had suddenly acquired a beauty more singular than
that of Miss Temple’s—a beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash, nor pencilled
brown but of meaning, of movement, of radiance” (104-105). Miss Temple is responsible
for offering a sense of tranquility and peace to the Dionysian Jane while animating the
physical beauty of the Apollonian Helen.
Miss Temple’s presence may calm Jane’s Dionysian impulse, but once she
withdraws from Lowood, she takes with her the Apollonian illusion of peace, and Jane
once again reverts to the reality of Dionysian suffering. Jane explains the transformation
she undergoes almost immediately after Miss Temple’s absence:
I had undergone a transforming process; that my mind had put off
all it had borrowed of Miss Temple—or rather that she had taken
with her the serene atmosphere I had been breathing in her vicinity
—and that now I was left in my natural element, and beginning to
feel the stirring of old emotions. It did not seem as if a prop were
withdrawn, but rather as if a motive were gone: it was not the
power to be tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for
tranquility was no more. My world had for some years been in
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Lowood: my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I
remembered that the real world was wide, and that a variety of
hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who
had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of
life amidst its perils. (123, emphasis mine)
In this section, Jane refers to the reality of the world and its knowledge twice, drawing a
distinct line between the artificiality of the serene dream world of Miss Temple and
Apollo and the “intoxicated reality” of existence outside of Lowood’s confines (BT 38).
The corresponding relationship that Jane describes here between the peace of artificiality
and the instability of reality is reinforced in The Birth of Tragedy: “The muses of the arts
of illusion paled before an art that, in its intoxication, spoke the truth... The individual,
with all his restraint and proportion, succumbed to the self-oblivion of the Dionysian
states, forgetting the precepts of Apollo... And so, wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the
Apollonian was checked and destroyed” (46-47). Just as Apollo retreats, Dionysus
prevails. Similarly, just as Miss Temple retreats into marriage, she takes with her the
tranquil illusion, and Jane is left to consider the suffering of the real world in which she
will soon be plunged.
Dionysian Temptation: Suffering and Passion
After leaving Lowood, Jane’s initial experience at Thornfield proves to be
unfulfilling within the context of her desire to experience the struggles of the “real world”
and acquire “real knowledge.” Unsatisfied by her peaceful existence, Jane expresses a
desire for movement: “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with
tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions
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are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their
lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the
masses of life which people the earth” (161). Faithful to the Dionysian impulse of her
childhood, Jane desires to rebel against the motionless confines of her designated station
in life. This desire for movement, however, gradually evolves into not only a rebellion
against peace, but also a rebellion against comfort in favor of a life marked by struggles
and suffering:
I did not like re-entering Thornfield. To pass its threshold was to
return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome
staircase, to seek my own lonely little room... was to quell wholly
the faint excitement wakened by my walk,—to slip again over my
faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still existence;
of an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I was
becoming incapable of appreciating. What good it would have
done me at that time to have been tossed in the storms of an
uncertain struggling life, and to have been taught by rough and
bitter experience to long for the calm amidst which I now repined!
(171)
Just as Jane recognizes the value of a struggle in appreciating the joy of tranquility,
Nietzsche acknowledges the necessity of suffering in order to experience pleasure: “only
the curious blending and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian revelers remind us—as
medicines remind us of deadly poisons—of the phenomenon that pain begets joy, that
ecstasy may wring sounds of agony from us. At the very climax of joy there sounds a cry
of horror or a yearning lamentation for an irretrievable loss” (BT 40). Bamford argues
that this “Nietzschean perception of suffering as beautiful is a perception of suffering
transfigured—to see how it is that existence is justifiable as an aesthetic
phenomenon” (68). Jane Eyre also implies that there exists an aesthetic value in
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suffering. Rather than subjugating a portion of human existence or condemning a vital
reality of life, both Brontë and Nietzsche embrace the pain that is both inherent and
necessary to human existence, recognizing that the pleasures of life would be
unenjoyable without the contrast of a Dionysian struggle.
Up until Rochester’s introduction in the novel, Jane has served as the sole
representation of Dionysian feeling. Rochester’s appearance, however, not only supplies
another example of the Dionysian impulse, but also provides the opportunity necessary
for Jane to retreat into an Apollonian dream world from which she may continue to
perpetuate the struggle between the two deities. Prior to being introduced to Rochester,
both the reader and Jane are informed of his Dionysian tendencies from Mrs. Fairfax who
explains that “the Rochesters have been rather a violent than a quiet race in their
time” (155-156). Mr. Rochester also admits to succumbing to his sexual desires as
evidenced by the relationships with his mistresses, and he states, “When fate wronged
me, I turned desperate; then I degenerated” (201). Unlike Helen Burns, who is capable of
enduring the wrongs that are inflicted upon her as a result of her Apollonian tendencies,
Rochester abandons reason, succumbs to his vices, and establishes himself as a follower
of Dionysus. Hughes also recognizes that “Rochester’s actions... identify him as the dark
god. Dionysos, since he is the elemental god of the fertility of nature, is also the erotic:
and there is probably no other hero of early Victorian fiction so embroiled in sensuality as
Rochester” (357). From his flaunting of his past sexual experiences, to his attempts to
commit both bigamy and adultery, to his endeavors to corrupt Jane by forcing her to
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become his mistress, Rochester creates the Dionysian force against which Jane may
struggle, revealing her Apollonian tendencies.
When Jane and Rochester first meet, Rochester notes that “the Lowood constraint
still clings to [her] somewhat” (205). Although Jane professes to have long abandoned
the precepts of Lowood and Miss Temple, her confrontation with this Dionysian reveler
forces her to revert to the Apollonian tendency of restraint. She is further implicated as a
follower of Apollo by her advice to Rochester concerning his attempts to better himself:
“if from this day you began with resolution to correct your thoughts and actions, you
would in a few years have laid up a new and stainless store of recollections, to which you
might revert with pleasure” (203-204). This advice is void of the rebellious attitude that
has been characteristic of Jane’s behavior up until this point in the novel. Instead of
advocating a rebellious attitude characteristic of Dionysus, Jane demonstrates that she is
also a follower of the “soothsaying god..., ruler over the beautiful illusion of the inner
world of fantasy” (BT 35) by inciting Rochester to avoid his suffering by escaping to a
world of illusion. Rather than proving herself to be an entirely Dionysian character, Jane
demonstrates the existence and necessity of both the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses
to human existence by altering her behavior according to the force that opposes her.
When confronted by moral characters such as Mr. Brocklehurst and Apollonian
characters, such as Helen Burns, Jane’s behavior is marked by Dionysian impulse. When
she is confronted by the “Dionysian flood and excess,” as in her relationship with
Rochester, however, she relies on Apollonian reason. The transformation of Jane’s
behavior as a result of the circumstances of her environment, implies a necessity for
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balance. In order to maintain an aesthetically pleasing presentation of life, Jane Eyre
must perpetuate the struggle between the Dionysian and Apollonian.
Female Madness: The Suppression of the Dionysian Impulse
While Jane may represent the Apollonian vision necessary to complement
Rochester’s Dionysian tendencies, the Thornfield section of the novel is not entirely void
of allusions to Jane’s Dionysian nature. Jane’s relationship with Bertha within the
context of her supposed “madness” emphasizes various Apollonian and Dionysian
tendencies that may otherwise be obscured. When Rochester reveals his marriage to
Bertha, he immediately stresses her madness, saying, “Bertha Mason is mad; and she
came of a mad family; idiots and maniacs through three generations! Her mother, the
Creole, was both a mad woman and a drunkard!—as I found out after I had wed the
daughter: for they were silent on family secrets before. Bertha, like a dutiful child,
copied her parent in both points” (437). By including this information concerning
drunkenness in conjunction with the announcement of madness, Rochester implies that
Bertha’s insanity is directly related to her attitude towards alcohol. Bertha is therefore
initially connected to the Dionysian, which Nietzsche explains “is brought home to us
most intimately by the analogy of intoxication;” however, she also personifies the
Dionysian state through her liberal sexuality and violent actions. Rochester describes to
Jane Bertha’s “violent and unreasonable temper” (459), and he catalogs her intellectual
faults while detailing her immoderate behavior: “What a pygmy intellect she had—and
what giant propensities! How fearful were those curses those propensities entailed on
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me! Bertha Mason,—the true daughter of an infamous mother,—dragged me through all
the hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a wife at once
intemperate and unchaste” (459). Rochester’s descriptions of Bertha’s madness always
rely on her unrestrained actions and sensual behavior, emphasizing her Dionysian
tendencies.
While Bertha’s excessive behavior and sexual tendencies result in the conclusion
that she is insane, they also align her to “the rapture of the Dionysian state with its
annihilation of ordinary bounds and limits of existence” (BT 59). From this perspective,
Bertha becomes representative of basic human impulses, and the representation of her as
mad is therefore called into question. Valerie Beattie also disputes Bertha’s mania,
arguing that Bertha’s actions are indicative of woman responding to the extreme aspects
of her environment rather than of an irrational lunatic as Rochester would have us
believe: “The agency that Brontë bestows on Bertha—her calculated attack on Rochester
in his bed; her timely rendering of the wedding veil, her laugh—runs counter to
interpretations of her offered by Rochester and by critics who collude with his viewpoint
as simply mad and beyond reach” (499-500). From this perspective, Bertha becomes
viable as more than a plot device to hinder Jane and Rochester’s union and further the
movement of the novel. Her natural impulses and desires and the way in which they are
approached by the other characters add a level of complexity that reveals cultural fears
concerning human nature while exploring the Apollonian need to check such excesses.
Peter Grudin also recognizes that Bertha’s madness serves to reveal Victorian attitudes
concerning proper female behavior, arguing that “madness in not at an issue but is instead
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the persistent metaphor for sexual license in a woman” (157). Similarly, Carol-Ann
Farkas implies that the fact that Bertha is a woman plays a role in her being classified as
mad: “Bertha is locked up physically—but more importantly, of course, she is locked up
mentally, her Self imprisoned within the confines of madness, and arguably, within the
constraints of what sanity means for a woman of her time” (57). As a result of her
“annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence” that society dictated for a
Victorian woman, Bertha is confined literally in the attic and metaphorically within the
madness that is thrust upon her.
After being faced with the Dionysian personification of Bertha, Jane retreats into
an Apollonian state in which she denies her passions for Rochester in favor of what she
believes to be the salvation of the soul:
I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold
to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as
I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is
no temptation: they are for such moments as this when body and
soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate
they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them,
what would be their worth? They have a worth—so I have always
believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—
quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating
faster than I can count its throbs. (475)
Jane recognizes an internal struggle describing it as the “body and soul ris[ing] in mutiny
against their rigour” to which may be applied the Apollonian and Dionysian struggle
between “dreams and intoxication” (BT 33). She equates the body’s desire for Rochester
to madness, linking herself to the mad woman in the attic with whom she has just come in
contact. Just as Bertha’s Dionysian impulses are realized through the use of fire in her
attempt to murder the dreaming Rochester and to burn down Thornfield, Jane associates
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her madness and passion with the fire that is running through her veins. Jane’s selfaccusation of madness and referral to fire imply a Dionysian connection with Bertha, but
unlike Bertha, Jane is capable of demonstrating some level of restraint concerning her
actions by relying on an Apollonian desire for transcendence.
While Jane’s reliance on reason serves to separate her from Bertha who has
completely abandoned herself to Dionysian desire, other parallels between the two
characters serve to reinforce Jane’s Dionysian tendencies, linking both Bertha and Jane to
the natural world. Gruden also notes the similarities between the two characters, relying
on violence and passion to link Bertha and Jane:
The loss of restraint, the extraordinary force of passion that allows
the diminutive child to prevail physically over a larger antagonist,
the incarceration with its implications of heterogeneity and
alienation, the fright brought on by an image of an other-worldy
being reflected in a mirror, the dangerous condition of the child’s
nerve’s, all of these join, with shocking incongruity, Jane Eyre to
the thing in the attic at Thornfield. (153)
Both Jane and Bertha demonstrate a rebellion against traditional gender norms by
directing their acts of violence towards the male characters who are influential in their
oppression. Jane attacks John Reed and Bertha attacks Rochester and Mason.
Interestingly, both acts of violent rebellion occur after ten years of oppression. On her
death bed, Mrs. Reed refers to Jane’s rebellion saying, “You have a very bad disposition...
and one to this day I feel it impossible to understand: how for nine years you could be
patient and quiescent under any treatment, and then in the tenth break out all fire and
violence, I can never comprehend” (357). Similarly, we learn from Rochester that Bertha
has only taken advantage of Grace Poole’s “temporary lapses” three times—when she set
51
Rochester’s bed on fire, when she attacked Mason, and when she destroyed Jane’s veil.
All three of these incidents occur ten years after her confinement at Thornfield (464-465).
These acts of violence not only provide a means through which to parallel the two
characters, but they also result in the denial of both Bertha and Jane’s humanity. Valerie
Beattie points out that “Jane becomes like a ‘mad cat’ [when she attacks John Reed]:
Bertha is ‘like some strange wild animal’ who springs at Rochester and ‘grapple[s] his
throat viciously’” (500). Through their actions, both women demonstrate a Dionysian
tendency towards violence which serves to separate them from humanity, drawing them
closer to a bestial or natural world.
Rejecting Apollo’s Call: The Necessity of the Flesh
After escaping from the Dionysian call to sensuality, Jane retreats into the
Apollonian world of Moor House where she encounters the ultimate personification of
the dream god and rejects his call to complete servitude. Plunged into the uncertain
world for which she longed while at Thornfield, Jane approaches death, before being
rescued from the elements by St. John Rivers. In recalling his appearance, Jane states
that “had he been a statue instead of a man, he could not have been easier” to examine,
and she repetitively refers to his features that appear to be carved from marble (516). On
hearing her description of St. John, Mr. Rochester deems him “a graceful Apollo” (665).
Like Apollo, St. John attempts to transcend above nature, creating a world in which
dreams and illusions serve as a means of escape from Dionysian reality:
It is hard work to control the workings of inclination, and turn the
bent of nature: but that it may be done, I know from experience.
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God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate;
and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot
get—when our will strains after a path we may not follow—we
need neither starve from inanition, nor stand still in despair: we
have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the
forbidden food it longed to taste and perhaps surer; and to hew out
for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one
Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it. (542-543)
Like the Apollo of The Birth of Tragedy, St. John “overcomes the suffering of the
individual by the radiant glorification of the eternity of phenomenon: here beauty
triumphs over the suffering inherent in life” (BT 104).
While Jane recognizes the value of St. John’s metaphysical calling, she is
incapable of sacrificing the whole of her existence to Apollonian transcendence. In
response to St. John’s marriage proposal and call to become a missionary, Jane refuses to
marry him but expresses a willingness to accompany him to India as a fellow missionary.
She explains, “I will give the missionary my energies—it is all he wants—but not myself:
that would be only adding the husk and shell to the kernel. For them he has no use: I
retain them” (611). St. John rejects such a response, accusing Jane of offering God “a
mutilated sacrifice” (611). Jane, however, refuses to sacrifice her whole self to this
Apollo, retaining a portion to dedicate to Dionysus:
I should still have my unblighted self to turn to: my natural
unenslaved feelings with which to communicate in moments of
loneliness. There would be recesses in my mind which would be
only mine, to which he never came; and sentiments growing there
fresh and sheltered, which his austerity could never blight, nor his
measured warrior-march trample down: but as his wife—at his side
always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced to
keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn
inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame
consumed vital after vital—this would be unendurable. (613)
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Incapable of stifling the flame of her Dionysian impulses, Jane is forced to abandon St.
John’s call, which demands a complete sacrifice, and return to her now blind and maimed
“Vulcan,” with whom she may express both her Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies (JE
665).
Jane’s inability to “disown half [her] nature” in order to please St. John
demonstrates her unwillingness to serve only Apollo and implies an advocation on the
part of the novel to attribute value to every aspect of human nature (JE 599). Similarly,
in describing the opposing qualities of Georgiana and Eliza’s characters, Jane says, “here
were two natures rendered, the one intolerably acrid, the other despicably savourless for
the want of it. Feeling without judgement is a washy draught indeed; but judgement
untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition” (353).
Jane recognizes that there is value in both feeling and judgement, but the one without the
other is devoid of aesthetic value. Human nature is rendered artistically appealing as a
result of the innate contradictions it contains and to deny the value of any one aspect of
humanity is to deprive human existence of the “aesthetic phenomenon” by which it is
“eternally justified” (BT 52).
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CHAPTER 2
NIETZSCHE’S RELIGION AND THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL
“The Daimonion of Socrates”: Nietzsche and Christian Morality
While Charlotte Brontë chose to employ a religion that attempts to value both the
spiritual and the physical, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë portrays a version
of Christianity that closely aligns to the interpretation of Christianity that Nietzsche later
assumes to be the predominant form of Judeo-Christian religion. According to Nietzsche,
Christianity is concerned not only with destroying the Dionysian impulse, but also with
undermining the aesthetic value of life:
In truth nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic
interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in
[The Birth of Tragedy] than the Christian teaching, which is, and
wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the
realm of lies; with its absolute standards, beginning with the
truthfulness of God, it negates, judges, and damns art...
Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and
fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely
concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as faith, in “another” or
“better” life. (“ASC” 23)
Rather than questioning the validity of the Christian doctrine, Nietzsche chooses to
censure Christianity for its attempts to denounce every aspect of existence that does not
directly correspond with its teachings. According to Came, Nietzsche recognized the
value of a spiritual myth in which one may escape the chaos of the natural world:
55
Now a central aspect of Nietzsche’s religious psychology is the
claim that God is a projection whose main function is to impart
value and transcendent purpose to life... Faith in a divine being, in
other words, is dispensable for human beings, whereas (belief in)
value and meaning are not; that is, belief in God has instrumental
value only as a means to our real ‘target’—endowing life with
value and significance. (40-41)
From this perspective, it is apparent that, to Nietzsche, Christianity’s shortcomings result
from its attempts to isolate humanity from an aesthetic understanding of existence. While
the Apollonian is at odds with the Dionysian, this conflict serves to create what Nietzsche
terms as tragic art, giving value to a seemingly meaningless existence. Christianity,
however, with its reliance on morality alone, destroys the artistic struggle between
transcendence and natural impulse by subjugating both physical desire and the conflict to
stifle that desire. To Nietzsche, Christianity strives to silence every aspect of life except
for the morality on which it is founded.
In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Helen Huntingdon demonstrates what Nietzsche
views as Christianity’s complete adherence to morality. She explains that her “swelling
bliss” in her child is always checked by one of two fears, “the one: He may be taken from
[her]; the other: He may live to curse his own existence” (202). She goes on to explain
that of the two possibilities, the latter is the worse, and that she would rather see him die
than be corrupted by sin:
I could not bear to see him die, and relinquish to the cold and cruel
grave this cherished form now warm with tender life, flesh of my
flesh and shrine of the that pure spark which it should be my life’s
sweet labour to keep unsullied from the world,—and [my heart]
ardently implores that Heaven would spare him still to be my
comfort and my joy, and me to be his shield, instructor, friend—to
guide him along the perilous path of youth, and train him to be
God’s servant while on earth, a blessed and honored saint in
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Heaven. But in the other case, if he should live to disappoint my
hopes, and frustrate all my efforts—to be a slave of sin, the victim
of vice and misery, a curse to others and himself—Eternal Father,
if Thou beholdest such a life before him, tear him from me now in
spite of all of my anguish, and take him from my bosom to Thine
own, while yet a guileless, unpolluted lamb! (202-203)
Both of Helen’s fears concerning her son revolve around her Christian morality. She
does not desire to see him live so that he may experience the phenomena of existence, but
instead, her only hope for his life is that he may be a servant to God on earth so that he
may become a saint in heaven at death. This form of Christian thought, in which the
transcendence of death is preferred over the experiences of life, aligns with Nietzsche’s
understanding of orthodox Christianity in which everything is sacrificed for the sake of
morality. Nietzsche both condemns and explains the way in which the Christian
obsession with death and its depreciation of life results from a morbid fanaticism
concerning morality:
Hatred of “the world,” condemnation of the passions, fear of
beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this
life, at bottom a craving for nothing, for the end, for respite, for
“the sabbath of sabbaths”—all this always struck me, no less than
the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize only moral
forms of a “will to decline”—at the very least a sign of abysmal
sickness, weariness, discouragement, exhaustion, and the
impoverishment of life. (“ASC” 23).
As evidenced by her preference for her son’s death over his sinful corruption, Helen’s
Christianity may serve as an example of Nietzsche’s own interpretation of Christianity
years later. Her moral conscience forces her to deny the sensual aspects of life and favor
death over the possibility of an existence that does not align with her religious
perspective, implying a “secret instinct of annihilation” (“ASC” 23). According to
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Nietzsche, this “craving for nothing” through death demonstrates the way in which
Christian morality may be considered “the danger of dangers” (“ASC” 23).
Nietzsche’s attack against the excessive morality of Christianity grows out of his
earlier attack in The Birth of Tragedy against Socratic virtue. While in his “Attempt at a
Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche exclusively applies the danger of morality to Christianity,
Came explains that “Nietzsche uses the term morality and its cognates in a very broad
sense. Indeed, morality often seems to pick out anything that, for him, has life-denying
effects. The term’s extension would therefore encompass Christianity, Buddhism,
Platonism, and Romanticism, as well as most of the philosophical tradition” (48).
Nietzsche claims that The Birth of Tragedy was written from an “antimoral propensity
[that] is best inferred from the careful and hostile silence with which Christianity is
treated throughout the whole book” (ASC 23); however, his condemnation of Socratic
virtue in The Birth of Tragedy appears to be reflected in his later criticism of Christianity.
Just as Nietzsche baptizes Dionysus as the Antichrist in the “Attempt at a SelfCriticism” (24), in The Birth of Tragedy, he states that “we may recognize in Socrates the
opponent of Dionysus” (86). From the moment of his introduction in the text, Socrates,
like Christianity, is set up as the opponent of Dionysian impulse.20 Much like his
argument that Christian morality destroys tragic art, Nietzsche also claims that Socratic
20
While Nietzsche describes Apollo as being the opponent of Dionysus, the conflict created between the
dream god and the wine god results in the art form of Greek tragedy. The conflict that is created between
the Socratic and the Dionysian, however, results in the complete destruction of tragic art. Nietzsche
explains, “This is the new opposition: the Dionysian and the Socratic—and the art of Greek tragedy was
wrecked on this” (BT 82). In replacing Apollo as the opponent of Dionysus, Socratic virtue replaces tragic
art with dialectic. Nietzsche explains that within the Socratic aestheticism “It is impossible for [tragic art]
to attain the the Apollonian effect of the epos, while, on the other hand, it has alienated itself as much as
possible from Dionysian elements” (BT 83). From this perspective, Socratic virtue attempts to destroy the
Dionysian while replacing the illusory Apollonian dream image with “the dialectic of knowledge” (BT 97).
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virtue kills tragedy, saying, “Consider the consequences of the Socratic maxims: ‘Virtue
is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy.’ In these three
basic forms of optimism lies the death of tragedy” (BT 91). Similar to Helen’s use of
morality to bring meaning to existence, Socratic knowledge relies on virtue to promise
happiness to those who would succumb to it. Came also recognizes the similarities that
Nietzsche’s understanding of Socratic knowledge shares with his view of religion:
“Socratism, like art and religion attempts to meet our basic need for reconciliation with
the world. And like morality, it aims to do this by ‘eliminating suffering;’ and thereby
instigating ‘the earthly happiness of all.’” (49). Like the Apollonian impulse that seeks to
offer beauty and meaning to a Dionysian existence through the aesthetic of art, both
Socratic virtue and Christian morality attempt to validate a seemingly chaotic world;
however, to Nietzsche, both Socratism and Christianity attempt to offer significance to
life by denying the value and/or existence of vital aspects of human reality. Just as
Nietzsche describes the way in which Christian morality “negates, judges, and damns
art,” he also claims that Socratic knowledge is incapable of valuing the aesthetic of
tragedy. Utilizing the image of “the one great Cyclops eye of Socrates” (BT 89),
Nietzsche alludes to the same concept of closed-mindedness that he later applies to
Christianity. Incapable of seeing more than one side of existence, this single eye “was
denied the pleasure of gazing into the Dionysian abysses” (BT 89). As a result of this
blindness towards the Dionysian, Nietzsche describes a similar response of Socratic
virtue to tragic art as the Christian “Hatred of ‘the world,’ condemnation of the passions,
fear of beauty and sensuality”:
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What, then, did it have to see in the “sublime and greatly lauded”
tragic art, as Plato called it? Something rather unreasonable, full
of causes apparently without effects, motley and manifold that it
could not but be repugnant to a sober mind, and a dangerous tinder
for sensitive and susceptible souls. (BT 89)
Just as Helen views the temptation of sensuality as “repugnant” and “dangerous” for her
little Arthur’s soul as a result of her Christian morality, Socratic virtue instructs its
followers to reject the ecstasies and inconsistencies of tragic art. Both the religious and
the philosophical impulses seek to eliminate every aspect of existence that does not
correlate with their ideologies concerning the relevancy and value of life.
While Nietzsche is primarily concerned with the creation of tragic art through the
conflict of the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses and the reaction of Christian and
Socratic ways of thought to that art, he also utilizes both “Attempt at a Self-Criticism”
and The Birth of Tragedy to demonstrate the similarities between the religious and
philosophical impulses that he views as standing in opposition to the aesthetic forces that
bring meaning to existence. He further parallels Christian morality and Socratic virtue
with his explanation of “the daimonion of Socrates,” saying, “In exceptional
circumstances, when his tremendous intellect wavered, [Socrates] found secure support in
the utterances of a divine voice that spoke up at such moments. This voice, whenever it
comes, always dissuades” (BT 88). Similarly, Christian morality is characterized by “the
eternal No” (“ASC” 23). Both Socratic virtue and Christian morality, therefore, serve to
impede the natural impulses of life. The similarity between the two belief systems is also
emphasized by Nietzsche’s allusion to Christ in his explanation concerning what he views
to be Socrates’s attempt to improve existence. He says,
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Wherever Socratism turns its searching eyes it sees lack of insight
and the power of illusion and from this lack it infers the essential
perversity and reprehensibility of what exists. Basing himself on
this point, Socrates conceives it to be his duty to correct existence:
all alone, with an expression of irreverence and superiority, as the
precursor of an altogether different culture, art, and morality, he
enters a world, to touch whose very hem would give us the greatest
happiness. (BT 87)
Nietzsche’s sarcastic reference to the happiness that may be purchased by touching
Socrates’s hem not only reflects the Socratic maxims in which happiness is promised to
the virtuous, but it also serves as a means by which to set Socrates up as a typological
Christ by alluding to the healing miracles associated with touching the hem of Christ’s
coat: “Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve
years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, ‘If
only I touch his cloak, I will be made well” (Matthew 9.20-21) and “After the people of
that place recognized [Jesus], they sent word throughout the region and begged him that
they might touch even the fringe of his cloak, and all who touched it were
healed” (Matthew 14.35-36). Nietzsche’s contemptuous use of the image of the healing
hem serves to connect Socratic virtue to the image of Christ while undermining the
promise of happiness and completeness that both the philosophical and religious illusions
seek to offer.
In “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” Nietzsche refuses to accept the philosophical and
religious illusions in favor of the Apollonian and Dionysian conflict, claiming that “the
world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon” (22). Nietzsche’s emphasis of the
justice of such a perspective reveals his convictions concerning the proportional
relationship between the physical and metaphysical. According to Walter Sokel,
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Nietzsche’s desire “to be just is to guard against one-sidedness, against exaggeration,
against absolutizing particular viewpoints... Thus justice is a balancing act of particular
perspectives in order to do justice to the whole” (518). Therefore, Christian morality and
its desire to be “only moral” and the Cyclops eye of Socrates, which is incapable of
“gazing into the Dionysian abysses,” fail to do justice to human existence by denying
vital aspects of life. Instead, the aesthetic viewpoint, according to Nietzsche, is the only
acceptable means of understanding life because, by valuing both the Apollonian and
Dionysian impulses, it is capable of doing justice to every aspect of life—both the
beautiful illusion of the metaphysical as well as the harsh reality of the physical.
The Embodiment of Christian Morality and Socratic Virtue:
Religion in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Through the religious fanaticism of the protagonist, Helen Huntingdon, as well as
the excessive qualities of many of the minor characters of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
Anne Brontë appears to be commenting on the impracticality of extremist thinking,
therefore advocating Nietzsche’s later idea of an “eternal justice” in which the desires of
the Dionysian self must be held within “strict proportion” by the Apollonian attempts at
restraint (BT 143). When describing the Reverend Michael Millward, Gilbert Markham
says, “He was a man of fixed principles, strong prejudices, and regular habits,—intolerant
of dissent in any shape, acting under a firm conviction that his opinions were always
right, and whoever differed from them, must be, either most deplorably ignorant, or
willfully blind” (17). Such a perspective serves to represent what Nietzsche viewed to be
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the fatal flaw of both Christianity and Socratism—an inability to accept a contradictory
value system. Similarly, Mrs. Maxwell says of Helen’s desire to be united with the
overtly Dionysian Arthur, “What fellowship hath light with darkness; or he that believeth
with an infidel?” (149) In this passage, Helen’s aunt is referring to 2 Corinthians 6:14 in
which Paul instructs the Corinthians to shut themselves off from those who do not share
their beliefs, providing an appropriate example to support Nietzsche’s view concerning
Christian morality’s attempt to subvert any opposing belief system. While not
succumbing to the same level of extremism as Rev. Millward and Mrs. Maxwell,
Millicent Hargrave also demonstrates a sense of morality that does not align to the “strict
proportion” of an aesthetic understanding of existence. When confronted by Millicent’s
disapproval of her choice of a husband, Helen says, “give me my flesh and blood lover,”
to which Millicent responds, “I’ll be satisfied with flesh and blood too—only the spirit
must shine through predominate” (153). Millicient’s preferences concerning a suitable
spouse demonstrate her bias towards Christian morality. In saying that she will be
“satisfied” with a physical lover “only” if his spirit prevails over the flesh, Millicent
demonstrates her “disgust with life” and her “condemnation of the passions [and] fear of
beauty and sensuality” (“ASC” 23). She will only accept the physical aspect of her lover
as a necessary evil in hopes that his spirit will blind her to the physicality that she cannot
possibly accept.
While the minor characters of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall serve to demonstrate
the one-sidedness of Christian morality, Helen may be viewed as the ultimate
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embodiment of Socratic virtue in the novel.21 According to Arthur Huntingdon, Helen’s
religious tendencies overstep the ordinary bounds, creating friction in her relationship
with her husband:
It is nothing you have said or done; it is something that you are:
you are too religious. Now I like a woman to be religious, and I
think your piety one of your greatest charms, but then, like all
other good things, it may be carried too far. To my thinking, a
woman’s religion ought not to lessen her devotion to her earthly
lord. She should have enough to purify and etherealize her soul,
but not enough to refine away her heart, and raise her above all
human sympathies. (173)
While Arthur ultimately degenerates into an intoxicated personification of the Dionysian
with no tolerance for philosophical, religious, or artistic illusions of transcendence, at this
point in the novel, he voices a perspective of life that closely aligns with Nietzsche’s view
concerning the conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian. He values Helen’s
“piety,” but he also understands the importance of her physicality. By stating that an
abundance of religious morality will “raise her above all human sympathies,” Arthur
claims that Helen’s neglect of the physical excludes her from the reality of human
existence. Helen’s response to her husband’s warning only serves to solidify her
dedication to the Christian morality that may be interpreted as one of the destructive
forces in her marriage:
I will give my whole heart and soul to my Maker if I can..., and not
one atom more of it to you than He allows. What are you, sir, that
21
Helen's moral extremism is represented by the novel in purely Christian terms. However, it strongly
evokes the Socratic ideal that Nietzsche discusses in The Birth of Tragedy, an ideal which, as I have argued,
is closely aligned in Nietzsche's thought with the Christian ideal. Therefore, I have referred to Helen's
moral outlook in some places as Socratic and in others as Christian, depending on whether it correlates
most exactly with Nietzsche's attack against Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy or his attack against
Christianity in “Attempt at a Self-Criticism.” In other words, I use "Socratism" and "Christianity"
interchangeably in order to explore the close resonances of Brontë's novel with Nietzsche's philosophy as
he expressed it in different points of his career.
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you should set yourself up as a god, and presume to dispute
possession of my heart with Him to whom I owe all I have and all I
am, every blessing I ever did or ever can enjoy—and yourself
among the rest—if you are a blessing, which I am half inclined to
doubt. (173)
Rather than recognizing the duality of human existence and valuing the physical along
with the spiritual, Helen relinquishes all to the spirit, denying her own passions and
leaving nothing for her husband. She is neither a follower of Dionysus nor Apollo in that
she rejects the aesthetic value of the conflict between the two gods. Instead, she may be
seen to represent Socratic virtue, in which all tragic art is ultimately destroyed.
While Helen’s piety may be endorsed within an interpretation of The Tenant as a
temperance novel, Brontë’s treatment of Helen and Arthur’s relationship implies that a
more complex dynamic is at work in the novel than the struggle between sobriety and
inebriation. Prior to their marriage, Arthur and Helen represent opposing characteristics,
which Helen had hopes to successfully combine into a complete unit through their union.
She explains to her aunt that while Arthur “is of a sanguine temperament,” she is
“naturally inclined to reflection” (126), and while Helen does express a desire to reform
Arthur she also appreciates his spirited nature as differing from her own. Furthermore,
she rejects her aunt’s advice concerning a union of equals, arguing, “But what are all the
poor fools and reprobates to do, aunt? If everybody followed your advice the world
would soon come to an end” (112). At this point in the novel, Helen appears to
recognize the necessity of both the sanguine and the reflective for existence to be
successful, and while her expectations concerning her effect on Arthur’s conduct may be
idealistic, she does express a belief in the indispensable alliance between the contrasting
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elements of human behavior. As time progresses, however, Helen increasingly chooses to
value her own nature over Arthur’s, while Arthur continues to reject any possible course
that will lead to transcendence. The marriage is ultimately destroyed by both Helen and
Arthur’s unwillingness to compromise. Within this interpretation, it is evident that the
novel does not set Helen up as the infallible protagonist; instead, the implications
concerning a loss of sympathy for Helen as a result of her teetotalism is embedded within
the development of her relationship with Arthur. Helen and Arthur’s existence together
fails as a result of their inability to value the qualities of the other partner. While Brontë
may provide a more negative portrayal of Arthur’s behavior than that of Helen’s, she does
demonstrate the way in which both characters are responsible for the failure of their
marriage, therefore indicating the necessity of an acceptance of the Apollonian as well as
the Dionysian facets of existence.
Helen receives criticism concerning her fanatical religious beliefs and rejection of
the physical aspects of life not only from her husband but also from her would-be lover.
After repeated attempts to seduce Helen, Walter Hargrave concludes that Helen must not
be fully mortal: “I don’t know how to talk to you, Mrs. Huntingdon,... you are only half
woman—your nature must be half human, half angelic... I am the ordinary mortal,... but
you, Madam—I equally maintain there is nobody like you” (281). Like Arthur, Hargrave
also concludes that Helen’s intense commitment to her religion results in her exclusion
from ordinary human life and the denial of the physical aspect of existence:
You have it in your power to raise two human beings from a state
of actual suffering to such unspeakable beatitude as only generous,
noble self-forgetting love can give (for you can love me if you
will; you may tell me that you scorn and detest me, but—since you
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have set me the example of plain speaking—I will answer that I do
not believe you!), but you will not do it! You choose rather to leave
us miserable; and you cooly tell me it is the will of God that we
should remain so. You may call this religion, but I call it wild
fanaticism! (284)
While Hargrave’s intentions towards Helen may be interpreted as questionable, his
perspective on her religious “fanaticism” only serves to emphasize her complete denial
of every aspect of life that lies outside of her Christian morality, setting her up as the
personification of the Socratism that desires to destroy every manifestation of the
Dionysian.
While the perception of Helen by other characters in the book may call into
question the appropriateness of her religious dedication, her own explanation concerning
her motives in marrying Arthur serves as the most overwhelming evidence of her lifedenying tendencies. In justifying her desire to marry Arthur to her aunt, Helen states, “I
would willingly risk my own happiness for the chance of securing his. I will leave better
men to those who consider their own advantage. If he has done amiss, I shall consider
my life well spent in saving him from the consequences of his early errors, and striving to
recall him to the path of virtue” (128). Both Helen’s desire to save Arthur and her
willingness to sacrifice herself and her happiness for such a task directly aligns with
Nietzsche’s later interpretation of the ultimate Socratic goal:
To fathom the depths and to separate true knowledge from
appearance and error, seemed to socratic man the noblest, even the
only true human vocation. And since Socrates, this mechanism of
concepts, judgements, and inferences has been esteemed as the
highest occupation and the most admirable gift of nature, above all
other capabilities. Even the most sublime ethical deeds, the
stirrings of pity, self-sacrifice, heroism, and that calm sea of the
soul, so difficult to attain, which the Apollonian Greek called
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sophrosune, were derived from the dialectic of knowledge by
Socrates and his like-minded successors, down to the present, and
accordingly designated as teachable. (BT 97)
As a like-minded successor of Socrates, Helen’s primary motive in marrying Arthur relies
on her aspiration to teach him how to abandon his Dionysian tendencies in favor of her
Christian morality. Her pushing him “to think more deeply, to look further, and aim
higher” (TWH 173) demonstrates her depreciation of the Dionysian reality and her
reliance on “a beyond invented the better to slander this life” (“ASC” 23). By attempting
to destroy Arthur’s Dionysian impulse through Socratic dialectic and Christian morality,
Helen sets herself up as Arthur’s enemy as evidenced by his revulsion from her presence
when she comes to care for him on his deathbed, to which she responds, “you needn’t
shrink away from me, as if I were your greatest enemy” (362). Rather than saving him,
Helen only serves to solidify his retreat into his own Dionysian tendencies, resulting in
his destruction. While the Apollonian illusion serves as a peaceful and aesthetically
satisfying retreat from the revelries of Dionysian intoxication through which Arthur may
have been saved, Helen’s extremist approach, which strives to completely obliterate the
physical self, only serves to destroy the marital relationship by forcing her and her
husband into the roles of enemies.
While Helen’s fanatical religious views and stifling expectations concerning
Arthur’s transcendence do not justify his abusive behavior, they do imply a vital need for
the Apollonian illusion of escape. According to Nietzsche, “With his sublime gestures,
Apollo shows us how necessary is the entire world of suffering, that by means of it the
individual may be impelled to realize the redeeming vision, and then sunk in
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contemplation of it, sit quietly in his tossing bark among the waves” (BT 45-46). From
this perspective, Apollo, unlike Socrates and Christian morality, does not relegate the
chaotic world of suffering to the “realm of lies,” but instead seeks to unify seemingly
meaningless suffering with “the redeeming” vision in which the aesthetic value of
existence may be contemplated. Helen, however, chooses to rely on Christian morality
and its assurance of death as the ultimate respite and refuge from suffering. After
learning of her husband’s affair with Lady Lowborough, Helen sinks into despair but
considers herself saved by her faith:
Then, while I lifted up my soul in speechless, earnest supplication,
some heavenly influence seemed to strengthen me within: I
breathed more freely; my vision cleared; I saw distinctly the pure
moon shining on, and the light clouds skimming the clear, dark
sky; and then, I saw the eternal stars twinkling down upon me; I
knew their God was mine, and He was strong to save and swift to
hear. “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee,” seemed whispered
from above their myriad orbs. No, no; I felt He would not leave
me comfortless: in spite of earth and hell I should have strength for
all my trials, and win a glorious rest at last! (258, emphasis mine)
In this passage, Helen’s hope lies in death. Rather than valuing the human aspects of
suffering, she longs for the “glorious rest” that is promised to her by her religion. She
expresses a similar longing for death when she explains her refusal of Hargrave’s sexual
advances, saying, “if I were alone in the world, I have still my God and my religion, and I
would sooner die than disgrace my calling and break my faith with Heaven to obtain a
few brief years of false and fleeting happiness” (284). Helen’s acknowledgement of the
potential happiness that an affair with Hargrave may offer demonstrates her recognition
of the sensual aspects of life to which her Christian morality is opposed, but her
preference for death over such a happiness further indicates her complete alignment with
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the aspects of Christian morality that Nietzsche would later criticize for its “craving for
nothing, for the end, for respite, for the ‘sabbath of all sabbaths.’” As a result of her
religion, Helen becomes one with “the image of the dying Socrates... [whom] knowledge
and reason have liberated from the fear of death” (BT 96). This desire for death,
however, is in direct opposition to the Apollonian determination to extend life.
According to Nietzsche the primary Apollonian purpose is to prolong an inclination
towards life in the face of suffering:
If we could imagine dissonance become man—and what else is
man?—this dissonance, to be able to live, would need a splendid
illusion that would cover dissonance with a veil a beauty. This the
true artistic aim of Apollo in whose name we comprehend all those
countless illusions of the beauty of mere appearance that at every
moment make life worth living at all and prompt the desire to live
on in order to experience the next moment. (143)
While the Apollonian desire for life may serve to bring meaning to an existence that is
necessarily characterized by suffering, Helen chooses to rely on her interpretation of
Christian morality and wait for death. She is, therefore, opposed to life as a whole and
seeks to destroy every manifestation of Dionysian excess while waiting for her own
escape in death.
“The Dionysian Abysses”:
Arthur Huntingdon and the Rejection of Socratic Knowledge
If Helen is the embodiment of Christian morality and Socratic virtue, then Arthur
Huntingdon can be interpreted as the human personification of Dionysus. When Arthur
first makes his appearance in the novel, he is described as having “a sanguine
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temperament, and a gay, thoughtless temper,” and later as “a man without self-restraint or
lofty aspirations—a lover of pleasure, given up to animal enjoyments” (126, 206). This
description of Arthur aligns with Nietzsche’s interpretation of the Dionysian “ecstasy that
wells from the innermost depths of man, indeed of nature..., which is brought home to us
most intimately by the analogy of intoxication” (BT 36). According to Nietzsche,
“Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes
into complete self-forgetfulness” (BT 36). Just as Nietzsche’s Dionysus loses his
capabilities of control in the pleasures of human life and suffering, Arthur Huntingdon
loses all sense of self-discipline in his intoxicated revelries. “Everything subjective
vanishes” as a result of his “thoughtless temper,” and he is left to enjoy “the glowing life
of the Dionysian” (BT 37). According to Arthur, as he is consuming a tumbler of wine,
there is “an infernal fire in [his] veins, that all the waters of the ocean cannot
quench!” (214). He is completely absorbed in his Dionysian tendencies and incapable of
being reformed by Helen’s Christian morality.
According to Helen, “[Arthur] has no more idea of exerting himself to overcome
obstacles than he has of restraining his natural appetites; and these two things are the ruin
of him” (191). As Gwen Hyman argues, “the mad carousing, drunken wrestling, and
inebriated nonsense babbling and toasting of Huntingdon and his friends clearly
demonstrates, alcohol is all about reveling in the body and refusing the tyranny of
rational control” (457). Arthur’s almost constant state of intoxication not only aligns him
with the wine god Dionysus, but also demonstrates that his ecstasies have remained
unchecked by an Apollonian influence. Arthur is lacking the “joyous necessity of the
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dream experience” (BT 35) of Apollo, which Nietzsche explains, saying, “we must keep
in mind that measured restraint, that freedom from the wilder emotions, that calm of the
sculptor god” (BT 35). While Helen desires to save her Dionysian husband, she refuses
to rely on the Apollonian illusion to offer meaning to his chaotic life. Instead, she
chooses to offer a religious illusion that seeks to completely destroy the Dionysian and
therefore seeks to destroy the essence of who Arthur is. Within such a relationship,
Arthur is forced to retreat further into his Dionysian impulses in order to oppose the
Christian morality that would otherwise destroy him. Hyman also notes that “marriage
and fatherhood only drive Huntingdon further into the bottle” (458). While Hyman
argues that this increased use of alcohol is a result of Arthur’s desire to maintain the
social status that Helen seems to threaten, she does recognize that his inebriated behavior
is intensified by Helen’s opposition to his current way of life. Rather than creating the
aesthetically proportional relationship that is necessary to successfully check Arthur’s
Dionysian excesses through Apollo, Helen creates a religious opposition against which
Arthur is forced to rebel if he is not to be destroyed.
As a result of his retreat into his Dionysian excesses, Arthur never accomplishes
the necessary proportional state between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses that
Nietzsche describes in The Birth of Tragedy. This failure to achieve an aesthetically
justified balance between the conflicting aspects of existence culminates in a destruction
that is caused by his Dionysian vices. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche borrows the
words of Schopenhauer to describe the Apollonian dream illusion:
Just as in a stormy sea that, unbounded in all directions raises and
drops mountainous waves, howling, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts
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in his frail bark: so in the midst of a world of torments the
individual human being sits quietly, supported by and trusting in
the principium individuationis. (35-36) 22
Nietzsche goes on to define the Dionysian sensibility in contrast to this impression of
safety in an unstable world, saying:
In the same work Schopenhauer has depicted for us the tremendous
terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumbfounded by the
cognitive form of phenomena because the principle of sufficient
reason, in some of its manifestations seems to suffer an exception.
If we add to this terror the blissful ecstasy that wells from the
innermost depths of man, indeed of nature, at this collapse of the
principium individuationis, we steal a glimpse into the nature of
the Dionysian, which is brought home to us most intimately by the
analogy of intoxication. (36)
This interpretation of the Dionysian, when applied to Arthur’s death, serves to clarify his
desire to cling to the habits that result in his physical destruction while lamenting his own
demise. When Arthur expresses a fear of death, Helen attempts to console him with the
Christian promise of heaven, to which Arthur responds, “Oh, it’s all a fable” (376). He
refuses the religious illusion that attempts to veil the terrors of death with the promise of
reward for the morally upright. While he adheres to his Dionysian tendencies, Arthur
expresses an intense fear of death saying, “I can’t repent; I only fear,” to which Helen
responds, “Think of the goodness of God, and you cannot but be grieved to have
offended Him” (380). Arthur, however, cannot be convinced of such a being, and he
argues, “What is God?—I cannot see Him or hear Him.—God is only an idea” (380).
Like Nietzsche, Arthur interprets God as an idea that humans project in order to escape
the horror of death, an idea in which he cannot find the peace required to sooth the terror
22
Principle of individuation
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of the reality of existence. Without the necessary dream illusion to give aesthetic
meaning to his life, Arthur’s death is characterized by the torment of being torn between
the awareness of the Dionysian reality of suffering and the desire for a satisfactory means
of escape, and Helen’s sense of morality only serves to intensify his torment by offering
an unsatisfactory illusion that immediately collapses upon consideration.
While Brontë’s negative portrayal of Arthur’s alcohol abuse and violence sets him
up as the antagonizing force against Helen’s piety, the evolving nature of Arthur and
Helen’s relationship offers a complexity that a reading of the work as a temperance novel
alone cannot afford. Prior to marrying Arthur, Helen demonstrates desires that are not
representative of the Socratic obsession with virtue or the Christian infatuation with
morality. Helen does rely primarily on her wish to save Arthur from himself and his sins
as a reason to marry him; however, when alone, she also recognizes “love” as a motive.
After listening to the advice against a union with Arthur offered by her aunt’s doctrines,
Helen writes in her diary, “Her counsels may be good, as far as they go—in the main
points, at least;—but there are some things she has overlooked in her calculations. I
wonder if she was ever in love” (113). Helen’s idea of “love,” at this point in the novel,
may easily be interpreted as lust. She opposes more socially acceptable suitors because
she is repulsed by their age; she obsesses on Arthur’s physicality, creating picture after
picture of him; and she expresses a preference for a “flesh and blood lover” over the
“stilted heroes of romance” (TWH 153). Only after she marries Arthur and is fully
confronted with his physicality and Dionysian impulses does she retreat into the
fanaticism of her Christian doctrine, abandoning every aspect of her Dionysian self.
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Similarly, Arthur also demonstrates somewhat of a recognition of the necessity of both
impulse and restraint prior to his marriage. In discussing Lord Lowborough’s wavering
between absolute abstinence and complete indulgence in gambling and alcohol, Arthur
expresses a need for balance:
I recommended him to “take a little wine for his stomach’s sake,”
and, when he was sufficiently re-established, to embrace the
media-via, ni-jamais-ni toujours 23 plan not to kill himself like a
fool, and not to abstain like a ninny—in a word, to enjoy himself
like a rational creature, and do as I did;—for don’t think, Helen,
that I’m a tippler; I’m nothing at all of the kind, and never was, and
never shall be. I value my comfort far too much. I see that a man
cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one
half his days and mad the other;—besides, I like to enjoy my life at
all sides and ends, which cannot be done by one that suffers
himself to be the slave of a single propensity. (164)
At this point in the novel, while Helen may be led primarily by reason and Arthur by
desire, both are aware of the need for the opposing qualities of impulse and restraint. It is
not until both characters retreat entirely into their own tendencies does the marriage
dissolve. By abandoning certain aspects of their humanity, both Arthur and Helen initiate
the destruction of their relationship, demonstrating a need for the balance that Nietzsche
will later advocate in The Birth of Tragedy. By recognizing that both Arthur and Helen
are responsible for the failure of their marriage by stifling vital aspects of their humanity,
it is apparent that The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is more than just a temperance novel.
While it does advocate the necessity of restraint by demonstrating the negative results of
alcohol abuse, it also implies that the fanatical abandonment of the whole self in favor of
23 A middle
way (Latin), neither, never, nor always (French)
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a single aspect of human behavior, whether that be indulgence or abstinence, can only
result in failure.
Virtue and Temptation: Gilbert Markham and the Apollonian Relationship
Early in the novel, Gilbert Markham is characterized by his Dionysian tendencies.
In his letter to Halford, to whom the novel is addressed, he says, “I was young then,... and
had not acquired half the rule over my own spirit, that I now possess” (11). While his
lack of control over his spirit is typical of the Dionysian, he recognizes that he now
possesses the necessary rule over his impulses, implying that, unlike Arthur Huntingdon,
he has successfully adopted some form of Apollonian restraint. By beginning his
narrative with this revelation concerning his character, Markham suggests that over the
course of the often autobiographical account, he will acquire an appropriate sense of
balance between the impulses of the spirit and the restraints to control it. With the
passage of time, Markham has gained the necessary control to observe and interpret the
Dionysian sufferings of his youth, as evidenced by his ability to recount the pain that he
experienced after misinterpreting the relationship between Helen and Lawrence:
While thus conversing they had sauntered slowly past me, down
the walk, and I heard no more of their discourse; but I saw him
with his arm round her waist, while she lovingly rested her hand on
his shoulder;—and then, a tremulous darkness obscured my sight,
my heart sickened and my head burned like fire. I half rushed, half
staggered from the spot where horror had kept me rooted, and
leaped or tumbled over the wall—I hardly know which—but I
know that afterwards, like a passionate child, I dashed myself on
the ground and lay there in a paroxysm of anger and despair... (91)
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Markham’s recollection of his past suffering serves to demonstrate both his Apollonian
and Dionysian tendencies. Nietzsche utilizes Schiller to explain the way in which the
Dionysian experience serves as the reality necessary to create the Apollonian dream
image, saying:
In the first place, as a Dionysian artist he has identified himself
with primal unity, its pain and contradiction. Assuming that music
has been correctly termed a repetition and a recast of the world, we
may say that he produces a copy of this primal unity as music.
Now, however, under the Apollonian dream inspiration, this music
reveals itself to him again as a symbolic dream image. The
inchoate, intangible reflection of the primordial pain in music, with
its redemption in mere appearance, now produces a second
mirroring as a specific symbol or example. The artist has already
surrendered his subjectivity in the Dionysian process. The image
that now shows him his identity with the heart of the world is a
dream scene that embodies the primordial contradiction and
primordial pain, together with the primordial pleasure, of mere
appearance. (49)
Just as Nietzsche’s artist is capable of reliving the original sense of primordial pain
through the dream sequence of Apollonian reflection, Markham is capable of
reconstructing his original suffering so that he and his reader may experience the reality
of human suffering through the mere appearance of the Apollonian illusion. While
Markham’s recollection, as addressed to Halford, does not represent the same level of
artistic expression as does the example offered by Nietzsche through Schiller, it does
support Nietzsche’s argument “that the existence of the world is justified only as an
aesthetic phenomenon” (“ASC” 22) in that Markham utilizes the Apollonian illusion to
offer coherence to his narrative. Nietzsche explains that the Apollonian illusion “presents
images of life to us, and incites us to comprehend in thought the core of life they
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contain..., the Apollonian tears man from his orgiastic self-annihilation and blinds him to
the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the belief that he is seeing a
single image of the world” (BT 128). Apollonian illusion is, therefore, not only necessary
for the creation of art, but also for a coherent understanding of one’s own experiences.
From this perspective, Markham has successfully united the Dionysian with the
Apollonian by utilizing the aesthetic of Apollonian beauty to express the harshness of
Dionysian passion and suffering. He has used the Apollonian illusion to create an
intelligible image of his own suffering for both himself and his reader.
While Markham’s recollection of his past experience may serve to demonstrate
the way in which the Apollonian and Dionysian may be united to create a meaningful
existence, his character in the novel also represents a sense of balance between the two
opposing forces. On her first meeting with Markham, Helen expresses a desire to
maintain her child’s virtue by removing all possible temptations saying, “I would have
both [sons and daughter] so to benefit by the experience of others, and the precepts of a
higher authority, that they should know beforehand to refuse the evil and choose the
good, and require no experimental proofs to teach them the evil of transgression” (30).
While Helen’s viewpoint directly aligns with Nietzsche’s interpretation of a Christian
morality that seeks to destroy every aspect of human life that contradicts its doctrine,
Markham expresses an understanding of virtue and temptation that implies a necessary
yet conflicting relationship between the two to provide true meaning to one’s decisions:
But by such means... you will never render him virtuous.—What is
it that constitutes virtue, Mrs. Graham? Is it the circumstance of
being able and willing to resist temptation; or that of having no
temptations to resist?—Is he a strong man that overcomes great
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obstacles and performs surprising achievements, though by dent of
great muscular exertion, and at the risk of some subsequent fatigue,
or he that sits in his chair all day, with nothing to do more
laborious than stirring the fire, and carrying his food to his mouth?
If you would have your son to walk honorably through the world,
you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but to teach
him to walk firmly over them—not insist upon leading him by the
hand, but let him learn to go alone. (27-28)
Helen’s decision to provide her son with lessons of the experiences of others in
conjunction with the teachings of a “higher authority” align with the Socratic maxims of
“Virtue is knowledge; man sins only from ignorance; he who is virtuous is happy,” which
Nietzsche explains are “the death of tragedy” and the aesthetic meaning of life (BT 91).
Markham, however, assumes that meaning cannot exist without the conflict between
desire and restraint. Just as the Apollonian illusion is void of beauty without the
necessary meaning of Dionysian suffering, young Arthur’s virtue is hollow without the
temptation necessary to test it. While Helen serves as the protagonist of the work, the
novel does not seem to imply that she is infallible. Instead, of dismissing Gilbert’s
argument concerning the need for temptation, the novel provides it as a valid point in
opposition to Helen’s extremism. Within the context of Helen’s past life, of which the
reader will later learn, Markham’s defense of temptation appears to be a reasonable
doctrine by which to live. Helen’s past failures concerning her ability to save Arthur
from his own destruction and the collapse of her marriage demonstrate that her
expectations concerning abstinence and absolute Christian morality are unsuccessful and
unrealistic. By failing to save her husband even when he is faced with the fear of death
and hell, the novel implies that Helen’s. methods are unsound and will likely be
unsuccessful in securing the salvation of her child as well. In opposition to Helen’s
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absolutism, the novel offers an alternative solution through Markham’s argument in
which virtue is valued without sacrificing experience.
While Markham’s convictions and actions demonstrate a personal recognition of
the importance of both the physical and spiritual sides of life, his effect on both Helen
and the structural elements of the novel serve to provide an overarching cast of Dionysian
and Apollonian proportion to the work. Hyman argues that Helen uses her diary to create
a change in Markham, transforming him into a rational being:
She first intrigues and titillates her suitor/reader (with her diary as
with her person), and then changes him from a violent, careless,
selfish young man into a responsible, relatively self-controlled
adult lover through the device of the tale of licentious abandon and
its consequences. The boy who sulks and seethes, who beats Mr.
Lawrence over the head with his whip handle and makes himself a
misery to all around him is replaced with the rational, open-hearted
man who requires only truly love to render him complete.
(464-465)
While Helen’s influence may serve to calm Markham’s Dinoysian impulses, more
importantly, he is capable of altering her fanatical Christian morality, ultimately silencing
her religious maxims. After revealing the details of her abusive marriage and the escape
she deemed necessary for the sake of her son, Helen, incapable of completely abandoning
her love of Markham, implores him into “keeping up a spiritual intercourse without hope
or prospect of anything further,” in which they will not meet again until they reach
heaven (TWH 342). Markham initially rejects Helen’s attempts at a spiritual relationship
saying,
But if I am to be so changed that I shall cease to adore you with my
whole heart and soul, and love you beyond every other creature, I
shall not be myself; and though, if ever I win Heaven at all, I must,
I know, be infinitely better and happier than I am now, my earthly
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nature cannot rejoice in the anticipation of such beatitude, from
which itself and its chief joy must be excluded. (343)
This rejection demonstrates that Markham, while desirous of the happiness of
transcendence, continues to value his physical or earthly self as well. Unlike Helen, he is
incapable of completely dismissing the present world in hopes of securing a better one in
the future; however, he ultimately agrees to the terms of her “spiritual intercourse” while
secretly harboring the desire for a change in circumstances that will allow their physical
union.
The realization of Markham’s secret desires after Arthur’s convenient death
reveals that while Helen may have in some way tamed Markham’s spirit, he has
successfully wrought a change in her as well. Rather than continuing to deny her desires
after the death of her husband, Helen passionately leads the now timid Markham into a
proposal, presenting him with the gift of a rose and explaining, “The rose I gave you was
an emblem of my heart... would you take it away and leave me here alone?” (412). With
this rare manifestation of her passion for Markham, Helen is silenced within her own
story. Maggie Berg argues that “Markham’s assimilation of Helen’s diary, and his
subsequent passing it on to his brother-in-law, is precisely the point of the novel...
because the framing narrative is Markham’s, Helen’s story, and thereby her subjectivity,
is assimilated into his” (23-24). From this perspective, Markham becomes both the artist
and the creation. As the artist, he serves as the Apollonian reflection, giving meaning to
the lives of the suffering characters; and as the creation, he supplies the reality necessary
to sustain the Apollonian illusion. Through the union of the Apollonian and Dionysian,
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Markham suppresses Helen’s Christian morality and Socratic virtue and justifies
existence through an “aesthetic phenomenon” (“ASC” 23).
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CHAPTER 3
NIETZSCHE AND THE SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS
“More Romantic than a Fairy Tale”:
Wuthering Heights and Nietzsche’s “Redemption of Mere Appearance”
Like its sister novels, Wuthering Heights also demonstrates the dual nature of
humanity by relying on binary opposites to initiate the action of the novel. While
Charlotte and Anne Brontë focus on the confining yet necessary qualities of religion in
contrast to innate human impulses and appetites, Emily explores the more universal
relationship between nature and society. As the novel begins, Lockwood confesses that
as a result of the recent failures of his romantic pursuits, he desires to escape from society
by taking refuge in nature. He says of Wuthering Heights, “In all England I do not
believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of
society” (3). The division that Lockwood creates between the social sphere of the city
and the natural one of Wuthering Heights opens the novel with the conflict between
society and raw human nature that Brontë explores through the relationships among the
Earnshaws, the Lintons, and Heathcliff. From the opening, Wuthering Heights stresses
the contrasting elements of the structure of society and the unchecked impulses of nature.
Joseph Carroll argues that Wuthering Heights is “more powerful, more in touch with
elemental forces of nature and society” than most novels in the canon of English fiction
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(241). Carroll identifies the most relevant conflict between nature and society in the
novel as existing between the two dominant households:
The elements of conflict in Wuthering Heights localize themselves in the
contrast between two houses: on the one side Thrushcross Grange, situated
in a pleasant, sheltered valley and inhabited by the Lintons, who are
civilized and cultivated but also weak and soft; and on the other side
Wuthering Heights, rough and bleak, exposed to violent winds, and
inhabited by the Earnshaws, who are harsh and crude but also strong and
passionate. (243)
While the relationships that exist among the members of the two households do correlate
to the nature/society conflict that is present in the novel, to strictly assign the role of
culture or society to the Lintons and nature to the Earnshaws simplifies the complex
relationship between human nature and social standards that creates the action of the
novel. Instead of associating civilization with the Lintons and uncultivated nature with
the Earnshaws, Wuthering Heights offers a sense of mobility to its characters, allowing
members of both households to utilize the behavior most appropriate to their situation.
For example, Nelly claims that Catherine’s ambitions to be accepted by the Lintons “led
her to adopt a double character” (WH 83). She says, “In the place where she heard
Heathcliff termed a ‘vulgar young ruffian,’ and ‘worse than a brute,’ she took care not to
act like him; but at home she had small inclination to practice politeness that would only
be laughed at, and restrain an unruly nature when it would bring her neither credit nor
praise” (83). Within the context of this interpretation of Catherine’s behavior, it is
apparent that both social awareness and natural impulses are necessary to her existence.
If she is to survive the multifaceted environment that is created by Wuthering Heights and
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Thrushcross Grange, she must embrace every aspect of her humanity—both the natural
and the social.
Like Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the conflicts of Wuthering
Heights may best be understood within the Apollonian and Dionysian model offered by
Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. According to Brian Crews, “[Wuthering Heights’s]
structure and content can be spoken of in terms of the Dionysiac and Apollonian” (169).
Like Carroll, Crews also identifies one of the major conflicts of the novel as existing
between nature and civilization as evidenced by the treatment of Wuthering Heights and
the Grange. He argues, “Nature, then, is seen as a threat to civilization and in the novel
we find that, on the one hand, Wuthering Heights, and on the other, Heathcliff are
representative of the primitive, violent and uncivilised, in complete opposition to the
Grange” (171). Following this logic, that which is associated with the Apollonian, or
that which is social/civilized, must necessarily be characterized by a sense of artificiality.
Based on this interpretation, Crews appears to fail to recognize the complexity of the way
in which the Apollonian and Dionysian work together to form a single work of art.
Instead, Crews undervalues the Apollonian mode as a result of his negative understanding
of “artificiality,” and he implies the necessity of the Dionysian to conquer it. Crews’s
negative approach to the Apollonian suggests a misreading of both Nietzsche and Brontë.
While Nietzsche may express a personal preference for the Dionysian, he also stresses the
importance of the Apollonian. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche explains that the
Apollonian dream projection (understood as religion, or in this instance as civilization)
lacks true substance, saying, “even when this dream reality is most intense, we still have,
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glimmering through it, the sensation it is mere appearance” (34). He also goes on to
explain that this appearance of reality only serves to mask the true reality of the
Dionysian, saying, “the Apollonian illusion reveals itself as what it really is—the veiling
during the performance of the tragedy of the real Dionysian effect” (BT 130). According
to Arthur Scherr, “Nietzsche regarded the ‘Dioynsian’ mentality with its search for
meaning in life through orgiastic states, as more in touch with the ultimate reality of
suffering and death than the ‘Apollonian’ worldview, which sought to restore the
‘appearance’ of balance and order to a disordered universe” (259-260). While Nietzsche
recognizes the artifice of the Apollonian mode, he also stresses the fact that it is necessary
to come to an intelligible understanding of the Dionysian. He states in The Birth of
Tragedy, “the intricate relation of the Apollonian and the Dionysian on tragedy may
really be symbolized by a fraternal union of the two deities: Dionysus speaks the
language of Apollo; and Apollo, finally the language of Dionysus; and so the highest goal
of tragedy and of all of art is attained” (130). From this perspective, the artifice of the
Apollonian and the reality of the Dionysian create a dialogue through which human
existence may be understood. The application of the artificial element of culture is
necessary to make nature comprehensible. Similarly, Eagleton explains, “If culture
means the active tending of natural growth then it suggests a dialectic between the
artificial and the natural, what we do to the world and what the world does to us” (2).
Culture provides the means necessary to manipulate nature into a penetrable state, and
Wuthering Heights often demonstrates the way in which culture attempts to alter nature
by providing it with an artificial façade to make it more amenable to human expectations.
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For example, Isabella Linton attempts to apply the Apollonian artifice of her civilized
world to the Dionysian Heathcliff. Heathcliff describes Isabella’s misguided love to
Nelly, saying:
She abandoned [the elegances, and comforts, and friends of her former
home] under a delusion..., picturing me a hero of romance, and expecting
unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion, I can hardly regard
her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in
forming a fabulous notion of my character, and acting on the false
impression she cherished. (186)
Just as the Apollonian dream image attempts to bring meaning and balance to the violent
world of the Dionysian, Isabella Linton attempts to apply a fiction drawn from her
artificial world of society in order to rationalize Heathcliff’s behavior and bring meaning
to his violent actions.
While Lockwood does not go to the extent that Isabella does in forcing a false
“romance” onto an unwilling Dionysian character, he does demonstrates a desire to
separate nature from society in favor of the beautiful illusion of Apollonian civilization.
Shortly after being introduced to the characters of Nelly Dean’s narrative, Lockwood
states, “They do live more in earnest, more in themselves, and less in surface, change,
and frivolous external things. I could fancy a love for life here almost possible” (77). At
this point in the novel, Lockwood has created a clear distinction between nature (or the
Dionysian), which he considers to be genuine, and society (or the Apollonian) which he
views as artificial; however, Lockwood ultimately maintains a preference for the
Apollonian over the Dionysian as evidenced by his decision to remove himself from the
Grange back to the city. Carol Reeves comments on Lockwood’s inability to act
according to his natural desires. She says, “Lockwood’s failure, and his stubborn
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resistance to Nelly’s penetration, his resistance to transformation, make him the exile of
Wuthering Heights—fleeing back to his world of ‘surface change and external
things’” (20). Incapable of pursuing Cathy, to whom he is attracted and to whom he is
pushed by Nelly’s narrative, Lockwood fails to acknowledge the reality of his natural
desires in favor of the safety of the artificial dream world as offered by Apollo. While he
does not force the illusion of his world onto Cathy as Isabella does to Heathcliff, he does
fantasize about removing her from her natural environment and transplanting her to the
Apollonian dream world, reflecting, “What a realization of something more romantic
than a fairy tale it would have been for Mrs. Linton Heathcliff, had she and I struck up an
attachment, as her good nurse desired, and migrated together into the stirring atmosphere
of the town!” (374). Like Isabella, Lockwood is constructing his own fictional romance
in which he is attempting to alter the reality of the Dionysian with the artifice of the
Apollonian.
While Nietzsche recognizes the artificial quality of the Apollonian dream image,
he is not willing to abandon it. According to Scherr, Nietzsche realized the necessity of
the Apollonian illusion in understanding the meaning of Dionysian reality. Scherr argues,
“Despite his admiration, Nietzsche views the Dionysian as impotent, unable to affect his/
her environment or his/her ultimate destiny in a universe and society riven by pain
suffering, injustice, and death” (264). It is only through the language of Apollo that the
reality of the Dionysian may be understood. Dionysian reality is therefore dependent
upon Apollonian falsehood. Similarly, Dionysian suffering must exist in order to serve as
the model of the Apollonian dream image. Nietzsche explains, “despite all its beauty and
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moderation, [the Apollonian’s] entire existence rested on the substratum of suffering and
of knowledge, revealed to him by the Dionysian” (BT 46). From this perspective, the
Apollonian and the Dionysian are codependent. Without the Apollonian dream image,
the Dionysian would be lost in abstraction and pain, and without Dionysian suffering,
there would be no reality from which the Apollonian must provide an escape.
Brontë also recognizes the artificial element of the Apollonian, but she does not
dismiss the necessity of the Apollonian illusion in favor of Dionysian reality. At Edgar
Linton’s death, Nelly attempts to comfort him by lying to him regarding his daughter’s
relationships with Heathcliff and Linton. She says, “I uttered as little as possible against
Linton; nor did I describe all his father’s brutal conduct—my intentions being to add no
bitterness, if I could help it, to his already overflowing cup” (347). Nelly’s attempts to
secure Edgar’s peace are apparently successful as evidenced by the description of his
death: “He died blissfully, Mr. Lockwood... None could have noticed the exact minute of
his death, it was so entirely without a struggle... Fortunately, no thought of worldly
affairs crossed the latter’s mind, to disturb him” (349). According to Nietzsche, “to be at
all able to dream with this inner joy in contemplation, he must have completely lost sight
of the waking reality and its ominous obtrusiveness” (BT 44). As a result of the false
illusion that Nelly has provided, Edgar is capable of losing himself in his dream world,
oblivious to the suffering that surrounds him.
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The Honeysuckles and the Thorn: The Apollonian and Dionysian Conflict
While Nietzsche and Brontë demonstrate the way in which the Apollonian and
Dionysian work together to provide meaning to existence, they also emphasize the
conflict that is continually at work between the two opposing forces. Nietzsche explains
that “the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollinian and Dionysian
duality—just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife
with only periodically intervening reconciliations” (BT 33). Wuthering Heights may
illustrate the “periodically intervening reconciliations” between the Apollonian and
Dionysian through the peaceful periods of the Lintons’ marriage along with the final
glimpse at Hareton and Cathy’s relationship, but the novel is primarily concerned with
the conflicts that exist between the two opposing forces of existence. When Nelly begins
telling her story to Lockwood, she describes Catherine’s vivacity, saying, “Her spirits
were always at high-water mark, her tongue always going—singing, laughing, and
plaguing everybody who would not do the same. A wild, wicked slip she was” (52). In
contrast to the spirited Catherine, Nelly states that “[Edgar Linton] wanted spirit in
general” (83). Catherine also recognizes the difference between herself and Edgar when
she exclaims, “Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever: your veins are full of icewater; but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance” (146).
Catherine’s “excesses” are the result of her Dionysian character while Edgar’s lack of
spirit is characteristic of his Apollonian nature. He and Isabella serve as “the
honeysuckles embracing the thorn” (WH 113-114) as they attempt to “rest in the calm sea
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of Apollonian contemplation, though everything around [them] that [they] behold through
the medium of music is in urgent and active motion” (BT 55).
While Catherine and the Lintons have opposing characteristics, the most striking
conflict in the novel may be evidenced by the struggle between Heathcliff and Edgar.
From their childhood, the two characters have been made aware of their differences and
were separated as a result of them. The Lintons first come in contact with Heathcliff after
their dog has attacked Catherine. While Catherine is conducted into the house where she
is cared for for five weeks, Heathcliff is deemed a “frightful thing” (WH 62) and is thrust
from the house. The division between the Lintons and Heathcliff continues after
Catherine’s stay at the Grange as evidenced by Mrs. Linton’s condition “that her darlings
might be kept carefully away from that ‘naughty swearing boy’” (WH 68) if they are to
visit Catherine at Wuthering Heights. The division between Edgar and Heathcliff is
further reinforced by a description of their physical differences. Nelly describes
Catherine’s apparent awareness of the differences between the two characters, saying,
“Doubtless Catherine marked the difference between her friends, as one came in and the
other went out. The contrast resembled what you see in exchanging a bleak, hilly coal
country for a beautiful fertile valley” (87). Heathcliff’s appearance correlates with the
hopeless suffering of the Dionysian while Edgar’s appearance is “fertile.” It is full of
hope and promise offered by the dream illusion of Apollo. Further more, the physical
movement of the characters corresponds to the conflict between the Apollonian and
Dionysian as described in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche explains: “wherever the
Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was checked and destroyed. But, on the other hand,
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it is equally certain that, wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully
withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god exhibits itself as more rigid and
menacing than ever” (BT 47). As one deity advances, the other is forced to retreat,
creating a proportional relationship. Similarly Heathcliff is forced to retreat out of the
house as Edgar enters it creating a proportional demand on Catherine’s affections. John
Allen Stevenson also recognizes the way in which Edgar’s advances are only possible
when Heathcliff retreats, arguing, “It is no accident that Catherine actually marries Edgar
while Heathcliff is away, or that, upon his return, she perceives herself to be the ‘wife of
a stranger; an exile, an outcast’” (77). Edgar is allowed to descend only when Heathcliff
absents himself, but at Heathcliff’s impetuous return, he is forced to ascend as the
Dionysian Heathcliff makes his demands on Catherine’s affections.
The Dionysian and Apollonian elements of Edgar and Heatchliff’s relationships
with Catherine is also apparent in the way that they love her. Heathcliff differentiates his
love from Edgar’s, saying, “If [Edgar] loved with all the powers of his puny being, he
couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as
deep as I have: the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough, as her whole
affection be monopolized by him!” (184). This interpretation of the characters’ love for
Catherine demonstrates the way in which Heathcliff’s love is marked by the Dionysian
elements of passion and excess while Edgar’s Apollonian love is restrained by the bounds
of reason. According to Nietzsche, the Apollonian “looks simple, transparent, and
beautiful” (BT 67), but this “Apollonian illusion... aims to deliver us from the Dionysian
flood and excess” (BT 129). To incorporate Heathcliff into his own water metaphor
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regarding Catherine and Linton’s capability of love, if Catherine’s love is the sea, while
Edgar’s is no deeper than a horse trough, then Heathcliff’s love comes nothing short of a
flood. It is marked by the characteristic elements of Dionysian passion and excess, and
Edgar’s inability to check this flood of passion results in the consummation and
destruction of his and Catherine’s love under the flood of Heathcliff’s excesses.
By allowing Heathcliff, and therefore the Dionysian, to triumph over Edgar’s
Apollonian affections for Catherine, Brontë demonstrates the necessity of Apollonian
restraint. Nietzsche states of the appearance of the Dionysian:
The muses of the arts of ‘illusion’ paled before an art that, in its
intoxication, spoke the truth... The individual, with all his restraint and
proportion, succumbed to the self-oblivion of the Dionysian states,
forgetting the precepts of Apollo. Excess revealed itself as truth.
Contradiction, the bliss born of pain, spoke out from the very heart of
nature. (BT 46-47)
By applying this explanation of the Dionysian and Apollonian conflict to the relationships
existing among Catherine, Edgar, and Heathcliff, one may clearly recognize the necessity
of the Apollonian influence of illusion. Rather than rejecting the Apollonian element
based on its artificiality, Brontë embraces it, demonstrating that an absence of Apollonian
restraint results in complete destruction. Just as Nietzsche’s Apollonian man succumbs to
the “self-oblivion” of Dionysus, Catherine succumbs to Heathcliff’s passion, rejecting
Edgar’s Apollonian love. As a result of being consumed by the flood of Heathcliff’s
excesses, Catherine loses not only the sense of peace offered by Edgar, but she also goes
mad, becoming oblivious to who she really is as evidenced by her inability to recognize
her own face in the mirror. While Brontë, like Nietzsche, often demonstrates a preference
for the natural, or Dionysian, as expressed in the character of Heathcliff, the structure of
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the novel implies a realization of the necessity of both Dionysus and Apollo. Without the
Apollonian influence to check his violent passion, Dionysus, through Heathcliff,
successfully destroys the worlds of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. By
allowing this destruction to occur as a result of Heathcliff’s rise in power, Brontë
demonstrates that both the Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of human conflict are
necessary to ensure a successful existence.
While Brontë demonstrates the necessity of the Apollonian illusion by providing
her readers with the vision of a completely Dionysian world in which Heathcliff
successfully destroys all of the Apollonian manifestations with which he comes in
contact, she also uses Heathcliff’s character to illustrate the necessity of the Apollonian
aspects of human nature. Throughout the novel, Heathcliff’s humanity is frequently
questioned. He is described as being sent from the devil (45), being “possessed of
something diabolical” (82), as a “black villain” (138), “an unreclaimed creature” (127), a
“blackguard” (141), a “devil” (169), a “lying fiend” (188), a “savage beast” (208), a
“monster” (214), “only half man: not so much, and the rest fiend” (224), and a
“goblin” (405). Catherine claims that to encourage a union between him and Isabella
would be “as bad as offering Satan a lost soul” (140), and Edgar states that Heathcliff’s
presence “is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous” (142). Both
Isabella and Nelly refer to his inhuman appearance, describing his “sharp cannibal
teeth” (219) and his “sharp white teeth” (412). To the other characters of the novel,
Heathcliff is “not a human being” (188). His violent excesses dehumanize him and set
him at variance with those around him. Ivan Kreilkamp reads this dehumanization of
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Heathcliff as an attempt on the part of the characters to animalize those whom they
perceive to be outsiders. He argues, “Brontë defines Heathcliff as a feral pet, a resistant
animal brought into the family circle who rebels against the hypocrisy of the boundary
lines drawn to separate different forms of what Derrida calls ‘the living in general’” (98).
While Nelly does confess a distaste for outsiders, her acceptance of Lockwood implies
that Heathcliff’s dehumanization may better be read as a result of his antipathies rather
than as a result of his position as an outsider. Rather than rebelling against the
dehumanizing role forced upon him, as Kreilkamp implies in his argument, Heathcliff’s
dehumanization is the direct result of the influence of his actions on the other characters.
Interpreting Heathcliff’s character becomes problematic as a result of his
inhuman excesses in conjunction with the overwhelming references to his subhuman
status. With Heathcliff, Brontë creates a character who is beyond reality. As the other
characters recognize, Heathcliff possesses a supernatural quality that prevents a typical
reading of his character. He is excluded from the realistic world of his fellow characters
and requires an analysis that considers his extrahuman qualities. Crews suggest that an
application of Nietzsche’s Dionysian model will clarify the anomalies of Heathcliff’s
character:
The fact is that [Heathcliff] is a man, in a sense, stripped of civilization; he
is heath and cliff; he is representative of natural forces. For this reason he
is like Nietzsche’s superman, saying yes to life and to the natural instincts
of man, because of which he is above the rest of the characters. He is
beyond “good and evil,” beyond praise or blame. He represents truth and
brings out the true nature of other characters, as opposed to the falseness
of civilization whose façade is constantly under threat. (176)
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Nietzsche describes this Dionysian hero to whom Crews refers in physical terms of
strength, pain and suffering, claiming, “the only truly real Dionysus appears in a variety
of forms, in the mask of a fighting hero, and entangled, as it were, in the net of the
individual will. The god who appears talks and acts so as to resemble an erring, striving,
suffering individual” (BT 73). Just as Dionysus is referred to as the “fighting hero,”
Heathcliff is often identified by his fighting strength. While the Apollonian Edgar is
distinguished by his beauty and his “light hair and a fair skin” (70), Nelly praises
Heathcliff for his brute physicality, saying, “You are younger and yet, I’ll be bound, you
are taller and twice as broad across the shoulders: you could knock [Edgar] down in a
twinkling” (70). Like the Dionysian hero, Heathcliff is characterized by his fighting
strength.
Heathcliff’s association with Nietzsche’s Dionysus is further reinforced by his
mysterious history. Kreilkamp argues that Heathcliff’s obscure background serves to
further dehumanize him:
To assign Heathcliff a “racial status” is potentially to attach him to human
history, lineage, and parentage; but what seems fundamental to his
beginning is precisely its failure to attach such traditions or grounds for
social identity. Heathcliff is a “cuckoo” or “animal” in his outsider status
to human categories of being and belonging. (98)
While Kreilkamp interprets this dehumanization as an attempt to transform Heathcliff
into something subhuman or animal, within the context of Nietzsche’s The Birth of
Tragedy, his unknown past serves to transform him into a demigod by further aligning
him with Nietzsche’s Dionysian superman. Nietzsche claims that “the hero is the
suffering Dionysus of the Mysteries” (73). Rather than transforming Heathcliff into an
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animal, his mysterious history offers the possibility of a heritage that would elevate
Heathcliff above his peers. Nelly emphasizes the existence of this possibility as she
attempts to comfort Heathcliff regarding his sense of inferiority to Edgar:
You’re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows but your father was the
Emperor of China and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to
buy up, with one weeks income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross
Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought
to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth;
and the thoughts of what I was should give me courage and dignity to
support the oppressions of a little farmer! (71)
While Nelly relies on a strictly human hierarchy to encourage young Heathcliff, his
inhuman qualities in conjunction with his mysterious past allow for a supernatural
reading in which Heathcliff serves as the personification of the Dionysian impulse. Seen
in relation to the Dionysian model, Heathcliff shakes off the mortal bounds that make a
traditional reading of his extreme behavior so enigmatic.
While Heathcliff is isolated from all of the other characters at some point in the
novel, his relationship with Catherine unites him with the mortal world while reinforcing
his Dionysian elements. In an attempt to describe her love for Heathcliff, Catherine
claims that her union with him attaches her to a universal sense of immortality:
I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there
is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of
my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this
world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from
the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished,
and he remained, I should still continue to be, and if all else remained, and
he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I
should not seem a part of it... Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always
in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to
myself, but as my own being. (102)
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Catherine’s claim that she is Heathcliff demonstrates the unifying quality of the
Dionysian that Nietzsche explains in The Birth of Tragedy: “Under the charm of the
Dionysian not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature... celebrates
once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man” (37). Through her relationship with
Heathcliff, Catherine loses her individual self, uniting herself with both Heathcliff and
the natural world as evidenced by her longing to escape from Thrushcross Grange to the
moors with Heathcliff. Crews argues that, “According to Nietzsche, the Dionysiac
element absorbs culture and all that separates man gives way before a sense of unity.
Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights absorbs culture and is the unifying element in the
story” (177). Within this context, Catherine has apparently lost sight of the Apollonian
illusion offered by Edgar. Instead, she is absorbed by the Dionysian Heathcliff, uniting
herself with the embodiment of the natural world. Simon Marsden also explains
Catherine’s dependence on Heathcliff, saying, “Catherine finds in Heathcliff the
effacement of the individual consciousness and unity with that of another. This
consciousness is linked to the relationship with a greater totality: Heathcliff is Catherine’s
means of encountering the universe from which she would be estranged in the event of
his loss” (246). From this perspective Heathcliff serves as the Dionysian facet of
Catherine’s character that is necessary for her to fully experience human existence.
In becoming Dionysus, Heathcliff refuses a traditional interpretation in which his
actions must be reconciled to normal human behavior. The excesses which characterize
Heathcliff’s conduct serve to alienate him from a traditional view of humanity. Carroll
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recognizes Heathcliff’s inhuman qualities and argues that Heathcliff is consumed by
hatred to an almost unrealistic extent:
In Heathcliff, human nature has been stunted and deformed. Apart from
his passional bond with Catherine, his relations with other characters are
almost exclusively antagonistic. The capacity for hatred is part of human
nature, but so is positive sociality. No other character in the novel accepts
antagonism as a legitimately predominating principle of social life. (245)
While Carroll recognizes that Heathcliff’s function in the novel is not typical of ordinary
human behavior in that he completely rejects the possibility of “positive sociality,” he
continues to make Heathcliff’s actions align to traditional expectations concerning human
behavior by explaining his actions with the claim that “In Heathcliff, human nature has
been stunted and deformed.” Rather than interpreting Heathicliff as the Dionysian
personification of suffering and desire, Carroll strives to utilize a psychological model by
which he may explain Heathcliff’s behavior. While Carroll does, however, attempt to
reconcile Heathcliff to humanity, he also recognizes the role of Heathcliff’s inhuman
behavior in the novel. He claims that Brontë sets herself up against Heathcliff’s
extremism by ultimately affirming “the common sympathies that propel the novel to a
resolution in romantic comedy.” Rather than allowing Heathcliff’s hatred to dominate,
she sets up Cathy and Hareton as the sympathetic characters who succeed in resolving the
conflict of the novel. Just as Heathcliff’s creation of an entirely Dionysion world through
the destruction of the manifestations of the Apollonian illusion demonstrates the necessity
of the Apollonian to veil the horrors of Dionysian reality, Heathcliff’s excessive antipathy
also demonstrates the need of the Apollonian within the individual self. To be entirely
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human, one must recognize both Dionysian impulse and Apollonian restraint; otherwise,
“he’s only half man” (WH 224).
“I’ll Give You a Feeling of How I Feel”:
Dionysian Abstraction and Apollonian Language
After informing Nelly of her acceptance of Edgar’s proposal and prior to
confessing her feelings for Heathcliff, Catherine exclaims, “In my soul, and in my heart,
I’m convinced I’m wrong!... I’ll explain it: I can’t do it distinctly: but I’ll give you a
feeling of how I feel” (98). Catherine’s inability to describe the sense of passion she feels
for the Dionysian Heathcliff directly relates to Nietzsche’s explanation that the Dionysian
experience resists the Apollonian illusion of expression. Instead, the Dionysian must
discover its own set of symbols before the emotion may be disclosed:
The very element which forms the essence of Dionysian music (and hence
of music in general) is carefully excluded as un-Apollonian—namely, the
emotional power of the tone, the uniform flow of the melody, and the
utterly incomparable world of harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb man
is incited to the greatest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something
never before experienced struggles for utterance-—the annihilation of the
veil of māyā, oneness as the soul of the race and of nature itself. The
essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; we need a new
world of symbols; and the entire symbolism of the body is called into play,
not the mere symbolism of the lips, face, and speech but the whole
pantomime of dancing, forcing every member into rhythmic movement.
(BT 40)
Realizing that the expression of her love for Heathcliff requires a different set of symbols
than the expression of her relationship with Edgar, Catherine employs the symbolism of
her whole body when attempting to give utterance to her experience with Heathcliff,
“striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast” as she cries “Here! and
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Here!... in whichever place the soul lives” (98). Her earlier description of her
relationship with Edgar did not require this physical set of symbols, but instead she was
capable of rationally explaining her experience through language. As the Dionysian
personification of suffering, however, Heathcliff resists rational expression, and
Catherine is forced to give “a feeling of how [she] feels” concerning “the essence of
nature.” Nietzsche uses music to describe the phenomenon in which the Dionysian
resists expression through language:
Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music,
because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction
and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore
symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena. Rather,
all phenomena, compared with it, are merely symbols: hence language, as
the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the
innermost heart of music; language, in its attempt to imitate it, can only be
in superficial contact with music; while all the eloquence of lyric poetry
cannot bring the deepest significance of the latter one step nearer to us.
(56)
Margaret Homans argues that the inadequacy of language in Wuthering Heights is the
result of the signifier/signified relationship, claiming that “Writing creates an order of
priority. Ordinarily, a word presents itself as coming first to the reader, putting its referent
in second place. The only way to preserve the priority of something is not to have it
named, so that what is primary is just that which is left out of the text” (11). While
Homans argues that Brontë utilizes “these omissions of description” to emphasize the
importance of nature over culture, she simultaneously uses the civilized, or Apollonian
realm, to demonstrate the way in which the deep emotional sensation of the Dionysian is
still reliant on the Apollonian for expression. Stevenson argues that without language
“Catherine and Heathcliff... can assert that their likeness has a meaning only within a
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system of differences. In a sense, the gap between them and Edgar establishes what they
are; there is literally no language for their love until they visit the Grange and view the
‘has not’ that the Lintons represent for them” (63). This concept of expression being
reliant on the existence of an opposite is reinforced by Catherine’s description of her and
Heathcliff’s souls in contrast to Edgar’s: “Whatever our souls are made of, [Heathcliff’s]
and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightening, or
frost from fire” (100). As a result of the Dionysian’s resistance to language, Catherine is
forced to express the essence of her soul through imagery. This imagery, however, is
reliant on the relationship between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Without the
Apollonian opposite, the Dionysian would be impotent to express itself and would be lost
in abstraction. It would remain the feeling of a feeling, or a “mere appearance of mere
appearance” (BT 45).
Just as the Apollonian is necessary for an expression of the Dionysian, both
Brontë and Nietzsche imply that the Dionysian is necessary to provide the substance
around which the Apollonian illusion is formed. After informing Nelly of her decision to
accept Edgar’s proposal, Catherine contrasts her love for Edgar and Heathcliff, saying,
“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware,
as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a
source of little visible delight, but necessary” (102). While Catherine’s love for Edgar
may be more appealing visually as a result of the beautiful Apollonian dream vision, her
love for Heathcliff serves as the foundation on which it stands. Catherine’s awareness of
Heathcliff as her foundation parallels with Nietzsche’s description of the Apollonian
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Greek’s realization of his dependence upon the Dionysian: “Indeed, he had to recognize
even more than this: despite all its beauty and moderation, his entire existence rested on a
hidden substratum of suffering and of knowledge, revealed to him by the Dionysian. And
behold: Apollo could not live without Dionysus!” (46). Similarly, Catherine’s acceptance
of the Apollonian Edgar’s proposal is founded on Heathcliff’s suffering as evidenced by
her confession that she desires to use Edgar’s money to “aid Heathcliff to rise” (101).
Her relationship with Edgar, and in turn her relationship with the Apollonian facet of
herself, is dependent upon the suffering that she experiences through the Dionysian
Heathcliff.
“An Absurd Termination”: Dionysus’s Failure and the Second Generation
At the close of the novel, the reader discovers that the once forceful Heathcliff has
become impotent, failing to fully exact his revenge on the descendants of his enemies:
It is a poor conclusion, is it not?... an absurd termination to my violent
exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train
myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is
ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate of either roof has
vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise
time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it, and none
could hinder me. But where is the use? I don’t care for striking; I can’t
take the trouble to raise my hand!... I have lost the faculty of enjoying
their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing. (397)
Crews agues that Heathcliff’s “final failure to act is the result of his ability to understand
that all is futile” (178). While Heathcliff does express a realization of the pointlessness
of destroying his enemies’ representatives, his ultimate decision to not raise his hand
against them appears to stem from a more complex dynamic at work than his sudden
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epiphany regarding the futility of his cruelty. Crews claims that “The oppositions in the
novel are necessary because there is constant conflict in life itself and the meaning of the
novel lies in that very opposition” (173). Without the necessary opposition to his will,
Heathcliff becomes impotent. Nietzsche explains this dynamic in The Birth of Tragedy:
Though it is certain that of the two halves of our existence, the waking and
the dreaming states, the former appeals to us as infinitely preferable, more
important, excellent, and worthy of being lived, indeed, as that which
alone is lived—yet in relation to that mysterious ground of our being of
which we are the phenomena, I should, paradoxical as it may seem,
maintain the very opposite estimate of the value of dreams. For the more
clearly I perceive in nature those omnipotent art impulses, and in them an
ardent longing for illusion, for redemption through illusion, the more I feel
myself impelled to the metaphysical assumption that the truly existent
primal unity, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the
rapturous vision, the pleasurable illusion, for its continuous redemption.
(44-45)
Without the redemption of the Apollonian illusion, Dionysian suffering is allowed to exist
without the hope of transcendence, revealing the futility of human existence. Within this
perspective, Heathcliff’s sense of futility along with his failure to act are the results of the
absence of conflict between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. In destroying every
manifestation of the Apollonian illusion, Heathcliff has destroyed his purpose in life and
revealed the hollowness of his own existence.
While the Apollonian and Dionysian are codependent upon one another within
Wuthering Heights, successful human existence also remains reliant upon the relationship
between the two forces. Rather than favoring the Dionysian as genuine and the
Apollonian as confining and artificial, Brontë chooses to value both human nature and
social cultivation as necessary aspects of our humanity. Carroll claims that Brontë’s
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decision to end the novel with a focus on Hareton and Cathy’s relationship reveals her
attempt to align the often rebellious text with traditional social standards:
Wuthering Heights operates at a high level of tension between the motives
that organize human life into an adaptively functional system and impulses
of revolt against that system. In Brontë’s imagination, revolt flames out
with the greater intensity and leaves the more vivid impression. Even so,
by allowing the norms of romantic comedy to shape her plot, she tacitly
acknowledges her own dependence on the structure of human life history.
(254)
While Brontë may question the social structure around which her novel is written, she
does not advocate a dismissal of culture in favor of nature. Instead, she demonstrates the
way in which nature and culture may successfully work together to create a meaningful
existence. The description of Hareton as being “content with daily labour and rough
animal enjoyments, till Catherine crossed his path” (372) in conjunction with the
description of his countenance after Cathy began teaching him, in which Nelly says, “His
brightening mind brightened his features, and added spirit and nobility to their
aspect” (396) indicates Brontë’s advocacy of both nature and culture as reflected in
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. By offering the conflict of Heathcliff and the Lintons
in combination with the successful relationship of Hareton and Cathy, Wuthering Heights
demonstrates “that the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollonian
and Dionysian duality—just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving
perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations” (BT 33).
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CONCLUSION
THE EMBRYO OF A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH:
APOLLONIAN AND DIONYSIAN INTERDEPENDENCE
While Emily Brontë’s work at times does deviate from the convictions that
Nietzsche would later express regarding the Apollonian and Dionysian duality, the views
that she demonstrates in her novel, poetry, and essays encapsulates an awareness and
acceptance of the conflicting elements of humanity that are characteristic of both her own
work and that of her sisters. In Emily’s “The Prisoner: A Fragment,” the speaker
expresses a reliance on the Apollonian illusion as a means of escape from the suffering of
her Dionysian reality:
But, first, a hush of peace—a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends
Mute music soothes my breast—unuttered harmony,
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me. (33-36)
Just as Nietzsche explains in The Birth of Tragedy, the speaker understands that “to be at
all able to dream with this inner joy in contemplation, [s]he must have completely lost
sight of the waking reality and its ominous obtrusiveness” (44). The prisoner, therefore,
is incapable of escaping into the peaceful Apollonian dream world that she describes “till
Earth [is] lost to [her].”
Although the prisoner’s method of approaching the Apollonian illusion parallels
Nietzsche’s explanation, her interpretation concerning the Apollonian objective differs
106
from his convictions. While Nietzsche emphasizes the artificial aspect of the Apollonian
illusion, arguing that “the true artistic aim of Apollo in whose name we comprehend all
those countess illusions of the beauty of mere appearance” (BT 143) is to veil the reality
of Dionysian suffering and “make life worth living at all and prompt the desire to live on
in order to experience the next moment” (BT 143), the speaker of “The Prisoner” claims
that the goal of her dream illusion is to motivate a desire for death, saying, “If it but
herald death, the vision is divine!” (53). While the prisoner’s implication that to
accommodate a complete escape from Dionysian suffering, one must die, conflicts with
Nietzsche’s views concerning the life affirming qualities of the Apollonian illusion, her
awareness of the relationship between her reality and her dream illusion continues to
demonstrate the way in which Brontë’s awareness of human duality foreshadows
Nietzsche’s explanation of the conflicting forces of Apollo and Dionysus. Although the
prisoner apparently values the dream illusion over the reality of her situation, like
Nietzsche she is aware of the artificial quality of the illusion that facilitates her escape
from the reality of her suffering. As the dream begins to fade and reality once again
becomes the prominent experience, the speaker expresses a longing to return to the
illusion:
Oh! dreadful is the check, intense the agony,
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain. (45-48)
Like Nietzsche, she acknowledges a division between the illusory world and the physical
reality of suffering. While Apollo strives to provide the individual with the possibility of
107
transcendence, lending meaning to existence, Dionysus continually unites existence with
the physical reality of suffering.
While the speaker of “The Prisoner” may reflect a preference for the dream
illusion while underestimating the value of Dionysian reality, in “The Butterfly” Emily
offers a pessimistic view of life in which existence can only be justified through the
union of both transcendence and the reality of suffering. As she opens the essay she
recognizes the artificial aspect of the world around her, saying, “All appeared happy, but
for me, it was only an appearance” (176). Similarly, Nietzsche explains:
If, for the moment, we do not consider the question of our own “reality,” if
we conceive of our empirical existence, and of that of the world in
general, as a continuously manifested representation of primordial unity,
we shall then have to look on the dream as a mere appearance of mere
appearance, hence as a still higher appeasement of the primordial desire
for mere appearance. (BT 45)
Rather than appreciating the manifestation of the natural world and the illusion of
happiness, at the beginning of “The Butterfly,” Emily is only capable of recognizing the
primordial aspect of suffering and destruction that unites every species and every facet of
nature. She says, “Nature is an inexplicable problem; it exists on a principle of
destruction. Every being must be the tireless instrument of death to others, or itself must
cease to live” (176), and she questions “why was man created? He torments, he kills, he
devours, dies, is devoured—there you have his whole story” (178). Nietzsche recognizes
a similar dilemma concerning the justification of human existence in the face of suffering
and death, ultimately reconciling suffering and life by applying the aesthetic phenomenon
of the Apollonian and Dionysian conflict. While Emily does not utilize the same
108
vocabulary as does Nietzsche she also expresses a need for both the beautiful illusion of
transcendence as well as the reality of destruction and death:
I was mute, but an inner voice said to me, “Let not the creature judge his
Creator; here is a symbol of the world to come. As the ugly caterpillar is
the origin of the splendid butterfly, so this globe is the embryo of a new
heaven and a new earth whose poorest beauty will infinitely exceed your
mortal imagination. And when you see the magnificent result of that
which seems so base to you now, how you will scorn your blind
presumption in accusing Omniscience for not having made nature perish
in her infancy.” (178)
As “the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth,” the natural world of suffering and
death serves as the necessary foundation for the world through which transcendence may
be acquired. From this perspective, both reality and illusion are necessary to human
existence. Without the reality of suffering, transcendence would be impossible, and
without the illusion of a perfected world, the suffering of existence would be
unjustifiable.
By exposing the pain of the human condition and the desire to escape that reality
through the artistic imagination, the Brontë novels demonstrate a complexity that
foreshadows Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and exposes a new way of understanding
both art and life. The Brontës’ appreciation of both the Dionysian self and the Apollonian
illusion demonstrate their perception of the aesthetic quality of human life that was later
reflected in The Birth of Tragedy. According to Nietzsche human existence is not
justified by the individual experience, but instead, its worth is determined by the aesthetic
projection that it creates as a united whole:
The entire comedy of art is neither performed for our betterment or
education nor are we the true authors of this art world. On the contrary,
we may assume that we are merely images and artistic projections for the
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true author, and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as
works of art—for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and
the world is eternally justified—while of course our consciousness of our
own significance hardly differs from that which the soldiers painted on
canvas have of the battle represented on it. (52)
Within this context, the Brontës’ expression of both the Dionysian and Apollonian in their
works demonstrates that rather than applying a value system to the conflicting aspects of
humanity, human existence may be better understood as an aesthetic phenomenon
whereby the opposing qualities of nature and transcendence create the tension necessary
to motivate the continual “construction and destruction of the individual world” (BT 142).
110
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